The Edge of Armageddon

by David Leadbeater

  “Fifteen minutes,” Dahl said.

  Drake eyed the odometer. “Right on schedule.”

  “How much time will we have spare?”

  “Three minutes,” Drake rolled a hand. “Give or take.”

  “What’s that in miles?”

  “At two hundred miles per hour? Roughly, seven.”

  Dahl raised a hopeful expression. “Not bad.”

  “In a perfect world,” Drake shrugged. “Doesn’t include turn maneuvers, speeding up, shark attack. Whatever the hell else they might throw at us out there.”

  “This thing have an inflatable?” Dahl cast around, fingers clutched tight to the nuke.

  “If it does, I don’t know where.” Drake watched the clock.

  Twelve minutes to explosion.

  “Get ready.”

  “Always am.”

  “Bet you didn’t expect to be doing this when you woke up today.”

  “What? Dropping a nuclear bomb into the Atlantic Ocean to save New York City? Or talking to you, face to face, whilst riding a marine’s chopper?”

  “Well, both.”

  “The first part crossed my mind.”

  Drake shook his head, unable to hide a smile. “Of course it did. You’re Torsten Dahl, the great hero.”

  The Swede relinquished his grip on the nuke for just one second to place a hand on Drake’s shoulder. “And you’re Drake, Matt Drake, the most caring person I have ever known. No matter how hard you try to hide it.”

  “You ready to drop that nuke?”

  “Of course I am, ya daft Northern dickhead.”

  Drake made the chopper dive, plummeting nose first toward the gray swell. Dahl threw open the rear door, shuffling around to get the best position. A current of air gusted through the SuperCobra. Drake tightened his grip on the stick and worked the pedals, still plummeting. Dahl shifted the nuke one last time. Waves tossed and collided and sent errant spray flaring up to meet them, a white foam laced through with diamond sparkles of sunlight. Bracing every muscle, Drake finally pulled up hard, leveling the halo off and spinning his head to watch Dahl heave the metal-cased weapon of ultimate destruction out the door.

  It fell toward the waves, a spinning bomb, entering the water easily because of the low altitude it had been released at, another failsafe to ensure the anti-tamper sensor remained neutral. Drake instantly gunned them away from the point of impact, skimming the waves so low they washed over his skids, wasting no time in climbing and giving the chopper less space to fall through in case of calamity.

  Dahl checked his own watch.

  Two minutes.

  “Get your foot down.”

  Drake almost repeated that he wasn’t actually driving a car but concentrated instead in coaxing every modicum of speed from the bird, knowing that the Swede was just venting tension. Everything was down to seconds now—the time before the nuke exploded, the miles they were distant from its blast radius, the span of their lives.

  “Eighteen seconds,” Dahl said.

  Drake prepared for hell. “Been a pleasure, mate.”

  Ten . . . nine . . .

  “See you soon, Yorkie.”

  Six . . . five . . . four . . .

  “Not if I see your stupid—”

  Zero.

  CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

  Drake and Dahl saw nothing of the initial underwater explosion, but the enormous wall of water that erupted from the sea behind them was enough to make their hearts falter. A liquid mushroom cloud exploding thousands of feet into the air, dwarfing all else, shooting up toward the atmosphere as if striving to drown out the very sun. A spray dome surged up, the precursor to shock waves, a spherical cloud, high surface waves and a base surge that would rise to a height beyond five hundred meters.

  The blast wave was unstoppable, a manmade force of nature, an energy corruption. It struck the rear of the chopper like a hammer blow, giving Drake the impression he was being pushed along by the hand of a malicious giant. Almost immediately the chopper swooped, lifted and then turned to the side. Drake’s head struck metal. Dahl clung on, a rag doll being thrown around by a vicious hound.

  The chopper rocked and rolled, buffeted and beaten by the endless blast, the dynamic wave. It spun again and again, its rotors slowing, its body pitching. Behind it, the immense curtain of water continued to rise, propelled by a titanic force. Drake struggled to stay conscious, abandoning all control of his destiny and just trying to hang on, remain awake and in one piece.

