The Alarmists (11 page)

Brent heard a repeating popping sound, then lifted his head enough to see Maddy rising from her seat, gun in hand, firing toward the restaurant’s front door. She shouted at him to keep his head down, but Brent chanced a look behind him. He counted three men, one of them on the floor and not moving, and more shadows near the front door—perhaps reinforcements for those already inside. He noticed then that the restaurant patrons were nowhere to be found.

As a professor and researcher, Brent had been in a precarious situation or two, but none resulting in the firing of actual bullets. Consequently he had no idea what to do. His first impulse was to throw himself to the floor beneath the table, hoping that whatever played out in the air above him would wind up in his favor. But in the instant he had to decide, he could see that Maddy alone wouldn’t be able to handle all the assailants pouring through the front door.

It was in that moment that Brent saw the proprietor—the man who had welcomed them with warmth and kindness—emerge from the kitchen wielding a pump-action shotgun. The man took one look around, leveled the weapon, and fired toward the door. He managed to squeeze off a second shot, and Brent saw one of the assailants go crashing down.

He and Maddy had taken cover in the booth, where she returned fire against a better armed enemy. When he looked the other way, he saw the proprietor’s shotgun lying on the floor. He caught Maddy’s eye, and while she couldn’t possibly understand his intent, she seemed to intuit that he was about to do something foolish. But before she could put voice to it, Brent launched himself out of the booth, keeping low as he navigated the gap between the booth and the kitchen’s double doors. Running from the booth, he thought he had his feet under him, but somewhere along the way he stumbled and fell, landing atop the dead proprietor as bullets cut a trail past his ear.

Brent snatched up the gun, turning and aiming it at their attackers. The reinforcements had followed behind the initial trio, taking positions in the hall between the entrance and the dining area. The only experience Brent had with a gun was skeet shooting, so he used the same technique and fired a shot in the direction of the enemy. Despite all the chaos, he saw the man who was moving into the dining area collapse under the shot. Before Brent could chamber another round, another man took his place and aimed his weapon at him. Brent dove to the floor, using the proprietor’s body as a shield. Peeking above the dead man, he saw a number of lifeless bodies in the doorway yet still more coming in.

He glanced over at Maddy, his eyes finding her just in time to see one of the enemy’s bullets find its mark. Then Brent watched as the captain, who had come out from behind the table, reeled back and fell onto the seat.

As he saw her go down, everything shifted into slow motion, as if he’d stepped away from himself to view the scene from a vantage point safe from gunfire and the sights and sounds of carnage. One moment he was staring at Maddy’s fallen form, and the next he was looking at their attackers, four men advancing into the room. He raised the shotgun with arms steadier than he would have thought possible. He quickly lined up his shot and squeezed off a round that, while missing the man’s chest at which he was aiming, succeeded in taking out the legs. A bloodcurdling scream filled the room.

Turning, Brent saw movement from the booth—Maddy pushing herself upright and facing the men closing in on them. Even as he readied the shotgun to fire again, he watched her raise an arm, hesitate for a second, and then fire. The attacker toppled over, dead. Spent by the effort, she brought her arm down and the gun dropped to the floor.

To Brent’s amazement, the two remaining men, their paths obstructed by fallen comrades, backed down the hallway and exited the way they’d come. As Brent struggled for breath he heard the sound of an engine, followed by the screech of tires. In the silence that followed, when he was certain that no enemies lurked anywhere in the restaurant, he lowered the gun and pushed himself to his feet. He rushed to the booth, his ankle protesting with each step he took.

Maddy had collapsed again, lying still on the booth seat. Brent set his weapon down and reached for her. He wedged a hand beneath her shoulder and eased her up, and then realized that the wetness he felt on his hand was her blood.

Far off in the distance he heard the wail of sirens.

