Enemy Agents, page 9
The second chemist looked at Milton. “We’re looking for a way to remove body armour without killing the man underneath. If you can take away his sense of safety, he’s more likely to surrender. It could prevent situations from escalating.”
Milton nodded politely, said nothing to the eager young scientist, and kept walking. A few steps later, he leaned conspiratorially toward Quarrel. “Very bright minds here, but they don’t realize that the people we employ would always make the headshot anyway.”
At the next station, a woman stood facing a narrow hallway that extended out sideways from the main room. She shouted, “Fire in the hole!”
Quarrel realized it wasn’t a hallway at all, but a long rifle range. The woman facing down the range was not holding a gun, but an umbrella. After shrugging her shoulders to loosen up, she held the umbrella straight out horizontally, holding it with both hands. With a click of her thumb on the handle, a two-inch long rocket-propelled grenade fired from the tip and down the range, exploding with a huge noise but very little vibration.
“There’s an accelerometer inside of it. It only fires if you hold it steady and within three degrees of horizontal for three seconds first,” the woman said, turning and removing her earplugs. “That way you don’t accidentally blow up when you twirl it.”
Milton offered the woman a handshake. “Chris Quarrel, this is Meg. Meg’s our fabrication specialist. Anything we can’t buy, she builds.”
Quarrel shook her hand as well. “What do you take in school to get that job?”
“Electrical engineering. But we’ve got everyone from nuclear physicists to auto mechanics. If you can build gadgets and gizmos, you can work here.” Meg was surprisingly young, probably close to thirty but looked like a college student. She had short, spiky brown hair and a round, slightly pudgy face. She was skinny despite the baby fat on her face, so she was practically swimming in her big white lab coat.
Milton guided them toward the middlemost counter, which was covered in a variety of guns and knives. “Agent Quarrel has decided he needs a weapon. A good sidearm he can keep for a while, nothing ‘special’.”
“Gig!” Shouted Meg. A lanky young man in a Ninja Turtles t-shirt emerged from an open door behind the counter.
“What ya want?” He said before he saw Milton. “Oh, hi, sir.”
“New guy wants a gun,” explained Meg.
“OK. I’m Gig. I’m the procurement specialist. I buy the stuff Meg can’t build.” She gave him an angry look.
“I can build anything, it’s just faster to buy certain things.”
Gig shrugged. “Mostly I’m the gun guy. You want a gun, I’m the guy.”
Quarrel was amused by the pair of excitable young nerds in the heart of the secret underground bunker. He shook Gig’s hand. “Gig and Meg?”
“Codenames, obviously. The network guy’s called Kilo.”
“I see.”
Milton wasn’t as amused. “Just a sidearm. Nothing special.”
“Anyway,” Gig said, “we have a lot of nothing special in stock, and even more standard issue. It’s the special orders that keep me up at night.” Gig gestured to the table of guns like a spokesmodel on the ‘Price is Right.’ “Take your pick and we’ll sign it out.”
Quarrel studied the guns. He had used about a dozen of these before but had never really thought about his own preference. And he was very intrigued by the variety of weapons he’d never even tried before.
Suddenly, the elevator at the end of the room dinged open, and a short blonde man with thick legs and large biceps sprinted out of it. Quarrel knew him; he was Jack Hall from the training program. Hall didn’t break stride until he reached Gig, but by then he was already barking out orders.
“Gig! M-two-forty-nine with a grenade launcher. H-E rounds and flashbangs!”
Gig disappeared back into the door beside the counter as the big man turned to Milton. “Harry, we have a big problem. A guarded CIA convoy just got hit about a half-hour outside of Langley.”
“What the hell were they moving?”
“Control computers for American nuclear weapons.”
“Control computers?”
“They tracked the missile’s location and only armed the bomb when it was near the target so that you didn’t have any nuclear accidents if the missile was shot down before it got to the target. There was a team dismantling old nukes at a site on the northeast coast. The actual bombs and fissionable materials are already secured and harmless. These computers were the last components to be dealt with. And there were six of them on the truck. Supposed to just go to a recycling plant and get ground into bits.”
“What use is an old computer without the bomb it’s attached to?”
“Don’t know. I guess in theory if you happened to have a thirty-year-old nuke lying around, this thing could set it off but you’d think anyone with decent electrical skills could just hack it.”
“So why steal them?”
“No idea. These things have a short-range tracker but they predate modern GPS. If they get away, we lose ‘em for good.”
“Jesus Christ. Take a chopper. You bring the computers back or destroy them, but don’t let the hijackers keep the damned things!”
“That’s why I need a nice big bang.”
As if on cue, Gig emerged from the door with a machine gun and a black messenger bag. The blonde man took the bag first, and then the gun.
“I just attached that grenade launcher—I’m hoping it fires straight.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
The big man sprinted for the elevator. Staring at the table of weapons, Quarrel asked Gig a question: “These things loaded?”
“Yeah, why?”
Quarrel grabbed a handgun and a light machine gun and ran after Hall. “I’m going with him!”
The big man turned back, looking past Quarrel to Milton. “Who the hell is this guy?”
