Radiant Dawn (7 page)

Captain Roger Stenson, Naval Intelligence: "As far as our best intel goes, softkill option weapons don't exist. The Pentagon's research on all nonlethal projects was shelved in '94. Our friends at JSOC—" a nod to the black-uniformed officer "—have made use of subsonics and chemical incapacitants, but nothing like an EMP wave ever got past the testing stages. The KGB and GRU only did minimal research on those projects under the Soviets, with the same results. France, Germany, Japan and South Korea are all still trying it, but, again, they can't induce a seizure in a single subject in a lab, let alone an entire base. There are about fourteen private corporations around the world pursuing EMP weapons technology as a sideline, but they're years away from anything remotely like what the Admiral has described."

"I think the Admiral's here to report a flying saucer," said Willis Kopko, the NSA rep. More laughter.

The Admiral flushed so red Cundieffe expected him to spit blood. "Please, would you shut the hell up until I've finished the goddamned briefing? Thank you. Now, a sentry from the north gate and one on the flight control tower made their routine check-ins every thirty minutes during that time, and received the proper countercodes until oh-three hundred. They were on a tape. At oh-two hundred five hours, a civilian outside the base saw two helicopters flying low over the desert, headed east. They were inside for only an hour, and when they left, they were loaded down."

"Shithouse mouse, it's an inside job," said Sibley, the CIA rep. "They've got your fucking codes, back to front."

"At oh-three ten," Meinsen went on, "the security hut personnel had come to and phoned in the breach. We scrambled helicopters and alerted NRO, who snapped these Keyhole satellite prints of the area."

He stood back as the lights dimmed, and a projection of a satellite photograph came up on the wall. Cundieffe studied it for a few moments, feeling as if he was looking at one of those Magic Eye stereogram prints that his mother seemed to think he enjoyed. A blocky spiderweb lay tacked out on the desert, bedizened with dewy spots of luminescence that indicated vehicles and other large heat sources. This was China Lake. Around it, the desert spread like the rumpled sheets of a vast bed. With digital enhancement, Cundieffe knew, the Admiral could zoom in to examine cacti and Joshua trees and shotgunned beer cans until Y2K day, but he wouldn't find any helicopters. The stormy, purple knot his face had become told all in the room that he was well aware of this. He nodded toward the military end of the room, though Cundieffe hadn't seen anyone move to address the group. "Yes, Mort?"

Lt. Col. Mort Greenaway of Delta Force cracked his knuckles over his report and fixed Meinsen with his fierce gaze. Cundieffe could see in those eyes that he'd already been braced by the Admiral, and was plenty peeved about something. Cundieffe could easily enough read the tight-beam message that leapt from the Admiral:
Mort, did your Delta assholes pull some kind of psycho wargame maneuver on one of my bases?

And the equally naked broadcast from Greenaway, who'd just tumbled on to why he, and not a SEAL Team Commander, was here:
Admiral, has one of your elite units gone rogue?

When he finally spoke, the Lieutenant Colonel's fingers twisted and tugged at his beard. "A Black Hawk has a range of three hundred eighty miles. Unless they can refuel in the air. Can you at least say with any conviction that they're still in the desert?"

"No other radar stations picked up anything but fixed-wing aircraft in the region. We've set our eyes on all the roads in and out of the area, and have patrols checking all freight vehicles passing through. I think it's safe to assume they've gone to ground somewhere in the Mojave."

"Shit, that narrows it down," Sibley hissed. "You only read one helicopter, when two were visually confirmed. If they can't be reliably tracked on radar, you may as well start looking in Mexico."

Wyler threw his hands up. "We've all been sitting here shitting biscuits listening to this, and wondering why we're here at five in the morning when the President hasn't even been told yet. What the fuck did they take, Wayne?" Cundieffe's ears burned to hear such language from his own supervisor's lips.

"Just four tons of twenty-five year old napalm in fifty-five gallon storage barrels. Just enough Vietnam-era incindergel to torch a small city."

This time, there was no mumbling. A few pens clattered on tables, more than a few indrawn breaths, but in between, Cundieffe could hear sweat breaking out of pores. A crisp plastic snap resounded in the silence, and Cundieffe looked over to see Lt. Col. Greenaway's hand was black with ink from his broken pen. He made no move to clean himself, staring into Meinsen, his fist drizzling fat droplets of ink all over the desk.