  Time was rendered irrelevant and they might have lurched and bucked inside that blast wave for hours, but it was only when it surged past and they found themselves in its wake, that the true toll of its devastating power became clear.

  The chopper, almost upside down, plunged toward the Atlantic.

  Out of control, Drake braced himself for the impact with the knowledge that, even if they did survive the crash, they had no life raft, no life vests, and no hope of rescue. Somehow retaining enough cognizance to hold on with every last ounce of strength, he watched as they plunged into the ocean.

  CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

  Alicia saw Drake make the connection in his head about three seconds after her. Dahl too. The boys were slow, but she’d never tell. It was far better to hold some things in reserve. As the rest caught on and Hayden sought advice from Moore and his government cronies, Alicia took on board the fateful knowledge that the law of safe distances was going to make them all suffer badly sometime in the next half hour. As Drake worked toward appropriating a chopper, Alicia turned her eyes and her attention to something else.

  A chopper would crash, she knew that, so the obvious choice of tailing him in another bird didn’t made a jot of sense. But if his helicopter flew at two hundred miles an hour . . .

  Alicia pulled Beau aside, explained her plan and then found a soldier who introduced them to a representative of the US Coastguard.

  “What’s the fastest ship you’ve got?”

  By the time Drake lifted off, Alicia was heading below decks and jumping aboard a hastily scrambled Defender Class boat, good for over eighty miles per hour. As one of the sheepish crew attested, they had made some modifications, which may or may not have increased the boat’s speed to over one hundred. When Alicia told them in just a few terse words what she wanted to do every man there insisted on staying to help.

  The Defender roared away minutes later, pounding at the seas with a rigid hull, trying to narrow that gap between the inevitable detonation and their time of arrival.

  As Alicia told them: “We’re racing toward the nuclear explosion, boys. Hold on to yer plums.”

  And whether they understood or not, the crew coaxed every ounce of speed from the boat. Riding the waves, challenging them, the Defender class boat gave everything it had. Alicia clung with white knuckles and white face to railings inside the cabin, watching through the windows. A GPS charted the course of the chopper, having plotted its transponder signal. The ship’s crew constantly worked out the time differences, saying they had narrowed the gap to twenty minutes then eighteen.

  Seventeen.

  Still too long. Alicia gripped the rail and then started when Beau seized her shoulder.

  “It will work,” he said. “We will save this day.”

  The boat raced hard, pursuing the speeding chopper, both of them bizarrely chasing an oncoming explosion that hadn’t happened yet. The horizon was an ever-changing line, never straight. The crew sweated and struggled and plumbed the depths of their knowledge. The boat edged into unknown territory, engines so virile they felt alive.

  When the captain turned to Alicia, she had already seen the spiraling cloud on the horizon, not too far distant, but much further away than Drake and Dahl’s helicopter. The speeding Defender zipped off the top of one large surge of water, saw and struck the approaching blast wave, and broke through, shuddering every bolt that held fast its structure. The great ring of white water was visible in the distance, the spectacle stopping even Alicia’s runaway m
outh for a second.

  But only for a second.

  “Move,” she breathed, conscious of Drake and Dahl now almost certainly crashing into hostile waters. “Move, move, move!”

  *

  It took another thirteen minutes to reach the crash site. Alicia was ready, life vest strapped around her body and another held in her hand. Beau was at her side with more than half a dozen crewmen, eyes searching the waters. The first debris they found was a floating piece of rotor blade, the second a full length skid. After that those parts that hadn’t sunk came more frequently, passing by in a clump.

  But no Drake, and no Dahl.

  Alicia scanned the waves, standing in the bright sunshine but living in the darkest hell. If the fates determined that these two heroes could save New York and survive the explosion, only to be lost in the Atlantic, she was not sure she’d be able to handle that. Minutes passed. Wreckage floated by. Nobody spoke, nor moved an inch. They would remain until nightfall if need be.

