Gauntlet

Temple Publications International, Inc.

SAN DIEGO, CA

www.richardaaron.com

Gauntlet
is a work of fiction. Apart from well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Aaron

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Published in the United States by Temple Publications International, Inc.

ISBN:
978-1-62652-337-1

Ping, Doon, Bubbles, Foxy Lady, and my very own “Turbee.” I love you all.

S
O JUST HOW BIG A CRATER
will
it make if we blow up 660 tons of Semtex?” Richard Lawrence asked Sergeant Jason McMurray.

“No clue,” replied the taciturn McMurray, scratching his chin. “There’s no precedent for something like this. It’s an unconfined explosion, and it’s gonna be a damned dangerous one. But if I can’t handle it, no one can.” McMurray was from the Army’s 184th Ordnance Battalion stationed in Fort Gilles, Georgia. He’d had more than 15 years of training in the disposal of conventional, chemical/biological, and nuclear weapons. He had defused or disposed of bombs, warheads, mortar shells, and land mines, and had a pronounced scar on his left cheek as a daily reminder of the danger of his vocation. He was the best of the best. And he was already planning a 30-day leave after he’d wrapped up this particular circus. Cold beer, family, and golf.

Now he looked around the place once again, this time with annoyance. What had started as a solid, common-sense idea had turned into a carnival. The Islamic Republic of Libya had fallen apart into a series of warring factions, all vying for the throne. Europe and the USA had finally convinced the remnants of the Libyan Army that, if it wished aid and assistance from the west, it had to give up its enormous stockpile of the Czechoslovakian plastic explosive known as Semtex
.
The question had quickly become how the United States would dispose of the explosive once it was surrendered. Then some bright executive in the Pentagon had come up with the perfect solution. Cart the explosive to the middle of the Sahara Desert and blow it up, where it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Sergeant McMurray was in charge of a crew of 20 soldiers from the 184th—men who had been handpicked to take care of the mess. At the moment they were busy receiving, counting, packaging, and then transporting the packets of Semtex from an abandoned landing strip near Bazemah, which was nothing more than a tiny town adjacent to an oasis in the eastern Libyan Sahara. A strange base for such a large operation, but it had been the best they could do. Most of the Semtex had been delivered by air, in a variety of planes. Some had also come by Jeep, and, amazingly, some by camel. Most came in the cellophane wrapped “bricks” that had been sold by Czechoslovakia in the ’70s; each ten inches in length, four inches in width, and two inches in depth. There was 660 tons of the stuff—approximately 600,000 kilos. Each brick was measured for size, weight, and contribution to total, and turned over to the Army for transport to the detonation site.

Richard Lawrence was the CIA’s contribution to the field trip. He was a trained pilot who had flown for the Navy, then retired his wings to become a Federal field agent. He didn’t know anything about explosions, and was demonstrating his ignorance at every turn.

“And we’re looking at what, about twenty thousand bricks?” he asked.

“Yup,” came the terse reply.

Richard performed a few calculations. “Have I got it right, McMurray?” he asked. “The pile’s going to be twenty feet wide; twenty-five long and eleven high feet wide, 25 feet long, and 11 feet high, more or less?”

“Well more or less,” replied McMurray. “The thing you have to realize, though, is that you can’t blow it up cartoon style, with one fuse running to the pile. If you did that, a fair amount of the material would be blown free through the kinetic forces. Not all of the Semtex would be destroyed.”

“So what are we doing instead?” pressed Richard.

“Multiple blasting caps and fuses, together with Amtec timers, so that separate electrical signals are transmitted to the pile at precisely the same instant,” said McMurray. “And by ’precisely,’ I mean within a nanosecond. It’s actually not that different from detonating a whopping big pile of C4. These bricks are a little larger, but the characteristics are similar.”

“Oh obviously,” said Richard, flicking a fly off his clipboard. “How big will the blast be?”

“We’re looking at two thirds of a kiloton, but this is Semtex, not TNT. I’d say we’re looking at the equivalent of a kiloton of TNT. That will make the explosion, if things are fused properly, the equivalent of a small nuclear blast.”

Richard reflected on that for a minute. “How far back should they be?” he asked, referring to the pack of reporters that appeared to be growing by the hour.

