Devil's Gate Read online

  Other data was being overlaid on the screen, numbers and codes that Pitt wasn’t familiar with. In some respects he wondered why he was even there. NUMA was peripherally involved in the search, but for the most part any action at this level would be well out of their hands.

  With the participants given a few minutes to review the files in front of them, Dirk studied what he’d been given a second time. One thing that caught his attention was the fact that the entire field and the four rigs were owned by the government of Sierra Leone and always had been, unlike all the structures taken just days before in the sweeping nationalization.

  Another red flag that stood out was the fact that oilmen the CIA had spoken with insisted there was no oil beneath the shelf where the Sierra Leone government was drilling. It was a boondoggle, they insisted. A waste of the money the IMF was pouring into the country.

  Add to that the continued presence of construction barges and constant deliveries of equipment well after the construction of the platforms was completed, and something odd seemed to be going on.

  Pitt closed the file in front of him and looked up to see Brinks and Vice President Sandecker walking his way. They stopped and chatted with the Navy’s chief of staff before wandering over to where Pitt sat.

  Pitt stood and shook hands with both men.

  “I told you your man was off on a wild-goose chase, looking for this mercenary,” Brinks said.

  Pitt smiled and his green eyes showed nothing but pure joy, despite a desire to punch Brinks right in the mouth.

  “I honestly hope you’re right,” Pitt said. “After all he’s been through, Austin could use a vacation.”

  “Well,” Brinks said confidently, “we’re about to give him one.”

  As Brinks moved off, Sandecker took a seat next to Pitt.

  “Thanks for the invite,” Pitt said, sarcastically. “It’s like a pool party with sharks and alligators.”

  “You think I wanted you here?” Sandecker joked. “Brinks dialed you up.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably wants to gloat.”

  “Nothing like a sore winner,” Pitt said.

  Sandecker agreed. “I hear you shot him down pretty hard the other day.”

  “He was asking for it,” Pitt said.

  The VP chuckled and leaned back, focusing on the screen. “I bet he was.”

  Pitt appreciated Sandecker’s support. Always had. “You know it’s weird for me to see you without a cigar in your mouth,” Pitt said.

  “No smoking in the Situation Room,” Sandecker replied. “Now, pipe down and you might learn something.”

  Up front, Cameron Brinks stood and began his presentation. After explaining what Dirk had already discovered in the file, he went on to elaborate.

  “I’ll make this as quick as I can,” he said. “We all know the situation in Sierra Leone is spiraling. What we didn’t know until now is whether there was any credence to the threats leveled against us. We now believe, based on information uncovered by various sources, that there is. As odd as it sounds, Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, is now in possession of a weapon of incredible destructive power.”

  Brinks walked to the side of the room, conferring for a second with an assistant who seemed to be hooked up to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the satellite data was coming from.

  “In the time since we put together the files in front of you,” Brinks said, “we’ve conducted additional satellite passes of the area described in them. The Quadrangle. The video on the screen is a real-time scan.”

  Brinks looked down, waited as his assistant tapped a few keys on the computer terminal in front of him, and then raised a remote control device and pointed at the screen. With the click of a button, the colors on the screen changed. False hues illuminated the water, the land, and features that hadn’t been visible in the earlier shot.

  “This is an infrared scan of the Quadrangle area,” Brinks said.

  Pitt looked on. The area around each oil platform was bathed in a reddish color that elongated with the tide. It had to be a discharge of some kind, one that was raising the water temperature around the rigs and slowly being drawn off by the current. Pollution was his first thought, leaking oil or distillates of some kind, but then he remembered that there was no oil in the region.

  “The rigs are pumping heated water,” he said.

  Brinks nodded. “Very good, Mr. Pitt. Each one of these platforms is shipping heated water out into the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-temperature water every day. There can only be one reason for that: whatever they’re doing requires an immense amount of cooling.”

  “They’re generating power,” Pitt whispered to Sandecker a few seconds before Brinks confirmed it.

  “The question is, why?” Brinks said. “The answer is simple: to use in a massive particle accelerator that they have turned into a weapon.”

  Brinks clicked his remote control, and the image changed again, adding purple to the dark blue, gray, and magenta already on the screen. The new iridescent color ran in a thin line, encircling the four oil rigs—which were, in fact, spaced miles apart—in a giant loop. Other thin fingers branched off this loop and stretched out into the Atlantic. One group went to the west and the northwest, another group north and northeast, a third group of these thin purple filaments branched back toward the African continent.

  “This loop demarks an underwater structure that was identified through a combination of infrared scans and surface-penetrating radar from an Aurora spy plane. The loop is fifteen miles in diameter,” Brinks said, using a laser pointer to indicate the circle. “And each of these supposed oil rigs is just a facade to throw us off. Beneath their structures are throbbing power plants, each large enough to light a small city.”

  “What kind of power plants?” someone asked.

  “Gas turbine generators, feeding off a large natural gas pipeline that was built allegedly to bring gas out of the area. We now know the opposite is true.”

  “And all that power?” someone else asked.

  “Used in the superconducting electromagnets that accelerate the particles,” Brinks said, “and the massive cooling system required to keep the ring at operating temperature.”

