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  Lazar shook his head. “The fact that they were worried about environmental warfare should tell you something. It tells you that they wouldn’t ban something that didn’t exist. They knew this was a real threat and they were likely to be on the wrong side of victory. Just look at how the US extended the monsoon season in Vietnam.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, America failed in Vietnam, but only for political reasons. There are powerful commercial interests that benefit from war. Better to drag it out. But let’s stay focused here. I mentioned Vietnam. Let’s bring this closer to home. In 1975, the Soviets began pulsing extremely-low frequency waves, called ELF waves, off the west coast of the United States.” Up on the screen, Lazar looked down. It appeared he was looking at his watch.

  He said, “I’d love to tell you about it, but my time here is running out fast. I do wish I could spend more time with you.”

  “My loss,” Chuck said.

  “No, your gain. Few people are treated to the mind of a genius before they die. Enjoy the moment. The year 1998 brings us to the HAARP system. In 2003, the World Meteorological Organization complains about a sudden increase in extreme weather events around the globe. Think of Hurricane Katrina. If I had more time, I could go on and on. Do you really think it’s because certain people don’t drive a particular brand of car?”

  “That’s what we’re told.”

  “Look, Brandt, you know as well as I do that almost nothing we’re told is true—especially in regards to the weather. At the People’s Health Assembly held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dr. Bertell talked about how earthquakes and tornadoes are engineered and decimate populations. Case in point: In July 1976, an earthquake in China left 650,000 people dead. That could be just another earthquake, right? But experts have published another story. They say that the earthquake was preceded by an airglow, similar to what you see with ionospheric heaters. They point the finger at Soviet ELF wave experiments to heat the atmosphere.”

  “A lot of people are pointing fingers. What does it all mean? Who knows?”

  Lazar looked down again, appearing to check his watch. “That was not a one-time wonder. Just look at the San Francisco earthquake. According to Dr. Bertell, ultra low frequency waves were detected in California on September 12, 1989. The waves vanished, then spiked on September 17. They were off the chart. The San Francisco earthquake happened three hours later.”

  “This is all very sick and disturbing.”

  “I’m not finished. Just think about this: according to data from ground sensors and satellites, mysterious radio waves or other electrical and magnetic activity have been detected before many recent earthquakes. NASA’s AMES Research Center studied over a hundred earthquakes. They found that most of them are preceded by electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. There’s an abundance of evidence, including earthquakes in Japan, Southern California, and Armenia. No scientist has offered up a credible explanation for these coincidences.”

  “I said I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Yes, you did, Brandt. Think about this. Since the 1960s, natural disaster rates have multiplied by ten times. That’s not a natural ebb and flow of environmental cycles. That’s more like a top that’s wobbling out of control. I’m talking about flooding in India in 1996 that left millions homeless. I’m talking about snow in South Africa, which is rare. I’m talking about rare tornadoes in Canada. In 1996, there were earthquakes in Mexico, France, Southern Italy, India, Japan, Kamchata, and Indonesia.”

  “What are you getting at? Are you saying that there was some kind of secret earthquake warfare going on?”

  Lazar’s eyes glittered with sudden excitement. “Many earthquakes are surely natural, but the staggering increase in earthquakes and weather-related disasters has gone up exponentially. The elites know something the general public doesn’t. They know about the full capabilities of HAARP. They know that their ionospheric heaters could in fact heat the earth by heating the ionosphere or just ripping it to shreds.”

  “So, what you’re saying then, is that you have tremendous power at your disposal.”

  “I was Russia’s greatest general until I was condemned to an insane asylum by jealous peers. My chances of making history from traditional warfare were largely destroyed. However, I am a general of unlimited talent and ambition. If I can’t make history one way, I’ll make it another way. I have at my disposal the tools to unleash tremendous damage and destruction upon the world. You know it’s about to happen. Nobody can stop me. The Russians will not act. The English will not act. The US government will not act. Who will?”

  Chuck frowned and shook his head. He grabbed the glass ashtray on the table. Spinning around, he threw it like a hardball. It glanced off Mac Truck’s head.

