Kitobni o'qish: «Primary Threat»

Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising seven books (and counting).

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Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Getmilitaryphotos, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

PRIMARY GLORY (Book #4)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

ASSASSIN ZERO (Book #7)

DECOY ZERO (Book #8)

CHAPTER ONE

September 4, 2005

5:15 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time (9:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Martin Frobisher Oil Platform

Six Miles North of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The Beaufort Sea

The Arctic Ocean

No one was ready when the killing started.

Moments before, the man they called Big Dog stood at the rail in quilt-lined coveralls, steel-toed boots, thick leather gloves, and a faded yellow baseball cap that said Hunt Hard across the front.

It was cold out, but Big Dog didn’t feel the cold anymore. And it was nowhere near as cold as it was going to be. All around him was the vastness of the Arctic—gray sky, dark water punctuated with bright white ice, as far as the eye could see.

He smoked a cigarette and watched a double-hulled personnel boat working its way through the ice floes in the bleak light of late afternoon. You couldn’t call it sunlight. The cloud cover was constant now, like a heavy blanket, and Big Dog hadn’t seen a speck of sunlight in at least a week. It was easy to lose track of the sun. It was easy to lose track of everything.

“They’re early,” Big Dog said out loud to himself.

That boat didn’t sit quite right with him. It gave him an uncertain feeling in his gut. It looked a lot like a boat that would bring crew members out to the rig after a break. In fact, from here he could make out at least a dozen men on the deck of the boat, preparing to disembark when they reached the dock.

But shift changes didn’t happen early, and boats didn’t appear unscheduled and unannounced. Not out here. He tried to run through the possible reasons for that boat in his mind. But he was hung over again, and the jackhammer pain in his head, combined with the brain fog from lack of sleep, made it hard to think.

No matter. It would all get worked out when they got here. It was just barely possible that someone made a mistake. A lot of people in the Arctic had no idea what day it was. No one here spoke of Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. What would be the point? Every twelve hours was the same, working or sleeping, working or sleeping. Time blended, blurred, faded into hard steel and cold white oblivion.

Whoever they were, no matter what they were doing, they would have to come talk to Big Dog. Big Dog wasn’t as mean as he once had been. He had grown up on the reservation, what he called half Blackfeet Indian, and half “American.” And once upon a time, he’d been as mean as they came.

Six feet, seven inches tall, 250 pounds when he was light, 275 when he was carrying beer muscle. Past fifty years old now, he was easier, less quick to anger, possibly even a little bit compassionate. Still, he was the biggest man out this way, maybe the biggest man in the Arctic, and this was his oil rig.

Big Dog had been on the crew that built this thing. For five years, he had been the crew foreman. He was not a geologist, he was not the driller, and he was not a college-educated company man, but make no mistake. There were more than ninety men on this rig at any given time, and every single one of them, even the bosses, reported to him.

It was a half-billion-dollar hunk of steel, the Martin Frobisher—“The Bish,” as the roughnecks who worked it, and lived on it for two weeks at a time, tended to call it. The Bish was a royal blue and yellow tower, platforms and blocks of machinery stacked high over the hole where the drill entered the ocean floor. The top of this tower stood forty stories above the water. It was positioned more than 250 miles above the Arctic Circle, on a six-acre man-made island just offshore from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Bish was owned by a small company called Innovate Natural Resources. Innovate had contracts with all the biggies—BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips—but this was Innovate’s own rig. Big Dog often thought the heavy hitters let Innovate operate out here because it gave them plausible deniability about what was going on. Innovate did the dirty work, and if anyone found out about it, Innovate would take the fall.

The island was reachable by ice road over the frozen sea most of the year. But not in summer, and not even in September. Not anymore. The permanent ice was gone—melted—and the water was open all summer. With summer over, the seasonal ice was starting to fill in.

