“Why are we following them?” a man with a heavily bandaged face asked.
“Because you failed to capture the woman,” Gregorovich said.
“We have helicopters and jamming equipment,” Victor Kirov replied. “And twenty trained commandos on board. We could take her now with ease.”
Gregorovich didn’t like having official Russian agents on his team, or even the Red Army commandos they’d sent him, but at least he could trust the soldiers. With an ambitious GRU man like Kirov, that was not possible.
“You’re lucky I allowed you to come aboard, Victor. You’ve lost face with me in more ways than one.”
Kirov bristled at the comment but didn’t respond.
“Don’t you see?” Gregorovich asked. “The Americans know something. They wouldn’t be driving through the waves at flank speed if they didn’t. They are the hounds chasing the fox. We are the hunters on horseback. At this point, it’s best to shadow them from a distance, using the satellite granted us by the Kremlin to keep an eye on them from over the horizon. When they settle on a final location, we’ll act.”
Kirov snorted and shook his head. “If Thero proves to have a workable weapon, the Americans will swarm here like a horde of angry bees. Our little force will be no match for them. We must find him and destroy or take what he is building before he tests it in a way that alerts the world.”
“Take it?” Gregorovich said. “So we have alternate plans now?”
“If some of the technology can be recovered, we are to do so,” Kirov noted.
“Those were not my orders,” Gregorovich said.
“They’re mine,” Kirov replied.
This was odd, Gregorovich thought, but not totally unexpected. He shrugged it off, more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t been told than the actual task.
“And what are we to do with the little toy you brought along?” He nodded toward a case secured to the far bulkhead. A nuclear warhead lay inside. A suitcase bomb. The mother of all suitcase bombs, really.
The Russian designation was RA-117H. While most tactical warheads yield a few kilotons at best — enough to vaporize several city blocks and perhaps devastate a square mile or so — the RA-117H yielded far more. Nearly three times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
“Once we have samples of the technology, we are to activate the weapon and obliterate the site. There are to be no remnants of Thero or his experiments this time.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Maxmillian Thero walked past a line of his engineers and technicians, a group of misfits he’d molded into a production team. Among them was a North Korean who’d escaped Kim Jong-il, an Iranian couple who’d fallen under suspicion of the radical Ahmadinejad government when their efforts in building his bomb were sabotaged by an American or Israeli computer virus, a Pakistani scientist wanted by Interpol for selling nuclear secrets, a middle-aged German woman whose radical thoughts made her persona non grata in her homeland, and a youth from Chechnya who was brilliant beyond his years but who’d been forced into hiding under the threat of a death sentence for killing Russian soldiers.
In a way, they were his children, Thero mused. But only in a way.
A mixture of fear, promises, and lack of other options kept them at his side, working like devout believers.
“You are the lost sheep whom I’ve gathered beneath my wings,” Thero said, the arrogance in his baritone voice echoing in the semidarkened control room. “Together, we shall witness the fruits of our labor. The brilliance of my genius.”
He moved to a control panel and flipped a series of switches. Lights came on around them, and a suite of computer monitors lit up. Beyond the panels lay a large Plexiglas window. On the other side, a great cavern was illuminated. Perfectly spherical, it stretched nearly five hundred feet from the polished stone floor to the curved, domelike roof. Much of it was natural, but Thero’s believers and his slaves had worked it into the shape of a perfect sphere.
Inside the sphere sat a mechanical orb, made of metal pipes and scaffolding. It resembled a monstrous gyroscope, and, in a sense, it could act as one, pivoting in any and all directions.
This was Thero’s weapon, the ultimate expression of his genius. With it, he could direct vast amounts of energy toward any point on Earth. But, unlike most weapons, Thero’s would not rain destruction down from above. It would send it surging up from below.
By disturbing the zero-point energy contained within the Earth, Thero could channel this energy through the heart of the globe if he chose to.
One by one, a bank of indicator lights went green.
“All systems go,” announced the Chechen.
“Set for minimal power draw,” Thero said.
The engineers busied themselves with Thero’s protocol. They went through checklists and procedures and soon came to the point of no return.
“Switching from geothermal input,” the German woman said. The lights dimmed for a second and then returned to full brightness.