Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

“What’d you see, Gav?”

“Pretty big place. Three entrances. Armed guards, which I guess isn’t that big of a deal for a place storing lots of stuff.”

“Did you notice the undercover guards? Not your typical rent-a-cops.”

“Not really. My peripheral vision kinda sucks.”

“Some of those guys were strapped. Real operator types.”

“That second facility had military vehicles parked there,” Gavin said. “Maybe that’s why.”

“What about the refrigerated facility? Why do you need armed guards there? And they seemed to be the most paranoid.”

“They must be guarding something really valuable. I’m guessing it’s not the trailers full of Stouffer’s Meat Lovers Lasagna—my personal favorite, by the way.”

“So tell me about Runtso. Why would a brainiac like him work in a frozen food warehouse? The transition from ORNL to here doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

“Unless they’re working on a top-secret frozen pizza recipe inside of that place, I don’t think they’d need the kinds of clearances he had.”

“And he wouldn’t need a physics degree to work in there. So what would he have been doing at ORNL?”

“It was redacted from the records. But he was working on a project even your dad would have a hard time accessing. It had to be something on the bleeding edge of national defense. Next-gen nukes? Directed-energy weapons? Electromagnetic railgun? Something like that.”

“At ORNL, sure. But at a frozen food warehouse?”

Gavin scratched his flaky scalp. “I know. It doesn’t make sense. We need to get in there but the security was too tight back there to try and fake our way in. And there’s only two of us, so it’s not like we’re going to fight our way in.”

Fight our way in? Jack fought back a smile. “Good call.”

“I think we should call the FBI or DoD and have this place checked out.”

“And what would we tell them? There’s a warehouse full of Swanson TV dinners that pose a threat to national security you need to investigate?”

“Yeah. I guess it does sound kind of stupid.” Gavin’s stomach gurgled like a jar of fermenting kimchi. “I’m getting kinda hungry. How about we go hit up Calhoun’s? I think it’s only like fifteen minutes from here.”

“Sure. Why not? Give us a chance to regroup and plan our next move.”

Jack put the Jeep in gear and checked for traffic in his rearview mirror.

A big refrigerated truck rumbled past, throwing brightly colored leaves, heading back toward Knoxville. As soon as it cleared, Jack pulled back onto the two-lane and followed him, his mind working on the problem at hand while Gavin scrolled through Calhoun’s online menu.

They rolled along at the posted thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit for a few miles. Suddenly, Gavin shouted.

“I’m such an idiot! How can I have been so stupid?” He thumped his forehead with the palm of his hand.

“Whoa, Gav. Take it easy. It’s just lunch.”

“We need to get back to Runtso’s.”

“Why?”

“Now, Jack. We need to get back now!”

65

Jack pulled into the back of Runtso’s house again, keeping the Wrangler out of sight from the street.

Jack and Gavin each pulled another pair of gloves on, then made their way back into the house and into the gaming room. Gavin led the way.

“Jeez, Gav. What’s got your tail knotted up?”

Gavin ran over to the broken shadow box with the Commodore 64 and picked it up. He stared longingly at it through the cracked glass, like he was reuniting with a lost love.

“Do you have a knife, Jack?”

Jack pulled out his EDC blade, the same Kershaw Blur he’d plunged into van Delden’s thigh back at the steel mill. He snicked the razor-sharp steel open and handed the knife to Gavin, handle first.

Gavin turned the shadow box over and set it facedown on the carpet. He took the knife and carefully cut away the backing, revealing the power plug and connecting cords and cables. There was another, thicker backing that supported the computer on the other side. There were also three small packages wrapped in plain brown paper.

“Oh, baby.” Gavin opened the first wrapped package carefully, as if he were handling an original version of the Constitution.

Gavin sighed with deep satisfaction, even reverence. “And it has the cartridges, too.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

Gavin then wedged the tip of the blade beneath the thin, twisted wire ties that held the computer in place against the thick backing.

“Is this really the time to play a game of Pong?” Jack asked, watching Gavin proceed with surgical precision.

“Runtso’s a genius. I know, because I’m one, too,” Gavin said. “And every young genius that could get his or her hands on one of these babies did so, or drove their parents crazy trying.”

A minute later, Gavin had the Commodore 64 removed. He picked it up along with its accessory parts and the cartridges and carried it over to the big-screen TV that was attached to a wall mount. He set the sacred objects down like a priest placing a sacrifice on the altar. He pulled the TV away and exposed its back and connecting ports.

“Runtso thought of everything,” Gavin whispered. He turned to Jack. “He was one of the good guys. I just know it.”

“Because he played old video games?”

“Just watch.” Gavin hooked up the Commodore 64 and powered it up. “Come to Papa,” Gavin whispered as the machine’s start-up screen displayed on the TV.

**** COMMODORE BASIC V2 ****

64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.

“Now watch this.” Gavin inserted one of the gaming cartridges into the slot on the side of the unit. The TV display pulled up another screen:

PASSWORD?

“Aha! I knew it!”

“What?”

“You don’t password games, Jack. Not back then. He’s hiding something.”

“Can you hack this thing?”

“ Pffft . I’m hurt, Jack. I really am. Runtso’s a gamer, just like me, and a gamer’s gotta game. So I know how this dude thinks.” Gavin’s chubby fingers began dancing on the keyboard.

“You keep on that. I’m heading back to Runtso’s job site. Call me if you find anything.”

“Will do.” Gavin glanced up at Jack, worried. “Careful, okay?”

“You keep your ears open, too. No telling who might be coming back.” Jack pulled his Glock and held it out, butt first. “You might need this.”

Gavin glanced at the pistol and shook his head. “I think you might need it more.”

—

After studying the map, Jack made a turn onto a side road five minutes away from the distribution center, a plan forming in his mind. His phone rang. It was Gavin.

“How’d it go?”

“I got in.”

“Fantastic! You really are a gen—”

“It’s far worse than we thought, Jack. Dear God.” Gavin’s voice cracked with emotion.

“Worse? What? How?”

“Runtso was working on a project called TRIBULATION.”

“TRIBULATION? We’re looking for RAPTURE.”

“TRIBULATION is RAPTURE, but not exactly. They’re both quantum computer projects. Universal QPUs, entangled particles, the whole nine yards. Only, RAPTURE is the ORNL project and TRIBULATION is a parallel project—stolen, basically, by Runtso and a lady named Parsons.”

“Is a true quantum computer even possible?”

“It must be, since they did it.”

“That’s not good. A quantum computer that powerful changes everything.”

Jack knew something about them from his time in Singapore when he busted a Chinese attempt to steal quantum software technology. But the stuff they were doing back then was nowhere near this powerful.