Authors: Robert Doherty
Jolo Island
Abayon was in pain. There was nothing unusual about that. His life had been full of pain ever since his encounter with Unit 731. But today he felt it more deeply than usual. And he knew it was not a spike, but the heralding of even more pain to come. The doctors had given him six months. But that was only a guess.
He leaned back in his wheelchair, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, trying to expel the agony with the air. It did not work. He closed his eyes for several moments, then opened them and reached for the piece of paper that had been brought to him several minutes earlier. It detailed the money made and disbursed the previous evening in Hong Kong. The numbers lessened the pain. If tonight's auction did the same, his group would have gone a long way toward funding the war against the rich for many years to come.
There was, of course, no word from Moreno. Security dictated that. The only way to know if he was successful would be to watch CNN and wait for the news.
CHAPTER 15
Oahu
"I have a job for you." Royce stared at Foster and waited.
The scientist in charge of the Sim-Center avoided his eyes. "I'm doing the job I was given."
"Multitask," Royce said simply.
Foster glanced into the control room where the military people were changing from day shift to evening shift. "Did that person really die in the parachute drop?" He nodded his head toward the control room. "They think it's part of an obstacle in their exercise, losing half the recon element. But you and I know better, don't we? I didn't program it in. That was a real message from real people."
Royce folded his hands in his lap. "You think you know better? Than what? You don't have a clue." And neither do I, he thought.
"You're doing all this for deniability," Foster said. "You're using me as a cutout—don't think I don't realize that I take the fall if the shit hits the fan on this."
Royce had read Foster's file. The man was not stupid, that was certain, although he had been rather indiscreet years ago. Royce briefly wondered how many people worked for the Organization simply going around and gathering blackmail material on people the Organization might eventually use someday. And not for the first time he wondered what the Organization had on him.
"You know what happens to you if the shit hits the fan?" Royce asked.
"What?"
"You die."
Foster blinked, then ran his tongue over his lips. "Who are you? That other guy said he was NSA. But you're not NSA, are you?"
"No." Royce said nothing more.
Foster fidgeted in his seat for several moments. "All right," he finally said. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to hack into Space Command's tracking records." He gave Foster the time period and estimated location in which David's plane had gone down. "I want whatever they have on it. I want to know exactly when and where it went down. I know they track every goddamn thing moving in the sky now with their satellites." Ever since 9/11, keeping an eye on the skies had become a much higher priority.
"Who was on this plane and why do you think it crashed?"
"That's not something you need to know," Royce said.
Foster was confused. "But why don't you send a request—"
"I want you to do this without anyone knowing you're doing it. Between me and you. Are you capable of that?"
Foster slowly nodded. "I should be able to get in there. I have access to the government's secure system, so that helps a lot. The hard part will be leaving no trace of my visit."
"I recommend you don't," Royce said. "Or else you'll get visitors who won't be as nice as me."
Johnston Atoll
Moreno knew he should stay on the submarine. He'd even promised Abayon that he would, though at the time they both knew it was a promise that would not be kept. Since their first days together as teenagers fighting the Japanese, they had always held the belief that a leader led from the front. Moreno knew that a major reason why the Abu Sayef had not been as active as it might have been was Abayon's confinement to the wheelchair. While it had been a politically prudent move for the group to lay low for many years, it was also partly because it took Moreno a long time to convince his old friend that even though he could not personally lead his men, he could—and had to—issue orders for others to go out and kill and die.
Moreno, though, was not confined to a wheelchair, and the spry old man slid down the side of the submarine into the waiting rubber boat crowded with his men. There were two other similar boats, each holding sixteen men. That left a skeleton crew of five on board the submarine, enough to hold it in place until they returned.
Moreno sniffed the air as they cast off in the dark. The wind was shoreborne, as he had planned. There was no moon yet, leaving only the scant illumination of the stars. He didn't need a compass to find Johnston Atoll, though. The complex was well-lit, glittering like a beacon three kilometers away.
Using small electric engines, the three Zodiacs glided silently through the water toward the lights. Moreno sat in the bow of the lead boat, his silenced submachine gun across his knees. A kilometer from shore he directed the small fleet to the left, to the landing spot he had picked, out of the glare of the lights. The three boats ran up on the beach and the crews jumped overboard, dragging them above the tide mark.
