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Page 39.
Scene 16. Montreal: Raiding Castor and Pollux
 Even as the CEO of Global Anaconda regaled the CEO of Camelback Consortium and his top advisors with their grand scheme, a game-changing scenario by Black Umbrella was underway.
Forty commandos with their full gear, including ammo and assault rifles, lined the main body of a chartered Airbus A700M Atlas as it roared over the North Atlantic from Europe to North America.
Project Gemini of the Black Umbrella Consortium was underway.
Anaconda’s Project David was about to end up dead on delivery.
The objective was to seize Global Anaconda Corporation's Castor-Pollux operational headquarters, knee-capping Project David, and appropriating the inventor's technology for the purposes of Dr. Night and his organization.
Global Anaconda had purchased an obscure Chinese manufacturer of sniper rifles, renamed it David Company or Project David. They were using it, and the Rulik assassination, as an elaborate cover for their Orbital Sniper Technology (OST).
Black Umbrella’s Project Gemini was about to take over the game.
From a quarry amid sprawling, empty farm land outside Montreal, six large vehicles roared forth into the descending dusk. They were concrete mixers that had been converted to a very special purpose by a local Black Umbrella shell company. Their headlights stabbed into the growing dusk as they trucked on noisy diesel engines, led and followed by smaller flag-signal vehicles as the law required. Each of the concrete mixers had been converted to a very special purpose for just this event, using borrowed field weapons of the old Canadian army.
With their huge mixer drums slowly rotating—gray, painted with orange stripes all around—the trucks noisily barreled toward Technopolis, Montreal’s city of technology.
The trucks would meet up at just the right critical moment with the BLUM commandos from Holland. The job would be over in about fifteen minutes—not much longer than the time it took to microwave a large burrito.
Immediately upon Louis Cartouche’s signing the Sicilian contract at the Villa Caproni, Anaconda had not wasted a moment. Before the ink from Louis’ pen was dry in Palermo, a convoy of deceptively marked Anaconda moving vans (Frontenac Movers, Inc.) had arrived at Louis’ underground facility in Montreal to remove the Pollux control to join the already tested and functional Castor unit across town.
That was a top secret Anaconda facility in the Technopolis district of the city, where the last steps would take just days to complete before the Castor-Pollux-orbiting Capricorn triad was operational and ready to smash tyrants. From orbit above the Tropic of Capricorn, Anaconda’s satellite—think Moon Raker with bullets—could pick off at will any tyrant the world’s big corponations found convenient. If the hypothetical nation of Oilistan was ruled by a jackbooted liberalista with socialist or democratic ideas, some oil-loving corponation would pay a trillion dollars, euros, or intercredits to see him replaced by a more amenable lobbyist type with a fat briefcase and a fondness for wine, women, and dance music. Anaconda planned to make a killing, both figuratively and literally.
But not so fast—Dr. Night’s troops were on the way. Black Umbrella was always a shadowy step behind, breathing stealthily down Anaconda’s neck. The tables were about to turn, as they say in Las Vegas. Black Umbrella would seize both twins—Castor and Pollux—and change the equation completely. They already had two operational destinations waiting to receive the units and plug them in—one on a remote island off the shore of Scotland, the other on a tiny island just north of Sicily in the Mediterranean. Anaconda would not know what hit them until the game for them was over, and they would look like the impotent fools that they were. BLUM and Dr. Night were about to change the balance of world power, and the outcome of history for the next century or more.
The Atlas cargo plane—thundering more than two miles high over Greenland in late afternoon sunlight—looked like a modern update on the venerable U.S. Hercules C-130 series of the previous century. The Atlas had a squat fuselage painted dark-green for these sub-polar latitudes. Like the Hercules, it had four powerful turboprop engines, but the Atlas' prop blades were scimitar-shaped, and the two propellers on each wing counter-rotated.
The forty fighting men on board were dedicated professionals who had cut all ties with their previous lives to serve with the elite fighting units of Black Umbrella (BLUM). They had been carefully recruited from top-caliber officer and NCO corps of a number of national armed forces—the French Foreign Legion; the German Army's DSO; the British Army's regular SAS/SRR; crack Italian mountain troops; South African Recces; and Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and some U.S. Navy SEALs.