As Big Dog watched, the boat pushed through the last of it and pulled up to the dock. A couple of Bish dockworkers began to tie the boat’s lines when a strange thing happened. It was so strange that several seconds passed before Big Dog’s mind could grasp it.

Men jumped off the boat and shot the dock hands.

CRACK! came the sharp report of gunfire, echoing across the distance in the still, cold air. In the fading light, miniature men fell dead with each shot.

CRACK!

CRACK!

Suddenly Big Dog was running. His heavy boots pounded across the iron rails of the deck, and he burst through the doors of the doghouse, the command center. It was like the pilot house of a ship, only instead of watching the open sea, men watched the drill all day. There were three men inside this time of day. As Big Dog came in, the men were already up and moving, breaking into the cabinet where the rifles were stored. The rifles were meant for polar bears, not invasions.

“What the hell is going on?” Big Dog said.

A heavyset man with glasses, Aaron, a company man, tossed a heavy rifle to Big Dog. It had a banana magazine poking from the bottom of it, and a scope up top.

Big Dog chambered a round.

Aaron shook his head. “No idea. We tried to raise them on the radio, but no answer. We figured we’d wait until they got here. Then they got here and started shooting.”

He gestured at the closed circuit security screens.

On one screen, a group of men moved up the docks. They were dressed in black, for cold weather, faces covered except for the eyes, and draped with guns and ammunition belts. As Big Dog watched, one of them approached a man writhing on the dock, pulled a pistol, and shot the man in the head.

“Aw no,” Big Dog said.

It hurt him. It hurt him to his core. And it made him angry. This was his rig, and those were his men being killed out there. During his decades in the Arctic oil industry, nothing like this had ever happened. Were there fights? Sure. Fist fights, knife fights, fights with pool cues and iron pipes. Gunfights, even? Yes, once in a rare while, someone pulled a gun.

But this?

No way.

And it wouldn’t stand.

The men in the control room stared at Big Dog.

The first thing Big Dog did when he left the reservation at the age of seventeen, he joined the Marine Corps. They spotted his eye right away, and they made him a sniper.

“The sons of bitches,” he said.

He didn’t care who they were or what they thought they were doing, it wasn’t going to stand. He went back out onto the deck, rifle cradled in his thick hands.

Below him, the group of men was running through the compound now, running for the Quonset huts that served as housing, the rec hall, the mess hall. Clarion alarms were screeching, and men were starting to emerge from everywhere, running. There was confusion, and there was fear.

Shooting came easy to Big Dog. Men had their skills, he supposed, the things that came easy. This was one of his. He sighted through the scope and put one of the black-jacketed invaders in the middle of the circle. The man was RIGHT THERE, so close Big Dog could reach out and touch him. Big Dog squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked in his hands and pushed against his shoulder.

BANG!

The sound echoed far away across the ice and water.

It was a center mass hit, chest high. The man threw up his arms and dropped his gun. He was knocked backward, off his feet, and he tumbled across the frozen ground.

Not good. That told Big Dog the man was wearing body armor. The bullet didn’t pierce him—it knocked him backward. He was going to feel that thing for a while, and he was going to be sore as hell tomorrow, but he wasn’t going to be dead.

Not yet, anyway.

Big Dog ejected the spent shell and chambered another round. He sighted again and found his man crawling along the ground.

He put the circle around the man’s head.

BANG.

The echo drifted away across the vast, empty wastes. Blood sprayed where the man’s head had just been. Automatically, without thought, Big Dog ejected the shell and chambered a new round.

Next.

Another black-jacketed bastard kneeled by the dead guy. He seemed to be checking vital signs. Checking them for what? Half the man’s head was gone.

Big Dog smiled and put the new guy’s head in the circle, dead center. The guy was an idiot.

BANG.

But not anymore.

The second man’s head exploded just as the first had done, a spray of red in the air, like the white spray from the blowhole of a humpback whale just below the surface. The two dead men slumped together now, black mounds on white ground.

