by Larry Bond
Four minutes left. They’d barely have been able to get a chopper airborne before the bomb went off.
“Shit,” the Marine lieutenant colonel said suddenly.
Dodson swung around. “What?”
“We just got a call from Norfolk, sir. There’s a Spruance-class destroyer en route to Baltimore for a goodwill visit— DD987, O’ Bannon.”
The general swore suddenly. “Where is she exactly?” He followed the Marine officer’s pointing finger to a large digital map of the Chesapeake Bay region and paled. “Christ almighty … get a flash warning off to her! Now!”
Aboard USS O’Bannon, in Chesapeake Bay
The long, gray, graceful silhouette of the destroyer O’Bannon slid quietly through the waters of the Chesapeake Bay — moving north at a steady twelve knots. To the west, lights marked the location of the Patuxent River Naval Air Warfare Center. Smaller lights glimmered on the eastern shore — marking waterfront homes belonging to wealthy Washingtonians or locals.
Lieutenant Mike Rydell, U.S. Navy, O’Bannon’s watch officer, felt his jaw drop open. He stared at the signal rating. “We just got what?”
“A flash nuclear strike warning, Lieutenant! They say it’s no drill!”
Rydell grabbed the message from the rating — scanning the coordinates shown and comparing them with the bridge plot. Oh, hell. The Navy ran periodic exercises on how to respond to a nuclear attack, but he’d never expected to ever do it for real not in a million years. He froze for an instant, but only for an instant, and then reacted.
Rydell tossed the message to one side and whirled around — already snapping out orders. “Captain to the bridge!” He swung toward the helmsman. “All ahead flank! Left full rudder! All lookouts inside! Sound General Quarters! Now!”
Caught by surprise themselves, the rest of the bridge crew stared back at him for a split second — their horrified faces ghostwhite even under the red lamps used to preserve night vision.
Then they exploded into action.
Klaxons howling, the destroyer heeled sharply to port, throwing a higher bow wake as four eighty-thousand-horsepower gas turbines kicked her up toward full speed.
Control Center
Thorn nudged the controls slightly, altering-course to bring the aircraft onto a heading of one five five degrees. The bomb-laden turboprop should be right in the middle of the channel now. And almost directly over those poor bastards aboard that destroyer.
His hands tightened again.
My God, he wondered desperately, isn’t there someplace else I can send this damned thing? He forced the thought away. There wasn’t anywhere else.
He glanced at the digital readout winding down in the corner of his display. “Ops Center, this is Thorn. Thirty seconds.”
Dodson’s strained voice came over his headset. “Understood, Colonel. Give me a running count, please.”
Thorn felt Helen’s tense hand on his shoulder. She squeezed slightly.
He cleared his throat. “Twenty-five. Twenty. Fifteen.
Ten.
“Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four …” His pulse hammered in his own ears. “Three. Two. One.”
The screen blanked abruptly — wiped clean of all data. Static replaced the picture on the video monitor.
Thorn swallowed hard. “Detonation.”
Outside the Control Center
Surrounded by a crowd of stunned prisoners and Fairfax County police, Sam Farrell stared southeast.
A roiling fireball flashed above the horizon, turning darkness into a flickering, deadly, man-made day for several seconds.
Slowly the fireball faded from white to orange to a final dull, bloody red.
At last, even that vanished — leaving the stars and the night sky untouched.
Over Chesapeake Bay
Fifteen thousand feet over the still, placid waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the Jetstream 31 turboprop ceased to exist blown first into its constituent atoms and then stripped down even further into a muddled sea of subatomic particles.
In its place, a sudden pinpoint of boiling energy burst into existence — a fireball spearing through the night sky ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun. Gamma rays sleeted outward — smashing into and ionizing the surrounding air molecules.
Chemical reactions formed a dense layer of smog tens of meters deep around the small, still-expanding fireball.
X rays raced outward ahead of the plasma core, heating everything in their path to tens of millions of degrees.
