Don Pendleton: Power Grab

Price tapped more buttons and the images shifted to show video footage of a sea of police cars, fire engines, emergency vehicles and SWAT vans parked in front of the blackened entrance to what could have been a shopping center in any part of the United States. A sharp-eyed Calvin James sat forward in his seat.

“Why am I seeing hazmat response teams in that shot, Hal?” he asked.

“Good catch,” Brognola said. “This was no ordinary terrorist bombing,” he explained. “Aaron?”

Kurtzman nodded and addressed the assembled operatives. “From the point of view of a terrorist,” he said, “the hardest part about perpetrating a successful bombing is not finding the materials to make a device. It is not even planting the device, in most cases. It is detonating the device at a time when the explosion will do more than just property damage. In other words, the hard part is figuring out how to kill the most people.”

“Timers,” Tokaido chimed in as if on cue, “are imprecise. If the bombers are going to be long gone before the bomb explodes, they can’t control the conditions at detonation. In Iraq especially, our military have become adept at dealing with one of the ways terrorists circumvent this problem, by using wireless phones to detonate roadside bombs when their spotters see victims in range. Signals of that type can be jammed, and specific locations can be hardened permanently against such technology.”

Schwarz nodded knowingly. Price knew that he had been on hand assisting Kurtzman and his team for the past few days, in anticipation of the problem they were now forced to confront directly.

“But what if,” Kurtzman said, picking up the narrative again, “terrorists developed a ‘smart’ bomb, a bomb that can ‘learn’ over time by sampling its environment and determining the optimum conditions for detonation?”

“You’d have the ultimate terrorist weapon,” Schwarz interjected. “A bomb that you can set, leave behind and trust to figure out for itself how to murder the most people.”

“Exactly,” Brognola said. “And that is just what we’re dealing with.”

It was Price’s turn to address the operatives. She keyed in several more images that were timed to display as she spoke. “Our intelligence and surveillance networks have known for some time that Iran was sponsoring, with just enough plausible deniability to stop world governments from intervening, the production of terrorist bombs and other weapons for use in hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems, however, that they’re not satisfied with making things worse. A team of Iranian scientists, whose location we have not yet been able to determine, has developed and has been producing, for six months now, these smart terror bombs.”

“The bombs are shielded against explosives’ detection methods using specially sealed canisters prepared and then cleansed prior to deployment,” Tokaido said at Price’s nod. Pictures of a briefcase-size weapon containing three inset spheres appeared on the plasma screens. “Central Intelligence Agency operatives have recovered at least two of these devices from potential terror sites abroad, and it was thanks to the CIA that we received the initial hard data that confirmed what our data network sweeps have been turning up as chatter for several months now.”

“Each bomb,” Kurtzman said, “has electromagnetic, heat, motion and sound detectors, among other sensors, all of it connected to a powerful microcomputer that is devoted solely to figuring out when the most victims will be within range of its payload.”

“It’s that payload, Calvin,” Brognola said, “that is the reason for the hazmat response.”

James nodded grimly.

“The bombs,” Tokaido said, pointing at schematics that appeared on the screens as Price called them up, “contain three sealed bouncing betty spheres. They’re extremely innovative. The plastic explosives are shaped breakaway charges that produce deadly shrapnel, and they’re interlaced with a low-level nerve gas, a chemical-warfare agent that ensures the blast radius has an effective kill zone of close to a hundred percent.”

“Bloody hell,” McCarter said softly.

“And then some,” Brognola acknowledged. “The blast radius, fortunately, is only about a hundred yards, but it was enough to demolish a good portion of the shopping mall you see here.” The image on the secondary screens returned to the video footage of the upstate mall.

“How many dead in that attack?” Blancanales asked.

“Fortunately, only the terrorists,” Brognola said. “There were some wounded among the responding police, but no fatalities. Our assets locally have interviewed law enforcement and the one witness we have, a security guard who seems to be the luckiest bastard in a polyester uniform for miles. In his debriefing, he said that two men who had apparently broken in after hours attacked him and tried to stab him to death. Apparently he used a knife of his own to cut his way out of the situation and flee.”

“Three cheers for American ingenuity,” McCarter said.

Brognola ignored that. “Something about the attack made our security guard think terrorists instead of burglars, probably because New Yorkers in general are understandably nervous about that kind of thing. He called the cops, the cops sent in SWAT and a gun battle ensued. It was anything but one-sided.”

“How so, Hal?” Blancanales asked.

“The terrorists were fielding fully automatic weapons,” Brognola said. “The locals say the last of them was trying to surrender when the bomb exploded. The three shooters were the only ones within the blast zone, thankfully, and the locals were smart enough to pull out before they got too much exposure to the toxin. Apparently somebody on hand was worried about conventional chemical weapons or perhaps even a dirty nuke of some kind. Whatever their fears, they got out of the way, and that’s what saved them.”

“If we’re going up against these bombs,” James said, “are we looking at dealing with chemical warfare?”

“The toxin used has a very short chemical half-life, to misuse the terminology,” Schwarz explained. “Clear the blast zone and wait ten minutes, and there’s no danger. That’s the only thing working in our favor here.”

“What does a new superbomb created in Iran have to do with a Turkmen terror network?” Carl Lyons interjected. “Please tell me the answer isn’t what I think it is.”

“Sorry.” Brognola shook his head. “It is. The bomb used in the attack was, according to our analysis after the fact, the very same bomb the Iranians have developed. Once intelligence services identified the three dead terrorists, the Man gave us the go-ahead to move on this.”

“So we’re hitting Iran?” McCarter asked.

“Unfortunately,” Brognola sighed, “nothing is ever that simple.” He waited while Price cued up several more images: pictures of men dressed in formal suits, as well as one man in paramilitary garb.

“This,” Brognola said of the latter, “is Nikolo Ovan. He’s essentially a warlord. His ultranationalist party has swept to power in the last year and seized control of Turkmenistan, militarizing it and terrorizing the Turkmen people. Ovan fancies himself the next Stalin or something. He’s motivated, intelligent, and very, very brutal. His leadership of Turkmenistan threatens the stability of the entire region.”

“Recent discoveries of new, more extensive deposits of natural gas,” Price said, causing a map of Turkmenistan and its neighbors to display on the screens, “have made Turkmenistan more economically powerful than it has ever been. Our intelligence sources tell us Ovan is negotiating with his neighbors, particularly Iran, to build a pipeline to them and trade in sales of the gas.”