U.S. wouldn’t believe China to be so arrogant as to leave these traces, and thus waste energy confirming such a setup,” Wethers explained.
“One step at a time,” Delahunt said. “We find the evidence, and then see where it points. As setup or as genuine.”
“Fair enough,” Wethers stated. He went to work, going over transistor lots and equipment manufacture manifests. Though it looked as if he were in a trance, mentally slowed to a stop, his brain raced at the speed of light.
In the back of his brilliant mind, the eldest member of the Stony Man cybernetics crew wondered if the speed of light was still too slow to prevent Armageddon.
Midway Island, U.S. Naval Cleanup and Reclamation Center
P HOENIX F ORCE HAD BEEN returning from an operation in India when they received the alert to go on stand-by due to another crisis. David McCarter waited in the hangar at what was a covertly operating Naval Air Station, stubbing out a Player’s cigarette. The U.S. Navy had been publicly ordered to clean up the contamination of the Midway Station National Wildlife Refuse, but there were still low-profile facilities available for the United States Special Operations Command to use as forward staging areas. Phoenix Force was taking advantage of the top-secret station to recuperate from the first half of a long flight when they’d received a stand-by alert.
“Thank you, David,” Rafael Encizo said, waving the fumes away from his face.
McCarter winked and pulled another from its pack, lighting up. “Anytime, mate.”
Encizo rolled his eyes. “This is Hawaii. Fresh air, crystal-blue water, verdant green…”
“Yeah. But I’m workin’ as fast as I can to fix that,” McCarter joked.
“Give me strength,” Encizo groaned. He walked out onto the tarmac. The breeze blowing spared him from suffering McCarter’s secondhand smoke. “Think we’ll have time to head home, or will we have to resupply here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” McCarter answered. “But I’m betting that it’ll be a little while until we’re back at the Farm. Hope you didn’t have any hot dates waiting.”
Encizo shrugged. “You know me, David. A girl in every port.”
McCarter didn’t know whether that was an exaggeration or not, but he didn’t particularly care. The Cuban had his relationships that had survived the social-life-strangling strains of covert operations, as McCarter had his own.
“We’ve got an update,” T. J. Hawkins announced. The youngest member of Phoenix Force had been manning their satellite uplink-equipped laptop, waiting for news.
McCarter crushed the half-smoked cigarette and joined Encizo beside Hawkins, Calvin James and Gary Manning to observe the electronic briefing from where they’d been occupying themselves.
“Currently, all we have is circumstantial evidence,” Barbara Price announced on screen. “But put together, it’s pretty damning. We’ve got several million dollars missing from People’s Republic of China banks. The money disappeared from facilities that were converting dollars to yuan and vice versa.”
“Added to the SAD-style night vision, it does look damning,” James, a former San Francisco police officer, agreed. “But circumstantial evidence doesn’t hold up. We need something stronger.”
“Try this image we’ve got from an NRO satellite,” Price added. An image appeared on the screen, a photograph of a launch facility. The image enlarged and focused on a corner of the launch campus. “It was observing a facility referred to in the records as the Phoenix Graveyard.”
“Glad I’m not superstitious,” McCarter muttered.
“Looks familiar,” Gary Manning said, cutting off his friend’s gloomy proclamation. “The same kind of terrorist combat training facilities that litter Asia from Syria to Pakistan.”
“Too disorganized to be conventional army barracks, and this tank,” Encizo mentioned. “I recognize that kind of water tank. There’s one at Cape Canaveral.”
“A zero-gravity, space-suit training tank,” James agreed. “The water duplicates the relative lack of gravity, as well as operating in a self-contained atmosphere, preparing people for extra-vehicular activity.”
“And it’s not for astronauts, because this is a second tank in addition to one for the Chinese astronauts,” Manning said. “The Chinese don’t normally send people into orbit, and when they do, it’s on the QT. Mostly, their facilities are rented out to launch satellites, but they do have their own space program, complete with a knockoff of the shuttle that’s a little better than the Russians’.”
“So they’re training terrorists for zero-gravity combat in a space suit?” McCarter asked. “That narrows down the targets considerably.”
“The International Space Station,” Hawkins concluded. “Isn’t there supposed to be a shuttle launch and rendezvous?”
“It’ll be going up in three days,” Price answered. “Take a look at this setup here…”
The photograph increased in detail, and it was a maze of tires. Utilizing computer wizardry, the picture blended with the layout of the ISS. The commandos of Phoenix Force were immediately aware of the PVC pipes that simulated the crawl-spaces between the station’s various modules.
“Still circumstantial evidence,” James stated. “It’s too thin to make a rush into the People’s Republic.”
“One more bit of evidence. We did a sweep for radiation on the scene,” Price concluded. “We picked up high-energy gamma radiation signatures.”
James winced and McCarter knew that the Phoenix Force medic had heard something terrible. McCarter checked his memory for problems that would have a high gamma radiation signature.
“Iridium 192,” McCarter stated.
“You got it, David,” James answered. “It’s a very credible threat for a dirty bomb. External exposure to Ir-192 pellets can cause radiation burns, acute radiation sickness or even death.”
“They wouldn’t need explosives,” Manning interjected.
“What do you mean?” McCarter asked.
“Iridium is a highly dense metal. We’re talking a higher friction resistance than the toughest steels around. Plop it into the atmosphere on a proper trajectory, when it hits the ground, even the pencil-size sticks of Ir-192 used for industrial welding gauges will survive and merely fragment,” Manning said. “Put it in a barrel, and reentry will heat the drum up enough that when it strikes a solid surface, like a building, it’ll pop like a balloon, spitting shards over the center of a city.”
“A radioactive shotgun round,” McCarter mentioned. “Anyone not killed by a splinter of the stuff would receive a dose of radioactive shrapnel. With the amount of casualties possible from an air burst over a city, you’ll have hundreds, perhaps thousands, suffering from both fragments and the radiation they put out.”
“They wouldn’t need a barrel, and they’d have their delivery systems on the ISS,” Hawkins noted. “Right now, our shuttle is going up to augment the ISS satellite maintenance
