Matt had wallowed in his own self pity for too long. He had mourned Zachary’s death and his inability to prevent his loss, despite his proximity at the time. He had convinced himself that he had become a liability to Zachary and had distracted him from his own mission, which ultimately led to his brother’s demise.
Irrational?
But now Matt was being given a chance to avenge the loss of his brother. While he knew that he had better odds of getting struck by lightning during a shark attack while celebrating a Power Ball lottery win than of finding his brother in some Canadian fishing hole used as a command post by terrorists, he had to try. What if?
“Okay, I’m in.”
CHAPTER 28
Matt’s stomach crawled into his throat at the nearly forgotten feeling of an MC-130 aircraft climbing to altitude faster than it was designed to. Matt leaned back into the red mesh webbing and shut his eyes for a brief moment, visualizing the pilots, frustrated fighter jocks, discussing whether or not to do a barrel roll or a corkscrew. The smell of jet fuel filled his nostrils, and it began to work its magical effect of making him drowsy.
“You say you know this guy?” Rampert interrupted. He was pointing at Dr. Werthstein. Matt rubbed his face and then looked at him. He considered that the doctor could be a body double for Albert Einstein in a biopic.
“No. Don’t know him, but know of him,” Matt said.
“Well, we can’t get jack shit out of him. Why don’t you try?” Rampert said. “But make it quick. You need to suit up.”
“Roger.”
Matt slid next to Werthstein, grabbed a K-bar knife from a sheath hanging in the communications pod, and cut Werthstein’s flex-cuffs free.
“Thank you,” the old man whispered, eyes looking down at the floor and hands rubbing his bruised wrists.
“Why didn’t you come with us when we tried to get you out of there?” Matt asked.
“They would have killed my family. There is no escaping them.”
“No escaping who?”
“What have I done? Oh, what have I done?” the doctor whispered, looking away.
“That’s what we’re trying to establish here. What have you done?”
“My family… is there any way to protect my family?” The old man was nearly in tears and for the first time made eye contact with Matt.
“Where is your family?”
“They are being held captive in France. We tried telling the French government these people were after me, but because we are Americans they told us to go to hell.”
“Who is holding them captive, and where are they?” When the man answered, Matt wrote down the information and handed it to Rampert. “See if you can get some of your buddies to go to this address and secure a woman and three children, ages nine to fifteen.”
Rampert looked at Matt, then at the professor. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
Matt walked back to Werthstein, who had witnessed the exchange between Matt and Rampert.
“Now, quid pro quo,” Matt said.
“I know, I know. Lord, help me.”
“Start with the bees. They communicate, right?”
“Yes, the bees. Very good. The bees communicate throughout the swarm by pheromones. Ants do much the same thing. When bees are out looking for nectar, one scout finds it and he can send pheromone signals back to the swarm, allowing all the drones to mass on that one area. Ants are similar except, of course, they don’t fly. They scavenge for food, find what they are looking for, and then mark the trail back and forth between the colony and target area so that all the other ants can simply follow the pheromone trail.”
Matt saw Rampert in the background, talking on a telephone, nodding his head. Matt felt the MC-130 shoot upward again, leaving his stomach on the floor.
“Okay, now tell me how that is a bad thing.” Matt asked.
“I am the only one who has been able to replicate this activity through nanotechnology, using microscopic chipsets and advanced computing power that isn’t even in the experimentation phase at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore. I have written the program that allows entities to communicate by way of dropping ‘digital pheromones.’”
“And who has this technology now?”
“Well, me, and those terrorists that kidnapped my family,” Werthstein spat.
“Okay, and what have the terrorists done with this technology?”
Werthstein hesitated. Matt could see the strain on his face. Faced with the impossible moral dilemma of watching madmen execute your family or handing over secret and lethal technology to your nation’s enemies, no man could predict how he would react until faced with the problem set. This man, Matt believed, was no different. Despite the crushing reality of his situation, he suffered under an incredible burden of guilt. He was given the worst of all choices: a lose-lose situation.
“They made me apply it to a fleet of UAVs. Now they can communicate with one another, flying in the sky for days. How do you think they tracked you?”
“That’s exactly what I thought, but how did the UAVs know to track me, Matt Garrett?” Matt said.
“I accessed your files, your medical records from Walter Reed. Really not very secure at all. I uploaded your physical characteristics and some photos of you into the UAV database. The microprocessor on the queen recalculated your dimensions into a data packet it could transmit to the drones. The drones then took turns following you in the sky, all from different directions, all for short duration so as to avoid detection. It’s all biometrics. Really quite simple to do today.”
Matt stared at Werthstein, speechless.
“This was a passive activity though, Mr. Garrett. I believe what they have in mind is not passive.”
“Go on,” Matt said. “Tell me, how many UAVs do they have? What kind are they?”
“They never gave me the number. They just flew me to a couple of different places — blindfolded, of course — and made me input the code into the ground control stations, the queens. Any one queen can communicate and direct a limitless number of UAVs. I loaded four machines, but I’m not certain if they were all ground control stations. They wouldn’t tell me what type of UAVs they are, but my belief is that they are Predators. They may have also exported the data over the web, but I can’t be sure.”
“Why do you think they are Predators?” It was all coming together now. Iraq, or some rogue terrorist supporter, would not have the satellite or bandwidth capability to put a bunch of Predators in the sky and let them roam around the countryside. However, when he thought about countries like China and North Korea, he could visualize the satellite capability and a cartel of sorts with the capacity to do precisely what Dr. Werthstein feared.
“I believe they are Predators because they had to give me the weight, wing span, and so forth so that I could write the code properly.”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Matt asked.
“The worst that could happen?” Werthstein paused. “Thirty, forty Predators roaming the skies, all programmed with one target for redundancy or many programmed with several targets. Once one Predator sees its target, it will communicate instantly to the rest of the swarm, just like the bees, and move to the target area. Only, these Predators will be armed, and I believe they will be armed with nuclear weapons.”
“Ten minutes, Garrett. Got to get ready,” Rampert shouted.
Matt sat back, stunned, staring at Werthstein.