Matthew Reilly - Temple

Special Agent John Paul Demonaco walked carefully through the vault room examining the scene of the crime. After the Navy captain, Aaronson, had gone off to give the green light to an assault on the suspected Freedom Fighter locations, the other Naval investigator — Commander Tom Mitchell—had asked Demonaco if he would take a look at the crime scene. Maybe he would notice something they hadn’t.

‘Aaronson’s wrong, isn’t he?’ Mitchell said as they wandered through the vault room.

‘What do you mean?’ Demonaco said as he scanned the heavily sealed lab facility. It was a very impressive laboratory. In fact, it was one of the most hightech labs he had ever seen.

‘The Freedom Fighters didn’t do this,’ Mitchell said.

‘No… no, they didn’t.’

‘Then who did?’

Demonaco was silent for a moment. When at last he spoke, however, he didn’t answer the question. ‘Tell me more about the device that the Navy was building here. This Supernova.’ Mitchell took a deep breath. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. The Supernova is a fourth generation thermonuclear weapon. Instead of splitting the atoms of terrestrial radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium, it creates a mega explosion by splitting a subcritical mass of the non terrestrial element thyrium. ‘The blast caused by the splitting of a thyrium atom is so powerful that it would rip out nearly a third of the Earth’s mass. Put simply, the Supernova is the first manmade device capable of destroying the planet we live on.’

‘This element, thyrium, you say it’s nonterrestrial,’ Demonaco said.

‘If it doesn’t come from Earth, then where does it come from?’

‘Asteroid impacts, meteorite landings. Segments of rocks that survive the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere. But so far as we know, no one’s ever found a live specimen of thyrium.’

‘I think you’ll find,’ Demonaco said, ‘that someone has now. And I might just know who.’ Demonaco explained. “Commander, for the last six months, my unit at the Bureau has been hearing rumours of an intermilitia war between the Oklahoma Freedom Fighters and another terrorist group calling themselves the Republican Army of Texas.’

‘The Republican Army of Texas—aren’t they the ones who skinned those park rangers up in Montana?’

‘They’re the prime suspects,’ Demonaco said. ‘We told the media that those two rangers stumbled on some hillbillies shooting illegal game, but we actually think it was worse than that. We think they stumbled on a secret Texan training camp.’

‘A training camp?’

‘Uhhuh. The Texans are a much larger group than the Freedom Fighters, and much better fighters—in fact, you can’t even join the Texans unless you’ve been a member of one of the armed forces.

‘They’re also exceptionally organised for a terrorist group, more like an elite military unit than a weekend hunting club. ‘They have a rigidly defined chain of command, with severe penalties for any member who breaks that hierarchy, a system that has been attributed to the influence of their leader, Earl Bittiker, a former Navy SEAL who was dishonourably discharged in 1986 for sexually assaulting a female lieutenant who gave him an order he didn’t like. He raped her both vaginally and orally.’

Mitchell winced. ‘Apparently, Bittiker was one of the SEALs’ best men—a totally remorseless killing machine. But like a lot of those types, he lacked certain civilising virtues. Apparently in 1983, three years before the rape incident, he was diagnosed as being clinically psychotic, but the Navy allowed him to remain on active duty anyway. So long as his aggression was directed at our enemies, they figured it didn’t matter. Great logic. ‘After the rape, Bittiker was discharged from the Navy and sentenced to eight years in Leavenworth. When he got out in 1994, he founded the Republican Army of Texas with a couple of other disgraced ex servicemen he’d met in jail.

‘The Texans train constantly,’ Demonaco said. ‘In the desert, in the badlands of Texas and Montana, and sometimes, up in the mountains in Oregon. They figure that when the time comes to launch a fullscale war against the United States government or the U.S. government in conjunction with the United Nations—they want to be ready to fight in all kinds of terrain. ‘What makes it worse is that they have money too. After the government screwed him on an oil deal, the Texan oil tycoon Stanford Cole left Bittiker and the Texans something in the vicinity of forty two million dollars and a note that said, “Give ‘em hell”. It’s no surprise then that Bittiker and his cronies are often seen at black market arms bazaars in the Middle East and Africa. Hell, last year, they bought eight surplus Black Hawk helicopters from the Australian government.’

‘Christ,’ Mitchell said.

‘Still,’ Demonaco went on, ‘that doesn’t stop them stealing some heavy duty hardware every now and then. For example, although we can’t prove it, we believe that the Texans are responsible for the theft of an Abrams M1A1 main battle tank while it was—’

‘They stole a tank?’ Mitchell said, incredulous. ‘Off the back of a semitrailer while it was being transported from the Chrysler plant in Detroit to Tank and Automotive Command in Warren, Michigan.’

‘Why do you suspect them?’ Mitchell asked.

“Because two years ago, the Texans bought an old Antonov An22 heavylift cargo plane from an arms market in Iran. The An22 is a damn big plane, the Russian equivalent of our biggest lifters, the C5 Galaxy and the C17 Globemaster. Now if you wanted a regular cargo plane, you’d go and buy yourself a smaller An12 or a C130 Hercules, not an An22. You’d only need a ‘22 if you were intending to move something big. Something really, really big. Something like a 67ton tank.’

Demonaco paused, shook his head. ‘But that’s the least of our worries now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because lately we’ve been hearing some disturbing rumours about the Texans. It seems that they’ve found something of a soul mate in the Aura Shinrikyo cult in Japan, the group who released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995. After the Tokyo attack, some members of the cult came to America and infiltrated a few of our militia groups. We have reason to believe that several members of Aura Shinrikyo joined the Texans.’

‘What does that mean for us?’ Mitchell asked.

‘It means that we now have a very big problem.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Aura Shinrikyo cult is a doomsday cult. Its only goal—indeed, its only reason for being—is to bring about the end of the world. We only know about the Tokyo subway incident because the networks got film footage of it. Did you know that in early 1994 Aura Shinrikyo managed to seize control of a remote Chinese missile silo? They almost launched thirty tactical nuclear missiles at the United States in an attempt to initiate a full-scale thermonuclear war.’

‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Mitchell said.

‘Commander, we’ve never really had a genuine doomsday cult in America. We have violent antigovernment groups, antiUN groups, antiabortion, antiSemitic and antiNegro groups. But we have never had a group whose sole ambition is to bring about the mass destruction of life on this planet. ‘Now, if Earl Bittiker and the Texans have decided to adopt a doomsday philosophy, then that leaves us with a big problem. Because then we’ll have one of the most dangerous paramilitary groups in America running around with a death wish.’

‘Okay, then,’ Mitchell said, ‘so how does all this relate to this robbery?’

‘Easy’ Demonaco said. ‘The group which carried out this robbery was a highly trained, highly skilled assault squad. The tactics that they employed were pure Special Forces— large-scale SEAL stuff—which would point to an organisation more like the Texan Republican Army and not the Freedom Fighters.’