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Page 40.
 The two buses drove along the night-time highway, and turned off onto an industrial boulevard. The whole area was well-lit with security lights, and several large corporate buildings had private security patrol vehicles parked in their front driveways. At the far end of a small access road smothered in huge trees, was a small brick building with the legend National Special Projects in black letters on a white background. In smaller letters underneath were the words Global Anaconda Consortium. Each was repeated in French. The paint was still damp.
The site resembled a military facility. It was recessed from the main city boulevard by a large, shadowy parking lots without lights, then a silvery perimeter fence. Within that was a belt of rolling lawns, and then the low brick walls with small, opaque windows.
The two buses rolled across the parking lot and pulled up at the main gate, several guards stepped out of a large guard shack to challenge them. A man in charge leapt from the bus, looking efficient and legit, and waved to the guards as if they were about to become friends and colleagues within the Anaconda family. Several Anaconda guards, looking relaxed, stepped out to greet the busses. Inside the perimeter, four more guards with assault rifles, and a large, well-trained German shepherd dog, stood watch.
The brief interlude lasted about two minutes, during which the guards called for papers or I.D. and the bus commando told them in a relaxed voice: “Wait a moment…our supervisor is on the way. We are going to dig up the sewer line. Can you smell the stench?”
The Anaconda guards looked at each other, puzzled.
To double-check all this, a guard inside the shack picked up a land line telephone to call his superiors in the buildings, only to find the line was dead. He took out a cell phone, and found that it had no connections. He could not call out. Calls coming in, if there were any, would simply go to answering devices or else drop into the ether.
A large truck came roaring around a corner, did a quick Y-turn, and backed up to the gate. As the puzzled Anaconda guards looked on, the truck emitted a strange, low humming sound. The air flickered with a dim reddish glow, bordering on infrared. High-intensity microwaves saturated the air in a cone shape, cooking the guards and their dog in place. They collapsed into shapeless lumps that lay in the shadowless, morgue-like light of overhead security lights.
The concrete mixed backed closer, buckling the gate and ripping its steel locks out of their anchor plates. The damage was not enough to be seen from the street, but it was enough to let the commandos slip open the gate. The buses quietly drove into the dead compound with their lights off.
Three BLUM commandos had taken their place in the guard shack, wearing the dead men's uniforms.
The buses drove onto the property. Behind them, the commandos in Anaconda guards' uniforms closed the gate.
The BLUM commandos now had access to the entire one-story building, which sprawled over four acres. Judging from the sparse lights on, and small clusters of parked cars, there might have been half a dozen scientists, engineers, and other staff working late. Twenty commandos, wearing dark blue ski masks, went from room to room, ensuring that nobody was alive. They were all dead.
On an inner courtyard, shrouded in shadows, a large, slatted aluminum garage door rolled upward on its core, exposing a warehouse overlooking a loading platform.
The two buses backed up to the loading dock.
Meanwhile, the concrete mixers and their escort headed back to a specially leased warehouse nearby, where they would sit perhaps for months before anyone discovered what was inside. Their drivers would be taken to the airport to meet up with their comrades and the plane back to Shiphol.
At the Anaconda facility, work continued at a rapid, well-trained, intense but relaxed pace.
In the back of each bus, a double door opened outward in both directions. This revealed that the rear half of seats had been removed. The rear of each bus was now a cargo hold.
Within a half hour, using a heavy-duty towmotor and a steel crane, the commandos expertly and cautiously brought Castor to the landing dock and loaded it into the first bus.
Moments later, its identical twin Pollux followed.
Each unit was a gleaming cylinder broken up into functional electronic units, some with solar panels, others with mazes of strutting electronic harnesses. Castor and Pollux were each about ten feet long, and six feet in diameter—about the size of a minivan, and weighing a ton. These were the two control units that were live and able to control the orbiting Capricorn satellite that contained the orbital sniper rounds.
The commandos were expertly trained. They wrapped the units in tape and bubble wrap to prevent injury. Just as quickly, they used cranes to swing them into the buses, where they were bolted to the floor. The bolts were huge, but well-oiled and easily torqued down on their carrying bolts with special spanner wrenches.
This phase of the operation was finished within the hour.
The commandos closed the doors, left some lights on, and tidied up any stray evidence of who had done this. Thus far, the world had not yet heard of Black Umbrella (BLUM).
The two buses rolled out of the facility.
Behind them, the facility slumbered on as if nothing had happened. It might take fresh, relief security patrols another hour or two to discover the hit. By then, the stolen technology would be in the air on its way to Europe.
The commandos sat quietly on their buses on the half hour ride back to Montreal-Mirabel International Airport. The city's neighboring Dorval International now served as the primary commuter and international hub, while Mirabel had slipped to the status of a military and cargo hub. The two buses passed back in through minimal checkpoints, and soon reached the private hangar where the refueled Atlas waited.
The control units unbolted as easily as they had been fastened down.
The commandos acted as cargo handlers, using lifts to bring the two stolen OST controllers and other equipment on board.
Now the commandos split up. Only ten of them remained as crew, in khaki overalls, in the cargo hold of the plane.
All but two of the rest of the men and women donned a mish mash of civilian clothing. Boarding their buses, they split up. One bus headed toward Toronto, the other toward Detroit. There, they would further split up. They would disperse to airports across North America, and then fly back separately to several European airports, for eventual rendez-vous by car at a Blum subpost in Naples. Their ultimate duty destination: the island of Vulcano, north of Sicily. Pollux would already be in place, waiting for them, ready to join Castor in sending death messages up to the orbiter Capricorn.
The two remaining commandos drove the buses away, to be parked in that same warehouse as the concrete mixers. Those two drivers would tidy up at the warehouse, drive down to Boston in a nice company sedan with soft jazz all the way, and take a normal passenger liner to their home base in Scotland.
The TAC had successfully accomplished its mission without a hitch—and without a shot fired, unless you counted the giant burrito cookers.
Dr. Moriarty of Global Anaconda did not yet know it, but he was out of the orbital sniper business. Somewhere else in the world, Dr. Night gleefully rubbed his hands together as BLUM’s Project Gemini got underway.
The ten remaining commandos, now acting as cargo handlers, secured Castor and Pollux to the flight deck of the chartered Airbus A700M Atlas.
Inspectors from Quebec customs came on board to inspect the two industrial laser measuring devices supposedly destined for a Dutch mining company with corporate tentacles in South America.
As soon as the tower gave permission, the Atlas taxied down the runway in standard civil aeronautics format. With its high and low lights twirling, and its headlights blazing, the aircraft lifted slowly, and droned away into a low cloud deck on its way toward Greenland and points east.
Project Gemini of the BLUM consortium was one step closer to going operational—and horrifying a defenseless world.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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