“Any other places the guy might use?” Chavez worried suddenly in the darkness.
“No,” Noonan replied. “I checked the panel on the way in. The whole stadium fogging system comes from this one room. If it’s going to happen, it will happen here.”
“If it’s gonna happen,” Chavez said back, actually hoping that it would not. If that happened, they’d go back to Lieutenant Colonel Wilkerson and find out where this Gearing guy was staying, and then pay a call on him and have a friendly little chat.
Gearing spotted the blue door and looked around for security people. The Aussie SAS troops were easily spotted, once you knew how they dressed. But though he saw two Sydney policemen walking down the concourse, there were no army personnel. Gearing paused fifty feet or so from the door. The usual mission jitters, he told himself. He was about to do something from which there was no turning back. He asked himself for the thousandth time if he really wanted to do this. There were fellow human beings all around him, people seemingly just like himself with hopes and dreams and aspirations but, no, those things they held in their minds weren’t like the things he held in his own, were they? They didn’t get it, didn’t understand what was important and what was not. They didn’t see Nature for what She was, and as a result they lived lives that were aimed only at hurting or even destroying Her, driving cars that injected hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, using chemicals that found their way into the water, pesticides that killed birds or kept them from reproducing, aiming spray cans at their hair whose propellants destroyed the ozone layer. They were killing Nature with nearly every act they took. They didn’t care. They didn’t even try to understand the consequences of what they were doing, and so, no, they didn’t have a right to live. It was his job to protect Nature, to remove the blight upon the planet, to restore and save, and that was a job he must do. With that decided, Wil Gearing resumed his walk to the blue door, fished in his pocket for the key and inserted it into the knob.
“Command, this is Johnston, you got company coming in! White guy, khaki shorts, red polo shirt, and backpack,” Homer announced loudly into everyone’s ear. Beside him, Sergeant Tomlinson started walking in that direction, too.
“Heads up,” Chavez said in the darkness. There were two shadows in the crack of light under the door, and then the sound of a key in the lock, and then there was another crack of light, a vertical one as the door opened, and a silhouette, a human shape and just that fast, Chavez knew that it was all real after all. Would the lights reveal an inhuman monster, something from another planet, or . . .. . . just a man, he saw, as the lights flipped on. About fifty, with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. A man who knew what he was about. He reached for the wrench hanging on the wall mounted pegboard, then shrugged out of his backpack, and loosened the two straps that held the flap in place. It seemed to Chavez that he was watching a movie, something separated from reality, as the man flipped off the motor switch, ending the whirring. Then he closed the valve and lifted the wrench to-
“Hold it right there, pal,” Chavez said, emerging from the shadows.
“Who are you?” the man asked in surprise. Then his face told the tale. He was doing something he shouldn’t. He knew it, and suddenly someone else did, too.
“I could ask you the same thing, except I know who you are. Your name is Wil Gearing. What are you planning to do, Mr. Gearing?”
“I’m just here to swap out the chlorine canister on the fogging system,” Gearing replied, shaken all the more that this Latino seemed to know his name. How had that happened? Was he part of the Project-and if not, then what? It was as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and now his entire body cringed from the blow.”Oh? Let’s see about that, Mr. Gearing. Tim?” Chavez gestured for Noonan to get the backpack. Sergeant Pierce stayed back, his hand on his pistol and his eyes locked on their visitor.
“Sure looks like a normal one,” Noonan said. If this was a counterfeit, it was a beaut. He was tempted to open the screw top, but he had good reason not to. Next to the pump motor, Chavez took the wrench and removed the existing canister.
“Looks about half full to me, pal. Not time to replace it yet, at least not with something called Shiva. Tim, let’s be careful with that one.”
“You bet.” Noonan tucked it back into Gearing’s pack and strapped the cover down. “We’ll have this checked out. Mr. Gearing, you are under arrest,” the FBI agent told him. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, we will provide you with one. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand these rights, sir?”
Gearing was shaking now, and turned to look at the door, wondering if he could –he couldn’t. Tomlinson and Johnston chose that moment to come in. “Got him?” Homer asked.
“Yep,” Ding replied. He pulled his cell phone out and called America. Again the encryption systems went through the synchronization process.
“We got him,” Chavez told Rainbow Six. “And we got the canister thing, whatever you call it. How the hell do we get everybody home?”
“There’s an Air Force C-17 at Alice Springs, if you can get there. It’ll wait for you.”
“Okay, I’ll see if we can fly there. Later, John.” Chavez thumbed the END button and turned to his prisoner. “Okay, pal, you’re coming with us. If you try anything stupid, Sergeant Pierce here will shoot you right in the head. Right, Mike?”
“Yes, sir, I sure as hell will,” Pierce responded in a voice from the grave.
Noonan reopened the valve and turned the pump motor back on. Then they went back out into the stadium concourse and walked to the cabstand. They ended up needing two taxis, both of which headed to the airport. There they had to wait an hour and a half for a 737 for the desert airport, a flight of nearly two hours.
Alice Springs is in the very center of the continental island called Australia, near the Macdonnell mountain range. and a strange place indeed to find the highest of high-tech equipment, but here were the huge antenna dishes that downloaded information from America’s reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and military communications satellites. The facility there is operated by the National Security Agency, NSA, whose main site is at Fort Meade. Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington.
The Qantas flight was largely empty, and on arrival, an airport van took them to the USAF terminal, which was surprisingly comfortable, though here the temperature was blisteringly hot, heading down from an afternoon temperature of 120.
“You’re Chavez?” the sergeant in the Distinguished Visitors area asked.
“That’s right. When’s the plane leave?”
“They’re waiting for you now, sir. Come this way.” And with that they entered another van, which rolled them right to the front left-side door, where a sergeant in a flight suit gestured them aboard.
“Where we going, Sarge?” Chavez asked on his way past.
“Hickam in Hawaii first, sir, then on to Travis in California.”
“Fair enough. Tell the driver he can leave.”
“Yes, sir.” The crew chief laughed, as he closed the door and walked forward.
It was a mobile cavern, this monster transport aircraft, and there seemed to be no other passengers aboard. Gearing hadn’t been handcuffed, somewhat to Ding’s disappointment, and he behaved docilely, with Noonan at his side.
“So, you want to talk to us about it, Mr. Gearing?” the FBI agent asked.
“What’s in it for me?”
He’d had to ask that question, Noonan supposed, but it was a sign of weakness, Just what the FBI agent had hoped for. The question made the answer easy:
“Your life, if you’re lucky.”
CHAPTER 38
NATURE RESORT
It was just too much for Wil Gearing. Nobody had told him what to do in a case like this. It had never occurred to him that security would be broken on the Project. His life was forfeit now-how could that have happened’.’ He could cooperate or not. The contents of the canister would be examined anyway, probably at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and it would require only a few seconds for the medical experts there to see what he’d carried into the Olympic stadium, and there was no explaining that away, was there? His life, his plans for the future, had been taken away from him. and his only choice was to cooperate and hope for the best.