“Foreign exchange student. He’s field trained.”
Stepping into the elevator beside the big, intense American, Quarrel offered a handshake. “Chris Quarrel. You trained me.”
The doors closed. “I remember now.” He ignored Chris’s hand. “You failed.”
#
After twenty minutes, they were flying low over a highway in central Virginia. It was still just mid-morning, and the traffic was light. Jack sat next to the pilot, navigating from a small tablet computer that was tracking the signal from the control computers. Quarrel was in the back, trying not to look terrified.
Between talks with the pilot, Jack would speak to Chris through the headsets they wore to communicate over the drone of the engines. He had filled Chris in with the pertinent details. There had been a five-vehicle convoy. The front and back vehicles were armoured SUVs, and the three middle vehicles had been armoured trucks. The computers were in the last truck, a detail the thieves must have known in advance. As the convoy went through an intersection, a semi-trailer truck rammed the target truck at fifty miles an hour, rolling it over. A team of at least twelve men then emerged from the surrounding area with machine guns and hand grenades, to hold off the rest of the convoy. A team then cut into the rear of the armoured truck, killed the men inside, and took the computers. Then all of the attackers got into five high-end sports cars and took off at well over a hundred miles an hour. They made it far enough that all authorities on the ground had lost them—meaning they could have switched vehicles and might be driving anything.
Hall seemed to be unfazed by that. “As long as we have the tracking beacons within ten miles they can ride a goddamn rocket ship and I’ll still find them.”
Now they were within a mile of all six computers, which were still together in one moving vehicle. There were three vehicles in a pack ahead of the helicopter. “Bring me over top of that cube van,” said Hall to the pilot.
They pulled over top of the van, and Hall nodded. “That’s the one. They’re right under us. Pull away a bit so I can see them.”
Quarrel looked out the window to see the van, which was bunched closely between two other vehicles in the slow lane. In front was a luxury convertible with the top up, and behind was a minivan. “Are the other cars with ‘em or civilian?”
“I don’t know. Either way we want to isolate the van.”
Suddenly, Jack threw open his door and leaned out of the moving helicopter. “Lower!” He raised the M249 and slid the safety off. Then he unleashed a barrage of bullets at the van, hitting the street first and then punching the driver’s door with several shots. After the burst, he waited. The minivan behind the van slammed on its brakes, while the convertible and the van both sped up.
“Closer!”
Realizing that he could help, Quarrel climbed over next to Hall, trusting his restraint straps to hold him inside the chopper. He raised his own weapon and lined up the sights. Before he could fire, Chris realized that the convertible’s top was opening. He readjusted to aim for the roof of the car. As soon as he saw a person, he fired. He missed. The man in the back of the car was holding something. There was a bright flash, and then a contrail of smoke shot past the chopper’s tail rotor.
“Rockets!” shouted Hall to the pilot, who sped up to pull them ahead of the terrorist vehicles.
Hall loaded a flashbang grenade into the under-mounted launcher on his gun. He took aim again, this time at the car, and fired. The round hit the hood of the car and exploded in a bright flash. The driver stomped on the gas and launched the car well ahead of the cube van. A second later, Chris realized the driver was blind when the convertible kept going straight where the road curved, and it slammed into the guardrail. The rocket-man standing in the backseat was thrown fully across the two lanes on the other side of the guardrail, while the driver was smashed into his steering wheel so hard that even if he survived, he wouldn’t be a threat. A second after that, the cube van passed the wreck without slowing.
“Aim for the tires?” asked Chris.
“Save your ammo. I got it.”
Hall reloaded the launcher, this time with a high explosive round. He took his time aiming as the chopper swung around to keep up with the bending road. They pulled up alongside the van, about fifty feet from the ground. “Hold that speed!” shouted Hall. Instants later, he fired.
The grenade hit the road a few feet in front of the speeding van. The van was almost on top of it as it exploded, and the force was enough to throw the front end of the van into the air so it was only driving on the rear wheels for a second. When it slammed back onto the ground, both front tires exploded and the van started to slow, gradually rolling to a stop. Either the engine was dead, or the driver was.
“Bring us down in front!” shouted Hall when he saw that the van was stopping.
A hundred feet in front of the stopped van, the helicopter lowered to the ground. Hall was diving out about eight feet from the ground, while Chris waited for touchdown before he ran out into the road, ducking his head out of f ear of the rotors.
Hall waved his hands in signals that Quarrel knew meant “Take the right, and take cover.” Quarrel jumped the guardrail to the other side of the road. It wasn’t busy, but he still felt uneasy about standing in the fast lane with his back to the traffic; however, the guardrail was the only cover available to advance on the van. Meanwhile, Hall was charging down the paved shoulder, his weapon ready in case anyone in the van moved.
They got within thirty feet before the van’s windshield exploded with handgun fire. Hall dove to his left, seeking shelter in a ditch. The bullets missed him by inches. Quarrel had never fired on a person before, but if he didn’t provide some cover, Jack Hall would be killed. As the terrorist fired on Hall, Chris took aim from a kneeling position behind the guardrail and fired at the shooter. His shots rattled the driver’s side door, where the window exploded. The terrorist stopped firing, and Quarrel indulged the thought—the fear?—that he’d killed the man, until he heard the bullets ricocheting off the guardrail. The driver was alive, and firing a machine gun back at Chris. Quarrel turtled behind the steel ribbons of the guardrail as bullets honed in on his position.