—

When the call came in, Richards found himself in one of those situations in which he did not have an immediate response, as if the news conveyed to him from thousands of miles away was meant for someone else. What urged him forward was decades of training, of acting within defined parameters while the particulars sorted themselves out. The first order of business was to contact General Smithson, to have a marine unit dispatched from Kabul, some three hours away by road from the hospital where his charges had been taken. Even considering a rapid response, as well as a probable chopper insertion at Mazar-e Sharif, Richards suspected a good ninety minutes would pass in which Maddy and Dr. Michaels would be subject to a follow-up assault. He thought that unlikely, as terrorist cells seldom moved against their targets without the element of surprise, but he disliked having his people in a position where he couldn’t protect them.

Once he’d secured Smithson’s promise of a company to support the Afghan security now surrounding the hospital, he placed a call to the U.S. embassy in Kabul, hoping a representative would have time to catch a lift with the marines before they headed out. He had to make certain a diplomat was en route, because while Maddy was cleared to fire in-country, Dr. Michaels was not. And terrorist attack or not, the local authorities could make things difficult for a foreigner accused of killing a native.

In spite of the circumstances, his one consolation was that with two phone calls he could organize a defensive operation from half a world away. What angered him, though, was that he couldn’t get anyone to tell him if Maddy was even alive. All Dr. Michaels had told him was that she was unresponsive going into surgery—and that there’d been a great loss of blood.

Richards had never lost a member of his team, not in the decade since he’d created it, and the thought of losing Amy Madigan was something he just couldn’t bear. In the absence of anything else he could do this far away, he chose one of the few courses of action available—an accounting of his team, to tell them what had befallen one of their own. It wasn’t a conversation he was looking forward to. Rawlings, Addison, and Bradford were in the building, working in the lab. Snyder was in transit from McDonough, and Petros had taken a personal day. He would get them all together before he gave them the news.

In less than two minutes he had both of his off-base personnel on their way in, with a minimum of grumbling from Petros. Richards thought he heard the soldier mumble something about the theater, which he found a bit surprising but didn’t press under the circumstances.

When he hung up he breathed a deep sigh, then sat down and did something he did not do well: he waited. And in an office without windows, dug out from the hard, rocky ground that made the construction of a building in this area as much an act of will as of logistics, Colonel Jameson Richards could not know that as a man on a personal day stepped off a Washington curb in possession of theater tickets he would now be unable to use, and as the man slipped behind the wheel of his Porsche and cranked the ignition, that act ended his life.

The car went up as a fireball, rising more than two stories, its sideways motion shattering the glass of the curbside ticket booth, killing both the ticket taker and a woman out walking her dog, and sending pieces of the incinerated Porsche for a block in every direction. Safe in his subterranean office, Colonel Richards could not hear the sounding of a dozen or more car alarms, or understand that war had just been declared on his team.

—

Dabir was not one to grant superiority where such was not warranted, so he refrained from giving the airport protocols in his country more due than they deserved. What he did concede, however, was that American security was not as untouchable as he had been led to believe. In the short time since he’d exited the plane and passed into the portion of the concourse beyond the security line, he had counted four instances in which he could have wreaked havoc on any plane taking flight that day. The information was of little use at the moment, but who knew when such knowledge would prove useful?

As he made his way past the funneled bodies—thick yet nowhere near as concentrated as an Ethiopian bazaar on a normal day—what impressed him the most, beyond the cleanliness of the place, was how much he stood out against the lighter skins of everyone around him. The result was that he felt far more exposed than he’d ever felt before. That feeling faded, though, when he realized that no one was paying him the least bit of attention.

Unlike his country, averting one’s eyes seemed to be the norm here, even from those who showed more than a passing interest. In these cases, when Dabir met their questioning eyes with his own steady gaze, eye contact was quickly severed, with the Ethiopian convinced that the ones who had noticed him would forget before they reached their departure gates.

Of primary concern was money. Dabir followed the universal currency exchange signs and soon was in possession of sufficient funds in American dollars, enough to secure for himself transportation and temporary lodging. And food. He hadn’t eaten in almost a day and he’d always wanted to try a hamburger made in America. He knew what the knockoffs in his country were like and couldn’t help but wonder how the genuine article compared.

