by Larry Bond
Ibrahim glared at him. “Do your job right, Captain. Then I won’t need any protection!”
Talal stiffened. “Yes, Highness.” He snatched up his submachine gun and headed for the door that led to the planning cell.
Ibrahim didn’t bother watching him go. Instead, he swung around on the two German technicians who were left. He pointed to the 9mm pistols they wore. “You know how to use those weapons?”
They nodded hurriedly.
“Good. Then guard the door. Move!”
The technicians scurried into position.
Ibrahim turned back to contemplate the secure phones that linked him with the five strike airfields. His eyes narrowed.
Should he transmit the arming codes and target coordinates now — and order an immediate launch?
Such an order would utterly disrupt the final stage of his carefully planned timetable. It would certainly throw the ground crews and security troops at those airfields into confusion. He frowned. Some were paid mercenaries like those who were failing him here. They were sure to panic when they heard his command center was under attack. A few might even abandon their posts without launching their aircraft.
And even if all the planes left the ground, Ibrahim knew the damage their bombs caused would be dramatically reduced — perhaps even halved.
Too many key American personnel would be at home asleep — and outside the target areas. His hired planners had run through several night attack scenarios when drafting the Operation. None had yielded the kinds of results he desired.
No, he thought furiously. He would not be panicked into wasting so much of the destructive power he had spent so much effort, time, and money to obtain.
Besides, once the four heavily armed men he’d so foolishly deployed outside the compound returned, the two Americans would find the odds tipping even more heavily against them. Thorn and Gray were only human. They could be killed.
First Floor
Thorn dropped another pistol-armed man taking potshots at them — swinging away to look for new targets before the man he’d shot even hit the floor. The sudden movement sent fire streaking down his side. Might have a broken rib there, he thought clinically.
“Pete!” Farrell’s voice sounded through his headset. “You’ve got company coming! That patrol’s on its way back-at the double! They’re heading for the gate.”
Damn.
Thorn scanned the room around them. He and Helen were each covering different sectors — moving from position to position whenever they fired. Several more of their enemies were down-either torn in half by his shotgun rounds or hit by one or more of Helen’s 9mm bullets.
Others had thrown their weapons away and were either lying doggo amid the clutter or fleeing out the building’s main entrance.
He let them go. There wasn’t any percentage in shooting unarmed men in the back-especially when they were abandoning the fight. Running away was exactly the kind of behavior he wanted to encourage.
But he and Helen were still taking fire from a couple of different locations. Throw four more guards wearing Kevlar and carrying automatic weapons into this battle, and you’ve got two very dead people, Thorn realized. Two very dead people who are us.
“Can you delay them?” he asked desperately. “I’ll try,” Farrell said matter-of-factly.
Thorn heard the sudden boom of a shotgun blast over the radio as Farrell opened up.
From his concealed position in the trees across the road from the Caraco compound, Sam Farrell saw the man he’d shot crumple to the pavement. Not even Kevlar body armor could stop a sabot round fired from less than forty meters away.
After a split second’s stunned amazement, the other three guards threw themselves flat and opened up — flailing away at the trees and brush on full automatic.
Pieces of torn bark and leaves rained down on Farrell. Shit, he thought, I am getting too damned old for this crap. He wriggled back behind the thick trunk of one of the trees and reloaded.
Helen Gray heard the desperate radio exchange between Peter and Farrell. The building entrance was in her sector. Which made stopping this new threat her responsibility.
She fired the Beretta two more times. Both shots slammed into the wall — right beside the man she’d been aiming at. With a startled yell, he threw his own pistol away and scuttled for the big double doors leading out.
Fair enough.
Helen tugged the empty magazine out of her own weapon and reached for another. Nothing. She’d used up the ammo she’d stuffed in her ready-use pouch. There were more rounds in her rucksack, but it would take far too long to get them out.
She switched to the shotgun, pumped it, and rose to one knee.
“I’m going for the doors, Peter,” she warned.
Without waiting for a response, she rose to her feet and moved forward, dodging around the tangle of cots, gear, and bodies.
A gunman appeared in one of the open doorways on the far wall.
Still running, Helen fired from the hip. Nine pistol-size pellets blasted out of the barrel and spread through a narrow arc. Two hit her target in the chest and two more tore his face apart.
Another man popped up to her right and fired twice. The first bullet snapped past her face. The second caught her in the side.
Momentarily stunned by the fiery impact, she stumbled and fell — still holding her shotgun. Another 9mm round spanged into the floor by her face and whirred away.
Helen spun on her side, fired, pumped the action, and then fired again.
An eerie, echoing, bubbling scream told her she’d hit the shooter.
Wincing, she levered herself upright and started for the main doors again. This time nobody tried to stop her.
On the other side of the vast room, the fire door to the stairs going down started to open.
Thorn caught a fleeting glimpse of two men, both wearing body armor, in the doorway. He fired quickly and swore as the sabot round tore a small, jagged hole through the wall a foot away from the door. He’d missed.
The steel door slammed shut.
Thorn scrambled to his feet. He had to take these new enemies now.
