First Team (44 page)

“Never heard of him.”

“Your loss,” said Conners.

“Why do you like those old songs?”

“Why do you?” said Conners. “Remind you of being a kid?”

“The childhood I never had.”

“Don’t get philosophical on me, Ferg.”

“I’m not philosophical.”

Bullshit, thought Conners, but he didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m philosophical?” asked Ferg.

“That and reckless,” said Conners.

“Reckless?”

“I’d call it a death wish.”

“That why I hang around with you, huh?” The CIA officer rolled down his window halfway. The blast of cold air stung his eyes, reminding him he was awake.

“You’re not an SF type,” said Conners. “Not a soldier.”

“Not enough discipline, huh?” said Ferg.

“Got that right. You don’t like following orders. And you take too many risks.”

“Got to.”

“You were lucky, Ferg, damn lucky.”

“Which time?”

Conners laughed.

“You’re telling me no SF soldier is reckless?” said Ferguson.

“Not the ones who are alive.”

“Bah.”

Conners didn’t bother arguing.

“Rankin’s not reckless?” suggested Ferg.

“Rankin? No.”

“Bull.”

“Taking risks and being reckless aren’t the same thing, Ferg.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Rankin’s a professional.”

“You Army guys like to stick together.”

“You don’t like him, that’s all. Not that I blame you—he hates your guts.”

“That doesn’t make him
not
reckless,” said Ferg. “Let’s try that turnoff over there,” added Ferguson, spotting the road.

~ * ~

7

BUILDING 24-442, SUBURBAN VIRGINIA

When Thomas matched Corrigan’s scribble with the name on the map—Verko—he felt as if the ceiling had lit up with spotlights. Verko was connected with several UFO sightings during the 1950s and ‘60s, all reported by villagers in the nearby mountains. The sightings had proven false; at the time Verko was a secret Russian base devoted to a squadron of spy planes.

It looked fairly isolated, a good place to arrange a pickup—but only if he could be sure the Russians weren’t using it anymore.

Or the guerrillas. Thomas threw himself into researching it, gathering every slither of information he could. He began with the generic, pulling up SpyNet and working from there. The base had been officially closed in 1992, though it hadn’t seen much activity for at least ten years prior to that. Thomas jabbed at the keyboard, calling up a set of satellite photos. He culled through a file, then went over to a collection made by a commercial satellite over the past several years without finding any that showed activity on the runway. He did find shadows undoubtedly related to activity there, though there was no new construction.

A scan of NSA intercepts turned up several hits that contained Verko, but most had not been decrypted. The one that had contained something seemed pure gibberish.

He continued to work, guessing logically and illogically. He lost track of time. He didn’t eat. He didn’t emerge from his room. At some point he decided he needed a break. Thomas got up and gathered all of the papers that he’d arranged on the floor in a big pile next to his desk, then dropped to the floor and did a hundred push-ups. When that didn’t rev him, he tried a hundred more. A third set left him so tired he fell asleep on the floor.

How long he slept there, he couldn’t say. He finally woke up because someone was pounding on his door.

“Yes?” he asked, opening it.

Debra Wu stood in the hallway, eying him suspiciously. She was wearing a different skirt, though this one seemed just as short as the other.

“Thomas, the security log says you’ve been here all night,” she said.

“Might be.”

Verko wasn’t a Russian base, he realized—it was a guerrilla stronghold.

“Corrigan wants to see you. Does he know you were here?” she added.

“I don’t know.”

“You want some coffee?”

“Why not?” He got up, orienting himself among his papers. “Tell Corrigan I’ll be down in a while. I have to put some things together. I need to make a few queries.”

“Okey-dokey,” said Debra, retreating.

“Don’t forget the coffee.”

~ * ~

ven though Debra warned him that “the loony slept under his desk,” Corrigan wasn’t quite prepared for the analyst’s disheveled appearance when he entered the secure chamber about an hour later. His hair stuck out in every direction; his shirt was half-out of his pants, and he seemed to have dust and lint pasted all over his body.

