First Team (58 page)

~ * ~

ABOARD SRI LANKAN FLIGHT 112, BOUND FOR KANKESATURAI

The coldness came clandestinely, sneaking up on Ferguson like a warrior infiltrating a frontier settlement. By the time he noticed it his hands were frozen; he had trouble moving not just his fingers but his wrists. Conners huddled in the front corner of the craft, shivering and passing in and out of consciousness. Ferguson dressed his wounds as best he could; the sergeant wasn’t bleeding anymore, though he’d obviously lost a good deal of blood. Not only were his clothes soaked, but Ferguson’s were as well.

When the plane finally stopped jerking up and down and back and forth, Ferguson returned to his search of the interior, sliding the flashlight’s beam around the interior. He saw what he thought had to be the door to the flight deck at the front of the space, a full level above his head. The ladder that would have been on the bulkhead in a standard cargo version of the plane had been removed, but the metal cladding of the explosives and radioactive cargo formed a ledge on either side. He started to climb up the space by pushing against the narrow walls directly below the door—they formed a kind of artificial chimney—but the space was a little too wide and shallow to make ascending easy, and as the aircraft hit turbulence, Ferguson lost his balance and dropped a few feet to the floor.

Looking for an easier climb, he found a section of the metalwork nearby that had pieces welded on like a ladder; he went up and found an irregular, roughly eight-inch ledge about nine feet off the floor on the left side of the hold. He worked his way toward the front of the plane, alternately using the flashlight and rubbing his cold knuckles across the surface, trying to decipher the indentations. The terrorists had packed roughly five feet of explosives and material on each side of the hold, arranging them in a patchwork pattern to maximize the plane’s destructive power; they were not very concerned with rounding off edges or filling gaps, and Ferguson cut his fingers several times as he worked around. Finally, he reached the doorway.

Ferguson steadied himself, then reached to his belt and took his pistol out. His plan was simple—he’d yank open the door, swing with it, and get onto the flight deck, where he’d shoot out the pilot and the rest of the crew. He didn’t bother thinking beyond that; it was superfluous.

But as he reached for the handle, the plane jerked upward. For a second Ferguson felt weightless, suspended against gravity. Then the floor of the plane seemed to reach up and snatch him down, and besides feeling cold he felt the incredible shock of pain hit him in the back of his head.

The thump of Ferguson’s body slamming to the floor a few yards away shook Conners awake. He stared as the flashlight spun wildly toward the rear of the plane, its beacon illuminating the metal grids lining the interior. The lids of his eyes felt like ice-cold daggers poking at his eyeballs. Conners started to get up but felt a heavy hand press against him; he crawled instead, making his way toward the light. When he finally got it, he pushed back to find Ferguson, who was lying on his back, arms and legs straight out.

“Jesus, Ferg, let’s go now,” Conners told him.

It was hard to tell if the CIA officer was even breathing. Conners put his ear to his chest, trying to listen.

The plane dipped forward, and Conners tumbled over his comrade. He tried to push himself off, and the plane jerked hard to the right. His stomach suddenly felt queasy—he leaned over and began to throw up.

~ * ~

7

ABOARD SF COMMAND TRANSPORT 3, OVER THE PERSIAN GULF

Corrine listened as Gray explained the abilities of the reconnaissance satellites, veering from the overly simplistic to the overly technical and back again. The bottom line itself was simple—it could take days to actually find the wreckage of the downed 747.

Assuming they had gotten it.

“Let’s assume we didn’t get it,” Corrine told Gray. “Where can it go?”

“Well, 747 range would be something over seven thousand miles,” said Major Gray. “Maybe even a bit more, depending on the version, how it was loaded, flight conditions.”

“We’ll have to search every airport or field that a 747 could land on within that range,” said Corrine.

“That has to be well over a thousand. I doubt it’s still in the air. The Navy would have found it by now,” said the expert. “They have the Gulf completely covered, and they’re in the Indian Ocean. Nothing without a civil registration—no plane is going to get past them. I’m sure we got it,” added Gray.

“Just in case,” said Corrine. “I’d like to talk to the
Nimitz
battle group as well. In the meantime, we’ll raise the alert level at Manila.”

“Your call,” he said.