Before they recovered the initiative.
He pumped another round into the chamber and ran toward the stairwell firing on the move. Once. A finger-sized puncture appeared in the steel door. Twice. Another sabot round struck home — ripping a second hole at waist height near the handle.
Thorn pulled the trigger again. Nothing. He’d used the whole seven-round magazine. Christ, he thought, no time to reload.
Now what the hell do I do?
He reached the fire door and jerked it open.
One of the two men he’d spotted lay faceup on the top landing in a spreading pool of blood. The second, a tough, middleaged Arab, was very much alive.
The Arab brought the submachine gun he was holding on line — ready to fire at point-blank range.
And Thorn swung the Winchester up through a vicious twohanded arc — slamming it into the other man’s face with enough force to shatter bone.
Screaming and clutching at the red, pulped ruin that had once been his face, the Arab dropped his weapon and toppled backward down the stairs.
Helen cautiously pushed open one pair of double doors with the barrel of her shotgun. Nothing. No reaction.
She kicked open the door and slid through into a hallway closed off by another set of double doors — these leading outside into the compound.
Blood trails on the linoleum showed that some of the wounded had fled this way. A guard room stood empty to her right.
Naturally, she thought coldly. The guards were all inside — and dead or dying. Except for the men she was after now.
Helen moved on down the hall, pushed through the second set of doors, and came out onto the sidewalk fronting the half-filled parking lot.
Submachine gun fire rattled in the distance drawing closer.
A single, echoing shotgun blast answered.
“Delta Three, th
is is Two. How’re you doing?” she asked.
“They’re pulling back through the gate, Helen,” Farrell replied, breathing heavily. “I can’t stop them.”
Helen spotted the retreating patrol. Two were half dragging a third man, while a fourth provided covering fire. They would be in among the parked cars and vans in just a few seconds.
Too bad for them.
She knelt, laid her shotgun aside, and rifled through her rucksack.
Her fingers closed on the cylindrical plastic surface of a pipe bomb.
Her lighter came out of one of her assault vest’s breast pockets.
The retreating guards were sixty meters away. Fifty-five. Fifty.
Helen lit the fuse, stood up, and hurled the pipe bomb toward the enemy patrol. It spun end over end through the air, fell a little short, bounced once, and rolled under a minivan just meters away from them.
Perfect.
She snatched up her shotgun and rucksack in one hand, yanked open the closest door, and threw herself prone into the hallway.
WHAMMM.
The pipe bomb detonated directly under the van’s gasoline tank. A fireball tipped with nails and torn pieces of metal and plastic roared outward-consuming everyone and everything in its path.
“Jesus,” Farrell said simply over the radio.
Helen looked back over her shoulder at the inferno raging outside the building. That ought to get a few official pulses finally pumping, she thought calmly.
She stiffened as Peter’s voice came over the circuit. “I’m at the top of the stairs to the basement. I may need some help with this.”
Helen sprinted toward the inner set of double doors, slinging the rucksack over her shoulder. She started reloading the shotgun as she ran. “Give me thirty seconds, Peter!”
Strike Control Center
The sound of gunfire faded away on the floor above. At last, Ibrahim thought.
He signaled one of the technicians. “Find out what’s happening!”
The technician, an older man, swallowed hard. He hustled out the door leading to the planning cell. And then stopped dead.
“Sir!”
Ibrahim hurried over. “What is it, ma?”
The gray-haired computer specialist lifted a shaking hand, pointing toward the stairs leading up.
Ibrahim froze. Talal lay dead on the steps. His mangled face was covered in blood.
Impossible. Absolutely impossible.
The sudden realization that he was on the verge of losing everything flooded through Ibrahim’s stunned mind. He grabbed the shaking computer technician, pulled him through the door, and brutally shoved him toward one of the control consoles.
“Activate that console! Now!”
Then he whirled toward the other man — the younger one with a shaved head and a gold loop through his eyebrow. “Seal that door! Shoot anyone who comes through it! understand?”
The young man nodded convulsively, his face ash-gray.
May Allah protect me, Ibrahim thought bitterly. All would not be lost.
He could yet inflict a massive death blow to his great enemy.
He moved to the secure phone linking him to Godfrey Field.
“This is Control One. Get me Deckert! Now!”
Peter Thorn led the way down the stairs, with Helen coming right behind him.
He turned the corner. The Arab he’d clubbed lay crumpled at the foot of the steps. A few more feet brought him out into a large room crowded with empty desks.
He stopped in sudden confusion. Was this it? Had they been wrong about the whole setup? Where the hell was Ibrahim’s control center?
“Peter,” Helen hissed — pointing her shotgun at a gray, unmarked door in the far corner.
Thorn nodded.
He moved closer. Helen drifted off to the side so that they approached the door from different angles.
Thorn put his back against the wall, leaned over, and gently tested the handle. It was locked. Well, well, what a surprise, he thought grimly.
At a hand signal, Helen moved into position — ready to cover him.
He raised his shotgun, now loaded with solid slugs, and fired twice — smashing the hinges, first the top and then the bottom.