Big Dog pulled the gun down to get a wider view of the field. The scene was chaos. Men were running everywhere. Men were shooting. Men were falling dead.

Too late, he saw two men in black, both taking a knee. They pointed guns up at him. From this distance, he couldn’t tell what the men were carrying. They were small submachine guns, compact, Uzis maybe, or MP5s.

Less than a second passed.

Big Dog pushed away from the iron railing just as the first spray of bullets hit. They went right through him and he felt himself doing a spastic, jittering dance. Then the pain came, as if on time delay.

His feet slipped backward, out from under him, and he fell forward onto the railing. He thought he might vomit over the side.

But his height, and his momentum, carried his whole body forward. There was an awkward moment when it seemed he was perched on the rail, all the weight on his stomach. Then he was falling. He scrabbled madly for the iron slats behind him, but it was no use.

A second or two passed. Then IMPACT.

Time stopped. He drifted. When he opened his eyes again, it seemed he was gazing up at a dark sky. The last of the bleak day had passed, and the cold stars in their millions were coming out, playing hide and seek behind skittering clouds. He blinked and it turned to daylight again.

He knew what had happened. He had fallen to the iron deck two stories below the doghouse level. He had hit hard. His whole body must be broken. His skull must be cracked.

Also, when the memory came, it was like the bullets were piercing him again. His body jerked convulsively. He had been shot with machine guns.

There was no telling how much time had passed. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. He tried to move. It hurt to do anything. That was a good sign—he could still feel. There was a lot of dark liquid around him on the deck—his blood. He wheezed as he breathed, like a hydraulic lift going bad, fluid bubbling from his mouth.

Somewhere, not far, gunshots were still ringing out. Men were shouting. Men were screaming in pain, or in terror.

Shadows moved across him.

Two men stood there, looking down. They both wore heavy black jackets with white patches. The image on the patches seemed to be an eagle or another bird of prey. They wore green camouflage pants, like an army would wear on land, someplace where the world wasn’t covered in white. And they wore heavy black boots.

The men’s faces were covered in black balaclavas. Only their eyes showed. Their eyes were hard, without sympathy.

What did these guys think they were doing?

“Who…?” Big Dog said.

It was hard to speak. He was dying. He knew that. But he wasn’t someone who threw in the towel. Never before, and not now.

“Who are you?” he managed to say.

One of the men said something in a language Big Dog didn’t understand.

He raised a pistol and pointed it down at Big Dog. The hole at the end of the barrel was there, like a cave. It seemed to loom larger and larger.

The other man said something. It was a serious thing. Neither of them laughed. Their flat expressions didn’t change. They probably thought they were doing Big Dog a favor, putting him out of his misery.

Big Dog didn’t mind a little pain. He didn’t believe in heaven, or hell. When he was young, he had prayed to his ancestors. But if his ancestors were out there, they hadn’t seen fit to respond.

Maybe there was life after death, maybe there wasn’t.

Big Dog would rather take his chances here on Earth. The rig doctor might be able to patch him up. A medevac helicopter might come and bring him to the small trauma center in Deadhorse. An Apache helicopter might come and wipe these guys out.

Anything could happen. As long as he was breathing he was still in the game. He raised a bloody hand. Amazing he could still move his arm.

“Wait,” he said.

I don’t want to die now.

Big Dog. For decades, that’s what practically everyone had called him. His ex-wife called him Big Dog. His bosses called him Big Dog. The president of the company had flown in here one time, shook his hand, and called him Big Dog. He grunted at the thought of it. His real name was Warren.

A small flash of light and flame appeared from the black maw at the end of the man’s gun. The darkness came and Big Dog didn’t know if he’d really seen that light, or if this whole thing had been a dream all along.

CHAPTER TWO

9:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House

Washington, DC

“Mr. President, your thoughts?”

Clement Dixon was too old for this. That was his major thought.

