She’d just taken a deep breath and started to step forward when she felt arms clamp around her. Before she could even start to yell a bag was over her head. She felt a bump on her leg, one that was going to bruise, as she was tossed into a vehicle.
Then there was a strong smell and it was all she recalled for a while.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Kildar,” Greznya said nervously.
“Go,” Mike replied. He was looking at the defense plans for the Orlando area and shaking his head. Everybody was so afraid of scaring off the tourists, who were staying away anyway with the report of VX in Florida, that you couldn’t really call it a sieve. It was more like a bottomless bucket. The security plans just sucked.
Actually, Disney, accidentally, had one of the better set-ups. Because they used a tram system to move most people from their cars to the entrance, it made getting a car bomb into a major crowd harder. The main crowd a terrorist could hit on the outside was that of the people waiting for the trams. The next major chokepoint they’d already secured with big “planters” designed to stop anything up to a semi-trailer. The areas where really big crowds gathered you could only insert individuals into. And whereas a suicide bomber could take out quite a few people in one of those packed crowds at the monorail or the boats that crossed Bay Lake, it was nothing compared to what a U-Haul packed with ammonium nitrate could do.
The monorail had him really worried though. Again, max casualties about six hundred but that would be dead. A suicide bomber blowing the monorail would take the entire thing down.
And none of that took into account the VX. The main threat there was crop dusters. All of the known crop dusters in the Central Florida area were registered and cops were keeping an eye on them in general. But there were a bunch of the damned things. Outside of Orlando and the tourist areas, Central Florida was still mostly rural and heavily farmed. With constant sunshine, lots of rain and good soil, it was a supplier of off-season vegetables and other crops on the same order as the Imperial Valley in California. But the same idyllic conditions also meant a hell of a lot of crop pests, which meant dusting.
Poison gas was, essentially, pesticide with humans being the pests; anything that could spread pesticide could spread VX. And it would kill everything else that had a nervous system just as well as humans: birds, snakes, kittens and your little dog, too.
What was really bad about VX was that it lingered. The molecule was very robust and didn’t break down well. If any of the shit got spread around it was going to poison the area for a good long time. Unless every single surface was carefully cleaned, someone touching the underside of a door knob a year later would die. And if a couple of canisters were dumped over Disney — or EPCOT or Universal or anywhere else in the area — the shit would feed into the water system, contaminating it for years.
And nobody seemed to be taking the threat seriously. It was like the entire JTF was in denial. Nobody would be so vicious and cruel as to spray Disney or Sea World or Wet and Wild. Why, that would kill people! Yeah. And nobody would ever fly a plane into the Twin Towers.
The reports from the FBI were driving him crazy. First of all, there were reams of them. And they were… gobbledygook. The FBI had flooded the region with agents, most of whom were wandering around with no real clue what they were looking for or at. Agents from Seattle were trying to figure out this whole “sunshine” thing. Agents from New York were trying to “interface” with red-neck deputies in Lake County, a major crossroads area, and there had been “issues.” Lake County sheriff’s department had a very simple motto: Keep the FBI as far away from us as possible. Their joke was that the first biggest lie is “I’m from the FBI and I’m here to help.” And the FBI’s motto seemed to be “Ready, Fire, Aim.” Flood the area and hope like hell it helped. At the very least, their ass was covered. Especially if they created lots of pointless reports.
On the other hand, Mike had taken one look at the DEA’s reporting system and given up in complete disgust.
The FBI, though, had “determined” nine crop dusters in the Lake County area. Not “determined that there are.” Simply “determined.” Mike couldn’t even figure out what that meant. Had they secured them? Had they simply counted them? And crop dusters in Lake County didn’t really matter to him; the flight time to any significant target was too far.
The FBI had also “determined” seven in Orange County. Most of them were located at the Kissimmee Airport, which was close enough. It was in easy striking distance of all the major attractions. But Mike couldn’t see the rag-heads taking off from Kissimmee. They were going to have to load the birds. That was going to take time. They’d be in full view of airport security and, now, Orange County deputies and FBI. Even the FBI was going to be asking questions, given that very little dusting took place in winter.
It didn’t even have to be a crop duster. The vortex of a plane’s passage, and the vortex created by a prop, would spread the shit pretty well. Just a plane big enough to carry the two barrels would do it. Hook up a couple of big tubes, run one out either side of the plane, and you had a pretty effective distributor.
Another effective distributor could be seen every night in Orlando. Even in winter the mosquitoes in Florida could get bad. To keep them down, every county had pesticide trucks. They were converted pickup trucks that simply sprayed clouds of pesticide out the back. They only ran at night, usually in the very early morning hours. But Mike’s nightmares were starting to be seeing one of those driving through a neighborhood in the middle of the night. And in the morning, the clean-up crews coming through for the bodies.
“Kildar, we have a problem,” Greznya said. “Anastasia has disappeared.”
“And so the other shoe drops,” Mike said, looking up from the report and taking off his glasses. “Any intel?” he asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“Not so far,” the Keldara said. “But Gonzales’ ship put out shortly before she disappeared. She asked to be taken to Nassau so she could do some shopping. And she asked to go alone. Is it possible… ?”
Mike looked at her and blinked in confusion, then shook his head.
“She didn’t turn if that’s what you mean,” Mike said. “She’s afraid of the outdoors. She was probably just working on that. I should have made clear that she needed an outer perimeter.”
“Greznya,” Olga said, walking in the room and handing the intel boss a note. “Jay.”
Greznya looked at the note and nodded.
“A group of what looked like a DEA snatch team took Anastasia from the market,” Greznya said. “Colonel Montcrief of the Constabulary has been informed that this was not one of our operations and is investigating. She won’t be going out by plane, that he can confirm. Boats, helicopters?”
“Get word to Jay that we need the take from the mikes Katya planted,” Mike said, nodding and looking at the reports. “And keep me updated.”
“Yes, Kildar,” Greznya said, frowning slightly.
“How’s it going?” Britney asked, walking in and sitting down across from the Kildar. He had reports spread all over a coffee table and had put his hated glasses back on.
“I’m trying to figure out probable method of attack,” Mike said, taking off his glasses. “I don’t mean direct method, how they’re going to spray it, but… There are two major attack methods if you have lots of resources. And six barrels of VX, three useable units in other words, is a lot of resources. Do you go for simultaneous attack or ripple?”