  The radio crackled constantly. Hayden’s voice, enquiring. Then Moore’s and Smyth’s on a different line. Even Kenzie spoke up. The moments passed in slow-motion turmoil, burgeoning dread. The longer it took . . .

  Beau rose onto his tiptoes, catching sight of something just rising up the side of a swell. He pointed it out and voiced a question. Alicia then saw it too, an odd black mass, moving sluggishly.

  “If that’s a Kraken,” she mostly whispered without realizing she’d even spoken. “I’m outta here.”

  The captain leaned the boat in that direction, helping the form gain focus. It took a few minutes and a little drifting, but as Alicia squinted she saw that it was two bodies, lashed together so that they wouldn’t float apart, and tied to the still-floating pilot’s seat. The battle between treading water and sinking seemed to be tilting toward the latter, so Alicia urged the Defender to hurry.

  And jumped overboard.

  Swimming hard, she grasped hold of the bobbing mass and heaved it around, trying to make sense of it. A face swiveled around.

  “Dahl. Are you all right? Where’s Drake?”

  “Hanging on to my coat tails. As always.”

  As the current shifted Dahl around in the water a second face became visible, resting against the back of the other’s jacket.

  “Well, you two look bloody comfy together,” Alicia mock-protested. “No wonder you didn’t shout out for rescue. Shall we give you another ten minutes or so?”

  Drake’s shaking hand rose from the waters. “Not even one. I think I swallowed half the bloody ocean.”

  “And I think we’re about to go under,” Dahl gasped a moment before the pilot’s seat drifted away and his head disappeared below the waters.

  The Coastguard boat came as close as it dared. “Are they okay?” voices hollered.

  Alicia waved. “They’re fine. Bastards are just messing about.”

  Then Drake slipped under too.

  “Umm,” Alicia stared. “Actually . . .”

  CHAPTER FORTY NINE

  In the aftermath the world adjusted, shocked by the near-miss horror of what had occurred, but sadly inured to it too. As the United States detailed back in the 1960s, it was only a matter of time before some terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in one of the world’s major cities. They had even developed a document and reaction to it—National Response Scenario Number One.

  If a more wounded, bruised, sore and complaining group of people assembled to debate the consequences and gloss over the near-misses of New York, then it was never acknowledged. This team, however, SPEAR and a few others, were contacted by the President, the Director of Homeland Security, and the Mayor of New York.

  Alicia was always going to complain about it. “And all I really wanted was a call from Lawrence.”

  “Fishburne?” Drake asked.

  “Don’t be silly. Jennifer, of course.”

  “Could she steal you away from me?”

  Alicia ginned. “In a heartbeat.”

  “Well, it’s always nice to know where you stand.”

  “If you like I could write you a list of principal suitors.”

  Drake waved a hand, still trying to come to terms with the kiss they had shared. It had happened right after a moment of great stress, a celebration of life, but it had stirred emotions, old emotions, inside him that he thought were long dead. As everything stood right now there were many other things to consider—Mai and Beau chief among them.

  But life didn’t decelerate just for you, he thought. Though many expected it to, and great chances mostly came along but once. To miss them usually meant a lifetime of regret, of never knowing. A chance taken was never a chance lost.

  Better to try and fail than to never try at all.

  Alicia was as complex as a solar system, but even that was navigable. He switched his thoughts off for a moment, still physically and mentally weak from all the exertions of the day and, indeed, the last few weeks. Around him sat his friends, enjoying a sit-down meal inside one of New York’s best Italian restaurants. Agent Moore had rented the entire place out at Homeland’s expense, as a thank you to the team, and locked them inside.

  “No matter what happens,” he said. “I don’t want you people rushing off to prevent it.”

  Drake appreciated that.

  And the team appreciated the fine food, the relaxed atmosphere, and the long break from such intense stress. The seats were plush, the room warm, the staff barely noticeable. Dahl had dressed in white shirt and black trousers, almost unrecognizable to Drake who was used to seeing him in combat gear. But then he had dressed similar, substituting the trousers for trusty Levis.

