A stir of shock rippled around him. In an age when hundreds of people were being blown up at once, this was unexpected. He grabbed the remote and with his eye on the counter, he drew the image back and rewound the stream. “MI5 reports the men were struck with darts.” He froze the image, the needle-like barbs only light streaks on the screen. “The area is locked down and British Intelligence has the ball.” He turned to the joint chiefs, his attention on Major General Al Gerardo. “I’d like to hear your opinion, sir.” Gerardo was the JCS expert on the latest weaponry.
“I don’t have one yet. But the man that steals one container of RZ10 is a thousand times more dangerous than a few IED’s and some militants.”
No one asked for more explanation, waiting.
Gerardo leaned forward, hands clasped over a small stack of files. “RZ10 is a highly explosive composite fuel. Thermobaric. Ignited, its oxidizing flash point is so high that it results in a vacuum. Everything collapses. Special Forces used it in the Afghan caves, but it didn’t leave enough debris to sift.”
Good lord. Who thinks up this stuff? “What can one container do?” Jansen asked.
Casually, Gerardo dipped his coffee spoon into his mug and lifted out no more than a taste. “With the right detonation, this alone would destroy this building.”
Jansen experienced a familiar tremor shoot down his arms to his fingertips. He clenched his fist, waiting for the general to continue.
“That makes it highly cost effective and powerful enough to need only small quantities. It’s used in enclosed spaces, but one half-liter container detonated, say inside an aircraft over land, would create a massive pressure wave of sonic magnitude, and depending how low it was when it ignited, would crush everything for…well…about the size of Texas.” The general glanced at his colleagues. “Over water, it could cause a tsunami that’d make the one in 2006 look like a surfer’s day out.”
Gerardo leaned back in his chair. “In the vacuum, nothing survives. Nothing.”
48 hours earlier
Satellite surveillance post
Mariana Islands, U.S.
Western Pacific
“I graduated summa cum laude for this?” Owen said, leaning back in his office chair, his headset cockeyed.
“So did I,” the voice on the other side of the divider answered. “Get over it.”
The frosted glass partition was more for toning down glare than privacy. “Didn’t you think when you were recruited, you’d end up doing something remotely James Bond?”
“No,” his partner Greg said, leaning back and pulling the headset aside.
Owen was listening with half an ear too. The satellite wasn’t in range for another three minutes. “That’s because you like eavesdropping too much, perv.”
“You don’t think the Farsi and three dialects are doing it for me?”
“Not till you find the Farsi word for lap dance.” Owen snickered to himself as he turned back to his screen, adjusted his headset, then checked the countdown.
Time to go to work.
He watched the timer trip and adjusted his frequency wave. He’d been instructed to focus on five sets of coordinates—at the same time. The range decreased, and he worked to isolate each one, assigning them names. He sifted through each, holding for a few seconds, then onto the next. He’d record and store if the chatter was too fast, but the system would pop open a window when it heard a key word. It didn’t happen as often as people would think, but these five points were of vital interest or he wouldn’t be tracking them. It wasn’t in his pay grade to know why.
He glanced at the counter and watched the animated replica of the satellite moving into position to do its job. He hit record one minute prior to zero. It was down to ten seconds when the words came.
“Ee…ine,” he caught and scrambled to replay. The satellite was in full range rolling through the first promenade, but the stream dropped off.
“Greg, did you get that stream?”
Greg leaned back. “The burst just before range? It was too short to get a lock, why?”
Teasing faded, the pair were all business. “I’ve got a flag on it.” In his section, Owen’s responsibility.
“No shit. What level?”
“Just a three.”
Greg frowned. “What did you hear?”
“I’m not sure.” Owen tuned the sound up and hit replay while keeping an eye on the tracking that was sweeping across the Pacific back to the points of origin.
Greg listened, then played it twice more. He looked at Owen. “We can’t track that for another twenty-four hours.” And that’s if it comes again.
“God, it was just barely on the edge before the satellite came in range,” Owen muttered as he typed. “I’m alerting Australia, see if they have anything on it. It should be a full stream on their part of the world.”
Dotted like bugs across the globe were American and ally listening posts along with their dangerous counterparts of China, Russia and a few others with the budgets to do it. We all listen, but few act, he thought, sending the message down under, then relaying it back to the U.S. where analysts better than him would be the first to see it and understand his suspicions.
Ee…ine…. He tumbled it over in his brain, trying to match it to full words. “Geez, can I buy a consonant?”
Spinning to another computer, he accessed the data bank and the search brought up twelve languages and about three thousand possibilities. It might be just radio backwash or another satellite out of kilter, but he had to be sure. He set search parameters, narrowing by category, then filtering casual conversation from eerily listed words like timer, device, slaughter, conspiracy. The computer did most of the work to match up common words that usually preceded suspicious conversations. But for the life of him, he couldn’t pinpoint the grouping.
Vigilant, he glanced at the relay, waiting for Australia to reply.
Marina Bay
Singapore
The entire purpose of standing on her feet all day waiting tables was to get close to table number eight. It was on a dais, shielded from the sun by a conical roof and perched out over a man-made lagoon. But the private dining gazebo wasn’t her station and the waitress who had it was protective.
Beyond, the sea view was spectacular, but Safia didn’t have time to enjoy it as she served a woman from the right, then delivered meals around table six. The patrons barely spared her a glance, deep in conversation. The hired help were nonexistent to the few elitists. Finished, she held her tray and kept her head bowed, asking if she could bring them anything else. Even her question was subservient. The more submissive, the better the tip, and considering the men wouldn’t give the hired help a glance, it kept her in the background. Just where she wanted to be.
She was filling in for Miya, a waitress and an asset with a shrewd eye for oddities in people. Singapore was full of them so picking out something non-indigenous was a skill Safia needed and Miya offered. The woman worked too hard for too little pay, and Safia was more than willing to fund her and her four-year-old daughter. Tax dollars well spent, she thought, because putting her in danger was out of the question. When the “golden skinned man,” showed again, Miya called in sick and sent a replacement. The boss barely gave her a glance when she showed at the height of the lunch hour.
She stopped at each of her assigned tables to be certain all were happy little diners. She had a half hour left on the shift and needed to get closer to the dais. Two of her tables were vacated recently and the busboy was clearing the dishes. She grabbed the freshly pressed linens and crossed the restaurant, waiting