Extreme Instinct

As they did, the pilot revved the power to full strength, and the nearly overloaded Mi-6 Hook lifted off.

As the tunnel dwindled below, Sergeant Melori waited until he was sure the cargo helicopter had reached a safe distance, then activated a small radio detonator and pressed the button.

The range was too great for them to feel the shock wave of the explosion. But from their great height, the two officers saw volcanoes of flame erupt from both ends of the tunnel. The fire raged unchecked until the steel support beams began to soften and the mouth of the tunnel melted shut.

“I wish them luck getting those open soon,” Melori stated, tucking away the detonator.

“What did you use?” Lindquist asked, watching the white-hot flames recede until they were only a pair of bright points in the darkness, then only a single point, and then the natural contour of the landscape took them from sight.

“Rocket fuel,” the sergeant replied.

Saying nothing, Lindquist tilted his head in disbelief.

“No, it’s true, my friend.” General Novostk chuckled. “Those tankers contained liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. We used the same mixture as the Americans do for their space shuttle. Two parts liquid oxygen and one part liquid hydrogen. Add some diesel fuel from the engines, and the mixture burns almost as hot as a thermobaric bomb.”

“Almost. But not quite.”

The general shrugged. “No, not quite. However, it should take them days to figure that out. And by then…” He grinned.

Colonel Lindquist understood. Soon enough, the whole world would have other things to worry about than the deaths of some thieves. Then he frowned.

“Were the tankers stolen?” the colonel demanded. From bitter experience, the man knew that hijacked trucks were easily traced, and this needed to resemble an accidental triggering of the Skyfire device, not a clever way of destroying any trace of forensic evidence.

“No, they were supplied by a dummy company owned by your employer in the Ukraine.” General Novostk laughed. “On paper, they never existed, and thus cannot go missing, eh?” Then he pretended to punch the officer in the arm. “Do not worry, my American friend. Every detail has been considered and taken care of. We are quite safe. Nobody will ever know who we really are.”

Angling away from the spreading umbrella of hard radiation tainting the clouds over the remote valley, the Soviet Union cargo helicopter moved low and fast over the rugged terrain, heading due south, out over the Black Sea.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Just a few minutes ago, we caught another heat flash,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman said, turning his wheelchair away from his computer workstation to pour himself a cup of coffee. “At first we thought it was a second nuke, but this wasn’t hot enough, and the chemical signature more resembled a space shuttle launch.”

“Have the Russians put something into space?” Barbara Price demanded, her stomach tightening.

Without adding milk or sugar, Kurtzman took a long draft of the steaming coffee as if it was tap water. “No, we don’t think so,” the Stony Man computer genius replied carefully, setting the mug into a recess on the armrest of his chair. “If the blast had occurred out in the open, that might have been a possibility. This actually seemed to be two simultaneous explosions exactly where the CIA believes there is a hidden tunnel.”

A tunnel? The Farm’s mission controller frowned. “Okay, something exploded inside, and the blast came out the ends,” Price rationalized, crossing her arms. “Could it have been the Red Army dealing with the thieves?”

“Or vice versa,” Carmen Delahunt announced from her console. Perched on the edge of her chair, the redhead was focused on her computer screen. Dangling from the back of her chair an S&W Bulldog revolver was tucked into an FBI-style shoulder holster.

“Explain that,” Price demanded.

“According to the NATO Watchdog satellite we hijacked, there were isotonic traces of diesel fuel in the chemical signature of the explosion,” Delahunt said. “Along with similar amounts of vulcanized rubber.”

“That sounds like a truck,” Price said slowly, testing the words.

“Three trucks, by my calculations,” Delahunt answered.

“Insulated trucks,” added Akira Tokaido, removing his earbuds. “There was far too much cobalt in the signature to come from anything other than heat-resistant steel.” Tokaido was of mixed Japanese-American ancestry. He seemed born to operate computers, code coming to him as easily as breathing to ordinary people.

“Maybe there was a tank, or an APC caught in the blast,” Price offered hesitantly.

“I wish that was true, but no,” Kurtzman countered, sliding his wheelchair under his console. “Russian military contains natural wood fibers to make the metal more elastic, and thus proof to most armor-piercing rounds.”

Wood fiber in tank armor? “Are you positive?” Price scowled.

Tokaido gave a curt nod. “The spectrum analysis is conclusive. No military vehicles were involved in the blast. So unless whatever was stolen detonated while suspended in liquid boron, or something equally outrageously exotic like that…”

“Then the explosion was caused by insulated tanker trucks carrying liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Clearly, it was a trick by the thieves to try to fake their own deaths,” Huntington Wethers said, removing an old briar pipe from his mouth. “Unfortunately, it also tells us what was stolen.”

