Incendiary Dispatch

Ramvik, Norway

THE YOUNG MAN muted the phone and gave Olan Ramm a wicked grin.

“Zhang, finally?” Ramm demanded. He was a blond, emaciated man with a cadaverous face.

When the young man spoke he sounded like British gentry. “He’s only three minutes late. He’s all done.”

“Then we are all done,” Ramm said, feeling almost euphoric.

“All done. All in place. Nothing left to do except make some phone calls,” the young British man said.

“Let’s make them, then,” Ramm said.

The young man unmuted his telephone.

Qingdao, China

“THE PROBLEM SEEMS to have righted itself. Thanks so much for your services, Mr. Zhang.”

Zhang saw the connection get cut. The screen went dead. And Zhang knew he had made a very bad mistake. He grabbed the control handle on the MK-8 and started the motor. It pulled him away from the Northern Aurora at full speed. Which wasn’t going to be fast enough.

Ramvik, Norway

IT WAS 4:03 P.M. in Northeastern Vermont.

It was 9:03 p.m. in London.

It was 5:03 a.m. in Qingdao, China.

It was 10:03 p.m. in Ramvik when Olan Ramm made the most anticipated phone call of his life.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

He was a powerful-looking man, even confined to a wheelchair. Aaron Kurtzman was the top cybernetics expert at Stony Man Farm, and as such he was tapped into a dizzying array of electronic intelligence feeds. His fingers moved deftly over a wireless keyboard.

One of those feeds had just beeped at him. He had hundreds of alerts programmed into the system, but this one he recognized.

So did the Japanese man at a nearby terminal. The alert had played over his earbuds, interrupting the music. “Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”

Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft was their internal acronym for the alert.

Their dynamic search routines assessed all the data coming into the Farm, looking for patterns, any sign of trouble. Any unresponsive aircraft could signal trouble, but the truth was that aircraft went unresponsive every day. A bad radio, a storm, a flight crew in an animated discussion about yesterday’s game—anything could cause an aircraft to be unresponsive for a little while. Stony Man Farm’s MUA alert didn’t trigger when just one aircraft went unresponsive somewhere in the world.

But when there were several at once, it demanded immediate attention. If they’d only been able to track MUAs in 2001….

“Airbus out of Heathrow, en route to New Delhi,” Kurtzman said out loud as he sped through the feeds highlighted by the alert. “Cargo flight out of Heathrow to Istanbul.”

“Cargo flight, LHR to MOW,” Tokaido announced. LHR was Heathrow, MOW was Moscow. “Passenger, LHR to CPT.”

CPT was Cape Town. And again out of Heathrow. Somebody had just exploited a huge hole in Heathrow security….

“Passenger!” Tokaido blurted. “CDG to SXM!”

It took an extra second for that to register. Vacationers to St. Maarten—out of Paris. Kurtzman felt sick. Then his own screen showed him a new window. Passenger. MIA-GIG.

“Miami!” he shouted. “That’s a GPS tracking beacon response failure.”

Kurtzman wished every aircraft on the planet was equipped with a device like that, constantly transmitting its exact location. The truth was, most aircraft had beacons that didn’t go off until there was trouble. And sometimes the trouble happened too fast for the technology to activate.

The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his screen.

And then another.

“Aaron?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”

“China?”

He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?

“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, now standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen.

“I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.

“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”

“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.

“Pipeline breaches. Each is a different one.”

Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he had programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously.

He’d just never dreamed it would actually happen.

“Talk to me, Aaron,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”

“Everywhere but,” Kurtzman said grimly.

Washington, D.C.

THE SUNNY AFTERNOON turned dark.

“Jesus!”

Hal Brognola was in his office when he heard the expletive issued out in the hall. It reached him through two closed doors. Now somebody was running. Now somebody was sobbing.

The big Fed in the big office overlooking the Potomac felt his stomach churn as he snatched up the remote and stabbed the power button.