CHAPTER 27
Huntsville, Alabama
Sunday
10:00 a.m. Central Time
U.S. Army Ranger Major Casey Dugan waited in his car outside the coffee shop that was just outside the gates to the U.S. Army Redstone Arsenal in North Alabama. He could see the gates about a kilometer down the long multilane road. All the gates had a red X lit up over the top of them except for one that was green. Not a lot of traffic on Sundays, he thought.
The coffee shop was mostly empty as it was Sunday morning. Most people in Huntsville, Alabama, were either still in bed, just getting up, or were sitting in church somewhere. Casey had flown in first thing and had already reached out to the contact he had in the area. She should be meeting him at any moment. He leaned over to turn the radio of the rental car down and grimaced slightly. His ribs ached some from the car crash the night before. He pulled the visor down and looked at the swollen red-and-blue spot just below his right eye where he’d caught an elbow, and exhaled.
“Should’ve ducked, I guess,” he said to himself. He turned his head to get more of a profile view of his face. It wasn’t that bad. In a day or two the bruise would probably turn brown or yellow, maybe some purple thrown in, and it would be sore to the touch. But it wasn’t too bad. He just hated that he’d have to miss out on the fun of trying to get useful information out of that asshole. Casey was betting that they would get nothing. Those guys had “pro mercs” written all over them. They knew if they talked, there would be another team of pros coming to shut them up.
He checked his wristwatch again but disregarded the time as he recognized the woman driving the green Tesla sportscar pulling in next to him. It was an old friend he’d worked with years ago on a program to stop al-Qaeda rocket-propelled grenades. He’d been a Sapper at the Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, doing his best to find an armor system to protect convoys from Russian pilfered and/or supplied—nobody knew which—RPG-22s and RPG-18s. The engineers had tested everything from battleship-hull plating steel to concrete with very little luck. Somehow, and he wasn’t even sure he recalled how, he was put into touch with a team of scientists and engineers from the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. And that is where he had met Dr. Amy Castlebaum. She was brilliant, funny, and mostly a lot of fun. He recalled the evenings after work hanging out a local bar near the university with her and the rest of the team. It had been fun. While there had never been anything romantic between them, there had always been something friendly and flirtatious.
The sportscar silently pulled up beside him and a tinted window rolled down. Castlebaum smiled at Casey and waved.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “It is you, after all.”
“Long time no see, huh?” Dugan replied.
“About nine years or so.” She smiled at him. “And you never called or wrote or emailed. Nuthin’.”
“Hey, I could say the same about you, Dr. Castlebaum.”
“Oh, are we being official this morning, Lieutenant Dugan? Oh wait, it’s Major now, isn’t it?” For the first time Dugan was turned toward her enough that she noticed his face. “Jesus! Casey, what happened to you?”
“Long story. Tell you later. And, Amy, while I’d love to spend a lot of time playing catch-up drinking coffee with you, there just isn’t time for that right now. As I told you on the phone, I’m here because of a matter of utmost urgency and national security. And the clock is ticking away on us very swiftly.” Dugan talked to her through the car window. “We need to go to your secure facility as soon as possible so I can brief you.”
“Yeah, okay. You’re so all-business now that you’re a major and all. I can’t imagine what you’ll be like when you’re a colonel. Follow me and be prepared to show your Common Access Card.” She waved her hand with a “come here” motion for him to follow.
“Got it.” Casey held up his badge. “After you.”
Casey followed her car through the main security gate to the Army base and then continued behind her down several main roads. There were several NASA buildings on either side of the road. One of the buildings had a huge engine out in front of it—space shuttle, he thought. He wasn’t sure if it was a mockup or the real deal. There were several other spots along the way where rocket engines or actual rockets were stood up. There were large satellite dishes strewn about the landscape between buildings and the occasional missile launcher here and there.
At times when the trees were separated or when he was in the right spot, he could see the large Saturn V moon rocket that stood over Huntsville at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center a few kilometers to his west. He was surprised at how much the Arsenal had changed since he’d been there almost a decade prior. Many of the places that he recalled to be pastures were huge, recently built multistory buildings. While there were still some large green pastures filled with cows grazing along the way, there were also shiny new brick-and-mortar complexes with very large parking lots. Dugan noted that it was quite the dichotomy of scenery. It being a Sunday, there were almost no cars in any of the lots.
A few more turns and they came to a new security gate. A guard at the shack came out and spoke to Amy for a second and he could see her motioning toward the car behind her—in other words, at him. Casey pulled his badge out and handed it over as the guard waved him up.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Working on Sunday, huh?” Dugan said.
“Pays the bills.” He scanned Dugan’s badge with a laser scanner without ever touching it. Then he depressed a button and the red-and-white-striped rail started to raise. “Have a good day.”
It had taken them a few minutes to get parked, badge into the front door, have Amy escort him up to her floor level, wait on him at the men’s room for a bit, open the SCIF, and then get settled in. She powered on the computer system in her office and offered Dugan a chair next to her desk after she turned on her personal coffeepot.
“Alright, Casey, we can talk at any level of classification you are cleared for in here, so what’s this all about?”
“I sent you a file through JWICS late last night. Bring that up first.”
“Okay, that’ll take a second.” Amy toggled her screen to the secure side and typed in her very long password. The screen lit up with the words TOP SECRET/SCI in a banner at the top and bottom of her screen. She waited for the system to spin up and then clicked open her email application. “Here it is.”
“Okay, open it, and I’ll start.”