Tall and distinguished-looking, Wethers seemed to be the epitome of a college professor with wings of silvery hair at his temples, a briar pipe and leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. Although fully tenured at Berkeley University, the man had felt a strong need to serve his country, and left the world of academia to become one of the most feared cyberhunters in existence.

Thoughtfully, Price chewed a lip. An explosion powerful enough to be mistaken for a tactical nuke, but without any radiation. The only thing that came to mind was… Oh hell, not that. “What was the last weapon tested there?” Price demanded, trying to stay calm. If what she thought had just happened, the world was in for a long hard rain of blood and pain.

“Difficult to say,” Delahunt answered. “The master computers of Mystery Mountain are not connected to the Internet, and the entire valley is covered with a camouflage net so that our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites can’t see what was happening down there.”

“However, the only logical extrapolation is that the thieves stole one of the new Russian thermobaric bombs,” Tokaido interjected.

“Now, LOX and LOH don’t quite burn as hot as one of those,” Kurtzman stated, cracking his knuckles. “But pretty damn close.”

Several decades ago, the Pentagon had started a program to create an arsenal of nonnuclear weapons, and the cream of the crop was the FAE bomb, or Fuel-Air Explosive, nicknamed Skyfire. The idea was simple, as all good ideas are. Imagine closing all of the doors and windows in a house, then turning on the gas oven but turning off the pilot. In only a few minutes, the house would be completely filled with highly explosive gas. Now stuff an ordinary fuse under the front door and light it. When the fuse reaches the interior, the house would thunderously detonate, obliterating the entire structure and quite often the homes alongside.

The FAE bomb did the same thing, but out in the open. A plane would drop the bomb and it would burst open, sending out a huge cloud of flammable gas, the exact composition of which was not known to even Stony Man. A split second later, the plummeting canister would explode, igniting the cloud, and a fiery implosion of unimaginable power would blanket the sky, uprooting forests, knocking over homes and office buildings and setting fire to everything within range. The one limiting factor was that a FAE bomb would not work if there were strong winds, or if it was raining, snowing, or even if there was heavy fog. It had to be a clear, calm day.

In spite of colossal efforts, no other nation had ever been able to duplicate the American trick of making a fuel-air explosion work. But a few months ago rumors had surfaced in the intelligence community that the Russians had not only figured out how to make an FAE but had also gone even further. They called their weapon a thermobaric bomb, and it worked exactly like an American FAE bomb, except it could function in high winds, rain, snow or fog. There were no operational limitations on a T-bomb, and if true, it was the most deadly weapon in existence. For all intents and purposes, it was a nuclear bomb that did not give off hard radiation—a clean nuke.

“Is there anything in space?” Price asked, walking closer to the wall screens, her hands clenched into tight fists. “Have the Russians created a new…I don’t know, some sort of a new plasma weapon and it’s running wild?”

“Space is clear,” Delahunt intoned.

Damn. “Do we have any video from the valley? Security cameras or such?”

“Not after a nuclear explosion,” Kurtzman scoffed, drinking from the old cracked mug. “The EMP blast of the nuke erased all of the electronic records.”

Which was probably deliberately done by the thieves, Price realized dourly. It would be very hard for the FSB to track down the thieves if they knew absolutely nothing about them. The nuke destroyed the base, along with any video, then the tanker trucks in the tunnel faked the death of the thieves and vaporized any physical evidence. Whoever took the weapon was smart. Too damn smart, in her opinion.

Deep in thought, Price started to pace. Personally, she hoped that China had stolen the damn thing. At least with them, the United Nations could exert political and economic pressure to not use the weapon. If a terrorist group got their hands on a T-bomb they would immediately use it to destroy a major city—New York, London, Tokyo. The death toll would be in the millions.

“Okay, if somebody has stolen a T-bomb, then how do we track the thing?” Price demanded. “There must be remote telemetry or a lowjack on the thing.”

“Which anybody with an EM scanner could find and remove,” Tokaido stated, studying the monitor on his console. The screen was flashing through road maps of the Russian countryside. A flatbed had been seen by a NATO spy satellite amid the wreckage left by the tidal wave from the destroyed dam. If the bomb was particularly heavy, then it could only be hauled over specific roads. Unfortunately, most of the logging roads in the mountains connected with railroads, and those went everywhere in Russia.

Grudgingly, Price accepted that. “Okay, what about dogs or chemical sensors?” She rallied. “We can tune every one at every major airport to look for just T-bombs.”

“Sorry, no can do,” Kurtzman stated bluntly, placing aside his empty mug. “Hell, Barb, we don’t even know what the damn thing looks like, much less how it works.”

Chewing a lip, Price tried to find some way to approach the problem, but was coming up with nothing. The Russian superweapon was practically invisible. Nobody would know it had been smuggled into Washington until the Pentagon vanished in a fiery implosion that also ripped the White House from its very foundation.