RW11 - Violence of Action (18 page)

“Fuck you very much,” I countered. “Let’s go. I’m starting to get depressed.” I started for the wide glass doors leading from the lobby to the great outdoors. Paul, after recovering the Kimber, slipped an arm around Trace and stayed with her as we left the now shattered Hotel Campbell. Danny covered our six, telling the HRT commander who’d appeared out of nowhere that we were headed back to the PANG.

“Before you leave you might want to hear this, sir.”

I stopped. “Hear what, brother?”

The federal counterterrorist officer looked each of us over. We were a fucking mess. But we were alive. It had been one hell of a firefight. At least this time it had been us and not HRT who’d taken the hard hits.

“That device they had downtown was command detonated about five minutes ago. Blast killed a shitload of people in the area. There are bodies all over the place, mostly cops and firefighters. We can’t get to the wounded…”

“Why the fuck not?” I asked.

“HAZMAT is registering radioactive contamination at the blast zone. They’re pulling back another ten blocks and suiting the Guard up to go in with protective gear. The bastards set off a dirty nuke! The whole city is freaking out and the mayor is one of the dead at the scene. It’s a fucking mess.”

“And it ain’t over yet,” I said quietly. “I’m afraid we’ve only just seen the beginning.” I didn’t know exactly what Blanchard was up to, blowing a fucking dirty nuke instead of the SADM he’d gone to such trouble to steal. I started walking toward the soccer field where my helos were warming up for the flight back to the PANG. My team fell in beside me, each of us silent and alone in our private thoughts. Night had fallen and with it my spirits. Despite my best efforts, Blanchard still controlled the agenda. I promised myself that would change soon. I was coming for Max Blanchard. It was just a matter of time. It was just a matter of will.

It had begun and I wasn’t in any position to stop it. Before now I’d always played out scenarios of this magnitude in a war room somewhere, or around the bar with my shooters. What if this…? What if that…? “The sky is falling,” warned Chicken Little. No one listened to the little feathered fucker. I can relate. When Red Cell began its operations I began warning my superiors about the clear and present danger terrorists posed to our poorly protected nuclear weapons sites. Forget the nuclear power plants scattered around the country. Security at those sites was and is still absurd; they’re wide open to assault and attack. I didn’t waste time analyzing
that
vulnerability. Why bother to fuck with a clumsy old power plant when you could so easily walk off with a convenient, handheld world buster?

Like poor old Chicken Little, I learned how easily the powers-that-be can turn a deaf ear. How much they
want
to turn a deaf ear. Even when we were tromping around setting demolition charges in nuclear submarines’ torpedo rooms, the brass deemed it politically correct to turn a blind eye to the truth. Terrorism and terrorists were a joke to the senior Pentagon statesmen. They were working on fighting the real wars. Wars with ships and tanks and airplanes and divisions of hairy-assed men all loaded down with 200 heavy pounds of lightweight equipment on their backs. The problem was the wars they wanted to fight had already been fought decades earlier. Our new enemies were renegade nation-states with miniature armies and limited resources. Their leaders knew a face-to-face with the United States military machine was a no win situation. So they had begun conducting their wars against us using small bands of highly organized, motivated, and trained terrorists. State-sponsored terrorism was the Black Plague of the new millennium. I’d seen it coming a long, long time ago. I’d seen the sky crashing in on us and had raised the alert. I’d been ignored, banished, and then disgraced for failing to toe the party line. Yep, Chicken Little was a fella I could identify with. Especially now at 3000 feet above the earth in a helo filled with my wounded shooters.

A disaster of fucking huge proportions was unfolding below us, and I knew even more bad things were just waiting in the wings for their cue.

“My God, Dick! What the fuck…?” Danny Barrett’s voice crackled in my headset as we stared out the port side of the ’hawk as it hauled ass for the PANG base. On the streets below, major gridlock was building as thousands of cars sat on Portland’s freeways and highways, stalled bumper to bumper in their owners’ efforts to flee the city. As we reached the Columbia River I asked the pilot to take her down to 1000 feet and fly the river. We dropped hard and fast, leveling out in the darkness and assuming a course that put the well-lit city on Danny’s and my side of the ’hawk.