Two hundred microseconds after detonation, a shock wave formed at the surface of the fireball — roaring away from the explosion at one hundred times the speed of sound.
USS O’Bannon
Four miles from the base of the mushroom cloud, the shock wave was still moving at nearly the speed of sound when it slammed into O’Bannon’s stern. Caught in its powerful, howling grip, the destroyer bucked forward — buried under a wall of water thrown skyward. Railings, radar, and radio antennas all tore loose and vanished.
The ship disappeared from view inside a maelstrom of spray and flying debris.
Control Center
Thorn sat numbly, staring at the static on his screens and listening to the crackling hiss over his headset. There were nearly four hundred men aboard that destroyer. Men who might already be dead — fried by heat or radiation, crushed by impact, or trapped in a ship already heading for the bottom.
Helen stood at his side, her hand still on his shoulder.
A voice sounded in his headset. “This is Dodson.” Thorn sat upright.
“Go ahead, sir.”
“We’ve reestablished contact with Par River, Colonel,” the general said “They’ve taken a hell of a lot of damage — planes thrown around, instruments smashed, but nobody was hurt.
They all made it into cover in time.”
“What about O’Bannon?” Thorn asked softly.
Dodson hesitated, then replied: “There’s no word, yet, I’m afraid.
We’re still trying to make radio contact.”
Thorn stiffened feeling as though he’d been punched in the stomach. “I see.”
“Look, son, you did everything you could. Nobody could have done more,” Dodson said.
Thorn shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, General.”
He lowered his head, staring blankly.
Helen knelt beside him. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Peter …”
Thorn’s head snapped bolt upright. There were cheers coming through his headphones!
“Thorn, this is Dodson!” the general said suddenly. “Par River just called in. They’ve established contact with O’Bannon by signal lamp.
Her radio antennas were smashed, but she’s still afloat! Par River says she’s battered, she’s lost most of her topside gear, and she’s scorched as hell, but she’s steaming in under her own power!”
“What about casualties?” Thorn heard himself ask, still not daring to believe the destroyer had survived the blast.
“They have wounded ― mostly impact trauma cases-but no fatalities,” Dodson answered. “Whoever was on watch put her stern to the blast point and ran like hell! She made it just far enough away to ride out the shock wave!”
Slowly, with shaking hands, Thorn pulled off the headset and turned toward Helen.
She looked up at him with shining eyes full of joy and wonder.
“You did it, Peter. You did it.”
“No,” he said, pulling her closer. “We did it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
END GAME
JUNE 21
Strike Control Center, Chantilly
Fifteen minutes after the fireball faded out of the night sky, Helen Gray still knelt at Peter’s side — holding him tight as his hand lovingly stroked her hair.
She turned her head as a tall, dapper man came into the control center, pushing through the several Fairfax County sheriff’s officers who were now studying the tightly packed array of computer hardwar
e in stunned amazement. Ibrahim al Saud was gone — hauled away under arrest with the other wounded terrorists shortly after the police entered the bulletriddled headquarters building. So far, her FBI credentials had kept them from being arrested themselves.
Despite the early hour, the newcomer’s gray suit was perfectly pressed and his black loafers perfectly shined. She’d known him.
FBI Special Agent Paul Sandquist stopped in front of her, took in the scene silently for a minute, and then shook his head in amazement.
“Jesus Christ, Helen. How the hell do you manage to stick your neck out so far every single time? You know I have orders from the Director himself to arrest you and Colonel Thorn on sight?”
Helen nodded. “Yep.” She calmly let go of Peter, stood up, and held out her wrists. “Okay, Paul. You want to handcuff us and take us to your fearless leader?”
Sandquist smiled wryly. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to need the handcuffs, Special Agent Gray.”
Helen felt Peter Thorn’s warm hand slip into hers and smiled back.
“No, somehow I didn’t think we would either. But let’s get going. Colonel Thorn and I have a few things to discuss with Director Leiter.”