Soldiers of First Tac—officially the 1st Tactical Insertion Force, sometimes 1st TIF—sat paratroop style in facing lines of canvas seats along the bulkheads in the cargo bay. First Tac was on a straight flight from Shiphol International in Amsterdam to Montreal-Mirabel International Airport in Quebec Province, Canada. That was an air distance of 5500 km (3400 miles).
The men wore casual, dark civilian clothing. For about an hour, their officers instructed them, but for the rest of the flight, the men dozed or talked. They received one hot meal, and several cold snacks, along with each man's preference of hot, fresh tea or coffee, or bottled spring water. Ample comfort facilities made for a relaxing, refreshing flight. They would be ready for action on arrival in Montreal.
Flying at 11,000 m (37,000 feet), cruising speed 780 km/h (480 mph; 420 km), the lumbering dark-green aircraft traveled for about 8 hours against the jet stream. It crossed into Canadian airspace at nightfall.
The Atlas landed at Montreal-Mirabel after 9 p.m. local time. It taxied to a remote cargo hangar, which was almost entirely shut down at the moment. Clamshell doors opened in the fuselage, and air-stairs slid down to the tarmac.
The men emerged, well-dressed and layered for the autumn cold.
As the men filed down several air-stairs, two black buses pulled up with precise timing. The buses bore crudely painted white signage for a nonexistent local fundamentalist church. They were full-size buses with 50 seats each. The rear ten rows had been removed from each bus. Heavy chains had been welded to each bus' chassis. Loose end links lay curling across the rear floors.
As each bus pulled away with a wheeze of air brakes and a gout of diesel exhaust, it gave the appearance of carrying twenty devout young men to a worship meeting. The time was 9:30 p.m. It seemed like a late Scripture assembly indeed, but nobody would notice. Montreal was the second-largest city in Canada, and the seventh largest in North America. It was the largest city in Quebec Province (or Nation, by a 2006 act of Canada’s Parliament). In a city this size, anything was possible. No police officer would think to pull them over unless they were speeding, but the two BLUM drivers and their backups would not run a single stop sign, or travel faster than the legal speed limit at any point.
Cruising down the 25 Autoroute, the buses entered the Technopol, or Technical City. Here was the concerted French Canadian technological initiative, sprawling across acres of Montreal's largest suburb of Laval.
Six converted concrete mixers, accompanied by two SUV-like vehicles with warning signals, roared into position on the access road that completely surrounded the Anaconda facility housing Castor and Pollux.
The grounds had six corners, and each got one concrete mixer backing up to it, with the open rear of its rotating drum pointing toward the buildings.
Lights were on the buildings, which covered only a modest four acres. They were pleasant, nondescript brick buildings dating to the 1950s, which had once housed a government run school for handicapped adults. Later, it had served as an offices and warehouses complex leased out to one company after another. Finally, Anaconda had purchased the site to house its secret Project David. Castor had been here for two years, and Pollux for two days.
Anaconda Consortium kept the presence of armed guards to a minimum, in order to keep a low profile. One or two private security rovers patrolled the perimeter at any time, inside a silvery chain link fence, 24/7. Inside the warehouses were another twenty armed security guards who stayed out of sight. They were disguised as firemen, and could often be seen training on the green lawns within the perimeter. Or they would polish their fire engines. Or shoot guns inside, where nobody could hear them.
As the six concrete mixers dieseled into position, the guards inside took little notice. Construction projects were a norm in the area. At any one time, you could see at least two or three tall cranes rising spider-like over the cityscape.
The men and women in the trucks wasted no time. First, they turned on the advanced, ultra-powerful, but quiet generators that had been built into the huge, slowly rotating mixer drums. These had been thoroughly tested, like the other system, and worked flawlessly.
As soon as each truck commander read their gauges, and saw that the right power was flowing through a complete circuit, they gave the order for the next switch to be thrown.
Inside each drum was a microwave beam transmitter of the most advanced and recent design—an improvement on old military models of U.S. and Canadian vintage that had looked good in the pages of Popular Mechanics magazine, but had not worked well.
In the hands of BLUM, they worked superbly.
There wasn’t much sound, nor light. The air hummed strangely, and all the leaves fell off trees and bushes inside the four acre facility. Inside, any mammalian life form—be it guards, mice, scientists, or lab rats—was cooked to the consistency of a well-done burrito.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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