Atherton drummed his bony mortician's fingers on the thin report in front of him. "That just doesn't make any goddamned sense, Admiral. A tight operation like you described, and they just took napalm? What the hell would terrorists with effective softkill technology want with something as crude as napalm? They may as well have stolen a catapult."

"Shows what you fucking idiots know," Lt. Col. Greenaway said, his voice receding down a tunnel that led back to Vietnam. "Four fucking tons of nape, my God." Most of the uniforms present today had served in Nam, and it loomed over them like a shadow whenever talk turned to mass troop commitments and limited wars for political goals. Now it had followed them home. Right now, it was taking a bite out of the Lieutenant Colonel. Cundieffe took copious notes.

"It's bullshit," Atherton said.

Cundieffe tapped Wyler on the shoulder, scribbled on his yellow legal pad. "NOT TERRORISTS! VIGILANTES!" Wyler's eyes stalled on the note, and he leaned in close to Cundieffe. "What the hell?"

"Sir—"

"I think my assistant has something to offer," Wyler said. Cundieffe knew he was meant to see his boss's smile, this time.

"Well, it's just—"

"Go ahead, then."

"—Thinking out loud, really—"

"Out with it, young man!"

Cundieffe sucked in a deep breath of the room's stuffy, recycled air, and shuffled his files. "Well, in my, ah, experience, anybody who takes up arms against the government usually expects to have to take lives. If they don't, they're not terrorists. These, um, intruders of yours went to great lengths to do exactly the opposite: they didn't harm anyone, when they could've massacred the whole base and taken everything. In their hands, then, the napalm is useless as a lever of extortion, because we know they won't hurt people."

"That's what I'm thinking," Sibley replied. "They won't hurt sailors because they're armed forces themselves, or vets. But that hardly dismisses them as a threat."

"Hate crime," Atherton, buffing his glasses on his tie. "Tomorrow, they'll melt down Chinatown, or Watts, or the Fairfax District."

"Hell, why not the fucking White House?" Greenaway shot back, grinning.

"Maybe it isn't even for them," said Roger Stenson, the Defense Intelligence Agency civilian liaison. "They could sell it to another group who isn't so squeamish."

"Again, I don't think so, sir." Cundieffe was running now. Wyler's hand seized his wrist like a parent trying to steer a toddler away from a bear-trap. Wyler didn't fret that he'd get hurt; he just wanted the bait for himself. "You see, if they were planning to drop the napalm on a politically or racially motivated target, or even to sell it, secrecy would be paramount. They have to know this'll provoke as large a counterterrorist operation as can be managed in secret, and they have to know they'll never get to keep it for long, let alone deliver it on a target. Napalm has to be dropped from a plane or a helicopter, and there are dozens of ways to kill lots of people that are infinitely more efficient than napalm."

"We're aware of that, son," Meinsen said. "Are you still just thinking out loud, or do you have a point?"

"I think I—what I'm getting at, sir, is just this: that the theft may be more for your benefit than theirs. Maybe it's their way of trying to tell you they're going to do something, to challenge us. This reads more like vigilantism than terrorism." Blank stares from all but Lt. Col. Greenaway, who seemed to be trying to melt him with his gaze. Cundieffe could almost feel it working. "Admiral, have you ever heard of counting coup?" Oh nuts, where'd that come from?

"Mr. Peepers is all done, who's next?" Sibley said, and got a few muffled laughs.

Stenson was still looking at Cundieffe as he spoke. "Maybe he's got something, Wayne. The foremost goal of a comprehensive strategic terrorist plan is to destabilize the military, and alienate the government from the citizenry. You're going to have a hell of a time explaining door-to-door searches of an ever-expanding portion of California. It sounds stupid, I know, but look at the Unabomber."

Cundieffe sucked in another deep breath. He had to make one more run for it. "Captain Stenson's partially right, sir, but it's more than that."

"You're done, son—"

"Wayne, for God's sake, you don't have any more ideas. Let him talk." Cundieffe's hair practically stood on end. Two shocks in as many minutes. Captain Stenson was the one speaking up for him.

Silence. "Sure, they wanted us to know about the napalm, which almost invalidates it for anything but sale abroad, and anybody with the time and resources these people have could probably make it themselves. But they took it out into the desert, and they took much too much to move easily or quickly with it. A search for it in the desert could be passed off as an extended counterterrorist exercise, and they've got to know that.

