by Marc Cameron
“Not bad,” he said to himself, using two fingers to enlarge the photograph of a man with shaggy blond hair standing before a small choir of thirty or so smiling children — all a hodgepodge of race, ranging in age from less than seven to their early teens. They were ripe enough, Yazid’s heart raced when he saw the open auditorium behind the children — with seating for thousands. If Ibrahim had a target better than this, it had to be a ripe one indeed.
CHAPTER 36
Quinn awoke on his side, hands pulled unnaturally behind him. His helmet lay in the rocks a few feet away. He’d landed on his left ear after hitting the fesh fesh — superfine particles of dust that blew along the desert floor to fill in any low spots. Fesh fesh looked like regular ground and ate many unsuspecting motorcyclists if those low spots happened to be more than a few inches deep.
The KTM was somewhere close behind him. He couldn’t see it but reasoned that he hadn’t been unconscious long from the sound of ticking metal as the bike bled heat from the engine.
Quinn tried to push himself to a seated position and realized his hands were tied behind his back. He turned his head slowly and saw Zamora had an even bigger problem.
Ten meters to Quinn’s right, Blessington and another man Quinn recognized as the Chechen from the chalet in Mar del Plata stood towering over a bound Zamora. The Venezuelan’s riding boots and socks had been stripped off. His bare feet had been strapped to the handlebars of his motorcycle — which lay on its side, apparently another victim of unsuspected fesh fesh.
The Chechen spewed something in rapid-fire Russian, kicking Zamora in the ribs when he didn’t answer. The Venezuelan cursed him back, spitting vehemently into the dirt.
Blessington smiled, drawing back a long wooden staff nearly an inch in diameter. He let it hang for a long moment while the Chechen asked another question, then struck cruelly on the sole of Zamora’s pink foot before he had time to answer.
Zamora writhed in pain from the blow, thrashing hard enough to yank the handlebars of his bike sideways. Blessington set down the stick to maneuver the bike and his victim’s feet back into position as a better target.
Quinn knew both he and Zamora were dead as soon as they got what they wanted. He looked around, shifting his eyes rather than moving his head and drawing attention to himself. Behind him, he could feel the heat radiating off the KTM’s muffler. Taking advantage of their preoccupation with Zamora, Quinn inched backward to the bike, pressing the plastic zip ties on his wrist against the exhaust, as close to the engine as he could get. He winced as the heat seared the tender skin inside his wrists, but held them there until the plastic melted, freeing him with a faint pop as they gave way.
Now loose, he kept his hands behind him and took another look at his opponents. The Chechen had a pistol on his hip and Blessington had a knife in addition to his wooden staff. It killed him inside to help a man like Zamora escape. The treatment he was getting was well deserved. But Blessington was enjoying himself too much. It was obvious the Chechens wanted the bomb, but these two were heavy-handed. They were likely to kill Zamora by accident before he told them anything.
Quinn toyed with the idea of giving them a few minutes before he took action, but they could turn on him at any moment. The chance the Chechen would draw his pistol and start shooting was too great.
He moved his feet slightly, wiggling his toes to make sure they weren’t asleep. The last thing he needed was to be halfway into his lunge and realize he was working on two dead legs. When he felt reasonably sure his body was in good enough working order after the wreck, he took one final look at the situation and let Blessington have one more whack at Zamora’s feet.
The piercing screams provided good cover for his initial movement — and Blessington’s feelings of superiority at dispensing punishment to a helpless prisoner made him careless.
Many an advancing army had been beaten when a retreating foe turned and struck them down in the midst of their foolish bravado.
Quinn rolled to his feet at the crescendo of Zamora’s tattered cries. He picked up the helmet and threw it underhanded as he moved, catching Blessington center chest. It didn’t cause any damage, but surprised him, giving Quinn a precious second to focus on the other man.