  Snake eyes sprung at Chuck and tried to pistol whip him, but Chuck dove at his legs and ripped his feet out from underneath him. Snake Eyes landed on his tail bone and screamed. His gun fired as he hit the ground, but it was a wild shot.

  Mac Truck tried to kick him in the face, but Chuck grabbed his foot and twisted his ankle hard.

  The big man came down on the deck with a crash.

  “Stop him!” Lazar shouted. “Kill him!”

  As Snake Eyes tried to gain his feet, Chuck scrambled after him on hands and knees, dragging him back down. This time when Snake Eyes hit the ground, his hand opened up and his gun slid across the floor.

  Mac Truck delivered a stunning blow to the side of Chuck’s head, knocking him backwards, but despite the pain, he sprung up onto his feet and faced the two killers. Mac Truck swooped up his club from the floor and both of the thugs moved in.

  Snake Eyes raised his hands as if he planned to hurt Chuck with his fists. Mac Truck spread his arms out wide as if he was going to go for the tackle and take-down, but the club in his paw had a menacing presence. The club gave Mac Truck extra confidence, and he was the first to strike, lashing out at Chuck’s head.

  Chuck lunged in close, getting inside the swing and creating a cage. His left wrist hit the inside of Mac Truck’s club left arm, killing the momentum. At the same time, he rammed his palm into Mac’s face with the velocity of a jackhammer. The blow to Mac Truck’s head was a whiplash nightmare. He smashed down and didn’t try to get up.

  The lean killer reacted quickly, snapping up the club. Shaking his long hair out of his face, Snake Eyes pointed the club at Chuck and looked at him with malignant hatred. He snarled and said, “Time to meet the devil.”

  “No, thanks,” Chuck said. “Your mamma must be so proud.”

  Snake Eyes lashed out with the club.

  Chuck swayed back to avoid the danger. As the club flew past, Chuck swayed forward, raising his right wrist as a cage, a blocking arm against Snake Eyes’ attempt to now swing the club back the other way. At the same time, Chuck stepped in close to his side and reached with his left arm around the attacker’s neck. He reached fast and hard so that his inner arm delivered a strike to the back of his head. His hand cupped Snake Eyes’ chin and ripped his head backward. Half way through the rotation, Chuck pushed his face downward and kneeled on his head. Chuck now had the arm with the club pinned against his other leg, held there by Chuck’s right arm. Chuck twisted his wrist and the club dropped from his hand. Chuck knew that if he didn’t take Snake Eyes out of the game, that he would be back later, probably with a gun. So Chuck did the only thing that made sense at the moment. He pressed the lower arm down hard against his leg, causing the elbow to hyper-extend and rip out of joint.

  Snake Eyes screamed in pure agony and rage. He was suddenly reduced to quivering mass of flesh on the ground as his mind tried to make sense out of what had just happened to him.

  An ear-piercing alarm blared over ship-wide speaker system. It was so loud that it drowned out Snake Eyes’ scream. Chuck could see his mouth wide open, but it was as if no sound was coming out of him.

  Chuck pushed Snake Eyes away and rose to a standing position. He saw Mac Truck was still lying on the ground, his han
ds on his neck, the pain of whiplash stamped on his quivering face.

  A huge body appeared in a doorway and a couple of shots rang out as Chuck darted for the side door.

  CHAPTER 28

  Dante Brulé pursued Brandt, who fled into a room with no exit.

  Standing at the door, Dante was getting ready to break in when another Black Cobra arrived.

  Brulé whispered to him. Five minutes later, the terrorist was back with an engineer and welding equipment.

  Brulé stood at the end of the dim tunnel.

  Lazar obviously wanted Brandt dead, but Brulé knew that Lazar wouldn’t care how he got the job done. He had Brandt trapped in a room with no exit. He could just weld the door shut and gas Brandt later.

  The flickering light of the blow torch lit up the passageway.

  Brulé got a phone call. He said, “This is Dante.”

  It was Lazar’s voice. “I want you ready to terminate him as soon as they get the door open.”

