(Wrath-04)-Breathless (2012)

by Chris Stewart

  “But does the United States stop there? No, they are merely getting started. Iraq was to follow, a nation that had virtually nothing to do with the World Trade Center attack. Who was to follow after that? Iran has been living under threat of invasion for more than a generation! Is North Korea next? How do we know when they’ll stop? Is this the American’s idea of proportion? Is this the American’s idea of a fair and appropriate response? Something nips at their heels and they crush their heads. ‘Be our slaves or we destroy you. Do our bidding or you die. You are either with us or against us.’ How do you reason with that?

  “But that, my fellow citizens, is the great lesson they have taught us today. That is the lesson of this new century.

  “And now we have seen that Israel has learned the lesson from its master very well.

  “But I reject it. I reject it! And we must stop them now.

  “The blood of a hundred thousand Palestinians cries out from the ground. Ten thousand tortured Muslim prisoners cry for vengeance as well. Israel must be punished, but so must its master, for the slave does not do but what the master bids it to do.

  “So I come to you, my brothers, and beg you to act. And if you will not act, then don’t condemn me. If you will not act, if you don’t have the courage to finally make a stand, if you don’t have the courage to defend those who are defenseless, then at least stand out of the way. If you have no courage, then don’t try to stop me from what I am then forced to do.”

  The king stopped and looked out into the audience of world leaders who immediately burst into applause.

  SIXTEEN

  El Saud bin el-Aziz Auxiliary Air Base, Northern Saudi Arabia

  The Chinese general was escorted across the dry airfield by a Saudi aide holding an umbrella over the colonel’s head, not so much to block the sun as to hide the rank on his shoulders from the American satellites or reconnaissance aircraft that might be prying overhead. Yes, the Saudis thought they had a handle on most of the U.S. intelligence satellites, but they often varied their flyover schedule, and the high-flying drones might be overhead at any time.

  As the Chinese general walked, he glanced around the remote airfield. A few trucks had been parked at the opposite end of the runway, while a pair of French Mirages and two early version American F-16s sat on the far tarmac. A herd of white goats grazed in the center of the field, their shaggy coats attracting gnats and black flies. The few men present were dressed in military attire. There had to be more guards than he could see, the general suspected, but they remained hidden from his view.

  The general hacked and spit nervously. The king of Saudi Arabia had agreed to his demands for a personal meeting, which was very important in order for him to save face. But with the kind of money they were talking about, he would have agreed either way.

  The Chinese general was escorted down a long ramp that led under the desert sand, through a set of steel double doors, along a long hallway, down a winding staircase, and through more steel doors. He ended up in a small conference room. No windows. One door. A single table. Nothing else.

  The Saudi king was waiting. He stood when the general appeared.

  The conversation was fairly short. It was a simple request.

  “Do you understand what I am asking?” the king finally queried.

  The general had a few questions. What was in the crate? Was it drugs? Heroin? Counterfeit American bills? No. Obviously not. Had to be much more important, much more valuable than that for the king to be involved. Where was it going? What was the hurry? Why must it have an escort? All this, he needed to know.

  The Arab king frowned as he raised his hand. “Too many questions,” he answered bitterly. “Too many things, I cannot tell you right now. But what I ask is very simple. Only one crate. That is all. One crate to be shipped across your country. That is all I ask. If you can assure me of its safe arrival in Shanghai, then my people will take it from there.”

  The general smiled, mentally counting the money. Five million U.S. dollars. Twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. All for assuring safe passage of a single crate for the king. When he considered the money, his questions didn’t seem so important somehow.

  The two men talked a few minutes. Then the Chinese general agreed.

  He would allow a single crate to transit his country. But only one. And only once. And, not knowing its contents, he insisted on measures that would guarantee deniability for both him as an individual and his government. No records would be kept anywhere along the way. A Chinese military transport would pick up the crate at a small airport on the border and carry it to Beijing. The transfer to the civilian freight carriers in the city had to be under the general’s direct control. One of the Chinese intelligence organizations at the port facilities in Shanghai would see that the crate was cleared through customs without leaving a trail. Nothing would be documented or written down.

  “And there will be no inspections,” the king insisted again. “The crate will never be opened or inspected. You will see to this!”

  The Chinese general nodded. For five million dollars he would.

  “And you will get it across your country in twenty-four hours?”

  The general bowed and nodded. He certainly would.

  The Arab king smiled. Half the money would be presented up front, half when the crate was safe in Shanghai. The two men stood and shook hands, and the deal was done.

  “Soon. Soon,” the king emphasized as the general walked away.

  The general left immediately to make the arrangements. Six hours later, he called the king with good news. He had taken care of everything.

  That night, in the underground bunker beneath the expansive airfield, a Saudi technician went to work attaching the barometric trigger to the firing device. His work was monitored at all times by three highly motivated Saudi military officers. The nuclear warhead was then carefully extracted from its box and put on a metal stand. A blanket of composite material, impossible to purchase on the open market, secretly built in a Malaysian factory outside of Kuala Lumpur, was wrapped around the warhead and heat-sealed with electric blowers. The composite material would absorb any leaking radiation from the warhead, making it impossible to detect for at least a few days.