“Big smoke over there,” I pointed out to Barrett. “I take it that’s where Chinatown is?”

“Roger that, Captain,” interjected our pilot. “But ‘was’ might be a better word. That’s where the device went off. I understand the explosion was pretty nasty. Natural gas lines got busted open and at least one gas station went up. The firefighters can’t go in because of radioactive contamination. They haven’t got the gear or the training to deal with a major fire
and
radiation poisoning. The perimeter was pulled back from ten to twenty blocks in all directions. An evacuation of Ground Zero was ordered and the entire police bureau is handling that, even reserve officers and cadets have been called up to help.”

“What about the fires?” Barrett asked.

“They’re gonna burn, sir. Until someone down there with some authority sorts things out and makes some good decisions, all you see going up in smoke will be allowed to do just that. The mayor’s dead, the city council is on tranquilizers, and the uniformed brass is arm wrestling to see who gets to call the shots. They’re all fucked up down there. My guess is the Feds will step in any minute now and take control.”

Even from a thousand feet in the air, the devastation below was unmistakable. The fire department had already trucked in a half-dozen powerful klieg lights which gave the whole scene the surreal look of a movie set, or a scene out of an old black-and-white war movie. But this was no Hollywood make-believe. Through the dense veil of smoke and airborne debris, I could see that almost a full block of Portland had been leveled to nothing more than a steaming mass of twisted iron and rubble. Pockets of bright orange flame punctuated the entire area like a parody of streetlamps. At one side of the blast zone I saw that part of an elaborate Chinese-style gate still stood. Adorned with the figure of a massive stone lion and dozens of dragons, it struck me as an oddly appropriate entranceway to this small piece of Hell that had materialized beneath me.

And this, I reminded myself, was just an appetizer. A so-called dirty nuke is a poor cousin to a real nuclear weapon. It’s just some civilian radioactive waste strapped around a high explosive charge. And radioactive waste is surprisingly easy to come by. Visit a few big city hospital dumpsters and you’ll likely be able to recover medical grade radioactive “garbage” that’s been improperly disposed of. Scrape the insides of some old glow-in-the-dark watches and you’ll probably get a nice bit more. Put that crud with some C-4 plastic explosives and run like hell. You’ve built yourself an oversized pipe bomb with some added radioactive fallout as a special bonus. As bad as this looked, it was a far cry from what would happen if Blanchard detonated the SADM. What the fuck was his game? Why bother firing a warning shot like this, allowing us more time to organize against him?

As I gazed down at the panic-stricken city, I thought about what the pilot had told me. Every son of a bitch who had anything resembling a uniform, even reservists and cadets, was being brought to the blast site. There wasn’t going to be anybody left to keep the rest of the city under guard. Unlike New York City, which had enough cops and firemen to handle a catastrophe like 9/11 and still keep men on patrol, Portland would have to use every last man they had to handle tonight’s ratfuck. Blanchard would have free reign to plant the SADM anywhere he fucking wanted without interference. Hell, he could probably stroll into City Hall with the goddamn thing under his arm and leave it on the mayor’s desk. (Former mayor, I mean. R.I.P.)

Then I remembered Karen’s comment that they wouldn’t be able to keep the missing SADM out of the news much longer, given what was going down in Portland. Of course, Marcinko, that’s the other reason for this first bomb. Blanchard was just clearing his throat, making sure he had everybody’s attention. Testing the microphone, as it were. The whole point of this fucking bullshit wasn’t to blow up Portland, it was to spread his sick message to the masses. And the best way to do that was to make sure all cameras were rolling when he pulled out the big bomb. Better TV that way. He was going for ratings, the dirty cocksucker. I didn’t like it, but at least I felt I was starting to get some sort of understanding of the way Blanchard’s brain worked.

