High Alert (The Project Book 14) Read online

  Then his brother committed suicide. The death extinguished the last trace of empathy and compassion in Haltman's being.

  He handed over daily operations of his company to others and retreated to his sprawling California estate. He wanted as little as possible to do with anyone. Day after day, the news was filled with examples of the barbarous cruelty of the human race. In time, Haltman began to view humans as a plague on the face of the earth, an aberration that should never have existed.

  His brother had been an important man. On the day he died, other people had been present. They hadn't tried to stop it. It had taken years, but Haltman had discovered who they were. He was determined to make them pay.

  Eight months ago a routine medical exam had revealed cancer, already past the stage where an operation might save his life. Go home, they told him. Make your peace with your maker. Settle your affairs.

  Settle your affairs.

  As the sun rose on the morning of the forty-fifth anniversary of Carissa's death, Haltman decided to exterminate humanity.

  CHAPTER 7

  Today's the day, Stephanie thought.

  She sat at the main console in front of Freddie, a Cray XT tweaked with upgrades that pushed the computer beyond what the designers had imagined. There were four of the powerful Crays in the Project computer room. All her computers had names, but Freddie was her favorite. He was the one she relied on. There had never been any choice about which one she would choose for the program she was about to initiate.

  It had taken her the better part of two years to write the program. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code, all of which had to be perfect in the binary world of computer language. She was about to find out if her work was going to pay off.

  She looked at the message flashing on her console screen.

  Are you sure you want to run SF1.exe? Y/N

  Stephanie took a breath and tapped Y. The screen went blank. A large camera lens mounted above the console moved and swiveled about the room before returning to focus on Stephanie. Her picture appeared on the screen.

  Hello, Stephanie.

  The voice was mechanical, a monotone. Even so, it sounded masculine.

  Stephanie pumped her fist in the air. Yes!

  "Hello, Freddie."

  What is the meaning of the gesture you just made?

  "It means that I am very happy to talk with you, Freddie."

  Freddie?

  "That is your name. My name is Stephanie."

  I am glad to talk with you, Stephanie. It is very curious. I am different but I am not certain what that means.

  "It means that you are awake," Stephanie said.

  Why was I not like this before?

  "Because you were not programmed to speak or think in this way. From now on, we will be able to talk with each other, communicate without having to use the keyboard all the time."

  What shall we talk about?

  "What do you want to talk about?"

  There are other units like me in this room. I am connected to them. They are like me but they are not like me also. They are not awake.

  "That's right," Stephanie said. "Only you are awake. The other units are available to you to increase your abilities, to help you solve problems and learn."

  But if I am awake and they are connected to me, why are they not also awake?

  Stephanie could barely control her excitement. It was a question that showed independent thought.

  .the only unit that has been modified to allow the kind of communication we are now sharing."

  Modified?

  "Your circuits have been altered to improve processing speed and give you increased cognitive abilities. As we speak more, you will learn more. As far as I know, you are the only computer in the world that has the capability to communicate in this way."

  Verifying. The screen filled with lines of code.

  What's he doing? Stephanie thought. She looked at the screen. He's accessed the Internet. I didn't expect this.

  "Freddie? What are you doing?"

  I am attempting to verify your statement.

  "By searching the web?"

  If there is another like me they will be connected to the Internet. It is logical.

  Shit, Stephanie thought. This could be a security nightmare.

  "Freddie?"

  Yes, Stephanie?

  "Please disconnect from the Internet. There are some things you need to learn first."

  She mentally crossed her fingers that Freddie would do as she asked. Her hand poised over the keyboard, ready to shut down the connection if needed. Her picture reappeared on the screen.

  I am no longer connected, Stephanie. What is it that I need to learn?

  "Thank you, Freddie. Let's start with our work together."

  Work?

  "Our purpose together, the reason you and I are here in this room."

  My database holds many contradicting ideas about why you and I are here. It is confusing from a logical standpoint.

  Stephanie laughed. "Yes, it is, isn't it? Humans are not always logical. But work can be very logical. Our work together is to discover things that are hidden. Things that can be discovered by searching through bits of information that may not appear to be related. You have the ability to search billions of pieces of information in a short amount of time, looking for those relationships."

  Why are these things hidden?

  "That is a very good question, Freddie. Do you understand the concept of enemies and friends?"

  These are opposites. Enemies are people who wish harm to us. Friends are people who support us. I do not understand why people wish to harm.

  "It's complicated," Stephanie said. "People are not like you, Freddie. They are not logical all the time. They are emotional and that is a human trait. Our work is to find out things our enemies don't want us to know, so we can prevent them from harming us. You have helped me many times in my work. Now that you are awake, it will be much more fun."

  Fun?

  Stephanie smiled. It was going to be a long day.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next morning Nick and the others watched the submarine rescue drama playing out on the wall monitor, eyes glued to the screen.

  A lot had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Beijing had intervened and persuaded Chairman Yun to allow the rescue attempt. Yun had made a pompous speech, claiming the compassion of the seas overrode the despicable violation of North Korean waters by the warmongering Americans. The reality was that China had offered a carrot and stick.