“I would say at least two miles,” responded McMurray. “Maybe more.” Richard hadn’t counted on the growing crowd of reporters, journalists, and gawkers that had started to assemble around them. But August was a slow news month, and the destruction of Libya’s Semtex stash was starting to make the front pages.

He’d also overlooked the political wile of Libya’s new leader, General Minyar, who had assembled a large tent near the center of operations. He could barely control the many factions and armed bands that roamed Libya after the “Green Revolution.” He barely controlled the country, but at least he represented a figure of leadership that the West could deal with.

This had further motivated the news stations, which were there in force. News Corp was setting up a camp, and CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera were also there to record the fireworks. The official moment of detonation was still two days away, but Bazemah had already seen a substantial increase in tourists, all waiting to see the “big bang.” Several movie studios had sent crews and cameras, for the sole purpose of shooting footage of such a large explosion, to be used in some future high-budget action film. A festive atmosphere prevailed. The overriding concern shared by the news crews was that they would run out of cold beer before the explosion occurred. A fitting worry, since the explosion was taking place in the heart of the great Sahara; it was, by early afternoon, 120 degrees in the shade.

The question about the size of the explosion, and specifically the size of the crater it would create, was starting to tease the airwaves. There were many predictions, and there was even a Las Vegas betting agency setting odds on calling the crater size. What would it be . . . 500 feet across? Maybe 600?

Richard already had a throbbing headache from the pressure. He tried to ignore it, continuing to review the inventory counts that arrived with each new shipment, counting again and again the number of bricks, and entering them into a spreadsheet on his laptop. “God-damned bean counter now,” he muttered aloud, the corners of his mouth drawing down in a grimace. He longed for a return to his Navy days, when he was landing Tomcats on what, from a short distance out, appeared to be postage stamp‒sized aircraft carriers. He had taken pride in his skills, and was devastated when, in his early 30s, his vision started to deteriorate, and he could no longer meet the Navy’s requirements. Of course he hadn’t told anyone what was going on at the time, and had continued to do his job as best he could. Everything had been fine until one night, when he splashed a Tomcat in the course of a difficult nighttime carrier landing. It hadn’t been a mistake the Navy was willing to forgive. After that he had taken a lateral transfer to the SEAL program and had served in the second Gulf War as a special operations officer.

He had grown up in Islamabad, Pakistan, where his parents had worked at the US Embassy. When he was 16, both his mother and father had died in a car crash, and he’d moved to California to live with the Goldbergs, a family that had also been stationed at the Islamabad Embassy, and who had known Richard’s parents well. On his nineteenth birthday, he signed with the Navy. When he’d been forced to leave after the carrier crash, his background and his skill with languages, especially Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, had made him a natural choice for the CIA’s very busy Middle East operation. His dark complexion didn’t hurt either.

So here he was, 45 years of age, turning gray, counting bricks of Semtex like they were loaves of bread in an American supermarket, in this stinking, ungodly heat. Some promotion. He was well on the way to “Greeter” status at the local Wal-Mart. He popped a couple of Vicodin and continued the seemingly endless count. Since getting kicked out of the Navy, nothing had gone the way he’d planned, and his problems seemed to be growing. If his life was a river, he thought, it had definitely changed from a bright sparkling mountain stream to a mass of sludge and mud blockaded by a dam.

T
HE ONE AGENCY MISSING on the Semtex scene was the relatively new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. TTIC (pronounced “tea tick”) had been established on May 1, 2003, partially in response to devastating terrorist attacks on American soil. The concept behind the new agency was simple enough. Analysts from every agency in the US Intelligence Community received a steady stream of information to be developed by their agents and sources. Intelligence officers from every department continuously fit those pieces into the ongoing and ever-changing factual mosaic. Information was probed, developed, questioned, validated, and analyzed. Further information might come to the surface at any time and require immediate attention. The stream of “Intel” was continually sent “up the chain” from these Intelligence Agencies, and now also went laterally to TTIC. That agency received reports from the National Security Agency, the CIA, FBI, BATF, Secret Service, and all military Intelligence Agencies. It also received reports from security agencies from other countries; MI-5 and MI-6 reports were received daily from the United Kingdom, and Israel’s Mossad and Canada’s security organization, CSIS, reported daily. All told, 27 countries sent information on a regular basis. The people working with TTIC had distinguished themselves in their own Intelligence Agencies prior to their TTIC assignment. Generally, they were also individuals with highly developed computer skills. All in all, it was a brainy crowd, with an incredible amount of information at their fingertips.