  Brinks stood back and explained. “By our calculations, this system is generating and using twenty times the energy that CERN uses for its Large Hadron Collider. We can come up with only one explanation for such a power need. This thing is a weapon. It can probably take down satellites over Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa of course. It can threaten shipping in the Atlantic, perhaps as far as a hundred miles out. It can threaten commercial aircraft in a three-hundred-mile radius.”

  “The weapon can only fire three hundred miles?” Pitt asked.

  “No,” Brinks said. “It can probably do damage at a much farther range, perhaps even tens of thousands of miles, but it fires in a straight line like a laser. It cannot curve around the surface of the earth like a ballistic missile.”

  That made sense, but something else didn’t.

  “What about the Kinjara Maru?” Pitt asked. “That ship was nowhere near Sierra Leone when it was hit.”

  “No,” Brinks admitted. “Probably they have a derivative weapon on that submarine we’re looking for. But that’s a tactical weapon, small potatoes. This thing is strategic and threatens an entire region. We’ll deal with this first, the submarine afterward.”

  Brinks turned back to the group. “Our recommendation is that it be taken out in a surgical airstrike before Djemma can use it against someone.”

  Silence followed that statement. No one disagreed, not after Djemma Garand’s actions in the days preceding and his threats, however unspecified, against the United States.

  “Best recommendation as to method, Mr. Brinks?” Vice President Sandecker asked.

  “Advise we take out the rigs, Mr. Vice President,” Brinks said. “That’ll effectively shut off the power. And without power, the par
ticle accelerator is just a big tunnel with a lot of fancy equipment stored inside.”

  Though Pitt didn’t like Brinks’s jaunty tone, he calculated the situation similarly. A threat existed, controlled by a leader who appeared to be unstable. An airstrike would create minimal destruction, minimal casualties. The technology would be preserved for study.

  Much to Pitt’s dislike, he had to agree with Brinks’s assessment.

  “I’ll relay your recommendation to the President,” Sandecker said, then stood.

  Meetings like this didn’t often last long. And even if it was going to continue, the VP had seen enough.

  But before he could leave, something odd happened to the screen at the front of the room. The colors shifted for a second and then bled, like something was interfering with the signal.

  All eyes focused on it.

  Brinks looked to his assistant. “What’s going on?”

  The assistant was tapping away at a laptop. He looked up, shaking his head.

  A second later a flare of white light crossed the screen and then everything went dark. Static followed and then a blank screen. Text in the bottom right-hand corner indicated complete signal loss.

  Brinks looked embarrassed. “Get on the horn and find out what happened to the feed.”

  “The line’s clean,” the assistant said. “The signal’s coming through fine. It’s just not carrying any data.”

  Pitt had been watching something odd on the screen right before it flared. He doubted anyone else had noticed as the VP was leaving. When Sandecker stood, everyone else stood, Pitt as well, but he’d never taken his eyes off the screen.

  That allowed him to see a number indicating heat output from the oil platforms suddenly rising. It had climbed rapidly, like an odometer rolling over. A new area of red and magenta had appeared over one of the angled filaments. It had been visible for only a second, but Pitt was fairly certain he knew what it was.

  Somewhere in Fort Meade the techs probably knew too; they just were too stunned to say so until they’d checked every other possibility.

  “The problem’s not the computer,” Pitt announced. “It’s your satellite.”

  All eyes turned to him.

  “Really?” Brinks said. “And when did you become an expert in remote imaging diagnostics?”

  “I’m not,” Pitt said. “But play the last five seconds back. You’ll see an energy spike right before the image flared. They fried your satellite, Brinks. It’s gone.”

  Brinks looked over at his assistant. “We’re trying to reestablish a link,” he said.

  “Forget it,” Pitt told him. “You’re calling up a dead bird.”

  “Switch to Keyhole Bravo,” Brinks said, referencing the backup satellite that was orbiting at a different angle and higher altitude.

  Brinks’s assistant finished his last desperate act of tapping and looked up. There was nothing to say.

  “Two satellites gone,” Sandecker said. “That’s a damn act of war.”

  Everyone in the room grew more somber at that realization.

  “I figured you’d be happy,” Pitt said to Brinks. “This proves your theory. Djemma Garand is dangerous, his weapon is operational, and he’s not afraid to use it. Even I agree with you now. He has to be taken out.”

  49

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, July 7

  KURT AUSTIN AND JOE ZAVALA found themselves in the noisy cockpit of a Russian-designed IL-76 transport as it cruised at thirty-four thousand feet. They sat in the jump seats, just behind the pilots. They wore headsets and flight suits and stared through the windshield at a brilliant sunset out over the Atlantic.

  After leaving Singapore, they’d spent several days rounding up the equipment Kurt felt he needed to get aboard the Onyx. The last piece of the puzzle had been a jet capable of a transatlantic hop, piloted by a few people that would ask no questions.

  They’d chartered it out of Tangiers, through a somewhat murky chain of brokers that began with an Egyptian friend of Joe’s, who knew a man from Greece, who had good contacts with a few people in Morocco.

