Don Pendleton - Extreme Instinct

“Which anybody with an EM scanner could find and remove,” Tokaido stated, studying the monitor on his console. The screen was flashing through road maps of the Russian countryside. A flatbed had been seen by a NATO spy satellite amid the wreckage left by the tidal wave from the destroyed dam. If the bomb was particularly heavy, then it could only be hauled over specific roads. Unfortunately, most of the logging roads in the mountains connected with railroads, and those went everywhere in Russia.

Grudgingly, Price accepted that. “Okay, what about dogs or chemical sensors?” She rallied. “We can tune every one at every major airport to look for just T-bombs.”

“Sorry, no can do,” Kurtzman stated bluntly, placing aside his empty mug. “Hell, Barb, we don’t even know what the damn thing looks like, much less how it works.”

Chewing a lip, Price tried to find some way to approach the problem, but was coming up with nothing. The Russian superweapon was practically invisible. Nobody would know it had been smuggled into Washington until the Pentagon vanished in a fiery implosion that also ripped the White House from its very foundation.

“Okay, do we know of any operational limitations?” she demanded.

“Unfortunately, no,” Wethers muttered around his pipe. Smoking was forbidden anywhere near the supercomputer, but the man found chewing on the stem oddly inducive to his creative concentration. “The Pentagon strongly believes that the T-bomb can be activated at extreme low levels, perhaps as little as five hundred feet.”

Price stared hard at the professor. “Are you trying to tell me that it may not be necessary to drop the T-bomb from a plane?” she said slowly, absorbing the information. “Instead it could simply be rolled off the roof of a fifty-story building?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“But no nation in the world can secure every office building over fifty stories tall. There must be hundreds, thousands, of them.”

Deep in thought, Price poured herself a mug of coffee, adding a great deal of sugar and milk. Kurtzman liked the stuff strong enough to degrease tractor parts, but lesser humans preferred it at less lethal levels of corrosion.

Taking small sips, the woman finished the mug, then turned around with a new light in her eyes. “All right,” she said forcibly. “If we can’t track the weapon, then we go after the thieves.”

“But we don’t know who took it,” Kurtzman tactfully reminded her.

Impatiently, Price waved the objection aside. “That doesn’t matter. We know that they used a Chinese nuke. Start there. Send Phoenix Force to Milan to see if somebody purchased a black-market nuke recently. After that, they can try Paris and then Sudan. This whole thing might have been a trick by Russia for an excuse to attack their ancient enemy, China.”

“You think the Kremlin nuked Mystery Mountain just to have a legitimate excuse to start a nuclear war?” Tokaido asked in disbelief, then frowned. It wouldn’t be a nuclear war, but a Skyfire war. “On it,” he announced, and bent over the console, his hands flying across the keyboard.

“The big question is, how did the thieves know about the test?” Kurtzman growled. “It wasn’t exactly broadcast on the evening news.”

“Which leaves two possibilities,” Price continued. “Either there is a traitor, or somebody hacked into the computer system at Mystery Mountain.”

“Not even we can do that,” Delahunt stated in annoyance, curling her toes on the floor. “Their firewalls are just as good as those at the White House.”

Kurtzman snorted. “So it’s got to be a traitor.”

“Or a spy,” Price amended. “Carmen, check the first-class-passenger list at every major airport in the area, cross reference that to the personnel file we stole from the Kremlin last month. Find me somebody who went on vacation the day before the T-bomb was stolen.”

“I’ll also check with the health department to see if anybody recently got sick. Vacations can be cancelled by your boss, but nobody would interfere with a cancer treatment,” Delahunt muttered.

Clenching her gloves, she closed the files she had been reading and activated the NSA communication protocols.

“Okay, if Russia and China were not behind the theft, this might have been done by mercenaries hired to do the bloody work,” Price speculated. “Hunt, activate the Dirty Dozen, try to hire the top mercs and see who is not available.”

“Already doing it, Barb,” the professor muttered around his pipe.

Long ago, Mack Bolan had suggested the creation of some artificial buyers of weapon. In virtual reality, that was easy. But Kurtzman had decided to take the matter one step further. Together with his team, the Farm had created a dozen fake personalities in all of the major areas of crime, along with a team of black ops mercs called Blue Lightning.

The Dirty Dozen was a collection of artificial criminals invented by Kurtzman and his team long ago. Their entire lives were fake, forged out of nothing but the Stony Man hackers slipping data into files around the world. When a bank was robbed in Melbourne, the hackers started the rumors that it was financed by one of the Dozen. If a politician got assassinated in Norway, it was because he had crossed the path of another of the Dirty Dozen. Pirates attacked a cruise ship in the Caribbean, an Interpol agent was shot in Amsterdam, a plane crashed in the Andes—any unsolved crime was quickly attributed to these secretive masters of criminal underworld.

The names of the Dozen were constantly changed as they died in car accidents or were captured and executed—only to be immediately replaced by another Stony Man construct. The Dirty Dozen was a constant source of valuable information about international crime as people tried to sell them stolen goods. And whenever one of the Stony Man field teams needed to contact a terrorist group, a member of the Dirty Dozen was always available to vouch for them through e-mail or a phone call.

“Hunt, keep a watch for any secret arms sales,” Kurtzman added. “If the T-bomb becomes available for sale, it is a safe bet that one of the Dozen will be invited to the auction. If so, pay any price to get it. Better to pay a billion dollars now than a hundred billion to rebuild Los Angeles.”

“Agreed,” the professor muttered, his hands busy. “However, it could be more than a billion.”

“Don’t care. Pay whatever is necessary. I’ll have our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites initiate a planetary recon for any other gigantic explosions,” Kurtzman declared brusquely. “The thieves may try to fake their own deaths again. Or worse, actually use the T-bomb on somebody.”

“God forbid,” Price muttered softly, glancing at the clock on the wall.

“Hold on…okay, I found him,” Delahunt announced. “A janitor working at Mystery Mountain recently won a free vacation in an online contest and had to leave the day before the theft occurred or else he lost the prize.”

A contest win, that was a good cover. She had used something similar once herself. “What’s the name, and where did he go?”

“Stanislav Kominsky. Disney World, Orlando, Florida.”

“The other side of the world,” Kurtzman muttered. “Not very subtle.”

“Okay, try this,” Delahunt said. “He was killed in a car crash en route to his hotel room on the day he arrived. The body was taken to the Dade County morgue, and since Mr. Kominsky is Jewish, he had to be buried within twenty-four hours.” She paused. “He was interred at Bonaventure Acres roughly six hours ago.”

“Less than an hour before the theft took place.”

“Yep.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.” Kurtzman’s hands flew across the controls of his console with expert speed. “I’ll have Jack Grimaldi warm up a C-130 Hercules, and Able Team can be there in a few hours to check the body.”