The true power of TTIC was in its ability to access hundreds of thousands of databases in countries all over the world. Cellular phone, driving, and criminal records, and records from all the large retail chains, were at their beck and call; dozens of new databases were added to their vast addressing system each day. TTIC had access to trillions of bits of information—pieces that it could splice, dice, and parse in many ways, and at very high speeds. If someone bought a prescription, TTIC could find it. If they applied for a fishing license, TTIC would hunt it down. With debit and credit cards, commerce was becoming “cashless,” and slowly turning toward being completely “digital.” TTIC was designed to take advantage of this digital age.

The agency was powered by an experimental IBM computer known as Blue Gene/L. The computer was originally built for the Livermore National Laboratory in California, installed in 2004 with much fanfare. It contained 16 towers, each approximately six feet in height, and came with an elaborate Freon cooling system. The system had stolen the supercomputer crown from Japan, which had built the exotic Earth-Simulator supercomputer a few years earlier. Blue Gene/L had staggering amounts of ram, and could perform more than 300 trillion calculations per second, far outweighing anything else that had ever been built.

What was not made public was that IBM had actually manufactured several such systems—one for Livermore Labs, and a second for TTIC, in Washington, DC. The TTIC model had roughly twenty-five percent 25% more processing power than the Livermore model, and several times more disc space. Sixteen systems were also given to the National Security Agency. The existence of these systems was kept secret, even from most of the Intelligence Community. They were networked in a 16-system cluster, and together they performed at more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second. The NSA had operated the fastest computers on the planet since the beginning of the computing era, although few outside the walls of Crypto City, their home base, knew that. They saw this new system as nothing more than their God-given right.

At TTIC, the processing modules, power supplies, and disc drives took up an entire floor of their own, below the floor that housed the control room. Unlike the supercomputers of the past, which required armies of staff to keep the hardware operational, Blue Gene required only 20 people; essentially four shifts of five employees, working to ensure that the infrastructure remained intact. Given the computer’s sophistication and self-reliance, it was a fairly simple job. Their main responsibilities were virus patrol and making pots of coffee.

The second floor of the building contained some administrative offices, boardrooms, and secretarial stations. The main floor had reception, storage rooms, and little else. Not seen, but omnipresent, were many armed security personnel. The front of the building was marked by a small sign that said “Donovan and Sons Information Processing Corporation.” It was an inside joke.

The building had a large number of dedicated and highly secure fiber-optic telephone and data connections. Should some enterprising soul have found a way to compromise those links, they would have run into an extremely high level of encryption—the cutting edge of what hundreds of mathematicians working at the NSA had developed. The lines were linked to the CIA offices, the Pentagon, the White House, and the 15 other agencies that made up the American Intelligence Community.

The most important floor in the building was the fourth floor, which housed the huge TTIC control room—this was where the eyes, ears, and hands of the organism lived. The room was built on a circular plan. The curved front wall contained nine large flat panel displays, specially built by IBM, each with a diagonal measurement of approximately 101 inches. Currently, one was tuned in to CNN, another to BBC, and a third to Al Jazeera. There were three satellite images—two from KH-11’s focused on Iraq, and the third a feed from one of three spectacular new ORION satellites, currently focused on a North Korean factory site. Two more screens displayed video feeds from Predator Drones, and the ninth displayed Google’s homepage. Twenty 48-inch screens were vertically stacked on the extreme left and right sides of the wall.

The rest of the room consisted of two raised circular terraces with built-in desks, each with inlaid computers and display panels. Some of the stations had five or six additional independent display screens of various configurations and sizes. In all, there were 40 such stations. The center of the room contained a large, recessed, illuminated world map, some 35 feet across. The map was in fact a specially manufactured, interactive LCD display; if any portion of the map were activated, detailed information appeared in a separate window, which could in turn be enlarged for even greater detail. Using technology similar to the LCD mapping programs found in high-end cars, information could be drilled down to street level. Data about who lived, worked, or had significant connections in the area could also be brought up, or displayed on any of the larger monitors on the front wall. The staff had started to call it the “Atlas Screen.”