“I figured it out,” said Thomas.

“What?”

“They’re putting the bomb together at this place called Verko. It’s in the mountains, and it used to be an airbase.”

“Verko—that was one of the pickup possibilities,” said Corrigan.

“Verko’s the place you’re looking for,” said Thomas. “Allah’s Fist bought ammonia nitrate and had it tracked into a village a few miles away nine months ago. We have two sat photos showing those trucks on the road to the facility.”

“When?”

“Six months ago.”

“At Verko?”

“No, but that has to be where they’re going. And one of the companies that was associated with Bin Saqr rented a house in the village. Medical waste—they’ve been grabbing all the cesium they can get. Maybe other stuff. The analysts warned about this—I know the man who put the estimate together. Very reliable. I have an inquiry into NSA to see what intercepts may link with this.”

Thomas’s hair poked out at odd angles, and his eyes nearly bulged from his head. As much as Corrigan wanted to believe that the analyst had solved the problem, the portrait he saw before him did not inspire confidence.

“Take me back to the beginning,” he told Thomas.

Thomas explained what he had found a second time. Even laid out in a semilogical manner the shadows and glimpses of trucks near but on the base sounded less than definitive. Corrigan brought up a sat picture of the abandoned base on one of the computers.

“Where exactly would they do the work?” he asked. “The Russians dismantled the hangars they had there in the eighties. These buildings—are they big enough?”

“That is a problem,” said Thomas. “I don’t know.”

Corrigan frowned. “What do they do with the bomb once they put it together?”

Thomas shrugged again. “I haven’t figured it out yet. But it would be a perfect site. It hasn’t been under Russian control for the past five or six years, exactly when the head of Allah’s Fist disappeared.”

“That’s all you have? No intercepts there, no nothing?”

“Not yet.” Thomas peered over Corrigan’s shoulder. Maybe the Russians had burrowed into the side of the mountain, putting the planes in a nukeproof shelter. Or maybe there was a ramp elevator along one of the aprons.

Now if it had been an alien base, the transnuclear engines would allow it to slide through a fissure in the mountains without detection.

Probably he could rule that out.

“Maybe you should get some sleep while we work this over,” said Corrigan. “I’ll put in a request to NRO for every scrap of satellite data they have.”

“I have that all under way already,” said Thomas. “But I’m sure this is the place.”

“Sure sure, or just sure?”

“Sure,” said Thomas.

Corrigan debated calling Ferguson. If he was wrong, the officer would bash in his head.

“Get some more backup,” said Corrigan finally.

“On it, boss,” said Thomas, running from the room.

Corrigan finally realized there might be such a thing as too much enthusiasm, not to mention eccentricity.

Even so, he picked up the phone to call Ferg.

~ * ~

8

NEAR KASHI, KYRGYZSTAN

The marshaling yard was less than two years old, and while small by Western standards, it stretched out across the landscape like a city unto itself, with close to a hundred miles worth of track. Freight cars from all over Russia and Europe were scattered along the various spurs, each located and tracked by computer as massive freight trains were put together. Nearly all contained garbage.

The cars carrying the rad waste were in their own section of the yard, heavily guarded. They’d found a spot to watch the yard nearly two miles away from the perimeter of the facility, and though the view was unobstructed, Rankin had to sit on the roof of the car with his binoculars to see.

Corrine slept inside. Rankin had almost had to slug her to get her to take a rest. He was worried that she was going to burn herself out; she was clearly pushing herself because she thought she’d screwed up somehow losing the boxcar.

Rankin reached across the roof for the thermos of tea—coffee had become increasingly difficult to find—and poured himself a cup. He was just taking his first sip when the sat phone rang. To answer, he had to enter a personal ID code, then say his name into the receiver. The computer analyzed his voice pattern; if it didn’t match its records, the phone was temporarily locked into transmit mode and Corrigan—or whoever was making the call—alerted. Once the embedded GPS device gave a positive marker on the phone’s location—a matter of two seconds—the person on the other side could decide how to proceed.