After he’d worked his way through the line, paid what to him was an exorbitant price for a meal, and located a place where he could sit and eat, he found himself disappointed. The American hamburger lacked the spice of those served in his country. But rather than belittle the food, he remembered that familiarity was a powerful thing. He suspected, with a measure of pride, that realizations like this one were what made him an exceptional soldier. He was one of those outside-the-box thinkers highly prized by Standish.

Canfield. He had to keep saying the name to himself, to continue substituting the real name for the assumed. For that was why he was there.

Once he cleaned out the widow account, adding it to what he’d accumulated over the last year, he had enough to spend the remainder of his days somewhere free of worry. Yet he knew, even before he spent a year on a pristine beach and let the thing gnaw at him, that he would never be happy until he saw Standish—Canfield—face-to-face one last time.

His intel said the man worked for Van Camp Enterprises, which meant he would spend the bulk of his time in Atlanta. As logic would dictate, he owned a home in a high-end section of the city. That was another thing that amused the Ethiopian: a man who could wield such influence and produce such devastation in a country not his own could allow himself to be wholly unprotected in his country of residence. Dabir knew the American counted on anonymity to protect him, but he himself was proof that luck could send the entire arrangement crumbling. With a well-timed tail to an African airport, he had uncovered Canfield’s secret.

Now Dabir had to decide which course to pursue—whether to expend resources studying Alan Canfield or the company for which he worked. At first blush, Van Camp Enterprises was a monster corporation. CEO of one of the largest media enterprises in the world, Arthur Van Camp also had a hand in an impressive number of unrelated concerns. And yet Dabir had never heard of the man.

As much as he wanted Canfield, Dabir decided that much of what he needed to know began and ended with Arthur Van Camp. He pondered this as he finished his first American-made burger, and he hoped, indeed prayed, that whatever he wound up accomplishing in this country would not disappoint him nearly as much as this simple meal.

December 11, 2012, 9:15 P.M.

The Southern Ocean beat mercilessly against the Shackleton Ice Shelf, its massive waves coming with foam-tipped crests, striking the monstrous frozen platform that stretched for more than two hundred miles before turning southeast and degenerating into an arc of malformed ice with fissures ripped by the elements, hemming a bay filled with icebergs once married to the shelf. The ice shelf was in the death throes of a geologic formation not long for this world, if only in the stress fractures spider-webbing their way through its surface and the bergs newly calved to the sea.

Farther inland, where the glacier that formed the ice shelf narrowed, the effects of whatever natural forces had decreed its demise were most evident, strangling the shelf, shattering its brittle bones. The estimates were that the shelf would retain its shape—its place—for roughly thirty years. A wink in the period by which the growth of mountains was measured, but an eternity in the life of the average researcher.

And it was those three decades Canfield counted on. Without them, the time and expense exhausted by this project were wasted, and while Mr. Van Camp had money to spare, a project like this one was pricey enough to warrant extreme care.

Canfield stood on the flat ice, gazing straight ahead, the dim light rendering everything beyond him as shadows, including the ice that stretched for miles in three directions. The Shackleton Shelf covered more than twenty-three thousand kilometers, which meant that, even if it were a perfectly clear day, he wouldn’t have been able to see the ocean from where he stood.

Looking to his right, though, he could hear the expanse of seawater assaulting the shelf. Twenty yards away, an Ashok Leyland truck with a mounted DTH drilling rig bored a hole in the ice, forcing the bit down a quarter mile; the operation was illuminated by fluorescent kits that gave off no heat. What they were about to do required depth, which was why Van Camp had spent the money to have the hydraulic motor modified to push the bit through the deep, compressed ice. Other parts of the unit had also been adapted to the job, as well as to the environment in which it performed, such as the white surface that camouflaged the truck’s presence on the ice, including its tires. Even a refrigerant system had been set up to expel heat-stripped air around the cabin, masking the warmth inside. All to avoid detection from those satellites Van Camp’s money and influence were unable to reroute.

