David Golemon - Ripper

Collins lowered the radio. He then looked at the staring eyes of Farbeaux, Mendenhall, Everett, and Sarah, who were just as shocked to hear Niles’s explanation of events as he had been. His head turned and looked at the spot where their rescuers had vanished into the flowing waters of the Rio Grande River. Then Collins cursed himself and suddenly turned and ran back into the large opening of the culvert. Will and Everett followed. Sarah turned with the weight of the Frenchman and watched as the three men vanished into the darkness once more.

“We have to recover Guzman’s body or people are going to have a hard time believing this story.”

As Jack approached the spot where Guzman had been downed, his eyes saw smoke rising from the running water. Everett and Mendenhall saw the same thing and froze. Lying in the water where Juan Guzman should have been was nothing but a smoking ruin. The clothing was totally eaten away and only a fragment of bone here and there was recognizable. With the jar of fluid still clutched in his uninjured hand, Collins leaned down and looked at the eaten-away remains of the world’s most wanted criminal. Jack recognized the chemical smell almost immediately.

“What is it, Jack?” Everett asked as he too scowled at the smoking remains.

“It’s something like hydrochloric acid, but different, stronger, a lower ph — but similar.”

“Well it did a job on the old Anaconda,” Will said. “Good riddance.”

As Jack stood up he faced the lieutenant. He held up the jar of fluid. “Now this is the only evidence outside of our own accounts of what this stuff can do.”

Will regretted his remark, realizing that the colonel was talking about evidence, and he had just cracked wise about the magical disappearance of Guzman through chemical means. He eventually turned and followed Everett and Collins out of the culvert. He approached Jack, who was looking at the spot where their mysterious rescuers had vanished into the river. Mendenhall stepped forward and faced in the same direction as Collins.

“Okay, those men obviously destroyed what remained of Guzman before they split out of here, so just who in the hell were those guys, Colonel?” Will asked.

As Jack watched the flowing river, he knew he had been had by somebody, but what do you say to a team of men who had just saved your life but destroyed the evidence that you needed?

“I don’t know who they were, Will,” he answered while looking from the river to the amber-colored fluid in the jar.

Perdition’s Fire had left the hacienda, and it would be none other than Colonel Jack Collins who carried death with him back home to the Event Group Complex.

The Colorado-based space systems company operated no less than ten satellites in low-earth orbit around the world for a consortium of companies. All privately based and funded, they contracted with this small Boulder operation to download telemetry and feed these companies vital information from their gathering of information — everything from GPS tracking to far more reaching enterprises. Each bit of information is coded and sent to the corresponding company who contracted for the telemetry received by the 130-person operation only three miles distant from the University of Colorado.

On the third floor of the six-story building, a technician was currently tracking a trace program in Nevada. As he bit into a stale Twinkie his eyes roamed over the telemetry streaming in from one of their newer satellites launched just last year. As he chewed he watched as the new KH-21 photo-recon bird made its way across the American Southwest. He noted the red blip on the map and its corresponding latitude and longitude.

The young technician, a young man who never knew who his work was going to be sent to, was curious as he had never seen a tracer like the one he was tracking. This little gem was priceless in its accuracy — down to plus or minus sixteen inches on the accuracy of the coordinates.

The tech took the last bite of his Twinkie and then leaned forward to examine the small red blip still on the computer-generated map before him.

“Now that is a good old-fashioned ‘bug,’” he said as he watched the red tracer hesitate at a spot ten miles north of its original landing position. Then his eyes widened as the coordinates, while changing, started to get strange. At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then he tapped a computer command into his keyboard and he smiled as he realized that the tracer he was watching wasn’t moving north, south, east, or west, it was moving down — moving into the bowels of the earth.

“Must be a mine of some sort,” he mumbled and then punched the send button on his keyboard that would shoot the coded information out to the company or individual who had contracted for the tracking satellite’s services.

The technician, who really never got out much, had tracked the tracer blip to a spot fifteen miles outside of the city of Las Vegas. And then he missed the coordinates that would have told him his telemetry streaming from the satellite overhead was looking down on Nellis Air Force Base just outside of Las Vegas.

How could the technician know that the final coordinates before the bug died due to power loss placed his target at 5,700 feet below the desert in Nevada — at the north firing range of Nellis and to a complex that ran almost two miles beneath the desert sands inside a natural cave formation that wasn’t on any geological map and was home to — The Event Group.

Hiram Vickers was sitting in his office going over a file spread out on his desk. He looked up when a light knock sounded on his door. The bookwormish man waved at the girl he recognized as being stationed in the space-based imagery department two floors down.

“Hi,” he said as he removed his thin-rimmed glasses. His eyes went from the young girl’s face to her small chest. The man in charge of cheap tricks around the globe never lost his smile, but he immediately dismissed the young photography expert as not up to his usual standards. “What have you got?”

The girl stepped into the immaculately cleaned office and held out a large manila envelope. “We just received this from Cassini Space-Based Systems in Boulder. It came coded to you, but the office checkoff doesn’t have the director of intelligence in the information loop as it usually does.” The girl placed the large envelope against her chest, as if she wasn’t about to let the information leave her until she had a little bit more detail on why the agency chain-of-command signoff wasn’t included in the package.

“Ah, we’re just running a test. We had a major screwup the last time this small company gave us tracking info. They sent it, but it never arrived. Who knows, it probably went straight to the Russians or Chinese,” he said with a broad and disarming smile as he stood from his desk and removed his glasses. He stepped out from around the sensibly clean desk and held out his hand for the envelope. “This was to be passed straight to my desk.”

The girl didn’t look convinced at all. “But we have mandates from the director that nothing goes to the corresponding desks until they get passed to them by their department heads. And since this test originated in Boulder, it should go directly to the desk of North American Operations. Assistant Director Simpson should be the last one on the list before the director of intelligence on this checkoff sheet.”