Virginia Godfrey Field, Near Leesburg, Virginia
FBI Hostage Rescue Team section leader Felipe Degarza stepped outside the Caraco hangar and immediately took the full brunt of the late morning sun.
Sweat trickled out from under his assault helmet. Black coveralls, black boots, and heavy Kevlar body armor didn’t make the most comfortable outfit under the circumstances, he decided. But it was a hell of a lot safer when bullets went flying around. Better hot and sweaty than cold and dead.
Or so his old boss, Special Agent Helen Gray, had always said. For Degarza that made it gospel.
“Director Leiter is on the line, Felipe,” Special Agent Tim Brett said.
Degarza handed the H&K MP5 submachine gun he’d been cradling to his second-in-command and took the secure cell phone Brett offered him.
“This is Degarza. The airfield is secure.”
“Thank God,” Leiter said. “Any trouble?”
The HRT section leader shook his head, — watching a line of dazed prisoners streaming out of the hangar under the watchful eyes of his own troopers and the local SWAT team. “None, sir.
We caught them with their pants down. Apparently they weren’t slated to get their first plane off until well after sunrise. Their leaden-some German guy — was still trying to get through to Chantilly when we blew the door open.”
“And the bombs?” Leiter asked. “The bombs are still there?”
“Oh, yeah,” Degarza replied. He turned back toward the hangar.
“Besides one Caraco corporate jet, I’ve got four twin engine aircraft here — and all four of them are carrying devices that look a hell of a lot like the pictures of those TN1000s you faxed us.”
“Don’t touch those weapons,” Leiter ordered. “Leave that to the experts. There’s an Army EOD team on its way to your location now. The commander’s name is Lieutenant-Colonel Greg Lyle. He’s their best man. You let him check them over first, clear?”
“Absolutely, sir,” Degarza said, unfazed by Leiter’s apparent lack of trust in his common sense. Only an idiot would want to screw around with weapons packing a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand ton punch — especially when nobody knew whether or not these terrorists had booby-trapped them.
Which left him with one burning question. “Is there any word yet from the other dispersal fields, sir?”
“So far, so good,” Leiter replied. “We’ve hit them all now.
Took a couple of minor casualties in a firefight at Page and at Shafter-Minter, but nothing serious. A few of the bastards apparently got spooked early and ran when they couldn’t make contact with Ibrahim — but we know where they’re headed. They won’t get far. And we’ve recovered nineteen bombs. According to Special Agent Gray and Colonel Thorn, that’s all they had left.”
All they had left, Degarza thought in disbelief. He sure hoped Leiter knew just how lucky the Bureau had been — and how much it owed to Helen Gray.
JULY 5
Vienna, Virginia Colonel Peter Thorn gingerly poked his head into Farrell’s booklined office. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything, Sam.”
Farrell looked up from the yellow legal pad he’d been furiously scribbling on. He tossed the pad onto his desk and stood up to shake Thorn’s hand. “Not at all, Pete! But I’m surprised Louisa didn’t let me know you were here.”
Thorn grinned sheepishly. “I don’t think she saw me come in. I waited till I saw her go out into your garden and slipped in the back way.”
Farrell wagged a finger at him. “No more cloak-and dagger stuff in my house, Colonel. I’m retired for good this time.”
“Yes, sir.”
The general waved him toward a chair and sat down himself.
“I don’t see why you’re acting so skittish around my wife, Pete,” Farrell continued, smiling. “You know you’re one of her favorites.”’ Thorn shook his head. “That’s hard to believe — since we both know I dragged you into the middle of one hell of a mess — not to mention the ten thousand bucks of your money we spent. And Louisa’s been around the Army long enough to know how long it’ll take the green eyeshade boys to cough up any reimbursement— if ever!”
Farrell shrugged. “Who knows? I may just write that ten thousand off as research on a book I might write someday. And maybe I’ll even bill the FBI for the time I spent answering their questions.”
