Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

It was a mark of his leadership — to know that he was beaten and not let pride prevent him from calling in the bigger, albeit slower moving, search and rescue elements. With no scent, no beep, and heavy rain, tracking the bad guys was virtually hopeless. But just because he’d failed on his quick dash by helo to Priest Lake, there was no reason now to prevent the bigger battalions from coming in. Until it occurred to him — the most unexpected scenario of all — that because each tent and trailer-home site was so secluded in this heavily forested area, the terrorists could be hiding in the campsite itself. Freeman could not give himself or his team a reason why the terrorists should do this, but he did know that a good leader examines all the possibilities.

Freeman, Choir, Gomez, Lee, and Eddie Mervyn began doing a search, moving swiftly yet cautiously from one site to another. It was bad enough to have lost a man already, and Freeman didn’t want any more casualties in this — so far, at least — futile mission. Prince was doing his all, between bouts of sneezing that jangled their nerves. It took all of Choir’s concentration not to say, “Bless you,” to the dog each time, so close was his bond with Prince. He could see that Prince was becoming increasingly uncomfortable under the weight of the protective vest. Now and then the spaniel would stop and paw at it, to no avail.

Johnny Lee saw the strand and screamed, “Down!” Everyone did so, including Prince, but he’d already tripped the wire that had been strung a few inches above the apron of soggy ground. The bang of the claymore mine and the whistling of its seven hundred steel balls temporarily blocked out the sound of the rain. They were all hit with ricochets coming off the surrounding trees, but their hagvar helmets, vests, and high-collared battle dress uniforms had saved them from any incapacitating injury, though Choir’s right thigh would be badly bruised from one ricochet. Prince, however, had not been so lucky. Having caught part of the blast on the part of his hindquarters not covered by his hagvar coat, he now lay yelping in a tangle of wire dangling from the exploded mine’s carcass. Choir limped to his spaniel’s side, Freeman already calling in search and rescue in Coeur d’Alene via Sandpoint for an evac helo. Eddie Mervyn, Gomez, and Johnny Lee went into T.D.P. — triangular defensive position — to cover the general. The delay, they all knew, meant more gained ground for the terrorists, who the team now believed must be escaping on one of the many trails that wove their way farther from the campground into the wilderness of the Idaho — British Columbia border.

“Hang on, old boy,” Choir whispered to Prince, unbuckling the bloodied rear strap of Prince’s armored vest. “Hang on.”

A half an hour later, as they waited for the SAR helo that they could hear beating the air somewhere above them in the torrential downpour, their fatigue, the loss of Tony, and now, possibly, of Prince, sat upon them like a heavy, gray sheet of metal. Freeman knew that they had lost too much time to catch the terrorists before they crossed the border into Canada. By now, the regular army forces had had time to assemble and, under presidential orders, were taking over the search. The general, Gomez, Mervyn, Choir, and Johnny Lee all tried to hide their bitter disappointment as they regrouped, waiting for a lift back to Sandpoint, but the plain fact was that the terrorists, despite having lost half their number in the fiercely fought rearguard action at the lake, had soundly defeated Freeman’s team.

In the next twenty-four hours, as a few grim locals put it, “the hills were alive with the sound of curses,” as battalions of army reservists and army rangers, guided by forest rangers, scoured the high wilderness areas west, north, and east of Priest Lake, pressing ever farther into the mountainous fastness of Idaho’s panhandle. Only one thing of any relevance was found, and that by a ranger corporal. It was a manila envelope with “General D. Freeman— Personal ” written on it. The envelope had been placed inside a large, transparent plastic Ziploc bag together with what looked like black marble-sized pieces of bubble plastic. The bag itself had been attached to a tree at the side of one of the many hiking trails that crisscrossed the border. The area was inaccessible by vehicle and, for this reason, was frequently used by drug mules carrying prized “B.C. Bud”—marijuana — across into the United States.

There was very little conversation as Douglas Freeman and his reunited team were heloed back to Sandpoint, where, as Freeman was tersely issuing instructions for the transfer of Tony Ruth’s remains back to Arlington, a major delivered the Ziploc bag. The general held it up against the gunmetal sky, examining it carefully for any sign of booby traps, though the fact that it had been forwarded to him by army rangers without anything untoward happening was reasonably good assurance that it hadn’t been rigged. Still, this was the post-9/11 world, and there could be anthrax or some other equally lethal powder in the manila envelope inside the Ziploc. It didn’t take much to kill you. The general walked downwind, away from his team, the black melted plastic bits sliding back and forth in the bag like popcorn. He carefully removed the envelope from the bag, slipped out his twelve-inch Cold Steel blade from its scabbard and, holding the envelope downwind at arm’s length, slit it and waited. No powder. Next, he carefully opened the yellow, folded, letter-sized sheet of paper: “AMERICANS SUCK.”

The general, the sole passenger aboard the DOD’s West Coast Learjet en route back to Monterey, was handed an encoded e-mail by the copilot. It was from DARPA’s General Charles at the Pentagon, and confirmed what Freeman had feared most, that the black blobs of plastic in the Ziploc bag had once been a computer disk. The sickening implication was that the terrorists must have downloaded and transmitted the super-cavitation data via hilltop line-of-sight modem — and that with apparently no copies at DARPA ALPHA, America now had no record of the data, shifting the balance of power dramatically, and terrifyingly, from the West to the terrorists.

The general’s concomitant fear was that already the precious data was being fed into the brains of computer-controlled lathes that could turn the requisite hard carbon and steel composites into weaponry and ammunition with hitherto undreamed-of accuracy and destructive power.

Eleanor Prenty handled the news networks with typical aplomb. She allowed Marte Price to interview her on this evening’s Prime Time to state that classified material had indeed been stolen from a DOD installation at Lake Pend Oreille.

“What kind of material?” asked Marte Price.

“Personnel files.”

The look of incredulity from Marte Price was seen by millions of viewers. “Secretary Prenty, are you telling me that—” She glanced down at her notes. “—ten, no, eleven , Americans have been murdered by terrorists because they wanted personnel files ?”

Prenty’s Washington-honed expression gave away nothing.

“So!” the President growled at Eleanor Prenty, who was standing respectfully behind him on the Oval Office’s carpet as the chief executive of the United States, hands clasped behind him, gazed out through the bulletproof glass into the Rose Garden. “The hard drive’s been destroyed and the backup disk stolen. And now we have the possibility — indeed the probability — that some terrorist cell, who knows where, will throw it back at us in the form of a prototype bullet, torpedo, or missile, a technology which we don’t know how to counter because we’ve had the damn technological data stolen.”