By this time, Clark was on a shuttle flight to Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington. It landed on time, and Clark was met by a CIA employee whose “company” car was parked outside for the twenty-minute ride to Langley and the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building. Dmitriy Popov had never expected to be inside this particular edifice, even wearing a VISITOR – ESCORT REQUIRED badge. John handled the introductions.
“Welcome,” Foley said in his best Russian. “I imagine you’ve never been here before.”
“As you have never been to Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square.”
“Ah, but I have,” Clark responded. “Right into Sergey Nikolay’ch’s office, in fact.”
“Amazing,” Popov responded, sitting down as guided.
“Okay, Ed, where the hell are they now?”
“Over northern Venezuela, heading south, probably for central Brazil. The FAA tells us that they filed a flight plan-it’s required by law-for Manaus. Rubber-tree country, I think. A couple of rivers come together there.”
“They told me that there is a facility there, like the one in Kansas, but smaller,” Popov informed his hosts.
“Task a satellite to it?” Clark asked the DCI.
“Once we know where it is, sure. The AWACS lost a little ground when it refueled, but it’s only a hundred fifty miles back now, and that’s not a problem. They say the four business jets are just flying normally, cruising right along.”
“Once we know where they’re going . . . then what?”
“Not sure,” Foley admitted. “I haven’t thought it through that far.”
“There might not be a good criminal case on this one, Ed.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Clark confirmed with a nod. “If they’re smart, and we have to assume they are, they can destroy all the physical evidence of the crime pretty easily. That leaves witnesses, but who, you suppose, is aboard those four Gs heading into Brazil?”
“All the people who know what’s been happening. You’d want to keep that number low for security reasons. wouldn’t you-so, you think they’re going down there for choir practice
“What?” Popov asked.
“They need to find and learn a single story to tell the FBI when the interrogations begin,” Foley explained. “So, they all need to learn the same hymn, and learn to sing it the same way every time.”
“What would you do in their place, Ed?” Rainbow Six asked reasonably.
Foley nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it. Okay, what should we do?”
Clark looked the DCI straight in the eye. “Pay them a little visit, maybe?”
“Who authorizes that?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
“I still draw my paychecks from this agency. I report to you, Ed, remember?”
“Christ, John.”
“Do I have your permission to get my people together at a suitable staging point?”
“Where?”
“Fort Bragg, I suppose,” Clark proposed. Foley had to yield to the logic of the moment.
“Permission granted.” And with that Clark walked down the narrow office to a table with a secure phone to call Hereford.
Alistair Stanley had bounced back well from his wounds, enough so that he could just about manage a full day in his office without collapsing with exhaustion. Clark’s trip to the States had left him in charge of a crippled Rainbow force, and he was facing problems now that Clark had not yet addressed, like replacements for the two dead troopers. Morale was brittle at the moment. There were still two missing people with whom the survivors had worked intimately, and that was never an easy thing for men to bear, though every morning they were out on the athletic field doing their daily routine, and every afternoon they fired their weapons to stay current and ready for a possible callup. This was regarded as unlikely, but, then, none of the missions that Rainbow had carried out had been, in retrospect, very likely. His secure phone started chirping, and Stanley reached to answer it.”Yes, this is Alistair Stanley.”
“Hi, Al, this is John. I’m in Langley now.”
“What the bloody hell’s been happening, John? Chavez and his people have fallen off the earth, and-”
“Ding and his people are halfway between Hawaii and California now, Al. They arrested a major conspirator in Sydney.”
“Very well, what the devil’s been going on?”
“You sitting down, Al?”
“Yes, John, of course I am, and-”
“Listen up. I’ll give you the short version,” Clark commanded, and proceeded to do that for the next ten minutes.
“Bloody hell,” Stanley said when his boss stopped talking. “You’re sure of this?”
“Damned sure, Al. We are now tracking the conspirators in four aircraft. They seem to be heading for central Brazil. Okay, I need you to get all the people together and fly them to Fort Bragg-Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina-with all their gear. Everything, Al. We may be taking a trip down to the jungle to . . . to, uh, deal decisively with these people.”
“Understood. I’ll try to get things organized here. Maxi mum speed’.”
“”That is correct. Tell British Airways we need an airplane,” Clark went on.
“Very well, John. Let me get moving here.”
In Langley, Clark wondered what would happen next, but before he could decide that he needed to get all of his assets in place. Okay, Alistair would try to get British Airways to release a spare, reserve aircraft to his people for a direct flight to Pope, and from there-from there he’d have to think some more. And he’d have to get there, too, to Special Operations Command with Colonel Little Willie Byron.
“Target One is descending,” a control officer reported over the aircraft’s intercom. The senior controller looked up from the book he was reading, activated his scope, and confirmed the information. He was breaking international law at the moment. Eagle Two-Niner hadn’t gotten permission to overfly Brazil, but the air-traffic control radar systems down there read his transponder signal as a civilian air-cargo flight-the usual ruse-and nobody had challenged them yet. Confirming that information, he got on his satellite radio to report this information to NORAD and, though he didn’t know it, on to CIA. Five minutes later, Target Two started doing the same. Also both aircraft were slowing, allowing Eagle Two-Niner to catch up somewhat. The senior controller told the flight crew to continue on this heading and speed, inquired about fuel state, and learned that they had another eight hours of flight time, more than enough to return to their home at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City.
In England, the British Airways card was played, and the airline, after ten minutes of checking, assigned Rainbow a 737-700 airliner, which would await their pleasure at Luton, a small commercial airport north of London. They’d have to go there by truck, and those were whistled up from the British army’s transport company at Hereford.
It looked like a green sea, John Brightling thought, the top layer of the triple-canopy jungle. In the setting sun, he could see the silvery paths of rivers, but almost nothing of the ground itself. This was the richest ecosystem on the planet, and one that he’d never studied in detail-well, Brightling thought, now he’d be able to, for the next year or so. Project Alternate was a robust and comfortable facility with a maintenance staff of six people, its own power supply, satellite communications, and ample food. He wondered which of the people on the four aircraft might be good cooks. There would be a division of labor here, as at every other Project activity, with himself, of course, as the leader.
At Binghamton, New York, the maintenance staff was loading a bunch of biohazard-marked containers into the incinerator. It was sure a big furnace, one of the men thought-big enough to cremate a couple of bodies at the same time-and, judging by the thickness of the insulation, a damned hot one. He pulled down the three-inch thick door, locked it in place, and punched the ignition button. He could hear the gas jetting it and lighting off from the sparkler things inside, followed by the usual voosh. There was nothing unusual about this. Horizon Corporation was always disposing of biological material of one sort or another. Maybe it was live AIDS virus, he thought. The company did a lot of work in that area, he’d read. But for the moment he looked at the papers on his clipboard. Three sheets of paper from the special order that had been faxed in from Kansas, and every line was checked off. All the containers specified were now ashes. Hell, this incinerator even destroyed the metal lids. And up into the sky went the only physical evidence of the Project. The maintenance worker didn’t know that. To him container G7-89-98-OOA was just a plastic container. He didn’t even know that there was a word such as Shiva. As required, he went to his desktop computer-everyone here had one-and typed in that he’d eliminated the items on the work order. This information went into Horizon Corporation’s internal network, and, though he didn’t know it, popped onto a screen in Kansas. There were special instructions with that, and the technician lifted his phone to relay the information to another worker, who relayed it in turn to the phone number identified on the electronically posted notice.