A half step out, Quinn pulled up short, stepping sideways as if trying to avoid a confrontation. The Chechen, taking this for weakness, struck out with a powerful right hook. Instead of meeting the punch, Quinn let it sail by, grabbing it across the top, drawing against his center, then reversing directions to turn the wrist back on itself. In Japanese martial arts it was called kote-gaeshi.
Quinn kept his own circles tight and powerful as he spun, but extended the man’s arm, not only snapping the fragile wrist bones but destroying his elbow and shoulder joints as well. Screaming in pain, the Chechen clutched the damage with his good hand. Quinn grabbed him around the chest, turning to face a maniacal Blessington, the wooden rod raised high over his head like a sword.
Quinn’s hand slipped the pistol from the Chechen’s belt as he let the man fall. He shot without aiming, putting two slugs in Blessington’s belly as he tried to bring the wooden staff down on Quinn’s head. The Brit stood blinking for a long moment, slumping against the heavy stick like a cane before toppling forward, his open mouth blowing soft puffs of fesh fesh away as he drew his last breaths.
Quinn used his pocketknife to cut Zamora’s hands free, keeping an eye on the wounded Chechen.
“Are you okay?” Quinn said, tossing him the blade so he could cut loose his own feet.
“I’m fine,” Zamora said, blinking to clear his head. He tested tender feet before standing. “Thankfully, nothing is broken… ” He gave Quinn a long quizzical look before turning toward the glaring Chechen, who lay just ten feet away.
The Chechen peered up at Quinn with brooding eyes. “You think you know this man, but you do not.”
Zamora was on him in an instant, striking over and over. Quinn kept the blade of his ZT folder extremely sharp. That, combined with Zamora’s white-hot desire for revenge, gave the Chechen no chance for survival.
Zamora’s face was covered in blood when he looked up. “We should get out of here,” he said, wiping his face with a rag from inside his riding jacket. “Frankly I’m surprised the ASO hasn’t sent someone looking for us since our bikes have been stopped so long.”
Without the illegal communication Quinn could not have known about the accident or the fact that Zamora’s IriTrak was malfunctioning, so he didn’t mention it. Instead he nodded at the bodies, feigning shock.
“I’m not in too much of a hurry to get caught out here with these guys. What was that all about anyway?” He shrugged and picked up his bike. He breathed a sigh of relief when it started on the first try.
Zamora was already snapping the camlocks on his riding boots. “Trust me,” he said. “You do not want to know.”
The IriTrak on Quinn’s KTM began to speak, rescuing him.
“Contestant 172, please report your status.” The voice was thickly French.
“Good to go,” Quinn responded. “Just took a wrong turn. Moving now.”
“Acknowledged,” the race official said, ending the transmission.
A little more time bought, they dragged the bodies into the deep fesh fesh, making sure they were well covered in the event of a flyover. Quinn made certain the IriTrak on Blessington’s bike was disconnected before burying it in fesh fesh as well. The Chechen must have had a vehicle nearby, but it was nowhere to be seen and there was no time to worry about it.
Zamora’s Yamaha started with a little coaxing.
“There must be something wrong with my GPS.” The Venezuelan sat on his bike beside Quinn. “I am left to wonder why you followed me if your GPS was functional.”
Quinn shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easier to follow a pro than it is to lead. Why do you think Geroux and Caine trade wins each day? One does all the work of the leader while the other sits back only to shoot ahead fresh at the end — put
ting him in the lead for the next day and repeating the cycle.”
Zamora nodded. “And you hoped to follow me until the end so you could beat me?”
“It’s a tactic.”
“Well.” Zamora winked, lowering his goggles. “I am fortunate you came along. But sometime in the not too distant future, you may regret your decision to save my life.”
Quinn watched as the man raced away, covering him in a rooster-tail shower of sand. He regretted his decision already.
CHAPTER 37
Pollard didn’t know if it was the oppressive heat or the fact that he sat three feet away from the remnants of a nuclear bomb, but he had never sweated so much in his life. His plywood hut kept off the daily rain showers but proved more of an oven than shelter. Though sweat ran down his back and stung his eyes, the humidity was so high that none of it evaporated to help cool him. At first he’d shucked off his loose cotton shirt but found he worried too much about malaria-bearing mosquitos without it.