From Canfield’s spot on a slight rise, he could make out the locations of eight more units. The units were arranged in a straight line and spaced twenty-five yards apart. For the last four months they’d been working their way across the shelf’s surface—drilling, lowering charges, and filling the holes again, all the while progressing northward. Of all the projects on the Van Camp docket, Canfield thought this one the riskiest. It was also his idea, which prior to his recent change in goals made him more than concerned for its success.

In a perfect world, Canfield would have been there every moment, and that may have shaved two weeks off the project time. But with his other responsibilities sending him around the globe, he’d been forced to leave the supervision of the shelf to others. And it wasn’t until this last week—when they were nearing completion of an endeavor that would qualify as perhaps the most ambitious project ever attempted on earth—that he’d felt nervous.

The wind had picked up over the last hour and he could hardly hear it when his foreman, a journeyman and pipeline supervisor named Ricker, said something to him over the radio. Canfield brought the radio closer to his ear and asked the man to repeat himself.

“We’re finishing up the last one, Mr. Standish,” the man said. In the background Canfield could hear the roar of the rig, the scream of the bit ripping through thousands of years’ worth of ice.

“Excellent,” he shouted into the radio. He waved a gloved hand across the distance before realizing Ricker probably couldn’t see the gesture. But the other man, a white blur almost missed against the whiteness around him, raised his hand in response.

Canfield had selected Ricker for the simple reason that he was the best in the world at what he did, one of only a few who could take on a project of this magnitude. The problem was that as a former marine accustomed to thinking of everything in tactical terms, Ricker was bright enough to know that what they’d done there could have only been initiated for one of two reasons: scientific research or war. And the cost of the equipment—Ashoks with state-of-the-art drill rigs, crawlers with 800mm auger drillers, and the monstrous blast-hole drill—was far too expensive for all but the most well-financed of science expeditions. Not to mention the amount of explosives they’d buried beneath the ice, which were they lumped together in a single location and detonated, would leave a crater the size of Rhode Island. Canfield knew that Ricker understood all of this, which was why he had to consider the man yet one more loose end in a long string of them.

The foreman stood by one of the drill units, watching as the operator put the hydraulic cylinder in reverse and started to thread the line out of the fresh hole. Not far from Canfield, a white helicopter sat idle on the ice shelf. The chopper would carry him back to a research vessel working its way around Bouvet Island. He turned toward the helicopter and flashed a light, and immediately the pilot brought the bird to life.

Canfield lifted the radio to his lips. “Great work, Max. When the last charge is set, get everyone back to base camp. I’ll have the plane there at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Does that give you enough time to finish breaking down?”

Even across this distance, he could see the man’s shoulders shake with laughter.

“I’d have the camp down in fifteen minutes if you had the plane here now,” Ricker said. “ ’Cause there’s a hot shower calling my name the second we get back to the boat.”

“I’ll make sure there’s a clean towel and a bar of soap waiting for you,” Canfield returned with a chuckle.

He watched for a few moments longer, until the drilling rig finished its egress from the new hole and a pair of men began removing the bit and attaching the cable and payload to be lowered to the bottom. Then he turned and headed toward the helicopter.

Once there he placed a call to the research vessel, to the team waiting to clean up the camp. Once the call was made, and he knew that he would pass the second chopper in the air, he offered the endless ice outside the window a tired smile, knowing that Van Camp would appreciate his heeding his last dressing down. He was using company resources for this one. And once the deed was done, no trace of the drilling operation—or its men—would remain.

—

For more than an hour after arriving at the hospital, Brent was unable to locate a single person who spoke English. He’d finally given up, allowing the nurses, and the doctor who looked at him for less than ten seconds, to poke and prod. Their treatment of him was a good deal more gentle than the prodding he’d received from the Afghan authorities. The professor didn’t necessarily blame them. When the police—with an ambulance close behind—arrived at the restaurant, they found a half-dozen dead men, a gravely wounded American woman carrying a gun, and a foreign man who could do little but babble and point. Thinking back on it, Brent was grateful they hadn’t shot him on sight.

