Act of War Read online

  Kelly took the memo and glanced over it, trying like hell not to look too relieved. “New guardhouse, new weapons, cameras out the wazoo—what else you got in there?”

  “Half the cameras aren’t hooked up, and I swear to God these kids haven’t a fucking clue—if I got a dime for every time I’ve told these jerk-offs to keep their damned fingers off the triggers of those M-16s, I’d be as rich as you troopers.”

  “Har har.”

  “I’m serious, dude—as soon as my application is accepted, I’m out of here and going to the Highway Patrol Academy,” Tom said. “Working for Kingman is like what it must have been like working for Napoleon, Hitler, or Clinton.”

  “Bill or Hillary?”

  “I thought they were one and the same—they both liked their power and their women,” Tom said. Kelly was pleased to note that his laugh sounded normal. Tom’s face turned serious as he went on: “Starting next week, we’ll be instituting an electronic identity verification program for both individuals and vehicles. We’ll be asking everyone to have biometric prints taken, and your cars will have to have coded transponders on them, like on airliners. Give everyone at the station a heads-up.”

  “More fun and games, huh?”

  “This antiterrorist shit is no fun and games, especially with Mr. Kingman,” Tom said. “We’ll soon have security in this place that’ll make Fort Knox look like a day at Disneyland.”

  “I can’t wait.” Kelly noted with relief that the big outer steel gate was starting to open. “Why don’t you just have Kingman’s transportation guys transmit the vehicle logs over to headquarters rather than have us pick them up all the time?”

  “I guess Mr. Kingman likes seeing troopers around.”

  “Well, recommend that he make us feel a bit more welcome next time, or we’ll make him bring the logs to us rather than the other way around, the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “With all the political muscle Kingman has, I’m surprised he doesn’t have the governor build a DPS substation here at the terminal—or better yet, have the President build an entire army base here,” Tom said. He slapped the door sill. “You take care, Frank. Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse, though.”

  “No problem, buddy. Thanks for the heads-up. Later.” As Tom assumed a port-arms stance to guard the open gate area, Kelly pulled his cruiser inside the entrapment area when the green direction light came on. After he was inside, he waited until the outer gate closed, shut off the engine, popped open the hood and trunk, and then exited his vehicle to allow the security guards to search. They shined flashlights in the engine compartment, opened glove boxes and storage compartments, looked under the seats, flipped down sun visors, inspected under the spare tire, and rolled a mirror underneath the cruiser to inspect under the chassis.

  Kelly then handed a guard a logbook marked FIELD KIT SECURITY LOG, and the guard compared the last number on the log to the number stamped onto a steel truck seal that secured a large metal case in the trunk. The trunk contained a shotgun, ammunition, a Taser gun to subdue unruly citizens, road flares, flashlights, strobes, ropes, and other safety and security devices carried by all DPS sergeants, but they were prohibited in TransGlobal’s complex unless they were sealed by TransGlobal security personnel. The numbers matched, and the security guard closed up the trunk, handed the logbook back to Kelly, and nodded at the guardhouse to allow him to pass.

  Kelly got into his cruiser and started it up. Just when he was expecting the inner gate to open, he saw Tom enter the entrapment area. He rolled the window down again as he approached. “What’s up now, Tom?”

  “Just a glitch.” He noted Tom had his M-16 rifle hanging in front of him this time with his hand on the grip, not over his shoulder like before.

  “Need me to step out?”

  Tom shook his head. “Shouldn’t take a minute.” Kelly could see Tom touch an earpiece in his left ear as he listened to radioed instructions. “Pop the trunk again for me, buddy. They want me to check something.”

  Kelly hit the trunk release button. “Sure. Need the logbook?”

  “Why don’t you let me see it? These new guys are starting to blabber. They’re driving me nuts. Let me straighten this out.” Kelly handed Tom the truck seal log, and Tom went around to the trunk, opened it, and started to work inside.

  Kelly got out a moment later and casually strolled around to the back of the cruiser. He noticed three more guards outside the bunker, their M-16s also slung in front of their bodies but not upraised, watching him. Tom had his flashlight out and was inspecting the truck seal on the field kit box, the logbook open. “Problem, dude?”

