Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (438 page)

The taxi stopped at the regular drop-off point by the stadium. He paid his fare plus a generous tip, got out, walked toward the massive concrete bowl. At the entrance, he showed his security pass and was waved through. There came the expected creepy feeling. He’d be testing his “B” vaccine in a very immediate way, first admitting the Shiva virus into the fogging system, and then walking through it, breathing in the same nano-capsules as all the other hundred-thousand-plus tourists, and if the “B” shot didn’t work, he’d be condemning himself to a gruesome death—but he’d been briefed in on that issue a long time ago.

“That Dutchman looks pretty tough,” Noonan said. Willem terHoost was currently in the lead, and had picked up the pace, heading for a record despite the weather conditions. The heat had taken its toll of many runners. A lot of them slowed their pace to get cold drinks, and some ran through pre-spotted water showers to cool off, though the TV commentators said that these had the effect of tightening up the leg muscles and were therefore not really a good thing for marathoners to do. But they took the relief anyway, most of them, or grabbed the offered ice-water drinks and poured them over their faces.

“Self-abuse,” Chavez said, checking his watch and reaching for his radio microphone. “Command to Tomlinson.”

“I’m here, boss,” Chavez heard in his earpiece.

“Coming in to relieve you.”

“Roger that, fine with us, boss,” the sergeant replied from inside the locked room.

“Come on.” Ding stood, waving for Pierce and Noonan to follow. It was just a hundred feet to the blue door. Ding twisted the knob and went inside.

Tomlinson and Johnston had hidden in the shadows in the corner opposite the door. They came out when they recognized their fellow team members.

“Okay, stay close and stay alert,” Chavez told the two sergeants.

“Roge-o,” Homer Johnston said on his way out. He was thirsty and planned to get himself something to drink, and on the way out he placed his hands over his ears, popping them open to rid himself of the pump noise.

The sound was annoying, Chavez realized in the first few minutes. Not overly loud, but constant, a powerful deep whirring, like a well-insulated automobile engine. It hovered at the edge of your consciousness and didn’t go away, and on further reflection made him think of a beehive. Maybe that was the annoying part of it.

“Why are we leaving the lights on?” Noonan asked.

“Good question.” Chavez walked over and flipped the switch. The room went almost totally dark, with just a crack of light coming in from under the steel fire door. Chavez felt his way to the opposite wall, managed to get there without bumping his head, and leaned against the concrete wall, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Gearing was dressed in shorts and low-cut hiking boots, with short socks as well. It seemed the form of dress the locals had adopted for dealing with the heat, and it was comfortable enough, as was his backpack and floppy hat. The stadium concourses were crowded with fans coming in early for the closing ceremonies, and he saw that many of them were standing in the fog to relieve themselves from the oppressive heat of the day. The local weather forecasters had explained ad nauseam about how this version of the El Niño phenomenon had affected the global climate and inflicted unseasonably hot weather on their country, for which they all felt the need to apologize. He found it all rather amusing. Apologize for a natural phenomenon? How ridiculous. With that thought he headed to his objective. In doing so, he walked right past Homer Johnston, who was standing, sipping his Coke.

“Any other places the guy might use?” Chavez worried suddenly in the darkness.

“No,” Noonan replied. “I checked the panel on the way in. The whole stadium fogging system comes from this one room. If it’s going to happen, it will happen here.”

“If it’s gonna happen,” Chavez said back, actually hoping that it would not. If that happened, they’d go back to Lieutenant Colonel Wilkerson and find out where this Gearing guy was staying, and then pay a call on him and have a friendly little chat.