Thorn grinned. Sam, Helen, and he had been held in FBI “protective” custody for nearly two days while the Bureau, the Pentagon, and the CIA all ran them through extensive and exhausting debriefing sessions. At first, it was clear that the government would really have preferred to keep the whole crewed-up affair hushed up. But there was no way the administration could clamp a lid on a major firefight out in suburban Virginia and half a dozen heavy-duty HRT and SWAT raids around the country. Not to mention a nuclear explosion right over Chesapeake Bay.
Thorn frowned. He looked out the window at Farrell’s big, green, peaceful backyard.
They’d been lucky. Very lucky. Because it was an airburst, the blast hadn’t created a lot of fallout. Plus, the prevailing winds had pretty rapidly pushed what radiation there was well out into the Atlantic.
Still, the police and National Guard units had been forced to temporarily evacuate several thousand people from the Virginia portion of the Delmarva peninsula — mostly as a precaution. Fortunately, the Defense and Energy Departments decontamination teams surveying the area were reporting only very minor levels of background radiation.
Anyway, what started out as a trickle of news leaks had rapidly turned into a flood.
The first stories had focused on the horrifying news that someone had somehow smuggled a large number of stolen Russian nuclear weapons into the U.S. itself. That had generated a whole week’s worth of mile-high headlines and hour-long TV news specials. Now the other shoes were starting to drop one right after another.
There were questions about Caraco’s involvement in domestic American politics, questions about Ibrahim’s close ties to the administration, and questions about the roles senior officials had played in trying to shut down investigations into Caraco’s secret arms smuggling.
So far he had dodged the press, but he was just about out of excuses and running room. Especially now that Congress was getting its act in gear. Both the House and the Senate were talking loudly about forming special committees to investigate the administration’s recent conduct.
One of the people they were zeroing in on was Richard Garrett — Ibrahim’s former chief lobbyist.
There were also stories that the IRS was focusing its attention on the ex-Commerce Secretary — pursuing evidence that he’d avoided paying taxes on large unreported bonuses paid by the Saudi prince.
Perhaps even more intriguing, Thorn had heard of new developments from his conta
cts in the intelligence community — developments that were starting to shed some light on Ibrahim al Saud’s motives for trying to destroy the United States as a world power. Investigators combing through his estate in Middleburg and through his private files in Caraco’s various headquarters kept stumbling across intriguing proof that Ibrahim had been a major player in world terrorism — maybe even the major player.
There were dozens of highly complex bank transactions that led to virtually every terrorist cell operating against the United States.
Farrell whistled when Thorn told him that. “Now there’s a golden opportunity to do some good, Pete!”
Thorn nodded. “Our guys are going to have a field day ripping out the financial roots that armed and paid people like Reichardt.”
“Reichardt?” Farrell asked.
“An ex-Stasi officer. Aka the late Heinrich Wolf,” Thorn said with grim satisfaction.
Facing charges that included terrorism and conspiracy to commit mass murder, the dead Stasi officer’s underlings had been only too happy to come clean in the hopes of receiving a life prison sentence instead of death by lethal injection.
He looked up to find Sam Farrell eyeing him closely.
“So, what are your plans these days?” the general asked. Thorn detected the long arm of Louisa Farrell in that question.
The general’s wife had always taken too pronounced an interest in his private life. He decided to play dumb. “Oh, the debriefers are still keeping me pretty busy. I’ve run backward and forward over everything we learned so many times that I’m dreaming about it now.”
Farrell snorted. “I mean, what are you and Helen up to? You see much of her these days?”
Thorn hesitated, then shrugged nonchalantly. “Not as much as I’d like.
She’s pretty hot stuff where the FBI is concerned.
They’re parading her in front of every news organization and congressional staffer they can find — touting her as the agent who almost single-handedly put an end to one of the greatest national security threats this country has ever faced.”
Farrell nodded. “Smart move on the Director’s part. I assume she’s off the hook for Mcdowell’s death, then?”
