Don Pendleton - Neutron Force

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

PROCEEDING DOWN THE CORRIDOR, Price and Brognola passed several blacksuits, one of them working on an air-conditioner vent, another pushing a cart stacked with cases of shiny new shells, each about the size of a tube of toothpaste.

“When did we acquire a Vulcan minigun?” Brognola asked curiously as they got into the electric cart that would take them to the Annex.

“That’s not for the Vulcan. Those are 25 mm rounds for the new Barrett rifle.”

“Rifle?” Brognola repeated. “Barrett has invented a 25 mm rifle? How new is that?”

“Couple of months.” Price almost smiled. “Cowboy is bench-testing one at a rock quarry a couple of miles from here. Our gun range was too small for this monster. If it passes his approval, then it will be added to the arsenal of both teams.”

“A 25 mm rifle?”

“Cowboy says it shouldn’t be harder to control than a Barrett .50-caliber.” She paused. “Or getting kicked in the groin by a Mississippi mule. But you know Cowboy.”

“Yeah,” Brognola agreed. “He should know.”

“Or so he says.”

Reaching the entrance to the Annex, Price and Brognola exited the cart and proceeded on foot to the Computer Room.

Inside, the atmosphere of the room was cool and quiet. A coffeepot burbled at a coffee station and muffled rock music could be heard coming from somewhere.

Several workstations faced an array of monitors on the wall. One of the screens showed a vector graphic map of the world, blinking lights indicating the state of military alert for every major nation. Another monitor swirled with ever-changing weather patterns of the planet as seen from space. The remaining screens were dark.

Four people occupied workstations: a powerfully built man in a wheelchair, a young Japanese American wearing earbuds, a middle-age redheaded woman and a distinguished-looking black man with wings of silver at his temples.

“Aaron, where are the teams?” Price asked, heading for the Farm’s senior cyberexpert.

“In the ready room checking over their equipment and weapons,” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman said, turning to face the mission controller. “When Hal arrives without advance notice, I figure we’re in deep shit.”

“You figured correctly,” Brognola grumbled, placing the laptop on Kurtzman’s desk.

“Is Striker in trouble?”

“Everybody is in trouble,” Price answered brusquely.

“Meaning?” Kurtzman demanded with a frown.

“Do you know about the crash of VC-25?”

He frowned. “No.” The 747 had crashed? Obviously the President was okay because Hal hadn’t called the plane Air Force One. “Was it shot down? Rammed in midair?”

“There’s no mention that anything happening to the jumbo jet on the news services,” Huntington “Hunt” Wethers announced. A pipe jutted from his mouth, but no smoke rose from the briarwood bowl.

“Nobody knows about the incident other than a select handful of people in the American and Canadian governments,” Brognola stated, extracting a disk from the laptop. “And it’s part of this mission to make sure that nobody ever learns the truth.”

“Why not?” Carmen Delahunt asked.

“We’d never be able to handle the riots,” the big Fed said, passing the disk to Kurtzman.

At the fourth console, Akira Tokaido vaguely heard the conversation. He was slumped in his chair, apparently sound asleep. Both Brognola and Price knew that the young man was hard at work. Tokaido would rather be running the massive Cray Supercomputers located on the refrigerated floor below than doing anything else in the world. Even breathing and eating. The Japanese American was a modern-day Mozart with computers, a natural hacker. There was very little Akira couldn’t get done online, and he pushed the envelope further every day.

“Riots?” Kurtzman asked, taking the disk and sliding it into a slot on his console. The center screen came it life and Top Secret seals flashed by in a blur like a diesel-powered rotoscope.

“See for yourself,” Price stated, looking at the wall monitors. According to the computerized maps, the world was at peace. There were a few scattered battles here and there, but nothing major. She wondered how long that would last if the news of the neutron satellite got out. That underwater arcology Japan was building would be overrun with people fighting and killing to get inside.

Kurtzman leaned closer to the monitor. The encryption on the disk was fantastic, the only data file he had ever encountered that had more was the dossier on the Farm. As the files grudgingly opened and slowly loaded, he grabbed a ceramic mug and took a fast swig of hot coffee. A neutron cannon in space? Sweet Jesus…

Running his slim fingers across the keyboard like a concert pianist, Akira Tokaido continued his Internet search. There were a lot of heavily encrypted transmissions going out these days, t-bursts they were called, and every one of them had a fake ID and source code. A t-burst was the newest scourge of the Internet, a computerized version of a blip transmission over a radio, a massive amount of information condensed into a small tone that lasted for only a second, sometimes even less. So far, the young hacker couldn’t trace where they were coming from, or worse, where they were going. Obviously something big was going down in the cyberworld, and that was always trouble. Twice he had caught the garbled word “tiger” inside a picture code and logged it for further investigation.

“Everybody stop whatever you’re doing and access these files,” Kurtzman commanded. “And do it fast, people.”

The members of the cybernetic team did as requested, their curious expressions quickly turning grim.

“Help yourselves to coffee,” Kurtzman told them, reading the incredible material scrolling on the monitor.

“Ah…did Carmen make the coffee, or you?” Price asked warily.

“Me, of course.”

“Pass,” the woman snorted, crossing her arms. Strong wasn’t the word normally used for Kurtzman’s hellish coffee.

As they started reading the files, Wethers and Delahunt began to scowl deeply. Typing while he read, the former professor pulled up the passenger list of the crashed plane, while Delahunt fondled the air with the cybernetic gloves she wore, opening files. At the front of the room, one of the wall screens began to display reports on boronated armor, while another blossomed into a vector graphic of satellites orbiting Earth.

There were thousands of them, Price noted dispassionately. Needle in a haystack? she thought. Try a drop of water hiding in the ocean!

Skimming the pages, Kurtzman had trouble believing what he was reading. It would take a major world power to muster the resources to build a neutron cannon. The question was which one, and did it have control of the cannon now? If some terrorist group like al Quaeda, or Hamas, had control of the weapon, Washington would already be a death zone.

“A focused beam of neutrons,” Wethers muttered, taking the pipe from his mouth and tapping his chin with the stem. “Amazing, simply amazing.”

“And we have no idea who might be behind this?” Delahunt asked.

“Aside from the usual suspects, none at all,” Brognola admitted honestly.

“I’ll start a search for any other incidents of people dying without signs of violence,” Delahunt said. “Now that they know the weapon works, the thieves will start using it.”

Just then, a picture of Dr. Himar appeared on a wall monitor. A middle-aged man, short gray hair, black suit and a bolo string tie. The newspaper shot was of Himar receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Hunt, check the records of the public dossier,” Kurtzman commanded, slaving his console to the others. “Find out who might have accessed any data about Himar under the Public Information Act.”