  The warhead was sealed, and then carefully packed into a nondescript, reinforced wooden crate. Under cover of darkness, the crate was carefully put onto the back of a small military truck, carried across the airfield, and loaded on a Saudi military transport, which took off immediately.

  Ten armed guards, all of them dressed as civilians, accompanied the crate, never letting it out of their sight. They were some of the great king’s most trusted agents, but they worked under the clear threat of death.

  The Saudi transport flew across all of southern Asia, eventually landing in a busy airport on China’s western border

  From there, the crate was loaded into a Chinese civilian transport, one of the nondescript and undercover aircraft the general’s organization used every day. The steel and aluminum aircraft took off a little after noon and made its way east toward the glimmering city on the coast. En route, the aircraft stopped to refuel and change crews. After it had taken off again, the original crew members were driven to a deserted spot on the airfield and shot.

  Seven hours later, the aircraft touched down again. The new crew members were also silenced, and the crate was delivered to the general’s men in Shanghai.

  Shanghai International Airport, Shanghai, China

  It took less than a day for the crate to clear customs at Shanghai, and that was a record, for normally it would have sat in a warehouse on the south end of the airport for a week or ten days before its paperwork would move to the top of the pile.

  But a single call from a small brick-and-stucco office outside the fenced perimeter of the airport guaranteed that the crate would move through the international shipping terminal without delay.

  Two hours after the phone call came through, the crate was inspected, approved, and stamped for
shipment to Taiwan via PacEx Express, the largest commercial air transport that flew out of Shanghai. The freight manifest indicated that the contents of the crate were offshore oil drilling bits and platform braces from a manufacturer in central China. The inspectors at the customs facility were not surprised to see that their inventory system contained a computer-generated request for the parts from a Chinese-owned supplier in Canada as well as a receipt for the parts from the factory.

  The crate was postmarked to Québec. Like most international package carriers, PacEx would make several stops along the way, including a stop in Taiwan, where the huge crate from China would be loaded onto another aircraft. That aircraft would in turn make stops in Honolulu; Los Angeles; and Washington, D.C., before ending up in Québec.

  The PacEx Express Airbus 300 lifted off the runway at Shanghai International Airport, its wheels dropping a few inches against their pistons as the aircraft elevated into the night air. The humid atmosphere, hot, wet, and steamy from the afternoon storms, created miniature vortices off the wingtips of the jet, misty horizontal tornadoes that funneled through the air and dipped toward the tarmac before fading away. The intricate maze of blue, green, and white airport lights receded as the Airbus climbed into the night. Onboard the aircraft were six crew members, four tons of mail, twelve thousand seven hundred small packages, each of them boxed in the bright green and yellow PacEx Express colors, and various larger boxes and industrial crates.

  The crate from China was packed in the rear of the aircraft and strapped down carefully.

  As the aircraft lifted into the air, the pilot, an English gentleman who had earned a whopping three hours of combat flying time during the First Gulf War, climbed to five hundred feet, and then pulled the nose skyward to an angle of ten degrees. The copilot glanced at his instrument panel. The three lights depicting the main and nose landing gear turned momentarily red as the gear finally tucked into the belly of the jet. A solid thunk could be felt as the gear locked in place on their hydraulic arms. “Gear up,” he announced.

  With the gear up, the leading edge slats at sixty percent and the engines at full power, the aircraft climbed quickly through one thousand feet while maintaining a perfect heading of two hundred seventy degrees.

  “Departure, PacEx 687 is with you, passing through one thousand for nine thousand feet,” the pilot spoke into the tiny microphone attached to his headset. His accent was only one of many in the skies, for the Asian airways were filled with accents from all over the world, some barely understandable over the busy radios.

  The departure radar controller answered immediately. “PacEx 687, direct to Ryukyu, climb to flight level one-two-zero. Switch over to my channel on one-two-four point six.”

  “Direct to Ryukyu, up to one-two-zero, switching to you on one-twenty-four point six.” As he spoke, the pilot nudged the aircraft to the right, banking to 20 degrees. He was so smooth on the controls that the copilot didn’t even notice the turn.

  “Slats and flaps retracted,” the pilot called back.

  The sound of the rushing wind over the aircraft began to abate as the wings became a clean airfoil once again. The huge aircraft passed through a thin layer of smog and cloud around one thousand four hundred feet, creating another series of wingtip vortices. The pilot concentrated on flying the aircraft on the heading.