“Done.” Amy opened the PDF file that was attached to the email. A spinning icon appeared on the screen saying that the file was being scanned for malware and then it finally opened. Amy scrolled past the classification cover page and started reading the first page with information on it. It was a compressed version of a PowerPoint slideshow. The first slide was a typical intelligence briefing explaining the classification, date, time, and originator of the data.
“Go ahead and flip to the next slide,” Dugan told her.
“A Topol-M?” she asked rhetorically. “I’ve seen jillions of them.”
“Well, five days ago, this particular Topol-M TEL was attacked by a highly skilled team of mercenaries or some similar group who killed all of the Russian soldiers—except for their commander, a Colonel Vladimir Lytokov, who was in on the attack it now appears. They then made off with some plural number—as of yet unknown, estimated max of six—nuclear warheads each possibly up to one hundred and fifty kilotons,” Dugan explained. “As far as we know, neither us nor the Russians have any idea where the nukes are now.”
“Holy shit! Seriously?” Amy gasped.
“Seriously.”
“What are we doing about it?” Suddenly, Casey figured, Amy’s thoughts had gone from wondering what the major was doing for dinner to fear—the type of fear that some asshole was about to set off a nuclear weapon and kill millions of people. Casey could tell she was looking at his face differently now.
“A task force was stood up by the Joint Chiefs almost immediately following. We started chasing any leads we could find. That investigation has now led us to a former Oak Ridge nuclear physicist and likely Chinese spy who, while in college at MIT, had two roommates. One has turned out to be the wanted fugitive computer hacker Keenan James Ingersol, whereabouts unknown, and a Phillip Joseph Watkins, aerospace engineer and missile systems analyst for CIA, now deceased.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Amy said so reflexively loud that she looked about to make sure nobody was disturbed by it. She then realized it was Sunday, and nobody else was there. “Shit, Casey! This is crazy. Deceased?”
“Yeah, he lived in Reston, Virginia. We captured three men who were sent there to kill him—how I got this bruise on my face last night—but we were too late. Watkins had already been shot in the head at point-blank range in his study. We did get a lot of information from his house, desk, bookbag, and his computer. That is why I’m here.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Damn at the least. Look at the next slide.”
“Okay.” Amy scrolled her mouse to bring up the next slide. It was an image of paper with handwritten notes and calculations on it. Amy quickly recognized the vis viva equation and the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. There were some others that looked like orbital calculations from Kepler’s Laws and so on. “Basic rocket science stuff here, it looks like.”
“Well, if you keep scrolling through the next several pages, you’ll see lots of such calculations. They were beyond most of the analysts on the team. And that’s the reason I’m here.”
“You mean you’re not here because of my big brown eyes and wonderful personality? You certainly know how to woo a girl.” Amy laughed.
“Well, sorry. Maybe next time.” Dugan smiled at her and thought briefly that perhaps he wished she had pushed the boundaries of their relationship a bit back then. He could tell that she shrugged it off and was becoming hooked by the detailed rocketry in front of her. There were more important things to deal with presently than to be worrying about an ancient relationship that might have been.
“Okay, this is like…” She looked at the total page number on the slideshow. There were over one hundred and thirty slides. “This is, um, gonna take some time to go through.”
“How much time?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Hours? Days? I won’t know until I get into it.” Amy turned and looked a bit sheepishly at the Army Ranger. “What do you need from me?”
“I need to know what this is about, Amy. The Secretary of Defense has authorized this task force to do what it takes to find and stop this threat. Whatever this threat turns out to be. If you need approval to work overtime, you’ll get it retroactively.” Dugan paused for a breath as if giving her a chance to say something. But she, likely, simply didn’t know what to say. Dugan continued.
“Amy, I need this done as fast as it can be done. If you can start on it now, that is what I was hoping for.”
“Uh, Jesus, yeah. Okay.” Amy looked at the slide on her computer screen and then back and forth a couple times at Dugan. “I’m not exactly sure how long this will take, but I know it is gonna take some time. Look, I get it. I realize that every second wasted is another second closer to one of the nukes going off…maybe. Um, Casey, how do we know that these mercenaries aren’t just going to sell the nukes?”
“Nobody to sell them to.” Dugan could tell by the look on Amy’s face that she didn’t understand that comment, so he added, “We’ve chased that down a few rabbit holes, but our conclusion is that they plan to use them because the nukes are so hot right now. The Russians, we think now the Chinese, and the U.S. are all looking for them. The U.N. and NATO will be briefed on this tomorrow. There’s no way they could sell them to anyone without getting caught.”
“Hmmm.” Amy just nodded as if she understood. Casey wasn’t certain that she did. But that didn’t matter. There were over a hundred pages of rocket science in front of her that she needed to figure out. “Okay, then, this is going to take hours at least. You want me to escort you back out so you don’t have to just sit here waiting?”
“I was up all night,” he said. “Maybe I could go check into a hotel and get a nap.”
“Okay, good idea. Do you have reservations anywhere?”
“No. Just jumped on a plane and got here.” He shrugged. “Grabbed a rental car at the airport, and, well, here I am.”
“There are several hotels outside the gate that still run government per diem rates,” she said. “I’d take Martin Road east and then take the Parkway north and there will be several hotels on your right down there. I have your cell number. I’ll call when I get something.”
“Okay, maybe that’s what I’ll do. You mind walking me out?”
“Not at all, handsome.” She was still flirty, but he could tell she was anxious to get those numbers back on her desk.