  “That’s not the Bond look,” Dahl had pointed out.

  “I’m not James Bond.”

  “Then stop poncing about and trying to sound more sophisticated every time Alicia walks by. She already knows you’re just a Yorkshire tw—”

  “I think it’s time you pissed off on vacation, pal. If you can’t decide where to go I’d be happy to knock you into next week.” He held up a fist.

  “And there’s my thanks for saving your life.”

  “Don’t remember it. And if I don’t remember it, it never happened.”

  “Much like the time you matured.”

  Beau and Mai sat next to each other, the Frenchman enjoying the food and speaking when spoken to; the Japanese woman looking out of place, caught between two worlds. Drake wondered what she really wanted and where she truly belonged. In some moments he saw a fire in her that prompted her to fight for him, in others a doubt that sent her silent, introspective. Certainly, the four of them couldn’t resolve anything in a day, but he saw something coming, clouding the horizon ahead.

  Much like the nuclear explosion he witnessed yesterday.

  Smyth and Lauren were now an item. Maybe the kiss between Drake and Alicia prompted them, or maybe the brush with annihilation. Either way, they weren’t wasting another day wondering. Hayden and Kinimaka sat together, and Drake wondered if he saw more than the meter gap between them, something with more significance. It had more to do with body language than anything, but then he was mentally fizzled out and put it down to weariness.

  “To tomorrow,” he raised a glass, “and the next battle.”

  Drinks were drained and the meal continued. It was after the main course had been devoured, and most sat back draped beneath a contented drowsiness, that Kenzie made a point of speaking in front of the entire group.

  “And what of me?” she asked. “Is my fate so uncertain?”

  Hayden shifted, the mantle of leadership coating her once more. “Well, I’ll be blunt with you, which I’m sure you’ll appreciate. There is nothing I’d like better than to keep you out of a jail cell, Kenzie, but I have to say—I can’t see it happening.”

  “I could walk away.”

  “I couldn’t stop you,” Hayden acknowledged. “And wouldn’t want to. But the crimes you have committed in the Middle East—” she made a face “—at the very least upse
t a great many powerful people. Some of them American.”

  “Most likely the same men and women I procured other items for.”

  “A good point. But not helpful.”

  “Then I will join your team. Turn over a new leaf. Run alongside the blond gazelle that is Torsten Dahl. I am now yours, Hayden, if you will give me chance to work off my debt.”

  The SPEAR team leader blinked rapidly as she took in Kenzie’s heartfelt statement. Drake choked on his water, for the second time in two days. “I never thought of Dahl as a gazelle. More a—”

  “Don’t say it,” the Swede warned, looking slightly embarrassed.

  Alicia watched the Israeli closely. “I’m not sure I want to work with this bitch.”

  “Oh, I will be good for you, Myles. Keep you on those toes. I could teach you how to throw a punch that actually hurts.”

  “I may also have to stick with you for now,” Beau spoke up. “With Tyler Webb in the wind and playing Tomb Raider, I have no other place to be.”

  “Thanks,” Drake grunted. “We’ll think about it and mail you a very short letter of response.”

  “Good people are always welcomed to this team,” Hayden told him. “So long as they play nicely with the rest of us. I’m sure Beau will be a great asset.”

  “Well, I for one know he has a great asset,” Alicia said reflectively. “Though I’m not sure it would play nicely with the team.”

  Some laughed and some didn’t. The night waxed and then waned and still, the soldiers who saved New York depressurized themselves among good company and good stories. The city itself celebrated with them, though the majority of its inhabitants never knew why. A sense of carnival saturated the air. In darkness, and then the rising dawn, life went on.

  As a new day dawned the team drifted apart, heading back to hotel rooms and agreeing to meet that afternoon.

  “Ready to fight another day?” Dahl yawned at Drake as they walked into the crisp, new morning.

  “Alongside you?” Drake thought about ribbing the Swede and then remembered all they had been through. Not just today but since the day they met.