  *******

  Below, the East China Sea slipped into view, the moon illuminating the whitecaps against China’s eastern shore. As the Airbus passed over the coast, the air became very clear, providing the cockpit crew members with an unlimited view. The lights along Shanghai’s shoreline snaked north and south, millions of flickering candles illuminating the night. As the aircraft turned, the towers of downtown Shanghai moved into view. The web of lights from the high-rise office buildings reached up for the aircraft, concrete barriers stretching into the sky. They looked dangerously close, as if they were scraping the jet’s wings. It was a visual illusion that took the copilot’s breath away. He reached absently up and touched his cockpit window, superimposing his hand over the outline of the buildings. Beneath the skyscrapers, the curving lines of the highways flowed continually with light. Shanghai never slept. It was the hub of so many international corporations, organizations doing business in virtually every corner of the earth, that there was not a time when business was not being done. No time to sleep when there was money to be made.

  Continuing to climb, the Airbus turned on the heading. The lights along the Chinese shoreline faded in a thick bank of fog that had blown in from the sea. The pilot sat back, adjusting himself in the seat. The aircraft engines created a comforting and powerful drone. It was a three-hour flight to Taipei, and he expected to enjoy it.

  At 2:35 A.M. local time, PacEx 687 passed over the international reporting point called Ololo Teypa. After making the required radio call, the copilot noted the time, heading, fuel, altitude, airspeed, and outside temperature in the flight log. The Airbus was cruising at thirty-three thousand feet and five hundred twenty knots. The skies were crystal clear, unusually so, with a deep Milky Way spreading overhead and Venus so bright it looked more like an orb than a star. Visibility was thirty miles or better, but the night was very dark, for the half-moon had just set. There was no visible horizon between the sea and the sky, only a complete, sullen blackness between the stars and the water.

  Inside the cockpit, the two crew members took turns “flying the aircraft,” which consisted of nothing more than monitoring the instruments before them. Neither pilot had touched the controls since leveling at thirty-three thousand feet. The autopilot held the course, altitude, and airspeed with precision. The copilot, who was “flying,” stared into the night, glancing at the displays every sixty seconds or so.

  The aircraft landed at Taiwan’s international airport at 2:58 A.M. local time.

  The crate with the nuclear warhead was the first thing unloaded from the jet.

  As the crate was unloaded from the belly of the jet, a digital timer clicked on. The internal GPS searched, and then locked onto the orbiting satellites, determining its position down to a few feet.

  The crate was then loaded onto a Boeing 757 aircraft that would fly it to the United States. Strapped to the side of the warhead, the internal computer and GPS receiver tracked its way across the Pacific Ocean. The tiny computer recognized the descent and landing at the three intermediate stops: Taiwan, Honolulu and Los Angeles. Then it tracked the aircraft’s course across the United States en route to Washington, D.C., recognizing the aircraft’s descent and approach for landing at Reagan International Airport.

  The coordinates of the target were already fed into the machine. When the package carrier began its descent into Reagan International Airport in downtown Washington, D.C., the barometric trigger would kick in. Passing through three thousand feet, the firing device would explode. The nuclear warhead would go into a final two-minute countdown.

  Five hundred milliseconds later, most of Washington, D.C. would be gone.

  SEVENTEEN

  Washington, D.C.

  Sara Brighton got up at her usual hour, which was early, and walked down the old wooden stairs to the high-ceilinged kitchen. Her two sons were still sleeping, and she stood alone by the sink, staring at the huge oak trees that lined her backyard.

  A sudden shiver ran through her and she snuggled against her own arms, wrapping them around her chest and holding herself tight. She’d been anxious all night. She’d been anxious for days. She’d fought it, but it would not go away, this feeling of dread, oppression and anxiety in her heart. She had felt this feeling before. It was a warning, she knew, and it was as clear to her now as the morning sun on her face or the cup of juice in her hand.

  She turned and picked up her cell phone and dialed her husband’s cell number. It rang only twice, and then went to his voice mail. She didn’t leave a message; it was at least the tenth time she’d called. She knew that the White House was jamming all incoming and outgoing cell phone signals—standard p
rocedure when there was a national security crisis. It was irritating, but it was also the only way the White House could ensure communications security during a critical time.

  She hung up her phone, sipping her orange juice again. She hadn’t heard from Neil since the morning before, when he’d called very quickly just to see how she was. He couldn’t talk long. He had sounded utterly drained—not merely stressed, and not tired. He was far beyond that. He sounded used up. Worn out. Like a patch of thin cloth.

  It had been four days since the nuclear bomb had gone off over Gaza, four days of continual world condemnation of Israel and the United States, four days of panic in the stock markets, a flat-out collapse, four days of $300-a-barrel oil, gas shortages, military posturing, and a continuous stream of vile invective and hatred directed against the United States. It had come from Europe, Asia, Russia, China, South America, Africa, and, worst of all, of course, the Middle East. No one seemed willing to stand up and defend the Americans. They had no allies now—not even the United Kingdom, where the prime minister had already resigned, forced out of office, his personal relationship with the United States and Israel simply too much for his people to bear. And certainly not Germany and France, who declared their continued opposition to American and Israeli interests abroad. In Italy, the United States’ second closest ally in Europe, the prime minister had not been seen for two days, after narrowly escaping an attempt on his life. And he wasn’t alone. Many of the European leaders seemed to have gone into hiding, unwilling to be seen in public until things had settled down.