Hall poked up from the ditch to see that Quarrel had drawn the enemy’s fire. He aimed quickly and shot a grenade straight into the van’s open windshield. It hit the back wall of the cab with a thunk, and a split second later the cab exploded. A second after that, the gas tank went and a ten-metre-high gasoline explosion spat heat at Quarrel.
Quarrel watched the flames roll upward, thought of his mission with Shark, and wondered if giant fireballs were typical for CIB agents. Quarrel had fired on the thieves but knowing that Hall had killed them was somehow a relief. Killing a man was a step Quarrel hadn’t been prepared for; a realization that only occurred to him now that he was face-to-face with it. While Quarrel was still awed by the fireball, Hall flanked around the back of the burning van and waited for the rear doors to open. They stayed shut. Quarrel joined Hall at the back of the burning van. After a minute of the fire heating the van, Hall shot out the locks and pulled open the doors. Black smoke poured out, but nobody attacked.
There were two men in the back, both lying face-down.
“They weren’t in there long enough to die from smoke inhalation,” said Quarrel.
“The force of the grenade probably got them. It’s like dynamite fishing.”
Hall dug through the rubble of the van until he found a black steel case. There was one-half of a set of handcuffs still attached to the handle.
“Probably cut it off the guard with the same thing they used to break into the armoured truck.” He gave the case to Quarrel. “Take it to the chopper. If any of them are following, you take off and leave me. I’m going to search these guys and see what they’ve got on them.”
Quarrel nodded. He did as he was told. The pilot had already called in their location, so it was just a matter of waiting for the CIA to show up. The first responders were the state police, followed closely by field teams from both the FBI and CIA. The media were on-site within twenty minutes. As soon as Hall saw the first TV crew setting up, he climbed into the helicopter and ordered the pilot to take them home.
“We don’t need to be on camera,” he said through the headset.
“Shouldn’t the CIB have a presence down there?” asked Quarrel.
“Who do think those FBI guys were?”
“Oh.”
Five minutes later, Harry Milton messaged Hall with the code to open the case. The inside of the case was hard foam, with six slots cut into it to hold the six control computers. The computers looked like a combination of a remote control and an old stereo, with two connector wires hanging from one end. They were each the size of a 1980s cell phone, with a twelve-button pad and a rudimentary digital screen like on a graphing calculator. While there were six slots in the case, there were only five computers.
“They got one,” said Hall.
“What good is a thirty-year-old tracking computer?”
“Don’t know,” said Jack Hall, staring at the sun-drenched landscape below. “We only know two things. The first is that whoever it is, they have highest-level intel on us. They knew when the components were moving, and they even knew which truck to hit.”
“And the second thing?” Quarrel asked, knowing the answer already.
“The second thing is that they just stole something whose only purpose is to set off a nuclear bomb.”
13
It was May 1st, a chilly night in the Arizona desert, where a long, white bungalow housed three federal agents and one amnesiac prisoner. Khalid Saleb, as usual, was watching TV. He had no access to a computer, but the agents who guarded him let him watch TV—which he kept tuned to the news channels. Maybe he was filling in the gaps in his memory, or hoping to see something that sparked a recollection.
Saleb’s room looked like a normal bedroom inside the ranch house. He had a large window, with no metal bars to show that this was actually a prison cell. The window was actually shatter-resistant, bulletproof glass, with two three-quarter-inch panes providing redundant security. The walls, ordinary drywall painted a pale blue, covered cement-filled cinderblock. The fire-rated door was made of oak heavy enough that you wouldn’t notice that it contained an inch of plate steel.
Jessica Swift knew all of this as she watched Saleb through that window. She had been watching them for two days now, at a distance, through a telescope.
Finding out where he was being held wasn’t hard; she needed only to break into a field office of the United States Marshals Service, which was the agency assigning the guards who watched Saleb.
She had also located plans for the building itself, which was much more than a simple house. There were security cameras watching every direction outside the house, and every square foot of the inside. Cameras mounted on posts north and south of the house watched the road, which was usually empty in this barren piece of desert. This security video played in a room of the house, where one of the three guards-on-duty was always stationed. The other guards intermittently watched Saleb and took breaks. They rotated every two hours, until the end of the twelve-hour shift, when a new set of agents took over. The agents on the night crew were two women and a man. Whenever the man was on video duty, the women would sit down in the living room and play cards. Jessica was waiting for tonight’s game to start.
She pulled out a piece of blank white paper and wrote on it in big letters, then flipped it over and wrote on the back. She folded the paper and tucked it into her pocket. Everything else she needed was on her tool belt, except for the bikes that were lying in a ditch, covered with a brown blanket for camouflage. She had come here on one of the bikes. The second—a folding bike—had been strapped to her back. It was already unfolded and ready to ride, under the blanket.