  By way of reply, Tom ran a gloved finger under the truck seal, feeling all around the underside of the steel strap. After probing the entire seal, he gave a light pull…and the seal came apart and clattered to the carpeted floor of the trunk.

  “Why did you do that, Tom?” Kelly asked.

  The security guard stood up and faced the DPS sergeant, a dark, blank expression on his face. “It shouldn’t have come off that easily, Frank,” he said. “And it looks like the band itself was cut right at the clasp to make it hard to detect the cut.”

  “Probably just a bad seal,” Kelly said. “No big deal. I’ll pull out, and you can reinspect the field kit, reseal it, and sign the log again.”

  “There’s another problem, Frank,” Tom said. “There’s a radiation alarm going off.”

  “A what?”

  “Radiation alarm. We installed radiation detectors here at the facility.”

  “Yeah? That’s pretty cool. Well, the shotgun and my sidearm have tritium sights—your guns probably do too. That’ll set off a radiation alarm.”

  “This alarm is going off the scale, Frank,” Tom said. He raised his M-16 and clicked off the safety. “Turn around, walk forward to the fence, then place your hands on the fence, lean forward, and spread your legs.”

  Kelly did as he was told. “Jesus, Tom, put that thing down. It’s me, man, remember?”

  “I’ve known you for a grand total of two weeks, Kelly—stop making like we’re brothers or something. Cover!” he shouted. Two of the security guards started to enter the entrapment area. Tom took Kelly’s pistol and Mace canister out of his holster and tossed it aside, then held his rifle aimed at Kelly until the other guards could cover him. “Okay, asshole, what’s in the case?”

  “It’s my field kit, Tom. What do you think it is?”

  “You can’t get away, so whatever that thing is will kill you along with everyone else if it goes off,” the security guard said. “Give it up. What’s in the fucking box?” No reply. “Answer me!”

  Kelly hesitated for a moment, and then replied in a low voice, “If I were you, Tom, I’d get out of here, now, as fast as you can. Head for the train tunnel on the other side of the deep water canal—you’ll be safe there.”

  “What did you fucking say?”

  “I said you’d better get away from here. Leave me with the two Rambos. A kilometer should be far enough as long as you’re underground. Two would be better.”

  “Better for what?”

  “I like you, Tom,” Kelly said. “You’re a good guy. You always have been.”

  “What are you fucking talking about, mister?”

  “You’ve treated me with respect even though you’ve had your doubts about me—I like that. You should have followed your instincts, though. That just makes you a bad security officer, not a bad guy.” Kelly started to turn around.

  “Don’t you move!”

  “Don’t shoot me. Let me explain.” He continued to turn until they were looking into each other’s eyes. Kelly’s eyes motioned up to his left hand, and it was only then that Tom noticed he had a small device resembling a remote car door opener attached to a clump of keys in his hand. “You should order me to turn around again, Tom,” Kelly said in a low voice. “You tell the Rambos to cover me while you report this to security headquarters in person, and then you
should get into that armored Suburban back there and start driving toward the tunnel on the other side of the canal. Even if you don’t make it all the way, inside that Suburban, you should be okay.” Tom started to reach for the device. “Don’t do that, Tom. I’ve already activated it. It’s a dead-man’s switch. If it leaves my hand, it’ll trigger it.”

  “Trigger what?”

  “You know what it is, Tom,” Kelly said. “My mission has failed, and it’s time to give it up. But I can save at least one nice guy here. TransGlobal is filled with nasty, sleazy, uncaring persons. You’re the only good guy I’ve known that works for TransGlobal. You deserve a second chance. Get as far away from here as you can. I’ll hold them off, don’t worry.” Tom raised the M-16 and aimed it at Kelly’s head. “Don’t be stupid, Tom. If you shoot, I’ll let go of it, and you’ll die. That’s foolish. Do as I say. Get away from here. You don’t owe Kingman a damned thing.”

  “He’s not here. You won’t be doing a thing to him.”