There was no need for Moreno to issue any orders now, since they had rehearsed what they were about to do at least a hundred times on a mock-up of the facility on Jolo Island. The forty-eight men moved toward a fenced compound set about three hundred meters away from the main complex. Inside the eight-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, there was a bunker shaped like a pyramid with the top half cut off. According to the intelligence Moreno had been able to gather, it was built according to U.S. government specifications. He had been able to find the exact same type of bunker in Subic Bay at the abandoned American base there. It was used to hold precision munitions when the American fleet operated out of Subic—at least, that's what the Americans had publicly claimed. The persistent rumor was that the bunker had held the fleet's nuclear weapons.
Moreno grimaced as he pushed through a spiny bush. The Americans lied. They lied, and then they said no one else could do what they did. They bombed and invaded at will, yet acted like they were protecting the world.
Moreno paused in the cover of the bushes as four pairs of men crawled up to the fence and began snipping the links with bolt cutters. He looked left and right and was satisfied that his flank security sections were doing exactly as they had been trained. There was no sign of any guard, which he found surprising and a bit disconcerting. He could not believe the Americans would leave what was supposed to be in the bunker unguarded. Had the intelligence they'd bought at such great price been wrong?
They made four holes in the fence. The lead scouts crawled through. Moreno forced himself to hold back and let the scouts do their job. A minute passed. Another. Then a dark figure reappeared near the fence, gesturing. Moreno led the rest of the force out of the bushes and through the fence. The force deployed around the bunker as he and four men went to the large steel doors.
It was as the source had said. A lock was bolted in place on a thick hasp. One of the men shrugged off a backpack and removed a bottle of powerful acid. The others stepped back as the man donned a breathing mask, then opened the bottle and began to drip the acid on the lock. They had timed this on the same grade and amount of steel, and it would take fifteen minutes. But it was quiet, as opposed to the quick work an explosive charge would make of the lock.
As one poured the acid, other men checked the outside of the doors, searching for any alarm systems. There were none. The arrogance of the lack of security systems only played into what Moreno already believed about the Americans.
He could feel the tension mounting among his men as each minute passed. They had expected to meet at least one guard. If there were none posted, then there was a good chance there would be a roving patrol. The last thing they needed was gunfire or any sort of alarm to be given. Everything relied on stealth. Moreno's men were all armed with silenced weapons, but the guards would certainly not be. One shot and the plan would unravel. There were contingencies, but Moreno preferred not to have to use them.
With a startling clank the lock fell off.
Moreno and the others stepped forward and slid open the hasp, then grabbed the handles for the heavy doors. With a slight squeak of protest, the doors swung wide open. The interior of the bunker was pitch-black. Half of the group edged in, the other half staying outside. The doors swung shut and flashlights were turned on.
Moreno let out a slight sigh, not enough to be noticed by others, but enough to release the tension that had been building ever since he noted there was no guard on the bunker. The target was there, the only object in the large cavernous space. Set on a cart were four large, stainless steel canisters, each five feet high and two feet in diameter. Prominently displayed on the side of each was the warning triangle for a deadly chemical agent.
The U.S. government had long claimed it had destroyed all toxic agents in its inventory at the plant here on Johnston Atoll. As with many other things, Moreno knew for certain now that it was a lie. In those four canisters was a classified nerve agent, a variation of the extremely dangerous VX, which had been designated ZX.
He directed his special handling teams forward. Four men to each canister. They removed the four canisters and placed them on stretchers. They then strapped the canisters down and gathered near the large doors. The flashlights were turned off, the doors opened, and the group exited.
They carefully made their way through the holes in the fence and back to the Zodiacs. The rubber boats were shoved off and they headed back toward the submarine. There was still no sign of any alarm being raised.
Moreno sat in the bow of the lead boat staring at the steel canister that rested in the center of it. Not only was information about ZX a highly held secret, the fact that it had been developed
before
its sister agent, VX, was something very few people were privy to. According to most sources, VX was developed in 1952 by the British. In fact, ZX was developed in early 1945 by the Japanese at Unit 731. The formula for it was appropriated by the Americans when they gathered several of the lead scientists from 731 under the auspices of Operation Paper Clip. The information was shared by the Americans with the British, who developed a less lethal version they designated VX.