He sat at the head of the table, and all eyes were on him. Over a long career in politics, he had learned to read eyes, and facial expressions, with the best of them. And what his face reading told him was this: the high-powered people looking at the white-haired gentleman presiding over this emergency meeting had all reached the same conclusion as Dixon himself.

He was too old.

He had been a Freedom Rider since the very first ride, May 1961, risking his life to help desegregate the South. He had been one of the young speakers on the streets during the Chicago Police Riot of August 1968, and had been tear-gassed in the face. He had spent thirty-three years in the House of Representatives, first sent there by the good people of Connecticut in 1972. He had served as Speaker of the House twice, once during the 1980s, then again up until just a couple of months ago.

Now, at the age of seventy-four, he suddenly found himself President of the United States. It was a role he had never wanted or imagined for himself. No, wait. Scratch that—when he was young, a teenager, early twenties, he had pictured himself one day as President.

But the America he had imagined himself President of was not this America. This was a divided place, embroiled in two publicly acknowledged foreign wars, as well as half a dozen clandestine “black operations”—operations so black, apparently, that the people overseeing them were reluctant to describe them to their superiors.

“Mr. President?”

In his youth, he had never imagined himself President of an America still utterly dependent on fossil fuels for its energy needs, where twenty percent of the population lived in poverty, and another thirty percent teetered on the verge of it, where millions of children went hungry every night, and more than a million people had nowhere to live. A place where racism was still alive and well. A place where millions of people could not afford to get sick, and people often had to decide between taking their prescription medications and eating. This was not the America he had dreamed of leading.

This was a nightmare America, and suddenly he was in charge of it. A man who had spent his whole life standing up for what he believed was right, and fighting for the highest ideals, now found himself crawling through the muck. This job offered nothing but trade-offs and gray areas, and Clement Dixon was right in the middle of it all.

He had always been a religious man. And these days he found himself thinking of how Christ had asked God to let the cup pass him by. Unlike Christ, however, his place on this cross was not pre-ordained. A series of mishaps and bad decisions had brought Clement Dixon to this place.

If President David Barrett, a good man whom Dixon had known for many years, hadn’t been murdered, then no one would have looked to Vice President Mark Baylor to take his place.

And if Baylor hadn’t been implicated by a mountain of circumstantial evidence in that murder (not enough to charge him, but more than enough to see him disgraced and banished from public life), then he wouldn’t have resigned, leaving the Presidency to the Speaker of the House.

And if Dixon himself hadn’t agreed last year to spend just one more term as Speaker, despite his advanced age…

Then he wouldn’t have found himself in this position.

Even if he’d just had the strength of will to turn the damn thing down… Just because the Line of Succession dictated that the Speaker assume the job, didn’t mean he had to accept the job. But too many people had fought for too long to see a man like Clement Dixon, the fiery standard bearer of classical liberal ideals, become President. As a practical matter, he could not walk away.

So here he was—tired, old, limping through the hallways of the West Wing (yes, limping—the new President of the United States had arthritis in his knees and a pronounced limp), overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the thing entrusted to him, and compromising his ideals at every turn.

“Mr. President? Sir?”

President Dixon was sitting in the egg-shaped Situation Room. Somehow, the room reminded him of a TV show from the 1960s—the show was called Space: 1999. It was a silly Hollywood producer’s idea of what the future must look like. Stark, empty, inhuman, and designed for maximum use of space. Everything was sleek and sterile, and exuded zero charm.

Large video screens were embedded in the walls, with a giant screen at the far end of the oblong table. The chairs were tall leather recliners like the captain on the control deck of a starship might have.

This meeting had been called at short notice—as usual, there was a crisis on. Outside of every seat at the table being taken, and a few along the walls, the room was mostly empty. The usual suspects were here, including a few overweight men in suits, along with thin and ramrod-straight military men in uniform.