"And the whole softkill strategy makes a racist militia seem unlikely. Not impossible, mind you, but typically, anyone who's worked up enough to even contemplate genocide will kill anyone who stands between them and their chosen enemies. Militant bigots generally believe the government's a tool of the Zionist conspiracy. They're fanatical about it; so anyone who isn't one of them is a dupe or an active agent of oppression. They deserve to die."

As he paused for breath, the room erupted in conflicting voices, and Cundieffe had to shout to start up again. Remarkably, the room fell silent. "Moreover, no militia group we know of is as connected or as disciplined as it would take to pull this kind of thing off. The two largest groups in the southwest have both had their backs broken in the last year. The leaders of the Bear Flag Brotherhood are serving in Leavenworth for bank robbery, and the two leaders and only real hardcore members of the Aryan Crusade are in jail in Nevada for trying to synthesize botulinum—"

"Bring it home, Marty," Wyler whispered.

"I guess what it comes down to is, their need for the napalm is the loose thread. They're sophisticated and they don't want, nor do they have to kill. They've calculated this. They're good enough they could probably manufacture their own napalm, given enough time. So we need to look at something recent that would necessitate a napalm strike very soon, something that would be worth alerting the military, something they'd still feel confident they could destroy, and that we, after the fact, might even approve of."

"But what?" Sibley shot back, reaching into his breast pocket and taking out a pager. "We're supposed to relax and wait for them to drop napalm on a target—" His thought died and he was looking at the pager confusedly, like it was printing Chinese. "Excuse me," he muttered, and pocketed the pager, but made no move to get up. Cundieffe lost the thread of the argument, couldn't stop staring at Sibley, but the CIA man was far from noticing.

"Trying to get a theory to stick here's like nailing Jell-O to a tree, so long as you avoid the obvious," Atherton said. "We're looking at disenfranchised kooks with connections inside the military. Hell, you probably have the right people already on the base. Ask them."

"Those men are being questioned," the Admiral shot back coldly. "But how dare you suppose I'd kick up this much of a stink if my own men were responsible! Do you think I'm that stupid, or just that the Navy's as corrupted as the Army?"

"Hey, fuck you, Meinsen—" Brigadier General Arthur Cross started, but Lt. Col. Greenaway cut them all off.

"Roadblocks have been set up at all the weighing stations, and we're drafting a plan to sweep the desert in every direction for fifty miles by lunchtime. Seal Team One is on standby at North Island, and can be on-site in an hour on a moment's notice. As soon as the President and the Joint Chiefs wake up to this, I'll have three units of my own men on site. The mission is well in hand."

Atherton practically exploded. "What is this mickeymouse shit? Delta Commandos operating on U.S. soil? This is your idea of containment? The fact that he's here—" pointing a spear-finger at Greenaway "—and not Seal Six, says that, one, you don't trust your own men, and two, you're eager to dump this on another branch's turf, while keeping it inside the Pentagon. FBI tactical teams are more than adequate."

Despite the yawn that preceded it, Rear Admiral Meinsen's retort was all adamant resolve. "It hasn't been approved yet, but in light of the deep dark shithole we're in here, I'm confident the President will allow it. We want this over with fast, Carl. I've been advised that Delta's at a higher state of readiness than Six for this kind of thing, at this time."

Wyler took up the argument, his voice calmer than he looked. "Wayne, the FBI is capable of running down the perpetrators far more discreetly, with far less chance of civilian casualties, than any SpecWar force. This is our own goddamned country, and you've got to know the president will hand it to us. We have all the intel, we have the experts…"

"And you'll share them with Mort's boys. Until sunrise, it's my ass, my crime, my rules. I want four-eyes here and anyone you can spare from your counterterrorism squad here in LA to be on tap for the duration."

"I've got forty here. I can free up half of them right away, more as soon as their unit chief gets back into town this morning." As he spoke, Wyler passed a note to Atherton, who nodded and added to it. Inclining his head ever so slightly, Cundieffe caught most of it around Wyler's screening hand. WAYNE'S ASS = OUR MESS headed what Wyler'd written in a microscopic scrawl, while Atherton's response ended with GIVE HIM MORE ROPE.