  Brulé was holding his suppressed Mac-10 machine pistol. “I’ve got him trapped. I’m having the door welded shut.”

  “Are you sure he’s secure?” Lazar said.

  “I’ve been guaranteed there’s no way out, but we can drill a hole in the wall and pump gas in there.”

  “I like it,” Lazar said. “I want him gassed right away.”

  Brulé sent another Black Cobra to get an air pump and a propane gas canister.

  Brulé passed his Mac-10 machine pistol from one sweaty hand to the other and wiped his hand on his pants. He wished the welder would hurry up. He grabbed an engineer by his shirt and said, “Get me a drill with a quarter inch bit.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Eight-one minutes till WMD attack

  A quarter mile away from USS Forrestal aircraft carrier, the HAARP weapon transmitted as three hundred tree-sized antennas directed one billion watts of radiowaves skyward from the deck of General Lazar’s supertanker. The entire night sky from horizon to horizon lit up and turned neon green. This green light played a thousand tricks. It danced and shivered in the sky as an artificial areola borealis was born. The air hummed loudly, and the coils and shafts of green light moved around as if the sky was flowing liquid. Lazar had Beethoven’s 9th Symphony streaming loudly over the ship’s speaker system, but the air hummed even louder from the massive amount of power emitted by HAARP weapon. Beethoven was drowned out despite being broadcast with almost as much volume as a rock concert.

  The green light waves rose into the sky and into the atmosphere. The massive, illegal amount of radio waves intensified, modulated, and steered through the ionosphere. At the outer edge of the atmosphere, the waves were amplified 1,000 times by natural processes. The radiated power now exceeded ten billion watts.

  This power viciously ripped the fragile, delicately-balanced atmosphere. It curved downward toward an uninhabited, barren island to the northwest of the Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. A blast exceeded the force of a major nuclear explosion. It lit up the night with a massive fireball.

  The fireball was so bright that it would have blinded to anyone nearby if they could survive, but not many were nearby because this was over the horizon from the coast. Only a dozen sailboats were in the area. The temperature of the explosion reached 100,000,000° Celsius, exceeding the temperature of the interior of the sun.

  The brilliant fireball was caged in by thousands of bolts of lightning that forked through the sky and speared the ocean. The water was electrified for miles. The loss of sea life was catastrophic, but that was least of the effects. The island was completely vaporized. It no longer existed.

  A dozen sailboats, along with their crews, ceased to exist in a fraction of a second.

  A thousand miles away, on the flight deck of the carrier, General Lazar, dressed in a gold-colored jumpsuit, stalked back and forth in front of fifty Black Cobra guerillas, trained killers who stood at attention, side-by-side, three rows back.

  Satellite transmissions beamed down video feed collected from a satellite’s remote sensors. A satellite disk on the supertanker fed the video to six large 8x10-foot television screens that were set up on the flight deck to broadcast the demonstration.

  “Look at that!” Lazar said, pointing at the screens. “Could Alexander do that? Could Caesar do that?”

  The big screens telecasted a scene of bright light, a fireball at the center of the most massive electric storm any of them had ever seen—times a thousand.

  “It’s beautiful,” General Lazar said. “Beautiful. I wipe tears of joy from my eyes. This is moment I have lived for, the moment where I make my mark—a mark worthy of who I am. But look at the power. The power—look at it. It is but a taste of what is to come.” He waved his thick, stubby arms through the air. “Tupa Inca’s power was nothing compared to what I have at my disposal. No man alive has such power. It’s the most powerful HAARP weapon on earth. It cannot be traced. Vaporizing an island is the least I can do. I can vaporize entire cities. And that’s what I will do in my second demonstration, which will occur in seventy-six minutes.”

  The Black Cobras remained in formation. They showed no emotion.

  A wild look possessed General Lazar’s eyes. He said, “Remember how Thor shot thunderbolts from the sky to punish those who had angered the gods.” He swiped his hand through the air. “Thor was a little firefly. He was like a cop with a taser gun. It’s nothing. Look! Look at the screens. Look at the power. That is my name. My name is written on the stars.”

