Mike Galloway volunteered to check the attic. Thomas and Pierce grabbed a pair of flashlights off the counter and headed down below.
The old timbers of the stairway strained under the weight of their steps as they entered the cellar. Their flashlights cut through the blackness, the air thick with swirling dust.
As his feet hit the earthen floor, Thomas scanned the debris-strewn room, his flashlight coming to a halt on a closed door. “What’s in there?” he asked.
“That’s where my father had his darkroom. He was quite the wildlife photographer in his day.”
Thomas found his pulse quickening as his thoughts returned to the led’s photoelectric trigger. “What did he use for light?”
“He rigged up that old generator over there to a red safelight inside the lab.”
“I don’t suppose that it still works?” he questioned hopefully.
Pierce crossed the cellar, bent over, and pulled the generator’s starter. The buzzing growl of a one-stroke engine sounded, and she walked over to the darkroom’s shut doorway.
“The light’s right inside. Shall we give it a try?”
“I think it’s best if we kill these flashlights first,” said Thomas as he joined her.
For a second, the room lapsed into total blackness. Pierce opened the creaking door, then reached up and pulled the cord to the safelight.
In the dim red glow of a single bulb, Thomas surveyed the darkroom’s interior. He discovered a cracked, white enamel basin, and a wooden counter filled with an odd assortment of materials. He identified several boxes of electrical components, and a large roll of black, wax-based wrapping paper. It was beside a Scotch tape dispenser that he spotted a shoebox-sized lump of what appeared to be putty. It was wrapped in green Mylar, and upon closer examination, he saw that the plastic had a label on it reading, property of national guard armory wheeling, WEST VIRGINIA.
“Special Agent Kellogg, I was afraid of this, but it appears that your visit was justified after all. Take a look at this.”
His hands were trembling slightly as he took possession of a partially completed Priority Mail address label. The familiar cramped handwriting revealed the fictitious Winchester, Virginia, post office box of the sender. Yet this time it was the addressee’s name that had changed to the Honorable Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives.
“Do you find that interesting?” inquired a man’s voice from behind Thomas.
Thomas pivoted, and found himself looking down the menacing barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun. A scruffy looking long-haired male in his thirties held the weapon, and there could be no missing the long, straw-colored braids of the woman who stood beside him.
“Put down the gun, Andrew,” ordered Lee Pierce. “And for once in your life, listen to me! I warned you that violence wasn’t the way to get your views across, and now you’re going to have to pay the price for your pigheadedness.”
“Shut your trap, Captain!” countered the gun-toting extremist, whose eyes opened wide with abhorrence upon viewing the BATF patch that graced his prisoner’s coveralls.
“What do we have here?” he added snidely. “Captain, I think you should pay a bit more attention to the friends you’re hanging out with.
This one’s got a stink that could put a stuck pig to shame, and it’s going to be a joy to put him out of his misery.”
“You’re in enough trouble without adding murder to your crimes,” replied Pierce. “Put down the gun, and let’s talk about it.”
“I’m sick of talk!” shouted Andrew as he cocked the shotgun’s hammer.
“Me and Emma have made our choice, and talk isn’t on the agenda. It’s apparent that the President won’t listen to us, and now we’re going to introduce the Sons of the Patriots to our enemies in Congress.”
Thomas realized that the two warped souls standing before him were the extent of this organization. There was no way that they could have made good an attack on the QE2. And though he was relieved by this, he now had a much more immediate threat to be concerned with.
“If you’ve got a favorite prayer, Mr. Jackboot atf. man, now’s the time to be saying it,” advised Andrew.
Thomas met his crazed glance, doubting that he’d be able to talk his way out of this predicament. This certainly wasn’t the place or time where he expected to meet death, and just as he was about to surrender to Andrew’s suggestion of prayer, a sudden movement behind Andrew caught his attention; then a voice:
“Drop it, you bastard!” he heard Galloway say.
As Andrew snapped his head around, Thomas threw himself forward to divert the barrel of the shotgun. It discharged with a thunderous blast, the pellets boring harmlessly into the ceiling. While Galloway moved in from the rear, Thomas grabbed Andrew in an arm lock By the time Pierce restrained Emma, Thomas was already calculating how much time it would take to reach a telephone and relay the all clear to his brother somewhere in the mid Atlantic.
19
Brittany Cooper urns certainly no stranger to important briefings. Yet in this instance, she found herself dreading the thought of disclosing the reason behind this hastily convened meeting in the operation center’s conference room. Her guests had only just arrived, and as they gathered around the table, she made certain that they had a clear view of the three large projection screens that were set up on the other side of the glass partition.
Adm. Richard Buchanan sat at the head of the table. The youngest chief of naval operations ever, Buchanan was personally responsible for Op Center Bravo’s creation. At the former submariner’s right sat Gen. William Ridgeway, the medal-bedecked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ridgeway was in every way the consummate veteran in their midst, whose Army service went back to the early days of Vietnam.
As a pair of aides set up their laptops opposite them, Brittany addressed her own keyboard. In response, the projection screen on the left side of the room filled with a large scale chart of the North Atlantic. A red icon flashed in the narrow strait of water separating Greenland and Iceland, and Brittany activated a cursor to highlight this feature.
“It was twenty-three-and-a-half hours ago that the U. S. Navy SOSUS facility at Reykjavik, Iceland, received a report of an anomalous submerged contact beneath the waters of the Denmark Strait,” she revealed. “This data was subsequently analyzed, with the results arriving here within the last hour.”
“Why the delay?” asked Ridgeway.
It was the CNO who answered. “Since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Russian submarine deployments into the Atlantic have been extremely limited. Because of this, SOSUS monitoring of the GIUK gap has been downgraded to a Level-Two priority.”
“You’d have thought that we would have bumped up the alert level for this crossing even though the Russian president is on board,” remarked Ridgeway. “But that’s water over the dam. Now, what’s so important about this particular contact?”
The CNO flashed Brittany a supportive glance, and she swallowed nervously before replying, “Computer analysis of the sound signature shows a 93 percent probability that the vessel responsible is a Chinese fan-class, nuclear powered attack submarine.”
“Chinese?” repeated Ridgeway. “What in the hell are they doing way up there?”
“It looks to me that they’re trying to clandestinely enter the North Atlantic by way of the Pole,” returned the CNO. “This in itself is unprecedented, and I’d sure like to know which one of their boats managed to pull it off.”
“If you look to the middle projection screen, I believe I can answer that, sir,” said Brittany as she addressed her keyboard.
A black-and-white, overhead reconnaissance photo of a naval installation filled the screen, and Brittany identified it. “That’s the PLA Navy berthing facility at Tsingtao. This Big Bird shot is the most recent in a series displaying the base’s refit berths. If you’ll follow my cursor, you can make out the two other advanced Han-class submarines in their fleet. This pair of vacant slips nearby indicates that two of Tsingtao’s submarines are currently at sea. One of these vessels is the Yellow Dragon, a Xia-class ballisticmissile platform that set sail several days ago, for what appeared to be a routine deterrent patrol. The remaining empty slip belongs to the Lijiang, and that’s the sub that I believe SOSUS tagged.”