Once they wheeled Maddy in for surgery, all he could think to do was call Colonel Richards. For despite his barely knowing the man, Brent found it a comfort to talk to someone who assured him that all was under control and that he, Richards, was in charge, even from thousands of miles away. Later, he felt a whole lot better when a lieutenant with the marines showed up. According to the soldier, American forces were surrounding the hospital just in case the enemy was planning a repeat attack, though everyone thought that to be unlikely.

Brent had explained the events leading up to the attack, doing his best to leave out anything he thought Richards might prefer to remain classified. But since the lieutenant and his men were operating on specific orders to protect the army captain and her civilian traveling companion, anything more than the basics wasn’t required.

Brent’s ears were still ringing from the shotgun, as well as the rounds fired in his direction, and somewhere along the way he’d twisted his ankle. Yet he couldn’t complain, given how Maddy looked when they wheeled her away. He tried his best not to think about it, because each time he did his stomach knotted up.

“How are you, sir?” the lieutenant asked as he extended a plastic cup of water to the professor. Brent noticed the name Templeton on his shirt.

“Just fine,” Brent said, accepting the cup with a grateful nod. He hadn’t realized he was so thirsty.

He suspected he should say more to the man who’d choppered in from Kabul on his behalf, but nothing came to him and his eyes remained on the door through which Maddy had disappeared.

“Dr. Michaels, I’ve spoken with the local police and explained what I could, and while they’re not happy about it, it looks as though they’re deferring to us for the time being.”

“That’s good to hear,” Brent said.

The lieutenant followed Brent’s gaze to the gray windowless doors. “I’m sure she’ll be alright, sir,” Templeton said. “I hear Captain Madigan is pretty tough.”

Brent couldn’t help but smile, because in his assessment, Amy Madigan was indeed tough. Still, the lieutenant didn’t see how much blood she’d left in the restaurant. “Thanks,” he said.

The lieutenant nodded and walked away, leaving Brent to his own thoughts.

—

“I want that blast report yesterday!” Richards snapped.

The large briefing room was now a war room, teeming with officers. What had begun as a quiet investigation by his team was now a multi-branch operation between the army, air force, and Homeland Security. Although grief-stricken about the recent tragic events, Richards glanced around the room and was filled with pride, admiring the level of professionalism on the faces of his team. Even Snyder, who had spent more time with Petros than anyone else in the unit, maintained a look of resolve as he pored over the first of the reports taken from the blast site. Richards knew they would have time to grieve later; if they began now, they wouldn’t do right by Petros—or Madigan.

“We picked up traces of PTEN,” Snyder said. “The blast radius indicates whoever did this used a lot of it.”

“If they used PTEN, we’re talking about someone organized,” commented one of the Homeland Security techs, a smart-looking woman in her twenties who sat nearby working on a laptop. “And if they had enough PTEN to create an explosion that large, then they either had tons of money or a serious support system, or both.”

“Okay,” Richards said, “so we have a professional hit on an army officer in Washington, and a brute-force attack on another officer in Afghanistan. Who could strike both of them in less than twenty-four hours, and why?”

“If they’re even connected, Jameson,” said General Smithson. “Not only do you have to take into account the distance, the methods are different enough to give me pause about suspecting one person or group.”

Richards couldn’t blame the general for his skepticism. Were Richards not involved in investigating just such a far-flung series of unique events, he wouldn’t have bought it either. At some point he would need to pull the general aside and fill him in, but he harbored doubts about divulging that information to such a large and diverse group. Besides, he agreed with the Homeland Security tech’s assessment: any one person or group that could pull this off, and that could orchestrate everything the team had catalogued so far, was well positioned to infiltrate at least one of the groups assisting him now. Any man or woman in the room could be watching and listening for someone else. Richards scanned the room, aware of the paranoia, which only made it easier to indulge it. He looked back at General Smithson.

“You have to trust me on this one, Frank,” he said, and despite the differences in their ranks, Richards’s long tenure in this building allowed Smithson to take a measured look at the colonel’s face and then nod.

“Alright then,” said Smithson. “It looks like we have our work cut out for us.”

Richards saluted the general and returned to his work, barking out orders across the room.