Gearing spotted the blue door and looked around for security people. The Aussie SAS troops were easily spotted, once you knew how they dressed. But though he saw two Sydney policemen walking down the concourse, there were no army personnel. Gearing paused fifty feet or so from the door. The usual mission jitters, he told himself. He was about to do something from which there was no turning back. He asked himself for the thousandth time if he really wanted to do this. There were fellow human beings all around him, people seemingly just like himself with hopes and dreams and aspirations—but, no, those things they held in their minds weren’t like the things he held in his own, were they? They didn’t get it, didn’t understand what was important and what was not. They didn’t see Nature for what She was, and as a result they lived lives that were aimed only at hurting or even destroying Her, driving cars that injected hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, using chemicals that found their way into the water, pesticides that killed birds or kept them from reproducing, aiming spray cans at their hair whose propellants destroyed the ozone layer. They were
killing
Nature with nearly every act they took. They didn’t care. They didn’t even try to understand the consequences of what they were doing, and so, no, they didn’t have a right to live. It was his job to protect Nature, to remove the blight upon the planet, to restore and save, and that was a job he must do. With that decided, Wil Gearing resumed his walk to the blue door, fished in his pocket for the key and inserted it into the knob.

“Command, this is Johnston, you got company coming in! White guy, khaki shorts, red polo shirt, and backpack,” Homer announced loudly into everyone’s ear. Beside him, Sergeant Tomlinson started walking in that direction, too.

“Heads up,” Chavez said in the darkness. There were two shadows in the crack of light under the door, and then the sound of a key in the lock, and then there was another crack of light, a vertical one as the door opened, and a silhouette, a human shape—and just that fast, Chavez knew that it
was
all real after all. Would the lights reveal an inhuman monster, something from another planet, or . . .

. . . just a man, he saw, as the lights flipped on. About fifty, with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. A man who knew what he was about. He reached for the wrench hanging on the wall-mounted pegboard, then shrugged out of his backpack, and loosened the two straps that held the flap in place. It seemed to Chavez that he was watching a movie, something separated from reality, as the man flipped off the motor switch, ending the whirring. Then he closed the valve and lifted the wrench to—

“Hold it right there, pal,” Chavez said, emerging from the shadows.

“Who are you?” the man asked in surprise. Then his face told the tale. He was doing something he shouldn’t. He knew it, and suddenly someone else did, too.

“I could ask you the same thing, except I know who you are. Your name is Wil Gearing. What are you planning to do, Mr. Gearing?”

“I’m just here to swap out the chlorine canister on the fogging system,” Gearing replied, shaken all the more that this Latino seemed to know his name. How had that happened? Was he part of the Project—and if not, then what? It was as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and now his entire body cringed from the blow.

“Oh? Let’s see about that, Mr. Gearing. Tim?” Chavez gestured for Noonan to get the backpack. Sergeant Pierce stayed back, his hand on his pistol and his eyes locked on their visitor.

“Sure looks like a normal one,” Noonan said. If this was a counterfeit, it was a beaut. He was tempted to open the screw top, but he had good reason not to. Next to the pump motor, Chavez took the wrench and removed the existing canister.

“Looks about half full to me, pal. Not time to replace it yet, at least not with something called Shiva. Tim, let’s be careful with that one.”

“You bet.” Noonan tucked it back into Gearing’s pack and strapped the cover down. “We’ll have this checked out. Mr. Gearing, you are under arrest,” the FBI agent told him. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, we will provide you with one. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand these rights, sir?”

Gearing was shaking now, and turned to look at the door, wondering if he could—

—he couldn’t. Tomlinson and Johnston chose that moment to come in. “Got him?” Homer asked.

“Yep,” Ding replied. He pulled his cell phone out and called America. Again the encryption systems went through the synchronization process.

“We got him,” Chavez told Rainbow Six. “And we got the canister thing, whatever you call it. How the hell do we get everybody home?”

“There’s an Air Force C-17 at Alice Springs, if you can get there. It’ll wait for you.”

“Okay, I’ll see if we can fly there. Later, John.” Chavez thumbed the END button and turned to his prisoner. “Okay, pal, you’re coming with us. If you try anything stupid, Sergeant Pierce here will shoot you right in the head. Right, Mike?”

