Incendiary Dispatch

“—ruptured and exploded. We’re trying to get out but it’s moving fast.”

It looked like a small-time TV newscast. The title at the bottom of the screen read, Live in Shambert: Protesters Want Mayor Dubin’s Resignation.

What was on the screen was nothing as mundane as a protest against a local politician. The cameraman was trying to keep the image steady as the news reporter steered the van through black smoke.

“We heard the snaps and then we saw it coming down the hill. It didn’t take but a minute. Every building in the town’s on fire. We must’ve seen twenty people just get drenched in it. They’re still burning. No way to get to them. We’re trying to get out. Look at that!”

The camera swung to look out of the front windshield and for a moment there was the image of a street. Hundreds of gallons of black oil channeled between burning buildings and flooded through the streets. Running people scattered, but not fast enough. The burning oil tide swept over them. The camera caught the image of a woman twisting and staggering until the belching smoke masked her.

“Not getting out this way!” The reporter slammed the van into Reverse and whipped it around and into a side street.

And the image vanished. “We’re getting word from Houston of another oil fire, this one at an oil terminal station...”

The big Fed grabbed at the phone to make a call, but it was ringing when he touched it. It was the Stony Man Farm mission controller, Barbara Price.

“We need to shut down airspace, Hal.”

Brognola scowled. “Airspace? This some sort of aerial attack?”

He heard Price use a word that Barbara Price didn’t often use. Then there was a rush of words in the background. It was Kurtzman.

“Hal,” Price said calmly but firmly. “We have several incidents under way.”

“Top priority?” Brognola demanded. He could hear the urgency in her voice; there was no time for a debriefing. He was going to have trust her judgment—and he did.

“We’ve got many unresponsive aircraft alarms in the last few minutes. Half of them are out of Heathrow. Others are over Brazil, Africa, the Atlantic—”

“I thought the MUA alert system wasn’t supposed to work that well?” Brognola demanded, almost defensively. His mind was spinning.

“It’s working better than we had hoped, unfortunately,” Barbara Price said. “Six ELTs have activated, matching the MUAs. But only we know about it, Hal—because of the MUA alerts. Global air traffic control doesn’t yet see how widespread this emergency is. We need a global alert. We need airspace shut down. If we can get one more aircraft out of the sky before it’s attacked...”

“I’m on it.”

Brognola snatched up a second phone and dialed the President himself.

“Yes, sir. Right now our number-one concern is the aircraft. We believe at least six aircraft around the world have been downed. Yes, sir, some are passenger jets…. We don’t know.”

There was a pause.

“We don’t know. We can’t wait for the aviation authorities around the world to make these connections themselves. This attack is still going on.”

But even as he said it, Brognola wondered if it was true. The muted TV was showing a rotating series of nightmare images. Burning land. Burning people. Burning ships. Had everything really burst into flames simultaneously? If so, was the attack done?

The President hung up. He would make calls. Personally. He would ensure that warnings were spread around the world within minutes. Commercial aircraft would be lining up to land all over the planet. Air force patrols would take to the air by the thousands, looking for signs of attacking or suspicious aircraft. The response would be worldwide and as instantaneous as any global mobilization could possibly be.

Brognola looked at the clock.

It was 4:26 p.m.

The shadows were growing longer in D.C.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

AKIRA TOKAIDO’S BASIC skill set was in computer hacking, and right now he was tearing open digital security walls with all the finesse of a belligerent fifteen-year-old. It was somewhat amazing to watch his process. He would stare into one monitor, pull up a new attack report, then pound the keys in front of him, opening government and commercial systems with equal speed and ease, dismantling their firewalls in minutes, digesting the intelligence inside in search of anything that would help. He’d then dismiss it and move on to the next attack report.

So far, he’d come up with nothing. Neither had Carmen Delahunt nor Huntington Wethers, two other members of Kurtzman’s cyberteam. They were tearing through report after report in the Computer Room, looking for any electronic signature, any puzzle piece, any clue.

Barbara Price was doing what she could to simply organize what they knew so far.

The sheer number of the attacks was staggering. Pipelines all around the world. Oil tankers on every ocean. Aircraft—at least one on each inhabited continent.

She brought up the live video feed from China. It had been the first attack report that she had seen, and only because she had been watching a live news feed from BBC Asia, almost at random. They had news crews in Qingdao—at a hotel on the bay, in fact. It was the sudden bright light, not the noise, that had roused one of the news crew, who’d promptly set up a camera at the window of his hotel room and begun taping the burning of Jiaozhou Bay.

The Northern Aurora, which had been sitting there, waiting for some paperwork to go through so it could off-load a million barrels of crude oil, had burst into flame in the predawn night.

The BBC replayed its first minutes of footage and Price paused the playback herself. The massive oil tanker was a black hulk in the black night, but six gaping holes were open in its side, exuding orange flames that were licking off of spilling oil. The holes had been spaced with a precision that was unsettling.

“Easy,” sneered Tokaido, looking at the video on the well-mounted video screen. “You could put them there with a rowboat.”

He was glaring at the screen, his eyes glinting. The young Japanese hacker looked—what? Enraged?

Tokaido had been with Stony Man Farm for several years. He had seen much. Why, Price wondered, was he taking this one so personally?

Or was that just her imagination?

Tokaido abruptly thrust his finger at the frozen image of the tanker on the huge plasma screen.

“Fucker!” he snarled.

The way that Tokaido went back to his computer, Price thought he was going to start pounding the keys with his fists.

Wethers, Delahunt and Kurtzman had all stopped what they were doing. Kurtzman met her eyes before he returned to rattling the keys of his own terminal.

Price hit Play and watched the playback from China. The local time code started at 4:06 a.m., the moment the quick-thinking BBC staffer got his camera going. By 4:33 a.m. local time the black hulk of the Northern Aurora had vanished behind a lake of flame. The lake spread. Price watched with horrified fascination as the orange brilliance illuminated the shore and the buildings and then seemed to swallow them up. There were explosions. Ship after ship was being consumed in the flame. At least two more oil tankers were engulfed and burned until they blossomed and added their own fuel to the flames. The voice of the reporter standing behind the camera described the oil spill’s creep along the shore of the bay. Buildings were being set ablaze. Thousands being evacuated from the shoreline as the fire jumped to the buildings and spread inland.

The vivid image of the bay was of half blackness and half conflagration, but the blackness continued to shrink. The fire seemed to have sensed the voyeurs in the hotel and was coming after them.

“We’re leaving the camera,” the reporter said. It was odd, hearing the voices of a bunch of Brits in a hotel room. The oil fire itself was silent.

“Let’s go!” the reporter said a moment later.

Then viewers around the world heard the door to the hotel room open and slam shut. There were no more voices. Just the camera’s unique view of the fire that seemed now to reach to the horizon.

The attacks had happened less than an hour ago. The damage still had a long way to spread.

Over the next twenty minutes the satellite-fed footage of the flames crawling to the hotel was dramatic and terrifying. Then a new kind of smoke appeared in front of the fire. Close-proximity fumes. The hotel itself was finally burning.

CHAPTER FIVE