“It is,” she agreed, clicking into the com circuit to get an update from Van Buren.

~ * ~

8

ON THE GROUND IN CHECHNYA

Based on her preliminary readings, Van Buren’s radiation expert, Captain Renya Peterson, declared the hangar area in the mountain completely off-limits until the robot probes could survey it. Tests at the mouth of the cave showed there were weak- and midlevel gamma generators and traces of alpha material inside; while the levels were not serious outside the cave, they were bound to be considerably higher inside. In contrast, only the building Ferguson had explored earlier had any level of material, and this was relatively low, generating the sort of readings one might find in a medical radiation department where procedures were lax.

A knot of radiation-containment specialists and support troopers huddled in space suits near the cave, waiting for an hour until the last of the guerrillas in the second building surrendered. Van Buren had fourteen prisoners, all severely wounded. He decided to evac them right away, which would avoid any conflict with the Russians, who were reported en route. That necessitated more off-loading of equipment and more delays, and so, by the time they were ready to send the little rover into the mountain, the sky had faint hints of the approaching dawn ripening its edges.

Larger than the PackBot Explorers made by iRobot and used for exploring caves and minefields in Afghanistan, the lower chassis of the Atomic Rover looked like a squashed shoe box with two sets of tank tracks at each side. The main set ran the length of the vehicle; at the front, another set of treads rose like arms, helping the critter climb over obstructions. On top of the robot was a small disk not unlike that used to pick up satellite transmissions; in this case it fed and received a stream of data to and from the base station, which was contained in a pair of large suitcases and a laptop about fifty yards from the mouth of the cave. In front of the disk were two very small video cameras, which fed high-definition optical and near-infrared images back to the station. A pair of radiation counters and isotope analyzers, along with a chemical warfare “sniffer,” were mounted near the nose of the tiny vehicle. A fuel cell propelled AR and could do so for roughly twelve hours.

As Van Buren watched, the device rolled across the gravel where they were standing and rambled onto the hardened apron the 747 had used to get out; it popped up on the lip of the cement near the entrance and moved inside. Two men controlled AR, one handling the driving and the other the sensors. Each lieutenant had been thoroughly cross-trained in his companion’s job and, if circumstances required, could handle the entire show himself.

The small vehicle stopped in the middle of the hangar-sized area and began scanning around. Since Ferguson and Conners hadn’t been found yet, Van Buren assumed they were somewhere inside, though he was starting to fear that the two men would not be found alive.

The radiation suits the team wore provided protection against alpha and beta waves, where the real danger was contamination by breathing or swallowing particles, or infection in open wounds. They could not, however, shield out gamma waves; safety there depended largely on limiting time and proximity to the source. Each man on the team carried several film sensors, badges similar to those worn by medical personnel in X-ray departments to record their exposure to potentially harmful radiation. Each suit had a sensor that would sound if the exposure levels exceeded the preset limits. Before disembarking, the gear would be shed and left at the site. Upon returning to Incirlik a strict decontamination and isolation procedure— VB’s experts jokingly referred to it as twenty Saturdays’ worth of baths—would be followed.

Captain Peterson peered over Van Buren’s shoulder. “Crazy fucks,” Peterson said, holding a small Palm-like computer device that analyzed the radiation data fed from the robot. “Crazy fucks.”

Coming from the mouth of any other member of the SF team, the words would have seemed normal. But Peterson wasn’t just a woman—she was short, weighed maybe a hundred pounds, and had the complexion of a porcelain doll. Van Buren could not have been more surprised if her head began spinning around on her body, and he stared at her, waiting either for an explanation or a ventriloquist to appear.

“How bad is it in there?” he asked.

“Layman’s terms?”

“Please.”

“If you stayed inside for four hours, you’d have about twice the lifetime dosage you would give a patient with Stage IV thyroid cancer,” she said. “Won’t kill you right off, but eventually it’ll catch up with you. They’ve got all sorts of different material. There’s a lot of low-level gamma rays, but they were working with some nastier stuff as well. They must’ve had an accident at one point, a small spill that they had to contain.”

The specialist began talking about radiation levels and probability curves, and Van Buren started to get lost in the details.

“Layman’s language,” he asked.

“There are a couple of hot spots that we have to watch for inside,” she said.