forcing it to stop by practically throwing himself in front of it. Thankfully it was a farmer and not a terrorist. He talked fast, convinced the driver to help him, then gathered the children together and helped them into the cargo bed. He breathlessly used the farmer’s cell phone to call for help…
PECOS EAST TRAINING AREA,
CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, NEW MEXICO
THAT SAME TIME
Ariadna Vega threw open the office door and flipped on the light. “We got it!” she shouted.
FBI Deputy Director Bruno Watts, asleep on the sofa in Jason Richter’s office at the Task Force TALON headquarters complex, blinked at the light but was instantly on his feet. The task force’s new commanding officer did not look like your typical “snake-eater” ex–Navy SEAL—he was shorter than average, wiry, and rather soft- spoken around others. As his hair thinned and grayed he decided to shave his head, so he could still intimidate even in an office or social setting, but otherwise no one would ever recognize him as one of the world’s most highly skilled and experienced experts in unconventional warfare and counterterrorist operations. “What is it?”
“CID One’s locator beacon just went off,” Ariadna said breathlessly. “The unit’s been activated.”
“Where?”
“About twenty miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas.”
“Amarillo…” Watts tried to think of the significance of that city, but nothing came immediately to mind. “What about Richter?”
“No word from him, but he’s the only one who could have activated the CID unit.”
“But it doesn’t mean he’s controlling it, right?” Since taking command of the unit, Watts had been taking a crash course in the Cybernetic Infantry Device—and the more he learned the more excited he got about employing this incredible high-tech weapon system.
“He’s alive, I know it.”
“If he is, he’s got some explaining to do,” Watts said. “Are we…?”
“We’re getting ready to launch right now,” Ariadna said. “We’re only about a hundred miles away—less than fifteen minutes in the air.”
“Good. You stay here and man the command post. Give me any updates you receive.” He pulled on a leather jacket and hurried out to a waiting helicopter that would take them to Cannon Air Force Base, where a jet was waiting to fly him to Amarillo.
Just before touching down on the parking ramp, Watts suddenly slapped his hands together. “Shit!” he shouted, and he fumbled for the intercom control panel inside the helicopter. He dialed his microphone to “COM 2” and keyed the mike button: “Talon, this is Alpha.”
“Go ahead, Alpha,” Ariadna responded from the task force command center.
“Send an urgent message immediately to the FBI office in Amarillo and the Department of Energy. Whoever’s got the robot, I know what their target will be.”
On FM Road 293 four miles west of where Richter and the hostages had been dropped off, the two vans encountered the first roving patrol, an armored Suburban belonging to a private security company. The men inside the Suburban radioed the two vans’ license plate numbers to their headquarters inside the plant; they in turn contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety. The response came back a few moments later: vans rented in Amarillo, not reported stolen or missing, rented to private individuals.
A second request went out for the IDs of the renters. The data came back moments later: both vans rented to individuals from Mexico, no local address, no local destination. That got a lot of folks’ attention. The Carson County Sheriff’s Department was called and a request made to do a traffic stop and an ID and citizenship check, with the Potter and Armstrong County Sheriff’s Departments, alerted because the vehicles were so close to their jurisdictions. Although FM 293 was a public road, the Department of Energy had agreed to use the full force of the U.S. government to defend and indemnify the state, county, and local law enforcement agencies from any liability in conducting investigations requested by plant security.
There was no question that whatever plant security wanted, they would get, for this was the Pantex Plant, America’s only facility dedicated to the assembly, disassembly, and disposal of nuclear weapons. Administered by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (Defense Programs) and operated by a conglomerate of three nuclear engineering companies, Pantex’s mission was to assemble, disassemble, inspect, and store nuclear warheads.
After contacting the sheriff’s department and requesting a traffic stop, the security patrol returned to its rounds and continued to monitor the perimeter security while long-range telescopic low-light TV cameras continued to track the vans. FM 293 was actually separated from the plant itself by over two and a half miles. In between the road and the plant were two explosive incineration pits where the high explosive parts of nuclear weapons were destroyed or where testing of new explosive materials could take place, and also by a one-mile-square storage facility, mostly abandoned. At one time nuclear warheads awaiting distribution to military facilities were stored there, but no new warheads had been produced for decades. The plant itself was one mile south of the storage facility.
The vans were observed traveling west on FM 293 until it intersected Highway 136, where remote monitoring from the Pantex facility was terminated. The Potter County Sheriff’s Department was notified that the vans were now in their jurisdiction, and dispatchers put out a message on their units’ data terminals to be on the lookout for the vans and do a traffic stop and search if possible. But as soon as the request was handed off to multiple agencies, concern over the vans quickly waned. The vans hadn’t stopped or done anything suspicious; no laws had been broken. If Carson County hadn’t had probable cause to stop and search the vehicle, Potter County certainly didn’t. The request to stop the vans was relayed but largely ignored by the graveyard shift on patrol.
But the assault was already underway.
It took less than seventy seconds for the Cybernetic Infantry Device to carry two of Yegor Zakharov’s commandos and their backpacks full of weapons and gear the six tenths of a mile between FM 293 and the access road to Sheridan Drive west of the north end of the Pantex facility. The land was cleared and furrowed dirt, a simple buffer zone between the explosive incineration pits and the public road that looked like normal farmland—but the area was covered by a network of laser “fences,” covering everything from one to ten feet aboveground, that would alert plant security if any of the beams were broken. But it was easy enough for the CID unit’s infrared sensor to see the laser beams, and even easier for the robot to jump over the fences, even loaded up with all of its “passengers” and their gear. The robot dropped off the men and their equipment at the intersection of Sheridan Drive and North Eleventh Street and ran off into the darkness.
North Eleventh Street between the incineration pits and the weapon storage area was unlighted. They proceeded quickly down the road about a half-mile until they came to a single twelve-foot-high fence running eastward, with a security vehicle access road just outside the fence. At the end of the fence was a dirt and stone berm twenty feet high and a hundred and twenty feet thick, topped with another twelve-foot-high fence. There was a five-story guard tower at the corner of the berm. Floodlights erected every five hundred feet illuminated the top of the berm and the entire area beyond as brightly as daytime.
Called Technical Zone Delta, or TZ-D, this was the weapons storage area. TZ-D had two main purposes: storage of plutonium “pits”—the hollow sphere of nuclear material that was the heart of a nuclear device, for eventual reuse or destruction—and storage of nuclear warheads, from the United States military as well as Russia and other nuclear nations, awaiting dismantling. TZ-D was divided into four Technical Areas, or TAs. TA-1 was the security, inspection, and classification area at the single entrance to the storage facility; TA-2 was the eleven igloos, or storage bunkers, set aside for nuclear weapon electronic components and triggers; TA-3 was the forty- two-pit storage igloos, each housing anywhere from two to four hundred pits; and TA-4 was the eight igloos set aside for storing warheads awaiting dismantling.
TA-4 was the target.
The two vans seen earlier on FM 293 were now spotted by Pantex security monitors heading east on Farm to Market Road 245. They had apparently left Highway 136 and were now approaching the weapons storage area at high speed. The tall guillotine gate at the entrance was closed, and the security detail on duty around the entire
