Orange Alert by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

Bolan was the last to arrive, and Brognola watched him move to the open seat at the conference table.

“Are you hurt?”

“Just a little stiff.”

Brognola glanced across at Katey, who wore a small bandage on the top of her head where she parted her hair. “Your soft probe ended up being not so soft,” he said.

“They moved the strontium before we got there,” Bolan stated flatly.

“Which is where we can start,” Aaron Kurtzman said from his place at the head of the table.

He pointed a remote at the wall and pushed a button that simultaneously dimmed the overhead lights while causing a flat-screen wall monitor to appear. On the screen, a real-time map of the Atlantic Ocean was displayed, with tens of thousands of data points shown in various colors.

“Let’s hear from Akira,” Kurtzman said.

“Ocean traffic,” Tokaido said. “We’re using a process of elimination. The strontium went to Ireland to be processed into a dirty bomb. Let’s assume that’s already happened. Step two, get the bomb to its target, presumably the United States. With today’s security, you can’t get it here on an airplane. Therefore, it will come into Mexico, Canada or directly into the States via ship. These data points—” he motioned to the screen “—are vessels. Our job now is to find the right one.”

“How do you know we haven’t missed it?” Brognola asked. “It could already be at its destination.”

“I don’t think so,” Tokaido said. “The strontium was stolen in Georgia less than two weeks ago. Some of these data points are real-time. Also on this display are overlays of everything that left Ireland in the past week. For ships already at their destination we’re employing regression analysis. We’ll eventually find the most probable ship.”

“Eventually,” Brognola said, “may not be soon enough.”

“Understood. We’re going as fast as we can.”

“Who owned the farm we hit?” Bolan asked.

“Dead end,” Carmen Delahunt answered. “We’ve already chased that to ground. Owned for ten years by a name that’s untraceable. Doesn’t exist. No link to either the North or South.”

“How about the paperwork I took?”

“Nothing there to help us locate the strontium. No shipping invoices or anything like that, but there were orders for supplies. It looks like Cypher is assembling a small army. Thirty, forty soldiers maybe.”

“A bit fewer after the night before last,” Adams said, looking across the table at Bolan.

Brognola frowned and asked, “How dangerous is the strontium? What’s the worst case that we’re facing here?”

“Not nuclear,” Tokaido said. “Dirty bombs are referred to as weapons of mass disruption. The death and destruction caused by a dirty bomb going off is no greater than that of a conventional explosion. The disruption occurs because the area becomes contaminated, people have to be evacuated and, before the site can be used again, EPA personnel have to clean the place up.”

“How bad is that?”

Tokaido shrugged. “In rural settings, not bad at all. Scrape away a few feet of the earth, bury it at sea, and it degrades over time with insignificant ecological impact. In a city it’s much worse because concrete and granite absorb and retain radiation.

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