  “Maybe not to him, but to his company—this facility, this abomination to nature that pollutes Galveston Bay, pollutes the air, pollutes the drinking water, and enslaves workers all over the world.”

  Tom lowered the rifle slightly. “What?”

  “Kingman is a bloodsucker, Tom. He’ll do anything for profit. The only way to hurt him is to kill his profits.”

  “Are you some kind of environmentalist wacko?”

  “I am a soldier of GAMMA—the Environmental Movement Combat Alliance.” Tom’s face fell and he looked at Kelly over the sights of the M-16 with shock and surprise. “I see you’ve heard of us.”

  “You blew up that dam in Paraguay recently…”

  “Uruguay.”

  “You killed hundreds of people…”

  “TransGlobal paid almost five million dollars in bribes to government officials to get approval to build that dam,” Kelly said. “The government uprooted thousands of persons who had lived in that river valley for centuries. Hundreds of peasants, who were working for pennies a week, died during the construction—and then when they flooded the river valley, they wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of rain forest, priceless Indian artifacts, and the graves of thousands more.”

  “Where in hell did you get a nuclear weapon?”

  “There are governments all over the world anxious to sell nuclear weapon components,” Kelly said casually, “and there are many socially and environmentally conscious persons willing to pay to obtain them, and even more dedicated, selfless soldiers willing to plant them in the places where they’ll do the most good—not against mindless soldiers or isolated military targets, but against the real killers of planet Earth, men like Harold Chester Kingman.”

  “Is it a real bomb? Full-yield—not a dirty bomb?”

  “So-called ‘dirty bombs’ are the joke of the century—they would do nothing but scare a few people, certainly not someone as devoid of conscience and morality as Kingman,” Kelly said. “No, this is a real weapon. GAMMA has sent a tape with all of the data on it, including its yield and components, in order to validate its authenticity. I notice that since the tape also warned TransGlobal Energy to evacuate the area that either no one listened to it, or Kingman did listen to it and ordered his security staff not to do anything about it. I tend to believe the latter.”

  “I thought GAMMA was an environmental protection group. You’ll contaminate this entire region and kill thousands when that thing goes off.”

  “Kingman dumps enough pollution in the air worldwide every day to equal a full megaton nuclear blast,” the terrorist said. “Besides, I like the irony of that…using weapons of mass destruction to punish those like TransGlobal Energy and Kingman, men who build weapons of mass eco-destruction.”

  “You’re crazy. Do you know how many people you’ll kill in this area with that? Thousands…no, maybe hundreds of thousands. You’d do that just to try to hurt Kingman?”

  “He’s killing thousands of people every day around the world with his harmful deep-water drilling, leaky unsafe single-hulled tankers, outdated wells and storage facilities, wanton pollution just to make more profits, and miserable working conditions that enslave entire generations of workers,” Kelly said. “I truly believe that Kingman is capable of killing the entire planet if his practices aren’t revealed to the world and shut down now. If I can shut this one plant down, it’ll really hurt him right where he lives—in the wallet. Maybe he’ll give up after that, after what I’ll do wakes up the world to his lies, corruption, and criminal activities.”

  “You…you can’t do this. It’s insane…”

  “Get away from here, Tom,” Kelly repeated. “It’s your last chance. Get far away from here before your cowboys get their hands on me. Tell them to stay away. I’ll give you ten minutes. That should be enough time.”

  The two guards started to enter the entrapment area, but Tom raised a hand. “Stay back!” he shouted. Kelly smiled, nodded, and started to turn back toward the fence. But Tom ordered, “I’m going to take that detonator away from you, Kelly. I can see what button you’re pressing. I’ll put my finger on it, and you let it go. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Don’t try it, Tom. I’m giving you a chance. You have a wife and kids. Don’t let this chance slip away.”

  “My house is less than a mile from here, man. If it goes, they’ll go too. They’re innocent. You’d be killing them and thousands of other innocent people.”

  “I’m sorry to have to do that. You can call them—tell them to get belowground. Or you can go there, be with them—maybe even get them into that Suburban. At that distance, the armoring might protect them…”

  “You sick bastard!”