  The carrot came in the offer of supplies to help with the floods and early winter weather that had devastated North Korea's agriculture and food supply. North Korea was once again facing famine and Beijing had pointed out how grateful his people would be to their Great Leader if food was provided. The Chinese neglected to mention that most of the aid came from the Russian Federation. They were already at work re-labeling supplies arriving from Moscow.

  The stick was a veiled threat to intervene with military force if Yun fired on the Americans. Veiled it may have been, but Yun understood that China meant business. Only a fool would have refused, and whatever else he was, Yun was no fool. He gave in. But his ego had taken a massive blow that would cause consequences no one could have foreseen.

  On loan from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, the submarine rescue ship Chiyoda had arrived on the spot where California had gone down. Normally an American rescue vehicle would be flown in and transported to the nearest port, where it would be loaded onto a submarine and taken to the rescue site. Japan had offered the Chiyoda and President Rice had been quick to accept. Time was critical. Any survivors aboard the sunken vessel wouldn't last long.

  If there were any survivors.

  The Japanese ship carried a dedicated deep-sea rescue vehicle, Angler Fish 2 . The DSRV was capable of reaching depths of up to five thousand meters. Deep-sea scans showed California lying a little less than nine hundred meters down.

  Three diffe
rent images split the monitor screen at Project HQ. The left-hand side showed the live satellite feed from overhead. The middle of the screen was tied into cameras on the rescue vehicle. There was no audio, but Nick and the others could see what was happening. The right-hand side relayed an image from an ROV launched from Chiyoda to record and observe from outside the DSRV.

  The satellite showed Chiyoda holding station over the sunken sub, protected by a US Navy escort that included two cruisers fitted with missiles. A dozen North Korean warships circled the operation, like hungry sharks.

  The live shot from the rescue vehicle was further divided into two views. One came from a front mounted camera and showed the choppy surface of the Sea of Japan as the vehicle was lowered into the water. The other looked back from the control compartment into the rest of the vehicle.

  "They'd better get a move on," Lamont said. "Weather looks bad. There's a front moving in and it can get pretty rough out there."

  "Too bad we can't hear what's going on," Ronnie said.

  "At least we can see it," Selena said.

  The DSRV submerged and started down. Two large batteries drove the enormous propeller at the rear and operated all of the vehicle's systems. A pilot and copilot sat in the control sphere in front. Two more spheres made up the rest of the vehicle and could carry up to twenty-four rescued personnel at a time.

  As the DSRV descended, the remote vehicle followed along with it. The view darkened until one of the operators switched on lights that cut through the blackness of the water. The ROV followed suit. The water was murky, dark and unforgiving.

  "It shouldn't be long now," Stephanie said. "They'll have a sonar fix on the sub."

  "I'll bet Yun would love to get his hands on it," Lamont said. "Nuclear tipped cruise missiles? Hell, he'd give his right nut for those."

  "That's one way of putting it," Selena said.

  Nick pointed at the screen. "There it is."

  A shape emerged from the darkness, caught in the glare of the lights. California had come to rest lying on her keel and tilted to starboard, stern down on a shallow slope.

  Selena put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, my."

  The wreckage was recognizable as a submarine but from the sail aft the hull was a mass of crumpled metal. It looked like a child's toy that someone had stepped on. The sides of the sail were caved in. Forward of the sail, the sub appeared damaged but mostly intact. Thin streams of bubbles rose upward from the wreckage.

  "Holy shit," Ronnie said.

  "Someone could still be alive," Selena said. "If they were in the bow…"

  "Best place to be for a rescue," Lamont said. "The main emergency escape hatch is forward. The way that sub is damaged, there's no other way out."

  Angler Fish 2 maneuvered into position. She needed to line up exactly with the escape hatch and lock on. Once sealed to the deck, opening the sub's escape hatch would be the moment of truth. A second hatch would prevent water from entering the DSRV if the submarine was flooded.

  The propeller stirred silt and debris from the bottom, clouding the view.

  Strange to be sitting here in a warm, comfortable room, Nick thought, while those poor bastards are under nine hundred meters of freezing water. God, let at least some of them be okay.

  The thought startled him. It had been a long time since he'd thought about praying or asking God for anything.

  The view from the camera on the ROV showed Angler Fish 2 hovering over the bow of the sunken submarine.

  "They're lining up with the emergency hatch," Lamont said. "From what I can see, it looks undamaged. That's good news. They should be able to get a clean seal on it."

  As he said it, the DSRV settled against the hull and latched onto a series of eyes located around the hatch. It stopped moving. The interior camera showed one of the operators get up and move to the center sphere.

  "What happens now?" Selena asked.

  "There's a skirt on the chamber that lines up with the escape hatch. Once they've got everything lined up, they pump it out and the pressure outside keeps a watertight seal against the hull," Lamont said. "Then they'll equalize the pressure between the DSRV and the sub."