Still on his bunk, he let his head loll sideways to study the device. It occurred to him that the shielding had degraded to the point that he was being irradiated as he sat there, but found that he didn’t care. He doubted that he’d come out of this alive anyway. The point was to figure out a way to save his wife and son — and to do that, it looked as though he was going to have to rebuild a bomb that was well past its prime.
The trunk stood on its side with the lid hinged open like a door. The thing Zamora called Baba Yaga was nothing special to look at. A metal cylinder ran diagonally from one end of the box to the other, a length of about four feet. As big around as his leg, the cylinder housed the high-explosive charge as well as the “bullet” and “target,” two pieces of plutonium that would be rammed together by the charge to achieve critical mass.
Theoretically, the metal tube was shielded enough to protect someone carrying the device from errant radiation. The rat’s nest of wires leading from an ancient battery was white with corrosion. It could have been from the atmosphere or leaking acid, but radiation was highly corrosive to electronics. Without a Geiger counter, there was no way to tell which had caused the decay. So far the capacitors looked intact, though there was something about their array that he still couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Pollard sat up to look at the bomb more closely. There was a sinister beauty about the thing — like some kind of poisonous spider. Zamora was insane. There was absolutely no doubt about that. But he was smart enough to pick the right scientist for this job.
Baba Yaga, as the name implied, was an old hag. Built by the Soviets in 1970, she had seen better days. Her battery — last replaced in 1986—was toast, some of the wiring was corroded beyond repair, and she very likely leaked radiation like Chernobyl. Apart from the physical danger posed to Pollard — and anyone else who spent any time near the device — such leakage was also highly corrosive to the fragile electronics. But plutonium had a half-life of roughly eighty million years. That component, at least, was still good to go. If the explosive charge in the initial “gun” portion of the bomb remained viable, there was a slight possibility he might be able to fix the rest.
Old as she was, it was the very age of this device that made her so appealing. In an effort to help ward off the risk of rogue generals with their finger on the launch button, the United States had shared their own Permissive Action Link technology with the Soviets sometime around 1971—two months after Baba Yaga was born.
PALs, as the systems were called, were essentially the detonation codes. In the early days, a PAL was little more than a key and a three-digit combination lock. As devices and technology improved they became more sophisticated, with later generations buried deep within the device, making them impossible to tamper with.
Baba Yaga’s lock was analog without the later fail-safe mechanism that would render the bomb unusable after a given number of tries to defeat the code. It would take time to figure out, but first impressions showed a series of wires, covered in some sort of hard resin and suspended in a set of Enigma-like rotors. In order for the bomb to activate, these rotors would have to be turned to the correct location, aligning the wires with the appropriate contact. A simple clock allowed for a prescribed delay in detonation once the device was armed. Pollard thought he could work his way through the puzzle. What he didn’t know was what he’d do once he’d finished.
Yesenia’s voice saved him from horrible thoughts. He shut the lid to the case, hoping to protect her from what radiation he could.
“I brought you supper.” She still carried the Kalashnikov, but kept it pushed behind her back, as if it was more of an afterthought than a weapon of intimidation. At first Pollard wondered why none of the other guards had anything to do with him. A few minutes with the fascinating Guarani girl gave him his answer. Zamora knew he would never hurt someone as articulate and kind as this one. A male guard might bluster and give cause for an outburst. Pollard would only see Yesenia for the fellow victim that she was.
He took the wooden tray of piranha and rice and sat back on the edge of his bunk. The heat and worry over his family pushed a fist against his gut so there was more than he’d ever eat in one sitting. He speared a piece of the flaky white fish with his fork and held it up.
“Would you like some?”
She shook her head, content to stand and smile while he ate.
“I am sorry for you,” she said, as he handed her back the tray a few moments later. He’d picked at one of the fish and forced down a few mouthfuls of rice.