All this information had been gained by the Abu Sayef at great expense and effort. Bribery, torture, and murder had blazed a trail to these truths. While VX was considered by many to be the most lethal chemical agent in the world, it had half the lethality of ZX. Anyone exposed to just five milligrams of ZX died. Each of these canisters contained the potential for two million lethal doses. What made ZX very different and much more dangerous than VX—besides the higher lethality—was while the latter was in liquid form and difficult to make into a gas, ZX was already in a compressed gas state inside the tubes.
They arrived at the submarine, and looking toward shore, saw no sign of any alert or activity. With great care they hauled the canisters on deck. They slid three of them through the deck hatch into the sub, securing them in the forward torpedo room in place of the longer weapons. Moreno remained on deck with the fourth. Where a three-inch gun had once been bolted, there was now a device that resembled a gun with an oversized barrel that flared out to a four-foot-wide nozzle.
The fourth canister was slid into a rack at the base of the erstwhile gun placement and tied down. Moreno then ordered everyone else off the deck except one man. He was their chemical expert and wore a protective suit and mask. The man glanced at Moreno, waiting for him to leave also. The elder man shook his head. He wanted to set an example and make sure everything was done exactly right. He gestured for the expert to continue.
The man shrugged, then connected a hose to the back of the tube. As he was doing this, Moreno climbed up the outside of the conning tower and took his position on the small space on top. He held onto the railing with one hand as he picked up the mike with the other. He issued orders for the submarine to get under way, setting a course that would bring it closer to the atoll.
Moreno glanced down at the deck. The expert gave him the thumbs-up.
When Moreno nodded, the man walked to the bottom of the tower and stripped off the protective suit, then joined him on the bridge. Johnston Atoll was now less than two kilometers away.
Moreno and the expert went into the sub. "Seal all hatches," Moreno ordered.
When the board showed all green, Moreno turned to the expert. "Do it."
The man held a small remote. He pressed the red button.
It was anticlimactic, Moreno thought, as he went to the periscope. The sub was still on the surface. "Turn to course one eight zero, maintain slow," Moreno ordered.
He shifted the periscope as the sub turned and ran parallel to the atoll. Moreno could see no sign of the agent being sprayed, so he had to trust that the job had been done right. He glanced at the expert, who was watching a stopwatch.
His attention back on the periscope, Moreno saw they were now even with the island. He watched as it slowly slid by. He turned the periscope and glanced at the expert. The man clicked the watch and gave a thumbs-up. Moreno looked one more time at Johnston Atoll. Still no sign of anything unusual. He snapped up the handles.
"Dive," he ordered. "Course one-one-four degrees, full speed." He looked at the digital clock in the control room. "We must make the rendezvous in three hours and six minutes exactly."
* * *
On Johnston Atoll death came on the air, unseen and odorless. Some of the buildings in the main complex had been designed to handle Level IV contaminants, but these building with their complex filtering systems were designed to keep biological and chemical agents
inside,
not prevent outside agents from entering.
The first to be affected was the lone guard on duty at the airstrip control tower. The ZX was borne in from the ocean by the wind, carried across the runway. He had been reading a novel while the raid was conducted a kilometer and a half away. He was still reading as the first molecules of ZX arrived. He blinked as he felt unexpected tears form in his eyes. Two seconds later his throat constricted and he gasped for breath. His mind was desperately trying to figure out what was happening as it passed from consciousness to unconsciousness.
Which was fortunate for him. Every muscle in his body began to convulse as the agent spread, the ZX binding to the acetylcholinesterase enzymes at the end of each synaptic membrane. This made the AChE inactive, which then made it impossible for the nerve endings to stop firing, thus the uncontrolled muscle activity. Which quickly led to paralysis and death as the lungs stopped working.
All of this happened within thirty seconds.
The gas floated into the main complex, sucked in by the air-conditioning units in all the buildings and spewed out into the rooms inside. The results were the same. Most of those on the island were contaminated while they slept, and went from sleep to unconsciousness to death in half a minute without any awareness. The few others who were awake had those few moments of awareness that something was wrong. Then they too died.
Nine hundred sixty civilians and 250 military personnel were dead within five minutes.
The generators, amply fueled, continued to run, and the lights on the island continued to glow in the darkness.