  While the chain of command worried Kurt a bit, the aging craft they were flying in was even more concerning. It shook and rattled and smelled as if it were leaking jet fuel in half a dozen places. The pilots tapped hard on the old analog-style gauges as if they weren’t working, fiddled with a pair of fuses at one point, and chatted in English with an Eastern European accent, making constant references to the “worthless mechanics.”

  So far, the wings hadn’t fallen off. Kurt considered that a small victory.

  As he pondered whether their luck would hold, the copilot turned to him.

  “Radio call for you,” he said. “Switch to channel two on headset.”

  Kurt looked over at the toggle switch beside the headset jack. Cyrillic writing and the numbers 1 and 2 presented themselves. He flipped the switch to number 2.

  “This is Kurt,” he said.

  “You’re a damn hard person to find, Kurt.” It was the voice of Dirk Pitt. “If it wasn’t for a rather large item on your NUMA credit line regarding an aircraft charter, I wouldn’t have been able to track you down.”

  “Um, yeah,” Kurt mumbled. “I can explain that.”

  He tapped the copilot on the shoulder.

  “Is this line secure?” Kurt asked.

  The copilot nodded. “It’s a proprietary channel. Scrambled until it reaches plane.” He smiled, a large mustache turning up with the corners of his mouth. “All part of our service to you.”

  Kurt almost laughed. Not exactly the cone of silence, he thought, but it would have to do.

  “I think we’re onto something,” he said, wishing he had been able to have this conversation after he’d confirmed the accuracy of that particular thought. “I think we’ve found our man.”

  “Where?” Dirk asked.

  “On a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  “Then why are you airborne?”

  Kurt gazed out the window. The sun was about to drop below the horizon ahead of them. The moment of truth was still two hours away.

  “It’s the only way to get close enough,” he said. “The ship we think he’s on is sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, making a few knots and pretty much going nowhere. The problem is, it’s a hundred miles from the nearest shipping lane in a barren spot in the middle of the ocean. Approaching it on the water would be a dead giveaway—with emphasis on the word dead. Our only hope is an airdrop.”

  Dirk went silent, perhaps evaluating his employee for bravery or maybe a Section Eight.

  “I’m sure they have radar,” Pitt said finally. “I take it you’re not going to fly overhead and jump.”

  “No, sir,” Kurt said.

  “Okay,” Dirk replied, obviously aware of what Kurt was planning. “That explains the second item on your account.”

  “I made sure to get receipts,” Kurt insisted, as if it mattered.

  “We’ll talk about that later,” Dirk said. “The thing is, I don’t believe you need to make this jump.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say we’ve confirmed our primary target as lying elsewhere,” Dirk said. “Unfortunately, we’ve already sparred with them once today and we lost that round. Brinks was right, your man is nothing more than a hired hand. He delivered his hostages and took off. While there’s some value in locating him, I wouldn’t risk your life over it.”

  Kurt considered what Pitt was telling him. The brass all assumed Andras was a soldier of fortune, and why not? That’s what he’d always been. It seemed they thought his part in this was over and that he was on his way to a vacation or another job.

  Maybe they would pick him up later, maybe they wouldn’t, but if Kurt understood what he was being told, they’d confirmed Sierra Leone was the sponsor of all this madness.

  “Why don’t you just sit this one out?” Dirk added.

  “You know I would,” Kurt said, “but something is still bothering me. Our target
is not acting like a mercenary. More like it’s his party. I’m not sure what it all means, but I swear there’s more to this than we know.”

  He glanced over at Joe. “On top of that, Mr. Zavala says there’s a lot about this tanker that doesn’t add up. For one thing, she’s forty feet wider than most tankers her length, which gives her a kind of stubby appearance even though she’s twelve hundred feet long. She also has odd bulges protruding near the bow underneath the forward anchors, and a raised section amidships. We have no idea what any of it is for, but neither one of us likes it. If it’s all the same with you, I’d just as soon get a closer look at her.”

  “You’ve earned the right to make this call,” Pitt said. “Just be sure you’re making it for the right reason.”

  “I’m not trying to be a hero,” Kurt said. “If there’s nothing interesting down there, I’ll go over the side, pop the cork on my survival raft, and wait for you to send a blonde, brunette, and a redhead to pick me up. But on the odd chance Joe and I are right, better we find out now rather than later.”

  Pitt was quiet. “Okay,” he said finally. “Don’t get yourself blown up before I can yell at you for all these bills that are coming in.”

  Kurt laughed. “I’ll try not to.”

  With that, Pitt signed off. Kurt gazed ahead at the orange ball of the sun just dipping below the horizon. The truth lay eight hundred miles ahead, moving slowly through the dark of night.

  50

  TWO HOURS LATER, still on the old jet, Kurt and Joe had moved from the cockpit back into main section of the fuselage. They now stood in a cavern of metal, surrounded by equipment, small containers, and tie-down straps.

  Despite a pressure suit, gloves, boots, and fighter pilot–style helmets with noise-canceling headphones and forced oxygen, Kurt could feel the bite of the frigid cold at thirty-five thousand feet. He could feel every shudder of the aircraft and hear nothing but the piercing whine of the jet’s narrow seventies-era engines.