Sitting back, I looked over at Trace. A PJ was using a pen-light to check her out. She’d pulled off her turtleneck and peeled off the damaged ballistic vest. I could see a baseball sized crater that had already turned black and blue—almost green, really—due to massive internal hemorrhaging. I knew she’d been hit twice like that by two high-velocity rounds. Even now the pain must have been excruciating but Dahlgren just sat there with her eyes closed as the trauma medic worked on her.

“She’ll be fine,” Danny said reassuringly. “One tough soldier.”

“PANG coming up, sir,” the pilot announced. We’ll be on the ground in five mikes. I’ve asked for an ambulance to stand by so your people won’t have to walk. Our clinic staff is on call and ready to receive patients. They’re shit hot docs. You’re in good hands.”

I thanked the aircrew, then turned my attention back to my next order of business: Laski’s little black bag. Eyes closed and chin down, Paul was holding onto it with a death grip. We’d quickly rifled through it before taking off from the soccer field and found an impressive little collection of cell phones, a laptop, a Palm Pilot, and two beaten-up notebook computers. These two laptops were my main interest and I wanted to crack them wide open as soon as possible. I’d already called Karen using Danny’s cell and briefed her on how the hit on Laski had gone down. I told her we’d grabbed the command and control gear for Nemesis and that I needed an egghead on the ground ASAP who could bust through the security firewalls keeping me from what I needed to know in order to locate and recover the nuke. She promised me OISA would fly an asset who lived in Seattle to the PANG immediately. “He’s one of Bill Gates’s golden boys,” she said. “Inner circle type. As smart and capable as they come.”

Which was exactly what I needed.

“When we’re on the ground get yourself and these two squared away with the docs,” I told Danny. “I’m gonna have the PJ here slap a Band-Aid on my hip so I can get Laski’s shit over to the Op-Center, ready for Karen’s hotshot to crack when he arrives. I want Trace and Paul to get some sleep. We need ammo, full tac-harnesses, new vests, and the most up-to-date intel dump Mulcahy can provide from D.C. Let’s link back up in thirty mikes at the Op-Center. Got it?”

“Loud and clear.”

The ’hawk lined up on the PANG runway it had been assigned and began its descent. Off to my right I could see Portland International Airport. It was totally locked down, no flights coming in or going out. All air space for a hundred miles round Portland was off limits to anyone but the military. The PANG F-16 pilots were flying fully loaded fighters and had orders to shoot down anything that didn’t do
exactly
as the pilots ordered. Additional fighter and refueling support had been tasked out of McChord Air Force Base outside Tacoma, Washington. Three platoons of SEALs from ST-1 at Coronado were en route to start checking hulls and doing ship searches in the Port of Portland and on the Columbia River. A combat control team from McChord was also inbound to assist in handling the growing military air traffic at both the PANG and the civilian airport, which would soon fall under the military’s control. Out in civilian land, no such direction or order was possible.

We were seconds from touching down. I nudged Paul and woke him up. Shit, I wish I could still fall asleep anywhere and anytime!

“You think the colonel knows his cells are being taken down by now?” Danny asked me.

I turned toward him. We were near nose to nose, the hot air of the turbine engine washing over us and the familiar smell of JP-4 reminding me of a thousand other launch sites. “Yeah, he’s got to know we’re on his ass. But it doesn’t matter to him. He’s still in control of the device. He’s still in control of the mission. He’s still got half a dozen badass gunslingers at his side, and he’s the only girl in town who knows where and when the hammer’s going to drop. He’ll be more cautious now, but that’s about it. All we got is bodies, bullet wounds, and a ticking clock. Blanchard is still the target, and we still got a job to do.”

As the bird flared and settled I leaned over and slid the armored port side door open. I wanted out of the fucking helo in the worst of ways. I wanted to walk on the runway and for one fucking moment be alone with my own thoughts. I needed space.

I tossed the headset to the chief and headed out onto the dark tarmac of the runway. Shoving my swollen hands into my fucking
DEE
stroyed down vest I headed for the most remote corner of the field I could find. No one challenged me. No one dared. I needed some time to think about my next, and possibly my last move.