  He started pacing but stopped suddenly and glared wild-eyed at the first row of Black Cobras. Behind him the green areola borealis twirled in the sky.

  “I will vaporize a city and millions of people. After that, I will be the most feared man in the world. Nobody will dare to cross me because I can do it again—and again. You are seeing the birth of a new world authority governed by a secret elite, of which I am the new ruler.”

  He pointed at one of the t.v. screens. “Look! Just look! It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. You cannot imagine the power. The power. It is beyond imagination. History—that is what I am talking about. History. I will make history. I will change the world. Seventy-seven minutes!”

  CHAPTER 30

  Seventy-five minutes

  Hawked over by two Black Cobras, one of the ship’s junior engineers drilled a hole in wall and fed in a plastic gas tube. Brandt tied it off, so the engineer tried again. He rigged a set-up that pumped gas in through the crack under the door.

  ***

  Inside, Chuck decided to take extreme action. He ran a strip of C4 explosives along the edges of the door. After taking cover behind a metal wash bin, he said, “Stuart, maybe you’re not all bad.” He detonated.

  BOOM!

  The floor shook. Fire flashed. Fragments hit the walls. A smell like tar or burned motor oil filled the room.

  Chuck jumped up. He lunged through the smoke and burst out the doorway firing!

  He walked on the backs of two unconscious Black Cobras.

  Down the corridor, a third fired back.

  Chuck stepped behind a big vertical pipe running down the wall. The gunfire came in heavy.

  When Chuck heard the shooter reloading, he grabbed the abandoned propane tank and bowled it down the hall. It stopped near the shooter’s nook. The shooter must have thought he was being set up. He slammed in a new magazine and opened fire. Then he bolted, spraying a burst at Chuck as he darted around a corner.

  ***

  Sixty-six minutes till WMD attack

  Chuck flashed across the Blue Tile area and raced down a corridor that went on forever. He sprinted a hundred yards in under nine seconds, maybe faster. A man expecting a bullet in the back had an advantage that no Olympic track star could compete with. Running for his life, sparks almost shot off his heels. Wings sprung up on his shoes.

  The gunfire came just as he took a corner. He stopped and shuffled back to the brink. He then reached around the corner, squeezing off several shots. There was no return f
ire, so peeked. He saw a man crawling into a doorway. A shooter appeared, and Chuck tagged him in the arm. The terrorist screamed like a banshee. His assault rifle spun in the air and crashed onto the floor.

  Chuck ran the other way, but a Black Cobra terrorist popped up from the aft island ladder well. Other men following the killer up the stairwell were yelling. Chuck kicked the leader in the face. He lost his grip and fell backwards. He screamed as he bowled down the shaft and knocked those below him off the ladder. They all crashed down on the lower deck and piled atop one another. Chuck grabbed the handrails and slid down after them at high speed. His feet slammed down atop the pile. He felt nose cartilage and ribs crack under his boots. He saw a pair of hate-filled eyes lock on him like lasers. Acid Eyes was pinned under two other terrorists, but his arm fought to get free of the pressure. His hand reached for his holster. Chuck grabbed the top man’s assault rifle and struggled with him for the weapon, but with broken ribs, the man under his feet put up a pathetic fight.

  Chuck slammed the rifle butt into Acid Eyes’ face. The trauma dissuaded him from further adventures with his pistol. Chuck grabbed up several guns, kicked another terrorist in the teeth, and moved down the next stairwell much slower because, like the others, it was steep, and he was carrying an armful of guns that he didn’t want used against him. It would have been a lot easier to just shoot the stinking terrorists, but Chuck preferred the hard way. He gave them a chance to quit. In reality, they’d be back for more killing, and then they’d probably eat what they served. Chuck’s shrink had once accused him of having compulsive risk-taking disorder. If that disloyal trader had been correct, then Chuck’s problem was getting worse. He was taking insane risks. He was tempting fate. He was taunting disaster by letting all these hostiles live so they could take another try at killing him. He loved it. He loved to let them live, but if they came back and tried to kill him, then he would have to defend himself.

  Chuck descended staircases to the second deck, just below the main hangar deck.