by Jack Mars
Thank god for that.
“And the others?” Leonard recalled the ambassador saying that there were four in the Iranian group.
But the man simply shook his head.
They didn’t make it.
They reached the bottom of the second-floor stairs when the building groaned once more, followed by the thunderous and terrifying sound of a floor above them collapsing.
“We have to move!” A surge of energy shot through Leonard as he half-dragged the man along with him. The man winced in agony, but this wasn’t the time to be tender or careful.
He dared to glance behind him, upward, just in time to see the top of the stairs swallowed in darkness and dust as the floor collapsed.
He heard a cry of surprise and panic that might have come from his own throat as they nearly fell down the stairs to the first floor. The visitors’ center lobby opened up before them, empty and looking untouched compared to the carnage they’d just experienced, but he knew it was only moments away from devastation itself…
“Hurry up, let’s go!” A voice. A man—a police officer. The square-jawed cop that had shouted at him for entering the building was running across the floor, supporting the injured man on the other side. “Move it!”
Then they were running to the glass doors, to fresh air, to sunshine. There were two other officers there, grabbing onto them, practically carrying them to safety as the ceiling of the visitors’ center behind them collapsed.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Zero could only stare in horror. Just a moment ago, the blue spark of plasma danced down the length of the railgun’s electrodes and vanished across the water at seven times the speed of sound toward its target.
“That,” the German said, “was the United Nations building.”
Zero took no solace in being right about the target. He had to stop this man. He climbed to his knees, but the German waved the Ruger in his direction.
“Do not, please,” he asked gently. “I would be disappointed to have to kill you.”
There was a sound, a chime; the German reached into a pocket for a satellite phone and glanced at it. “Ah,” he said simply.
Tomahawk missiles rained down over the Atlantic at varying distances, getting closer. It seemed the missile strikes had swept out from their area and were coming back for a second salvo. The German seemed to realize it as well and turned back to the console, punching numbers into a keypad. Coordinates, if Zero had to guess.
Another target?
“You have a choice,” he told Zero as he input the numbers. “I cannot pilot the boat on my own. It requires two. We are one hundred and sixty miles from the coast. We can stay here and both die when a missile strikes the boat. Or we can work together and try to make it to the coast. Come what may beyond that—perhaps one will kill the other then.”
That explains why he hasn’t killed me yet.
Maria was gone. Alan was gone. His daughters were grown enough to take care of themselves. Shaw wanted him fired, if not imprisoned.
He couldn’t help but laugh dismally—not at his situation, but at the lunacy of this man believing that Zero cared whether he lived through this ordeal or not.
“What is funny?” the German asked, cocking his head slightly even as the rain of destruction continued to draw nearer.
“We’re both going to die out here.”
“Hmm,” the man said. “Seems you have a German sense of humor.” He reached for the plastic shield again, the one concealing the round red button that activated the railgun.
Zero let out a primal shout as he surged forward.
The German was quick—quick enough to get a shot off with the Ruger. It hit Zero right over his heart.
It hurt. God, did it hurt. But the German didn’t know about the graphene, and Zero did not slow down. He tackled the German to the deck, swinging rapidly, a flurry of punches at the smug face. Some glanced off, his knuckles scraping the rough floor of the boat. Others split his lips and blackened his eyes.
The German got both hands on Zero’s lapels and, with a ferocious grunt, hefted him over onto his side. Something hard and blunt jammed into his ribs—the LC9.
But the man was already scrambling back to the control panel. He reached up.
Zero raised the pistol and fired.
The German slammed a hand down on the red button.
A missile exploded not a hundred feet from them and the boat rocked.
“Oh.” The German slumped, a bullet in his back, as Zero scrambled to the control panel.
Eight seconds. He had eight seconds to do something.
He mashed buttons, flicked switches, hitting everything on the control panel, anything that might stop the railgun from firing.
Six… five...
A missile struck closer, tipping the boat precariously. Zero grabbed onto the edge of the bulletproof windshield to keep himself from bowling over.
Four… three…
He spotted a control stick, just a thin gray stick that looked utterly innocuous, practically hidden among the red buttons and green lights and LED displays of the console. He grabbed it and pulled it back.
One…
The railgun’s barrel shifted upward as it lit up blue and fired a plasma projectile at Mach 7. The tilt was just a few degrees. Barely an angle.
But at a hundred and sixty miles away, that tiny angle could have made all the difference. He would have no way to know if he had saved anyone or anything.
Behind him, the German laughed weakly. “Do you think that was enough?”
“I don’t know.” He turned to the man, who sat with his legs splayed before him, blood running down his back and forming a pool around him. “Who are you?”
The man winced as he adjusted his weight. “My name is Krauss. Stefan Krauss. Remember it. We may meet again—in this life or the next.”
Zero scoffed. These sociopaths always seemed to be part-time philosophers.
“And you?” Krauss asked him.
“Agent Zero.”
Stefan Krauss’s eyes widened as an eerie, bloody grin lit upon his face. “Really,” was all he said.