Thomas Hayes, Dixon’s new Vice President, was also here, and thank heavens for that. Having come aboard straight from being governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas was accustomed to making executive decisions. He was also on the same page with Dixon about many things. Thomas helped Dixon form a unified front.

Everyone knew that Thomas Hayes had designs on the presidency himself, and that was fine. He could have it, as far as Clement Dixon was concerned. Thomas was tall, and handsome, and smart, and he projected an air of authority. Yet the most prominent thing about him was his very large nose. The national press had already started to tweak him about it.

Just wait, Thomas, Dixon thought. Wait until you’re President. The political cartoonists were drawing Clement Dixon as the absent-minded professor, a cross between Mark Twain and Albert Einstein with their shoes untied, and minus the homespun humor or penetrating intelligence.

Boy, they would sure have fun with that Hayes nose.

A tall man in a green dress uniform stood at the far head of the table, a four-star general named Richard Stark. He was thin and very fit, like the marathoner he surely was, and his face appeared to be chiseled from stone. He had the eyes of a hunter, like a lion, or a hawk. He spoke with utter confidence—in his impressions, in the information given him by his underlings, in the ability of the United States military to hammer any problem into submission, no matter how thorny or complicated. Stark was practically a caricature of himself. He seemed as if he’d never experienced a moment of uncertainty in his lifetime. What was the old saying?

Often incorrect, but never in doubt.

“Explain it again,” President Dixon said.

He could almost hear the silent groans from around the room. Dixon hated to have to hear it again. He hated the information as he understood it, and he hated that one more try ought to make him understand it completely. He didn’t want to understand it.

Stark nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He pointed with a long wooden pointer at the map on the large screen. The map showed the North Slope borough of Alaska, a vast territory at the northern edge of the state, inside the Arctic Circle, and bordering on the Arctic Ocean.

There was a red dot in the ocean just north of land’s end. The land there was marked ANWR, which Dixon well knew stood for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—he was one of the people who had fought for decades to have that sensitive region protected from oil exploration and drilling.

Stark spoke:

“The Martin Frobisher drilling platform, owned by Innovate Natural Resources, is located here, in the ocean six miles north of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. We don’t have an exact census at the time of the attack, but an estimated ninety men live and work on that platform, and a small surrounding artificial island, at any given time. The platform operates twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, in all but the most severe weather.”

Stark paused and stared at Dixon.

Dixon made a hand motion like a wheel spinning.

“I got it. Please continue.”

Stark nodded. “A little over thirty minutes ago, a group of heavily armed, unidentified men attacked the platform and the encampment. They arrived by boat, on a vessel made to appear as a personnel tender bringing workers to the island. An unknown number of workers have been killed or taken hostage. Preliminary reports, gleaned from video and audio feeds, suggest that the invaders are of foreign, but still unknown, origin.”

“What suggests this?” Dixon said.

Stark shrugged. “They don’t seem to be speaking English. Although we have no clear audio yet, our language experts believe they are speaking an eastern European, likely a Slavic, language.”

Dixon sighed. “Russian?”

The day he took over this thankless job, indeed moments after he took the Oath of Office, he had unilaterally stood American forces down from a confrontation with the Russians. The Russians had done him a favor and responded in kind. And Dixon had then been subjected to merciless and scathing criticism from the warmongering quarters of American society. If the Russians turned around and attacked now…

Stark shook his head the slightest amount. “Not sure yet, but we think not.”

“That narrows it down,” Thomas Hayes said.

“Do we have any idea what they want?” Dixon said.

Now Stark shook his head completely. “They haven’t contacted us, and refuse to answer our attempts at contact. We have flown over the complex with helicopter gunships, but except for a few fires, the place currently seems deserted. The terrorists, and the prisoners, are either inside the rig itself, or inside complex buildings, away from our prying eyes.”

He paused.

“I imagine you want to go in with force and take the rig back,” Dixon said.