  “This is a war, Tom, and in war, innocent people are killed,” Kelly said quietly. “It’s what makes war so horrible—it’s the reason why we need to end it. This is my blow for freedom. Maybe it’ll be the beginning of the end of Harold Kingman.”

  “I’m going to take it from you, Kelly,” Tom said, his voice shaking. He had to concentrate to keep from thinking about his family. Where were they? In school? No, it was Sunday…they might be safe if they went to the grocery store or…but if they went to the park, they’d be out in the open…oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…“Listen, man, you don’t have to kill thousands of people to make your point,” he went on. “Once the world finds out what you’ve done here, they’ll all want to know about your beef with Kingman and TransGlobal. That’s the best way to get your message out. If you kill thousands of people here today, you’ll be nothing but a terrorist. No one will ever listen to you.”

  “I don’t care about that, Tom—I only care about hurting Kingman. He’s the target. Now get out of here.”

  “I’m reaching up to your hand, and I’m taking that detonator.” His hand touched Kelly’s. They looked into each other’s eyes. Tom must’ve seen something akin to surrender in the other’s eyes, and he thought it meant that he would give him the detonator.

  “You’re a good guy,” Kelly said. “You didn’t run. Maybe you would have made a good trooper. But we’ll never know.” And Tom watched Kelly’s eyes go blank, and then close…

  …just as his own thumb closed over the button to the detonator. Kelly did not struggle. Tom was able to take it out of Kelly’s hand, his finger firmly on the button, keeping it safe. He did it.

  Just then, Kelly’s eyes snapped open. He grinned at Tom, winked, then yelled, “Open fire!”

  “No!” Tom yelled, but it was too late. The two young security guards drawing down on Kelly opened fire, their M-16s on full automatic. Slugs ripped mercilessly into both men. Tom remembered through the pain and dizziness to keep his thumb on the button, keep his thumb on the button, keep his…

  …and then as a slug entered his brain, and he died, the world disappeared in a blinding flash of white-hot light…

  Multipurpose Range Complex, Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort

  Polk, Louisiana

  That same time

>   With a tremendous “CRAAACK!” as if from the world’s largest and meanest bullwhip, the lightweight thirty-millimeter projectile disappeared from view as soon as it was launched. The radar trackers on the instrument range followed its flight path flawlessly. “Good shot, J,” Dr. Ariadna Vega, a civilian research engineer assigned to Fort Polk, reported, checking the range telemetry data. Ariadna was in her early twenties, dark-haired, slender, and beautiful, and seemingly very much out of place on this muddy tract of land in central Louisiana. “Launch velocity…seventeen hundred meters per second. Awesome. Range two point three-five kilometers…two point four…two point four-seven kilometers at impact. Not bad.”

  “I can do better than that, Ari,” her partner, Major Jason Richter, responded confidently. “Reset the sensors and throw me another ball.” The two were very much alike and could have been mistaken for brother and sister. Not much older than Vega, tall, lean, and dark-haired, Jason Richter too was an engineer, assigned as the special project office director of the U.S. Army Infantry Transformational BattleLab, a division of the Army Research Laboratory, tasked with developing new ways for infantry to fight on modern battlefields.

  “You got it, J,” Ariadna said with a proud smile. She reactivated the radar scanners briefly to scan for any vehicles or unwanted observers in the area, then reset them to track another projectile. “Range is clear, sensors reset and ready.” She reached into a padded metal case beside her, withdrew an orange object, ran it under a bar code scanner to log its size, mass, and composition, and tossed it to Jason. “Keep your head down.”

  “I got this nailed,” Jason said. He put the orange projectile on a golf tee, leveled his “Big Dog” composite driver—slightly modified for these experiments and definitely not PGA tour–certified—addressed the projectile, brought the head of the driver back, paused just for a moment on the back side, then swung. They heard another loud whip-crack sound, but this time with a much less solid, tinny tone. Just a few hundred meters away, an immense cloud of mud and standing water geysered into the air, and the projectile could be seen skipping across the ground, soon lost from sight.