Andrew Britton - The Operative

Kealey thrust the fifty and another twenty through the window. “Cut over to Sixth, go up to Fortieth, you can leave me there. Deal?”

The driver took the money and headed up Sixth Avenue. He made it as far as Thirty Fourth Street before police-still on duty at Penn Station-directed them to turn east.

“Sorry,” the driver said, passing back the twenty.

“Keep it,” Kealey said as he opened the door.

“Thanks! Take care of yourself, G-man.”

Kealey grinned. The driver winked back.

HUMINT, Kealey thought. Nothing like it.

Kealey went up to Thirty-Seventh and ran west. The street was the least crowded of all those he’d looked down. He paused only long enough to eavesdrop on something that was coming over a policeman’s shoulder radio.

“Reports the shooter is down, according to Port Authority dispatch.”

Kealey wasn’t convinced. Breathing hard, he hurried ahead, showing his expired credentials quickly to gain access to Eighth Avenue, then again to get by the cordon of blue surrounding the bus terminal.

He knew at once this was far from over.

WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO

White Sands Missile Range was America’s largest military facility, covering nearly 3,200 square miles carved from terrain as harsh as its history. On April 6 and 7, 1880, it was the site of the fiercest battle of the Victorio War, between the U.S. cavalry and the Apaches. Even before that it was the site of countless mining operations, ambitious individuals and large corporations staking claims in the rough-hewn mountains adjoining the salt-white sands.

The navy came to the blistering range in June 1946 to join the army in testing V-2 rockets captured from the Germans during World War II. At the time, the navy was interested in expanding the power of its Viking rocket with V-2 technology, the first supersonic rocket to run off of liquid fuel, which resulted in the development of the sleeker, more powerful Aerobee, a small rocket originally introduced in the fifties that was designed for high atmospheric research. Today the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division, White Sands Detachment, was an independent group at the army-operated range. One of its charges was to develop weapons for America’s Strategic Defense Initiative. This sprawling blanket of technology included the Terrier and Tartar missiles and the Aegis weapons system, Rolling Airframe surface-to-air missiles, Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rockets, Tomahawk and Sea Sparrow missiles, high energy laser devices, and the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser and the Sealite Beam Director.

One of its key projects was the Sea Burst, a six-inch guided projectile designed to be fired from the shoulder-mounted Windjammer rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Unlike previous antisubmarine and anti-shipping RPGs, the Sea Burst was a thermonuclear device. At 35 pounds, it was the lightest such device ever designed, packing. 009 kilotons of destructive power. By contrast, the “Little Boy” gravity bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had the destructive force of approximately 13 KT of TNT. But “Little Boy” was not a focused explosion. It destroyed buildings across a two-mile diameter. The unleashed shock wave, moving faster than the speed of sound, turned structural debris created by the blast into shrapnel, which extended the field of destruction even farther.

It was an extremely effective weapon. However, if used in combat against a nearby boat or fleet, the blowback and fallout would not do the parent battleship any good. Even fired from a safe distance at a port city, it would destroy the port and the city both. Such results were not in the navy’s best interests.

The Sea Burst was designed to surgically obliterate a target with a minimum of collateral radioactive contamination. The delivery system itself had been tested at White Sands with conventional explosions. There were jokes in the bunkers about the comical little “pops” they produced, even though those blasts would be sufficient to punch a hole in 12 inches of alloy steel.

Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert was United States Army, not navy. But daily top secret briefing memos told him everything that was going on at the installation. He had been following the Sea Burst with particular interest because the applications for portable nuclear grenades impacted all branches of the military. It would enable special ops forces deployed in mountainous regions to employ bunker-busting force, rather than having to call in air raids, during which time their targets could relocate. It could enable a single paratrooper, dropped into a city at night, to take out the entire electrical grid of that city.

In the wrong hands, however…

Interrogations at White Sands typically involved amateur archaeologists looking for shell casings from the Apache war or for mining memorabilia. One woman, the fifty-five-year-old editor of the Canine Defenders of Freedom Web site, was looking for memorabilia from the Range Instrumentation Development Division’s dog program. In the early 1960s, it was necessary for engineers to recover small missile parts to ascertain why tests succeeded or failed. Ground crews would spend hours, sometimes days, recovering this material, which was often buried in the sands by the force of the test. That was before scientists came up with the idea of using canines in the recovery effort. The key missile components were coated with shark-liver oil. Specially trained dogs could smell it from 100 yards away. What took training was not smelling the squalene, but keeping the dogs from running after desert wildlife. The editor was searching for remnants of the terry-cloth jackets worn by the dogs, the pockets of which were stuffed with ice during the summer to keep the dogs from overheating.

The program was discontinued in 1965, when word got out that the dogs were also being used to recover materials from nuclear testing sites. The United States military went back to sending scientists.

Like many high-ranking officers, people who had spent their adult lives in uniform, General Gilbert had little use for civilian values and ideology. The inter-service rivalry was intense but, like any tribal organization, they closed ranks when it came to facing outside forces. And for all the value they provided, the American industrialists were a pain. Whatever machismo the individual soldier possessed; whatever alpha-dog qualities an officer developed or had innately; whatever vanity soldiers possessed about their bodies, the press of their uniforms, the medals they displayed, they were patriots first. Even a president could not stand opposed to a unified wall of military will. When the Joint Chiefs wanted surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, they got them. When the United States Central Command wanted to expand operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan, it was done. No president could risk worst-case scenario commencement addresses given by secretaries of defense. No administration wanted dire outcomes whispered in the ears of hawkish senators of its own party.

Conversely, industrialists all had boards of directors and stockholders. They might be patriots, but they were capitalists first.

Except for Jacob Trask.

Gilbert had first met him in the late 1970s, at a conference involving the role of the military in urban security. It wasn’t simply a matter of civil unrest, like the kind that had rocked the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965. It was about the bankruptcy New York City faced and the role technology could play in safeguarding streets with a skeletal police force. Trask had presented a slide show of his company’s plans to adapt discarded U-2 spy plane technology to urban patrols. Gilbert and many others liked the idea, but the ACLU learned of it and pressured Congress not to fund any broad domestic eavesdropping programs.