Helen spun out, savagely kicked the door in, and spun back into cover.
From inside the room a pistol cracked twice — sending steeljacketed rounds screaming through the opening.
The stupid bastard’s firing high, Thorn thought. He dropped to one knee and then threw himself flat in the doorway with his shotgun angled up. A figure loomed in his sights — a young man, obviously terrified, but still holding a weapon.
Bad move.
Thorn pulled the trigger.
The slug caught the other man in the stomach and threw him back against some kind of equipment console. Eyes already glazing over in death, he slid to the floor, smearing blood across the console, and toppled sideways.
Helen flowed in through the doorway, yelling, “Hands up! Get your hands up!”
A second man, this one older, hurriedly tossed his pistol to the side and stuck his hands in the air.
Thorn scrambled upright and joined Helen inside.
“Eight. Four. Alpha. Two …” someone said, speaking rapidly, but precisely.
He swung toward the voice and saw a tall, slender, handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes speaking intently into a telephone. Ibrahim. That had to be Prince Ibrahim al Saud — the man responsible for all this carnage. Rage flared inside him.
Thorn aimed the shotgun at the Saudi. “Drop the phone!”
Ibrahim smiled thinly and shook his head. “Delta. Tango.
Five …”
Helen fired. She was less than three meters away, and the pellets from her triple-ought shotgun shell were still tightly grouped when they hit — blowing Ibrahim’s right hand, the hand still holding the telephone, off just below the wrist.
The Saudi prince stood motionless, staring in horror at the blood pumping out of his shattered right arm.
Thorn grabbed the older man they’d taken prisoner and tossed him toward Ibrahim. “Use your belt! Put a tourniquet on him!”
“Oh, my God,” Helen said in horror.
Her shocked voice stopped Thorn in his tracks. He turned toward her.
She pointed at the several computer consoles that filled the room. One of them was live. It showed a digitally generated map of the surrounding region.
And a white dot blinked rapidly as it moved across the screen-heading inexorably toward Washington, D.C. One of the strike planes was airborne and closing on its target — with an armed 150-kiloton nuclear warhead aboard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DETONATION
JUNE 21
Strike Control Center, Chantilly, Virginia
Colonel Peter Thorn stared at the blinking dot in shock. Godfrey Field was barely thirty nautical miles from Washington, and the aircraft they’d seen based there had a cruising speed of two-hundred-plus knots.
Which meant they had maybe six or seven minutes before the equivalent of one hundred and fifty thousand tons of high explosive detonated right over the nation’s capital.
Several seconds trickled past — each an imagined lifetime of sorrow and regret. His shoulders slumped. “Oh, Christ.” Helen turned toward him. “We have to do something, Peter!”
Do what? What more could they do? Despite all the risks they’d taken, despite everything, they were too late. Ibrahim had managed to get one of his nuclear-armed planes off the ground.
And now the aircraft was following its preset flight plan, drawing ever closer to its programmed target.
He focused on the computer display. A single line below the digital map of the Washington metro area read: F1, FLIGHT CONTROL MENU.
Thorn grabbed the nearest chair, set his shotgun down, and sat down in front of the computer keyboard. He punched the F1 function key.
A new cursor popped on-screen, replacing the notation about a flight control menu: AIRCRAFT
ID?: Swell.
Thorn whirled toward the older man they’d taken prisoner with the Saudi prince. The man had just finished rigging his belt around Ibrahim’s maimed right arm as a temporary tourniquet.
“You speak English?”
The balding, gray-haired man looked up from Ibrahim’s slumped, unconscious figure. The wounded man had fainted halfway through the effort to save his life. He hesitated. “Was? Ich verstehen She Night.”
Something in their prisoner’s eyes told Thorn he was lying. He stood up and kicked the chair backward. “Bullshit,” he said softly.
The German flinched.
Thorn stalked up to the other man, grabbed hold of him by the shirt, and yanked him upright. “I said, do you speak English?”
Their prisoner stayed mute, his eyes wide in fear.
It was time for more active measures, Thorn decided coldly.
He scooped his shotgun back and casually, almost negligently, aimed it toward the other man’s head. “I’m going to ask you that question one more time. If you lie to me …”
He chambered a round.
The German bit his lip, trembling even harder now. “But you cannot do this! You cannot torture me. It is against American law!”
Thorn leaned closer. He pressed the shotgun right against the other man’s temple. “That plane is carrying a nuclear weapon.
What makes you think I care about the law right now?” His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Mein Gott.” The German swallowed hard. “I … I will help you. Do not shoot me … bitte. please!”
Helen patted him down, fished a wallet out of his pocket, and showed Thorn a tourist visa issued to one Klaus Engel.
He grabbed the German and dragged him back to the live console.
The blinking aircraft indicator was now roughly halfway between the towns of Leesburg and Herndon, Virginia — which meant they probably had somewhat less than five minutes remaining.
He pointed to the question asking for the aircraft identification.
“What’s the ID number for that plane?”
Engel shook his head frantically. “I do not know, I swear it! I merely built and programmed the machine. I was not part of the planning cell!”
