Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

“Wait.” Dave held up a hand, touched his earpiece. “I’m tapping into encrypted radio airspace around D.C.—military, intelligence and police channels—using our names as keywords. Something like this goes wrong, people start calling their superiors over cell phones and radios . . .”

Text scrolled out on his screen.

“Oh, shit . . .” Dave said.

“What?” Retter leaned forward.

Dave nodded at the text scrolling out on the screen:

TRACK V–DATA SYSTEM

ECHELON SUBSYSTEM REGION: E-4 WASHINGTON D.C. AND SURROUNDS

FREQUENCY RANGE: 462.741–464.85 MHZ

KEYWORDS: RETTER, MARIANNE, FAIRFAX, DAVID

KEYWORDS FOUND.

FROM USER: A9 (CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY)

VOICE 1: THE RETTER SNATCH AT THE PENTAGON WAS BLOWN. WHAT

HAPPENED?

VOICE 2: SHE IDENTIFIED US AND GOT AWAY WITH SOME GUY.

VOICE 3: WE HAVE HIS NAME. DAVID FAIRFAX. HE’S ALSO DIA. GOT A HOME

ADDRESS IN CRYSTAL CITY.

VOICE 1: GET THERE NOW.

Dave looked at Marianne. “And there you have it. You almost just got kidnapped by the CIA and we have to run right now .”

They fled from Dave’s apartment, taking his laptop with them, and dashed to a nearby mall that stayed open till midnight. There they hid in a bookstore, in the coffee shop by the magazine racks, with a good view of the entrance.

“Okay,” Dave said. “I think it’s time for some more information sharing between you and me.”

“That assumes I can trust you,” Retter said.

“Navy Cross . . .” Dave said. “On the run, too.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

Dave put his laptop on the table and typed as he spoke. “Okay, me first, here’s what I know: my Marine contact is up in the Arctic Circle. He said he was about to go into battle and asked me to look up two things for him: the Army of Thieves and Dragon Island, an old and very nasty ex-Soviet base up in the Arctic.

“My investigations into the Army of Thieves led me to you. My investigations into Dragon Island led me to this , which was why I was coming to see you. This is a list of American military and intelligence organizations who have made mention of or shown some interest in Dragon Island over the last thirty years.”

Retter’s eyes went wide when she saw the screen. “That’s the JCIDD. It’s only accessible to the Joint Chiefs and the highest-ranking—”

“Did I mention that I’m a code-cracker?”

“Oh, right.”

“Any names you recognize?” he asked.

She scanned the list on Dave’s screen:

AGENCY

DOC TYPE

SUMMARY

AUTHOR

YEAR

USN

SOVIET SUB REPAIR BASES

List of Soviet Navy ballistic-missile submarine repair facilities

Draper, A

1979–present

NWS

MACRO WEATHER SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Analysis of jet stream wind patterns

Corbett, L

1982

CIA

POSSIBLE LOCATIONS

Geographical options for Operation “Dragonslayer”

Calderon, M

1984

CIA

SOVIET CHEM & BIO WEAPONS DVLPT SITES

List of known Soviet chemical and biological weapons development sites and facilities

Dockrill, W

1986

USAF

HIGH-VALUE TARGET LIST (USSR)

List of first-strike targets in the USSR in the event of a major conflict

Holman, G

1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991

NRO/USAF

SATELLITE LOCATION LIST

Interagency swap of GPS data concerning Russian bases

Gaunt, K

2001 (updated 2006)

ARMY

SOVIET CHEMICAL & BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS SURVEY

List of known chemical and biological weapons kept by USSR/Russian Special Weapons Directorate

Gamble, N

1980–1991; 1992–present

Retter bit her lip as she peered at the list.

“The usual suspects,” she said, “Army, Air Force, Navy, CIA, even the National Weather Service analyzing the jet stream. But if you look closely at it, this gives you a sort of rough history of Dragon Island.”

“How so?” Dave asked.

“Well, look. It starts with Dragon coming to the U.S. Navy’s attention in 1979 as a run-of-the-mill northern repair facility for the Soviet ballistic-missile fleet. Then the Weather Service found it, due to its position under the Arctic jet stream. But then it gets interesting.

“Now, you told me earlier that the weapons base on Dragon was built in 1985. Look here: in 1986, Dragon appeared immediately on a CIA list of Soviet chemical and biological weapons sites and the Air Force’s list of high-value Soviet targets. It actually stayed on that second list until the USSR’s fall in 1992, but after that, it fell off it, no longer a high-value site. The other documents look like standard crap, like the 1984 CIA report titled POSSIBLE LOCATIONS by—wait a goddamn second—by ‘Calderon, M.’”

“What?” Dave asked. “Who’s that?”

“Calderon, M., is Marius Calderon,” Retter said thoughtfully. “No way . . . this is one of his schemes. Fuck me, this could be the link you’re looking for, Mr. Fairfax.”

“What? Why? You know this guy?”

“Do I ever. I’ve come across his name a few times in my research into the Army of Thieves. This could explain a lot.”

Now it was Dave who leaned forward. “So who is he and why is he writing about Dragon Island in 1984, a year before the base there was even built?”

A siren wailed outside the store, and they both spun, but it was just an ambulance, speeding away. They exhaled.

“Marius Calderon,” Retter said, “is a hotshot at the CIA, been there since 1980 when they recruited him straight out of Army Ranger training.

“His original area of expertise was China: Calderon was assigned to observe and analyze China following its program of economic reforms that had commenced in 1978. But he’s served in almost every corner of the CIA since: from the Activity to the Special-Ops division. Importantly for our purposes, in the late 1980s, he was an instructor at the School of the Americas, that military training academy I was telling you about that the U.S. Army ran out of Fort Benning at which . . .”

“. . . at which several Chilean members of the Army of Thieves learned how to be really bad dudes,” Dave said.

“Right. The only reason I found out about this Calderon guy was when I was looking into those twelve Chilean officers broken out of the Valparaiso prison. They all attended the School of the Americas at the time Calderon was a teacher there . All twelve were his students.”

“No shit . . .”

“So I looked up his record,” Retter said. “In addition to all that other stuff, Calderon has spent the bulk of his career in the Agency’s psychological warfare division. He’s an expert in, and I quote from his file: ‘the retrieval of mission-critical information from unwilling enemy combatants through unrestrained psychological interrogation.’”

“Torture,” Dave said.

“ Psychological torture. For the last twenty-odd years, Marius Calderon has been the CIA’s foremost expert in psy-ops and non-invasive torture, and these days non-invasive torture is back in fashion. Calderon’s methods are standard practice at Gitmo and other rendition sites.

“His theory is that you can get a man to do anything or reveal anything by ruthlessly attacking his mind.

“It’s said that in Afghanistan in 2005 he ‘turned’ three captured Taliban troops using subliminal methods—he stapled their eyes open and bombarded them for six days straight with videos of violence, sadism, live amputations and bestiality, while beating them relentlessly and overwhelming them with loud music and the cries of other people being tortured. Those Taliban troops were then released and sent back to their villages, where they became ticking psychological time-bombs, ready to explode when Calderon gave the word. After the CIA broadcast a certain radio message, all three of them went on shooting rampages in their home villages, killing over thirty people before turning their guns on themselves.”