He checked the console. The numbers that Krauss had entered into the keypad were 1-2-2-8-0-1. They weren’t coordinates, but he had no idea what they could mean.
Not that it mattered. The boat wasn’t going anywhere. Zero had no way to communicate with anyone on the shore. The South Korean vessel did not appear to have any sort of radio, which made sense; the boat was built for absolute stealth, and a radio frequency could be tracked. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring the satellite phone when he’d ejected from the Prowler.
His heart ached with the loss of Maria and Alan. But he’d be joining them soon enough. Another Tomahawk detonated, but it was further than the others and west by about two hundred fifty feet.
What if one doesn’t hit? he thought. The railgun was too powerful a weapon to fall into anyone’s hands—even the United States’.
You could take matters into your own hands. He reached for the thin gray control stick and pushed it forward. The railgun’s barrel responded in kind, pivoting downward, further, until it was pointed at the bow of its own ship.
Krauss let out a pained laugh. “Well. That is certainly a design flaw.”
“One I’m glad for,” Zero said dryly. “Goodbye, Krauss.”
He pressed the red button.
For a moment, he thought about jumping before the railgun fired. What would be more preferable, he wondered: a fiery death or a frozen one?
He sat at the console and waited, staring out over the sea on the starboard side. The ocean was calm, tranquil over here, the opposite direction in which missiles were falling.
The railgun lit up blue, and the blow exploded.
It happened so quickly that Zero’s brain felt as if it short-circuited. He heard the blast, but before he saw anything he felt heat, and then impact—the ballistic-resistant windshield came off in one piece, blasting outward and taking
him with it.
Next he was off the boat, in the air, tumbling end over end. He hit the water and it was as if every nerve ending in his body screamed. He broke the surface, gasping a lungful of air, but he couldn’t stay above water. His muscles seized; his limbs would not respond. His hands grasped blindly, hoping that the windshield had landed nearby, but if it had he couldn’t find it.
He sank again.
This is it.
He tried to move his arms, to just tread water, but it was so shockingly cold and everything hurt, as if a thousand pins were in his skin.
An icy hand latched onto his wrist and tugged at him, and he was certain it was Death.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Death, it seemed, looked a lot like Alan Reidigger.
Zero gasped and sputtered as Alan pulled him into the yellow inflatable life raft, first by the arm and then by the back of his pants, hauling him easily out of the water.
“Okay, you’re okay,” he said over and over.
“Here, put this on.” Maria was there, wrapping him in a silver crinkly sheet that looked like aluminum foil. A Mylar emergency blanket.
He trembled terribly, teeth chattering, lips refusing to move properly to address the questions that he needed to ask.
“Don’t try to talk.” Maria positioned herself against him, sharing her body heat. “We’re okay.” The front of her shirt was bloody and her jacket torn down one arm. Alan had a purple bruised eye that was nearly swollen shut and a gaping cut across the back of one hand that would certainly require stitches.
They were alive. Their cockpit had still been sealed shut when he ejected. They’d survived the crash and, somehow, miraculously, had managed to escape as the plane sank.
It was a story Zero very much wanted to hear, but it would have to wait until after the threat of hypothermia had passed.
“Penny.” Alan had a sat phone to his ear. “We got him. The railgun is destroyed. Do you have our position? Good. And would you ask them to stop shooting missiles at us?”
He lowered the phone. “A chopper is on the way. We’re not dying out here today.” He clapped a hand on Zero’s shoulder. “You did good, pal.”
Zero stared out at the South Korean ship, its devastated bow already sunk, the glimmering stern rising as the sea swallowed it. The back half of the railgun was still visible, its barrel facing downward in the water. He wondered if Stefan Krauss was still in there or if he too was flung with the force of the explosion. It didn’t matter; the German was undoubtedly dead.
He shook his head. “N-not… not over.”
Maria frowned. “What’s not over?”
Talking was difficult. But they still had to determine what it was that Krauss was trying to destroy, and why—and if he had been successful.
*
The CH-46 Sea Knight roared over the Atlantic toward the Virginia coast, carrying three soggy and battered CIA agents, one pilot, and two medics. After being hastily airlifted by harness from the life raft to the cabin of the tandem-rotor transport helicopter, Zero stripped out of his wet clothes and into a spare gray pilot jumpsuit they had onboard. He sat with a warm, dry compress around his neck, his breathing returning to something like normal, as the medics tended to Alan and Maria as best they could.
Everything hurt. His skin was red and felt raw. His spine and shoulders ached. His ribs, he’d noticed while changing, were badly bruised after being shot at multiple times. The superficial cut on his forehead had opened again—or perhaps it was a new one, he wasn’t sure—so he’d used his wet T-shirt to clean as much of the dried blood away as he could.
But they weren’t finished.
“The railgun operator said he targeted the UN building,” he said loudly into a headset. “What’s its status?”
Both of the medics avoided his gaze, focusing on their tasks.
“Destroyed, sir,” the pilot told him. “It was hit.”
Zero shook his head. I could have stopped that. “How many casualties?”
“Unknown at the moment,” the pilot said. “I heard tell that most were evacuated. But there were still people in the building.”
