Dale Brown - Act of War

“Dammit, Mr. Chamberlain, I earned the right to go with them!” Kristen said.

“You what?” Chamberlain retorted, rising from his chair and leaning forward on his desk, going nose to nose with the gorgeous television journalist. “You did no such thing! If it was up to me you’d still be under investigation for luring Richter and Vega to Brazil…”

“I didn’t ‘lure’ anyone…”

“…and just because you managed to survive your encounters with the terrorists doesn’t mean you can tag along with TALON anytime you feel the need to grab another headline!”

Kristen looked as if she was ready to bore into Chamberlain, but instead she took a step back away from the desk and averted her eyes. Chamberlain took his seat. “Mr. Chamberlain, I’m sorry for barging into your office like this,” she said. “But I feel as if I’m intimately tied into everything that goes on with Task Force TALON now. I know…I know I was wrong to go around you to get Jason and his team to Brazil, but I felt we had to take the opportunity we had, and I made a decision. I know how it must have hurt you and affected your authority, and I apologize, deeply apologize.”

Chamberlain nodded, crossing his fingers before him. “Well, that’s a start,” he said.

“I mean it,” Kristen said. “I know I like to behave like a big shot, and I like being in control, but I now realize that my attitude and actions have an enormous effect on many around me. I don’t want to be an enemy, Mr. Chamberlain, but I know sometimes my mouth and my bad-ass attitude makes me look that way.”

If mentioning her mouth and her ass was meant as a distraction, it worked—his eyes were automatically drawn to both those luscious parts of her body before flicking back to her eyes. She didn’t seem to notice, but he was sure her remarks were deliberately intended to elicit just that very reaction. He turned in his chair to look out the window; after a moment’s thought, he nodded. “All right, Miss Skyy,” he said. “I’ll approve it.”

“Thank you so much, sir.”

“You and your network will sign all the usual waivers of responsibility and liability.”

“Of course.”

“TALON has already deployed, and they’re incommunicado right now,” he went on. “To preserve operational security, I’m going to put you on the next scheduled military logistical flight to their general location, and I’ll arrange for Major Richter to meet you somewhere so you can join the team. The final decision whether or not to allow you to accompany the team will be his. Understand?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“How soon can you leave?”

“We’re packed and ready to go right now, sir.”

“I should have guessed,” Chamberlain said. “Report to base ops at Andrews right away; I’ll have a security pass and travel orders waiting for you at the front gate. Tell your boss that you’ll be out of touch, period—no communications with anyone from here on out until cleared by Major Richter himself. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I just hope you know what you’re doing, Kristen.” Chamberlain stood. “I’ll never understand this obsession with ‘the story,’ Miss Skyy,” he said. “The only way I can begin to understand is to equate it with my deep desire to defend my homeland. But the comparison still always comes up short.”

“I think you have it right, sir,” Kristen said, extending a hand. Chamberlain shook her hand and nodded. “Thank you again.”

“Sure. Remember, from here on out, no communications until Richter says it’s okay. Good luck to you, Miss Skyy.” He took a seat and started typing e-mail notifications to the chief of staff and orders to his secretary for the security passes and travel orders. As he typed, he could see Kristen Skyy fairly running out to the west entrance, with her crew members hustling to keep up.

Jason Richter, he thought, had no idea what was coming his way, he thought, and he wondered how he was going to be able to handle it…

She knew she said she wouldn’t tell anyone, but she had Jason’s secure short messaging service address already programmed into her phone, so she shot him a quick message: “CLEARED 2 GO BY NSA. C U SOON. LUV KRISTEN.” That couldn’t hurt anyone, she thought…right?

Near Giza, Egypt

Three nights later

The Giza necropolis is one of the starkest yet one of the most beautiful places on earth, awe-inspiring enough to give even ruthless warrior-princes like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Emperor Caligula, and Napoleon Bonaparte—men who conquered much of the then-known world—pause. The region has been the location of countless battles throughout history, and yet the pyramids, tombs, monuments, and ancient structures of the necropolis remain very much as they have been for over four thousand years. They have been invaded, desecrated, stripped of their wealth and beauty, and some have even been razed over the centuries to make way for newer ones, but there they are still, chilling and majestic.

Of course, the necropolis is no longer isolated on the limestone plateau on the edge of the Sahara Desert overlooking Giza. The city of Giza now engulfs the necropolis, so close that diners in a Pizza Hut restaurant right across the street can look out the front window and get a full awe-inspiring view of the Sphinx and the three Great Pyramids while munching on pineapple pizza. In turn, the sprawling Cairo metroplex have begun engulfing Giza as the Egyptian economy slowly improves and workers flock to the city. Thousands of visitors from all over the world still tour the pyramids and monuments every day, but it is no longer the mystical, mysterious, and magical place it once was.

Case in point: just five kilometers east of the Sphinx, near the town of Tirsa, was another sprawling complex of buildings, tunnels, and soaring structures rising out of the desert that, many thought, easily eclipsed even the majesty of the Pyramids: Kingman Tirsa, Africa’s largest petroleum refinery complex. The refinery was so close, and the complex so large, that at night the flames from the refinery’s numerous cracking towers were bright enough to fully illuminate the Great Pyramids when the floodlights were turned off.

While all of Egypt’s existing refineries and petroleum handling facilities were meant to handle product coming out of the Gulf of Suez and the Nile Delta in the Mediterranean Sea, and had already begun to see a decline in both volume and efficiency, Kingman Tirsa’s entire reason for being was to handle product coming out of Egypt’s newly explored Western Desert, five hundred kilometers to the west. The Western Desert explorations had already resulted in proven oil and natural gas reserves that exceeded all of Egypt’s previously known reserves combined.

Over four square kilometers in size, with thousands of kilometers of pipe controlled by a vast network of computers, the Kingman Tirsa refinery, twice as large as the Mostorod refinery northeast of Cairo, was designed to someday process three hundred thousand barrels of crude oil per day, over half of Egypt’s total production, and produce a diverse range of petroleum products with modern efficiency. Vast underground pipelines under construction tied Kingman Tirsa to transshipment ports in the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea, and pipeline routes were being tied in to oil fields in Sudan, Libya, and Chad.

As Egypt’s largest refinery, Kingman Tirsa was vitally important to the Egyptian government, so much so that an entire brigade of the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior’s Central Security Force, fully 20 percent of Egypt’s entire paramilitary homeland defense force, was assigned to guard the facility. The Kingman Brigade, as it was called, headquartered in Tirsa, had responsibility to patrol not only the refinery complex itself but its network of pipelines and pumping stations stretching all the way to the Western Desert and its ports along the Nile River and along the Gulf of Suez, as well as provide security for the dozens of residential subdivisions built for the refinery that housed the workers.