Stark shook his head again. “Unfortunately, no. As much as we are one hundred percent certain we can take back the facility through sheer force, doing so will put the lives of any men being held prisoner at risk. Also, the facility is of a sensitive nature, and if we make a large-scale counterattack, we risk calling attention to it.”

A few people in the room began murmuring together.

“Order,” Stark said, without raising his voice. “Order, please.”

“Okay,” Dixon said. “I’ll bite. What’s sensitive about it?”

Stark looked at a bespectacled man sitting halfway down the table from the President. The man was probably in his late thirties, but he carried some extra weight that made him look almost like an angelic child. The man’s face was serious. Heck, he was in a meeting with the President of the United States.

“Mr. President, I’m Dr. Fagen of the Department of the Interior.”

“Okay, Dr. Fagen,” Dixon said. “Just give it to me.”

“Mr. President, the Frobisher platform, although owned by Innovate Natural Resources, is a joint venture between Innovate, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and the United States Bureau of Land Management. We have extended them a license to do what is known as horizontal drilling.”

On the screen, the image changed. It showed an animated drawing of an oil platform. As Dixon watched, a drill extended downward from the platform, below the surface of the ocean, and into the sea floor. Once underground, the drill changed direction, making a ninety-degree turn and now moving horizontally beneath the bedrock. After a time, it encountered a black puddle beneath the ground, and oil from the puddle began to flow sideways from the drillhead into the pipe following behind it.

“Instead of drilling vertically, which is how the vast majority of drilling was done in the twentieth century, we are now mastering the science of horizontal drilling. What this means is that an oil platform can be many miles from an oil deposit, perhaps a deposit in an environmentally sensitive location…”

Dixon held up a hand. The hand meant STOP.

Dr. Fagen knew what the hand meant without having to ask. Instantly, he stopped speaking.

“Dr. Fagen, are you telling me that the Martin Frobisher, out at sea six miles north of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is in fact drilling inside the Wildlife Refuge?”

Fagen was staring down at the conference table. His body language alone told Clement Dixon all he needed to know.

“Sir, with the newest technologies, oil platforms can exploit important underground deposits without endangering sensitive flora or fauna, which I know you have previously expressed your concern…”

Dixon rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in the air.

“Aw, hell.”

He looked at the general.

“Sir,” Stark said. “The decision to grant that license was made two administrations ago. It was just a matter of perfecting the technology. Granted, it’s controversial. Granted, neither you nor I may agree with it. But I believe that’s a fish to fry at another time. At this moment, we have a terrorist operation underway, with an unknown number of American civilians already dead, and even more American lives at risk. Time is of the essence. And as much as is possible, I think we need to keep this incident, and the nature of that facility, out of the public eye. At least for now. Later, after we rescue our people and the smoke clears, there will be plenty of time for debate.”

Dixon hated that Stark was right. He hated these…

…compromises.

“What do you suggest?” he said.

Stark nodded. On the screen, the image changed and showed a graphic of what appeared to be a group of cartoon scuba divers swimming toward an island.

“We strongly suggest a covert group of highly trained special operators, Navy SEALs, infiltrate the facility, discover the nature of the terrorists and their numbers, decapitate their leadership, and, if at all possible, take back the rig with as little loss of civilian life as circumstances will allow.”

“How many and how soon?” Dixon said.

Stark nodded again. “Sixteen, perhaps twenty. Tonight, within the next several hours, before first light.”

“The men are ready?” Dixon said.

“Yes, sir.”

Dixon shook his head. It was a slippery slope when you were President. That’s what he, despite all his years of experience, had never understood. All his fiery stump speeches, his podium thumping, his demands for a fairer, cleaner world… for what? Everything had been sold down the river before you even started.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was off limits to drilling. From the surface. So they parked themselves at sea and drilled from beneath it. Of course they did. They were like termites, always biting, gnawing, and turning the sturdiest construction into a house of cards.