Don Pendleton - Incendiary Dispatch

She was a VLCC, a Very Large Crude Carrier. She was unexceptional in her class, one of about five hundred VLCCs plowing the world’s oceans. Still, any vessel capable of carrying two million barrels of oil was impressively large when seen from the waterline.

The massive shape loomed over Zhang Jei, but he couldn’t afford to admire it. He had a job to do. He floated on his back and removed the first device, placing it against the hull of the Northern Aurora. He dipped the device in the ocean to wet the foam backing, then pressed the foam to the hull and applied pressure. The foam cells burst and the encapsulated cyanoacrylate adhesive reacted with the water. In seconds, it was stuck in place. And it was never coming off.

The green LED inside waterproof plastic casing told Zhang Jei that the electronics were operational.

He swam along the hull, towing the DPV, making no sound loud enough to alert the security guard on the deck far above him. None of the bay patrol craft came close enough to spot a black-suited man in the black water alongside a black ship’s hull.

He put the second device in place 141 feet from the first one, and then a third. It wasn’t difficult, but he was careful. Soon all six devices were in place. Zhang Jei pulled a last phone from the pack—a waterproofed satellite phone. He dialed the number he had never dialed before.

He didn’t know who had hired him. He didn’t know why they wanted to sink the Northern Aurora. All he knew was that they had put a quarter-million dollars in his bank account already, and were obliged to pay him that much again when the job was done.

“Are they in place?” The man spoke English.

“They are,” Zhang Jei said.

“Wait,” the man said.

Zhang Jei didn’t wish to wait.

Then the man said, “We see a problem. One of the units is not responding.”

“Which one?”

“Do you want the serial number on the device?” the man demanded. “I can provide that if you think it will somehow help you determine which one of the six is not responding. Did you in fact note the serial numbers on the devices as you were placing them?”

Zhang Jei felt chagrined. He had asked a stupid question.

But he was feeling something else, too.

Maybe the question hadn’t been the stupidest thing he had done this day.

Ramvik, Norway

THE YOUNG MAN muted the phone and gave Olan Ramm a wicked grin.

“Zhang, finally?” Ramm demanded. He was a blond, emaciated man with a cadaverous face.

When the young man spoke he sounded like British gentry. “He’s only three minutes late. He’s all done.”

“Then we are all done,” Ramm said, feeling almost euphoric.

“All done. All in place. Nothing left to do except make some phone calls,” the young British man said.

“Let’s make them, then,” Ramm said.

The young man unmuted his telephone.

Qingdao, China

“THE PROBLEM SEEMS to have righted itself. Thanks so much for your services, Mr. Zhang.”

Zhang saw the connection get cut. The screen went dead. And Zhang knew he had made a very bad mistake. He grabbed the control handle on the MK-8 and started the motor. It pulled him away from the Northern Aurora at full speed. Which wasn’t going to be fast enough.

Ramvik, Norway

IT WAS 4:03 P.M. in Northeastern Vermont.

It was 9:03 p.m. in London.

It was 5:03 a.m. in Qingdao, China.

It was 10:03 p.m. in Ramvik when Olan Ramm made the most anticipated phone call of his life.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

He was a powerful-looking man, even confined to a wheelchair. Aaron Kurtzman was the top cybernetics expert at Stony Man Farm, and as such he was tapped into a dizzying array of electronic intelligence feeds. His fingers moved deftly over a wireless keyboard.

One of those feeds had just beeped at him. He had hundreds of alerts programmed into the system, but this one he recognized.

So did the Japanese man at a nearby terminal. The alert had played over his earbuds, interrupting the music. “Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”

Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft was their internal acronym for the alert.

Their dynamic search routines assessed all the data coming into the Farm, looking for patterns, any sign of trouble. Any unresponsive aircraft could signal trouble, but the truth was that aircraft went unresponsive every day. A bad radio, a storm, a flight crew in an animated discussion about yesterday’s game—anything could cause an aircraft to be unresponsive for a little while. Stony Man Farm’s MUA alert didn’t trigger when just one aircraft went unresponsive somewhere in the world.

But when there were several at once, it demanded immediate attention. If they’d only been able to track MUAs in 2001….

“Airbus out of Heathrow, en route to New Delhi,” Kurtzman said out loud as he sped through the feeds highlighted by the alert. “Cargo flight out of Heathrow to Istanbul.”

“Cargo flight, LHR to MOW,” Tokaido announced. LHR was Heathrow, MOW was Moscow. “Passenger, LHR to CPT.”

CPT was Cape Town. And again out of Heathrow. Somebody had just exploited a huge hole in Heathrow security….

“Passenger!” Tokaido blurted. “CDG to SXM!”

It took an extra second for that to register. Vacationers to St. Maarten—out of Paris. Kurtzman felt sick. Then his own screen showed him a new window. Passenger. MIA-GIG.

“Miami!” he shouted. “That’s a GPS tracking beacon response failure.”

Kurtzman wished every aircraft on the planet was equipped with a device like that, constantly transmitting its exact location. The truth was, most aircraft had beacons that didn’t go off until there was trouble. And sometimes the trouble happened too fast for the technology to activate.

The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his screen.

And then another.

“Aaron?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”

“China?”

He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?

“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, now standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen.

“I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.

“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”

“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.

“Pipeline breaches. Each is a different one.”

Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he had programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously.

He’d just never dreamed it would actually happen.

“Talk to me, Aaron,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”

“Everywhere but,” Kurtzman said grimly.

Washington, D.C.

THE SUNNY AFTERNOON turned dark.

“Jesus!”

Hal Brognola was in his office when he heard the expletive issued out in the hall. It reached him through two closed doors. Now somebody was running. Now somebody was sobbing.

The big Fed in the big office overlooking the Potomac felt his stomach churn as he snatched up the remote and stabbed the power button.

“—ruptured and exploded. We’re trying to get out but it’s moving fast.”

It looked like a small-time TV newscast. The title at the bottom of the screen read, Live in Shambert: Protesters Want Mayor Dubin’s Resignation.

What was on the screen was nothing as mundane as a protest against a local politician. The cameraman was trying to keep the image steady as the news reporter steered the van through black smoke.