Dale Brown - Edge of Battle

“It works! Excellent.” They tried their handheld radios—the man inside the robot had no trouble adjusting the radio scanner to pick up the handhelds’ frequency and making the connection. “It appears my missile attack had no ill effects. I am satisfied.” He pulled a pistol out of its holster. Jason felt a roaring in his ears as he realized that Zakharov had everything he wanted, and that sealed his fate. “And now, Major, as for you and the children…you are free to go.”

“Wh…what…?”

Zakharov grasped Richter by the shoulders, and, with Jason still protectively clutching the children, turned him around. “Walk in this direction, Major. Do not turn around, and do not try to head for the road—if my men or I see you on the road, we will gun you down. Stay together and do not allow the children to leave your side—if you do, our deal is off. Keep walking toward those lights. In about an hour, you should reach a farmhouse; if you miss it, in another hour or less you should reach the town. By then, my men and I should be long gone.” He issued more orders in Russian, and in an instant the CID unit ran off into the night and the commandos boarded the vans and drove away. Within moments, Richter and the children were alone.

“¿Dónde iremos ahora, señor?” one of the children asked.

Jason recognized the words “where” and “sir”—he guessed the rest. “Don’t worry, kids,” he said. “ No problema . Help is on the way.”

He led the children toward the lights of the town, carefully leading them across the furrows and ditches crisscrossing the fields. Soon his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, and he could make out stars. He found Polaris, the North Star, and realized he was walking east. He began to feel better—he didn’t know where he was at all, but at least he knew which way he was going.

Although he remembered Zakharov’s warning, he needed to find help as quickly as possible, so as soon as he saw a truck on the highway, he decided to risk it and started angling toward it. About fifteen minutes later, he reached the edge of the field adjacent to the paved road. He instructed the children as best he could to stay in hiding, then crawled through the dirt until he reached the road. He couldn’t see anything nearby, but several yards away he spotted a road sign, and he decided to risk trying to pinpoint his location. Half-crawling, half-crouched, he dashed through the edge of the fields until he reached the sign. It was very dark, and the sign was weathered and hard to read; it was riddled with bullet holes, commonly found in rural signage, but soon he read…

…and instantly, he knew what Zakharov’s real objective was.

He had no choice: when he saw the next vehicle, a pickup truck, coming down the road, he flagged it down, forcing it to stop by practically throwing himself in front of it. Thankfully it was a farmer and not a terrorist. He talked fast, convinced the driver to help him, then gathered the children together and helped them into the cargo bed. He breathlessly used the farmer’s cell phone to call for help…

PECOS EAST TRAINING AREA,

CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, NEW MEXICO

THAT SAME TIME

Ariadna Vega threw open the office door and flipped on the light. “We got it!” she shouted.

FBI Deputy Director Bruno Watts, asleep on the sofa in Jason Richter’s office at the Task Force TALON headquarters complex, blinked at the light but was instantly on his feet. The task force’s new commanding officer did not look like your typical “snake-eater” ex–Navy SEAL—he was shorter than average, wiry, and rather soft-spoken around others. As his hair thinned and grayed he decided to shave his head, so he could still intimidate even in an office or social setting, but otherwise no one would ever recognize him as one of the world’s most highly skilled and experienced experts in unconventional warfare and counterterrorist operations. “What is it?”

“CID One’s locator beacon just went off,” Ariadna said breathlessly. “The unit’s been activated.”

“Where?”

“About twenty miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas.”

“Amarillo…” Watts tried to think of the significance of that city, but nothing came immediately to mind. “What about Richter?”

“No word from him, but he’s the only one who could have activated the CID unit.”

“But it doesn’t mean he’s controlling it, right?” Since taking command of the unit, Watts had been taking a crash course in the Cybernetic Infantry Device—and the more he learned the more excited he got about employing this incredible high-tech weapon system.

“He’s alive, I know it.”

“If he is, he’s got some explaining to do,” Watts said. “Are we…?”

“We’re getting ready to launch right now,” Ariadna said. “We’re only about a hundred miles away—less than fifteen minutes in the air.”

“Good. You stay here and man the command post. Give me any updates you receive.” He pulled on a leather jacket and hurried out to a waiting helicopter that would take them to Cannon Air Force Base, where a jet was waiting to fly him to Amarillo.

Just before touching down on the parking ramp, Watts suddenly slapped his hands together. “Shit!” he shouted, and he fumbled for the intercom control panel inside the helicopter. He dialed his microphone to “COM 2” and keyed the mike button: “Talon, this is Alpha.”

“Go ahead, Alpha,” Ariadna responded from the task force command center.

“Send an urgent message immediately to the FBI office in Amarillo and the Department of Energy. Whoever’s got the robot, I know what their target will be.”

On FM Road 293 four miles west of where Richter and the hostages had been dropped off, the two vans encountered the first roving patrol, an armored Suburban belonging to a private security company. The men inside the Suburban radioed the two vans’ license plate numbers to their headquarters inside the plant; they in turn contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety. The response came back a few moments later: vans rented in Amarillo, not reported stolen or missing, rented to private individuals.

A second request went out for the IDs of the renters. The data came back moments later: both vans rented to individuals from Mexico, no local address, no local destination. That got a lot of folks’ attention. The Carson County Sheriff’s Department was called and a request made to do a traffic stop and an ID and citizenship check, with the Potter and Armstrong County Sheriff’s Departments, alerted because the vehicles were so close to their jurisdictions. Although FM 293 was a public road, the Department of Energy had agreed to use the full force of the U.S. government to defend and indemnify the state, county, and local law enforcement agencies from any liability in conducting investigations requested by plant security.

There was no question that whatever plant security wanted, they would get, for this was the Pantex Plant, America’s only facility dedicated to the assembly, disassembly, and disposal of nuclear weapons. Administered by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (Defense Programs) and operated by a conglomerate of three nuclear engineering companies, Pantex’s mission was to assemble, disassemble, inspect, and store nuclear warheads.

After contacting the sheriff’s department and requesting a traffic stop, the security patrol returned to its rounds and continued to monitor the perimeter security while long-range telescopic low-light TV cameras continued to track the vans. FM 293 was actually separated from the plant itself by over two and a half miles. In between the road and the plant were two explosive incineration pits where the high explosive parts of nuclear weapons were destroyed or where testing of new explosive materials could take place, and also by a one-mile-square storage facility, mostly abandoned. At one time nuclear warheads awaiting distribution to military facilities were stored there, but no new warheads had been produced for decades. The plant itself was one mile south of the storage facility.