“And why is that?” he asked, wiping his hands on his pants.
The Guarani girl squared her shoulders and nodded in thought. “Because you are a good man,” she said. “And I see no way out of this for you.”
She turned and left without another word. Pollard thought she might have been crying.
He fell back on his cot and looked up at the wooden crossbeams that supported the tin roof. He’d given up on the shredded mosquito netting. None of that mattered anyway. He deserved whatever diseases and misery came his way.
Yesenia was right about one thing. There seemed no good way out of this. But she was dead wrong about the other. Matt Pollard was a lot of things — but he knew a good man was not one of them.
2004
Portland, Oregon
Twitching beetles lay on the pavement under the streetlight in front of Fitzhugh Chevrolet. A black four-door Silverado was parked on the front row next to a gleaming Suburban of the same color. Flanking these like bishops on each side of a black king and queen were two slightly smaller but no more eco-friendly Chevy Tahoes. Row after row of these heavy, earth-killing vehicles covered the four-acre parking lot.
Matthew Pollard hid in the grassy shadows of an overpass, a small set of binoculars pressed to his eyes. A steady flow of traffic thumped on the highway overhead. The lithe coed beside him squirmed with anticipation. Her name was Audrey, but she went by Care. She wore formfitting unbleached cotton capris that hugged the curve of her hips and a tattered green Che Guevara T-shirt cut high so everyone could see the pair of orange and black koi fish playing yin and yang around her bellybutton.
She pushed a sandy dreadlock out of bright eyes.
“I’m, like, so nervous,” she whispered. “Aren’t you nervous? I can’t believe we’re, like, really following through. This is crazy. Don’t you think this is so crazy?”
Pollard turned to look at her for a long moment, then shook his head, saying nothing.
A doctorate in nuclear engineering, five years on a nuke sub, mere months away from a second doctorate, and he was hiding in the grass next to a nineteen-year-old dreadlock-wearing trust-fund kid — trustifarians, he called them — who thought wearing underwear and shaving her pits would somehow bind her to the evil elite of the bourgeoisie.
Crazy indeed.
Scanning the Fitzhugh parking lot one last time, he traded the binoculars for a handheld radio that lay in the grass next to his face.
“All clear from sta
tion two,” he said.
“Looks good from here,” a Hispanic voice crackled over the radio. “Listo?”
“Ready,” Pollard said, holding his breath.
He was sick of his life, embarrassed with the road he’d taken for so much of it. Doing something big seemed the only way to make amends. Sugaring a few bulldozer fuel tanks, attending some sit-ins to stop clear-cutting — all that was well and good, but the damage he’d done required a true penance.
He needed a big bang.
Thanks to a particular B-list movie starlet with enough liquid income to assuage her own guilty conscience, Pollard’s little group had the money to up the ante — call in the big dogs, so to speak. She’d put them in touch with a Venezuelan student named Valentine, also at the U of Oregon. He had slick hair, smoked hundred-dollar cigars, and was about to help them take the leap from beginner eco-terrorists using diesel bombs with Ping-Pong-ball and birthday-candle fuses to the big league of military plastic explosives.
Pollard stuffed the binoculars down the front of his shirt and moved in a low crouch toward the car lot. Care, for all her youthful nerves, stayed right beside him. It would be her job to act as lookout while he and Valentine Zamora placed the explosives at each corner of the building. It was one thing to blow up a gas-guzzler or two. They planned to bring down the whole enterprise.
Less than five minutes later, they’d set timers on six two-pound blocks of C-4 explosive. Two under the gas hogs out front and the others under the support columns of the building. Pollard had wanted to use remote detonators, but the good ones, the kind that would ensure they all didn’t get blown to hell by some idiot’s garage door opener, were out of his price range. Zamora, who seemed to be an expert at such things, had convinced him to use timers, planning the sets so they’d go off at roughly the same time.
All three of them ran across the frontage road to the safety of the overpass, sliding into their hiding spot in the tall grass.