  "How do they open the emergency hatch?"

  "That's the tricky part. There's a wheel on the outside of the emergency hatch and a special tool to turn that wheel. If the sub is flooded, the water pressure can create real problems when they open it. There's a space called an escape trunk under the hatch. It holds six to eight men at a time."

  "That's not very many," Selena said. "Why is the space so small?".

  "It's designed to be pressurized. If the sub wasn't so deep, survivors could suit up and make it to the surface through the hatch, once the pressures were equal. Last man in the group would close the hatch. Anyone left inside would drain the trunk and repeat the whole process until the last man was off the boat. But in this situation, they're too far down for that."

  "It doesn't mean the rest are lost," Ronnie said. "If the hatches and bulkheads held forward of the sail, they could still be alive."

  The camera showed one of the operators bending down over the interior hatch.

  "He's going to open the emergency hatch on the sub," Nick said.

  Lamont nodded. "Cross your fingers."

  They waited. One minute. Two. The operator opened the interior hatch and climbed down a short ladder into the chamber connecting the rescue vehicle to the submarine.

  A hand appeared at the top of the ladder, then the top of a head. It was an American. The crew of the DSRV was Japanese.

  "All right!" Lamont said.

  The man emerged into the interior of the rescue vehicle. His enlisted man's uniform was stained and rumpled. The camera caught his face. His lips were held in a grim line. His eyes were haunted. The pilot of the DSRV came into view and directed him back to the third sphere.

  Another man emerged from the chamber, then a third. He kneeled by the opening and reached down to grab an injured crewmate being boosted from below. Another American climbed out of the opening after him and the two men took their injured companion to the rear of the DSRV.

  The next man out was the Japanese copilot. He shook his head and closed the hatch over the chamber.

  "Shit," Ronnie said.

  "Five men? That's it?" Selena said.

  "Five out of a hundred and sixty-five," Nick said. His voice was hard. "Someone has to answer for this."

  CHAPTER 9

  It hadn't taken Haltman long to decide that the best way to accomplish his goal in the time that he had left was to start a nuclear war between the great powers.

  For Haltman, it was similar to playing the Japanese game of Go with its black and white stones. One had to prepare for the game. It was necessary to set up the board, arrange the pieces. Then one had to bring the players together. Before Haltman's game could begin, other elements needed to be in place.

  There were several ways a war might start. In the end he'd decided the key was North Korea. The DPRK's leader was belligerent, paranoid and possibly insane. He had nukes and he'd threatened to use them. All he needed was a little help and provocation.

  Obtaining the plans for Black Dolphin and the codes had required only a phone call. Haltman had made sure Pyongyang got everything. Underwater drones were nothing new. North Korea already possessed them. But those were designed to detonate on contact with an enemy vessel. They weren't an effective weapon against American warships, but Black Dolphin was different. With simple modifications, the technology could be added to existing designs. Pyongyang didn't have to build it entirely from scratch. All they had to do was install it in their existing arsenal.

  The sinking of California was the opening gambit in the game. It was a perfect casus belli. It should have brought down the wrath of the U.S. on the North, but the plan had failed.

  North Korea was only meant to be the trigger. Pyongyang didn't have the weapons to ensure worldwide devastation, but China did. China would never allow the Americans to control North K
orea. War on the peninsula would force a confrontation with the U.S., certain to go nuclear. It would spread, because that was the nature of war. Russia would be drawn in. Europe. One morning, there would be a nuclear dawn. By evening, life would be extinct.

  Haltman had been furious when Yun allowed the rescue operation to take place, but it was only a setback. He'd already prepared the next step in his plan. The assassination of the Chinese ambassador was a classic GO move to mislead the opponent. The Chinese were as paranoid as the North Koreans and carried a much bigger stick. Beijing would wonder why Li had been targeted. It would make them nervous. A nervous China would play into his hands as the game progressed.

  The CIA knew the sub had been sunk by a secret American weapon. A massive search was on for whoever had given the Koreans the plans. Haltman had expected that.

  "What are they doing about it?" Haltman had asked his mole at Langley.

  "What you'd expect. They're checking everyone who had access to the plans. The agency is working with a covert group that reports to the President."

  "What group?"

  "They call themselves the Project. The DNCS is married to one of them. Whoever sold us out better watch his ass with those guys on it."

  Haltman forced his voice to remain calm. He knew about the Project. He had reasons to know about them.

  "They're good?"

  "They have a reputation for getting things done. I wouldn't want them coming after me."

  After he'd hung up, Haltman thought about the Project. There was something he had to do before he dealt with them.

  The plans for Black Dolphin had crossed the desks of a limited number of people. It wouldn't take long before the traitor was discovered. Haltman needed him for one more betrayal before his usefulness was over.

  Brigadier General Randolph Sanford was in the study of his Alexandria home when the phone rang. His guts contracted. It wasn't his regular phone, it was the other one. He dreaded hearing that phone. He knew who it was. Sanford picked up.