“Yes, sir, I sure as hell will,” Pierce responded in a voice from the grave.

Noonan reopened the valve and turned the pump motor back on. Then they went back out into the stadium concourse and walked to the cabstand. They ended up needing two taxis, both of which headed to the airport. There they had to wait an hour and a half for a 737 for the desert airport, a flight of nearly two hours.

Alice Springs is in the very center of the continental island called Australia, near the Macdonnell mountain range, and a strange place indeed to find the highest of high-tech equipment, but here were the huge antenna dishes that downloaded information from America’s reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and military communications satellites. The facility there is operated by the National Security Agency, NSA, whose main site is at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington.

The Qantas flight was largely empty, and on arrival, an airport van took them to the USAF terminal, which was surprisingly comfortable, though here the temperature was blisteringly hot, heading down from an afternoon temperature of 120.

“You’re Chavez?” the sergeant in the Distinguished Visitors area asked.

“That’s right. When’s the plane leave?”

“They’re waiting for you now, sir. Come this way.” And with that they entered another van, which rolled them right to the front-left-side door, where a sergeant in a flight suit gestured them aboard.

“Where we going, Sarge?” Chavez asked on his way past.

“Hickam in Hawaii first, sir, then on to Travis in California.”

“Fair enough. Tell the driver he can leave.”

“Yes, sir.” The crew chief laughed, as he closed the door and walked forward.

It was a mobile cavern, this monster transport aircraft, and there seemed to be no other passengers aboard. Gearing hadn’t been handcuffed, somewhat to Ding’s disappointment, and he behaved docilely, with Noonan at his side.

“So, you want to talk to us about it, Mr. Gearing?” the FBI agent asked.

“What’s in it for me?”

He’d had to ask that question, Noonan supposed, but it was a sign of weakness, just what the FBI agent had hoped for. The question made the answer easy:

“Your life, if you’re lucky.”

CHAPTER 38

NATURE RESORT

It was just too much for Wil Gearing. Nobody had told him what to do in a case like this. It had never occurred to him that security would be broken on the Project. His life was forfeit now—how could that have happened? He could cooperate or not. The contents of the canister would be examined anyway, probably at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and it would require only a few seconds for the medical experts there to see what he’d carried into the Olympic stadium, and there was no explaining that away, was there? His life, his plans for the future, had been taken away from him, and his only choice was to cooperate and hope for the best.

And so, as the C-17A Globemaster III transport climbed to its cruising altitude, he started talking. Noonan held a tape recorder in his hand, and hoped that the engine noise that permeated the cargo area wouldn’t wash it all away. It turned out that the hardest part for him was to keep a straight face. He’d heard about extreme environmental groups, the people who thought killing baby seals in Canada was right up there with Treblinka and Auschwitz, and he knew that the Bureau had looked at some for offenses like releasing laboratory animals from medical institutions, or spiking trees with nails so that no lumber company would dare to run trees from those areas through their sawmills, but he’d never heard of those groups doing anything more offensive than that. This, however, was such a crime as to redefine “monstrous.” And the religious fervor that went along with it was entirely alien to him, and therefore hard to credit. He wanted to believe that the contents of the chlorine canister really was just chlorine, but he knew that it was not. That and the backpack were now sealed in a mil-spec plastic container strapped down in a seat next to Sergeant Mike Pierce.

“He hasn’t called yet,” John Brightling observed, checking his watch. The closing ceremonies were under way. The head of the International Olympic Committee was about to give his speech, summoning the Youth of the World to the next set of games. Then the assembled orchestra would play, and the Olympic Flame would be extinguished . . . just as most of humanity would be extinguished. There was the same sort of sadness to it, but also the same inevitability. There would be no next Olympiad, and the Youth of the World would not be alive to hear the summons? . . .

“John, he’s probably watching this the same as we are. Give him some time,” Bill Henriksen advised.