Zero frowned. It didn’t make sense. The United States was already aware that the railgun was en route before Krauss was even in range. Key personnel would have been evacuated. So why strike at the UN building? Was it symbolic? A show of force?
“There was a code punched into the railgun’s targeting system,” he told the chopper. “A six-digit code. It was one-two-two-eight-zero-one. It doesn’t sound like coordinates. Something else. Does that ring any bells in any heads?”
“An abbreviated date?” Maria spitballed. “Something he wanted you to see and figure out?”
“Could be a security code, maybe,” Alan suggested, wincing as the medic stitched his hand. “Did the railgun require an access code?”
Zero shook his head. They weren’t bad ideas, but neither made much sense.
“Sounds like it might be a transponder frequency,” the helicopter’s pilot mentioned.
Zero twisted in his seat. “It does?”
“Sure. Every plane registered with the FAA has a transponder to send and receive radio signals, and every transponder has a unique frequency code for them to identify it.”
That’s it, he thought, recalling that Penny told him the downed Antonov had been difficult to determine because it had turned off its transponder.
Krauss had been aiming for a moving target by using its transponder frequency. He didn’t even know the railgun could do that, but it made sense; how else would it find its target a distance that didn’t have direct visual?
“Alan, your sat phone.” Zero took it and made the call as he adjusted the headset off one ear. “Penny, I need you to contact the FAA and find the plane with this transponder code.” He recited it to her, and then quickly added, “I need to know where it came from, where it went, where it is now, and who was on it.”
“It would probably be faster for me to just back-door their database…” she said.
“Then do that.”
“Stay on the line.”
Zero twisted again to address the pilot, his back aching in protest. “What’s our ETA to the coast?”
“About twenty minutes, but I can probably cut that down by a few.”
“Then do that,” he said again.
A moving target… a plane. Was I right? What if the target really was Air Force One all this time? What if the railgun blast that he had adjusted by just a few degrees had been intended for President Rutledge?
But no, he realized; that didn’t add up. Emergency protocol had already been in place before the UN building was destroyed. If the president was the target, Krauss wouldn’t have wasted time on the static attack before his moving quarry.
“Zero,” Penny León’s voice came through the phone at his ear. “I found your code. It’s not a plane; it’s a helicopter. It took off from JFK with a proposed destination of Blair House but never made it there. Instead it landed at Joint Base Andrews near Washington.”
“And who was on it?”
“It’s not in their system, which means classified.”
Classified—that meant someone important whose identity they didn’t want known was on the helicopter. He knew of Blair House, the presidential guest house that comprised four buildings across the street from the White House in Washington, DC. It was named for an advisor to Andrew Jackson and was sometimes jokingly referred to as “the most exclusive hotel in the world” on account of being closed to the public and reserved only for guests of honor of the United States government…
“The Ayatollah,” Zero realized. “The target was the Ayatollah of Iran.” He had erroneously believed that Iran was behind this. But even Krauss had confirmed that it was not Iranians who were responsible.
Because their leader was the target.
Maria chewed her lip as she worked it out for herself. “He was due to arrive this morning for the meeting with Rutledge—but he was supposed
to visit the UN first…”
“But when the railgun threat was imminent, they must have sent him straight to DC,” Alan reasoned.
“His attaché was already at the UN,” said Penny. “Along with the treaty.”
Destroying the UN building was a calculated measure on Krauss’s part, Zero deduced. Even if the Ayatollah wasn’t there, the Iranians’ diplomats and the treaty itself were.
And then, he recalled, Krauss got a message to his sat phone. Someone told him where the Ayatollah really was—or at least the transponder code of the helicopter he was in.
The shot that Zero had misdirected was intended to strike the aircraft carrying Iran’s leader. “Take us to Andrews AFB!” he instructed the pilot.
“Roger that.”
“Penny, find out where they took him,” Zero said urgently into the phone. “Likely a bunker at Andrews, or a safe house nearby…”
“That could be difficult,” Penny admitted.
“But you can do it,” he insisted. “And do not alert anyone, do you understand?”
“Got it. Will call you back.” Penny ended the call.
“Zero,” Alan frowned, “the railgun is gone. The crew is dead.”
He nodded. “I know. But Krauss couldn’t have just assumed that the helicopter carrying the Ayatollah was in the air. That would have been too big a risk to take. And I saw him receive a message—someone had to have given him the transponder code of the aircraft.”
Maria’s eyes widened. “Someone that’s with him… maybe part of his own detail?”
That was what Zero feared most. Whoever the mole was, they were willing to die for this cause, willing to be blasted out of the sky along with the leader of Iran.
And if they were still there with him, as soon as the news came that the railgun had been destroyed, they might be inspired to try and finish the task they’d set out for.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Zero was out the helicopter’s side door before the Sea Knight was fully wheels-down at Andrews Air Force Base, less than a twenty-minute drive from the White House. The pain in his back sent a shockwave up his spine as he landed on the flat tarmac. The February wind bit through the gray flight suit and his feet felt frozen in his still-damp boots, but he did his best to ignore it.
