When the firestorms roar,
When there’s blood all around,
When there’s nuclear war,
You’ll be rockin’ the apocalypse
Rockin’ the apocalypse,
You’ll be rock-rock-rock-rock-rockin’ the apocalypse.
Elias thundered over the deafening music at the top of his lungs:
“ISIS and al Qaeda got nothing on me. I’m a lean, mean killing machine. How do you like it so far, ladies? I’m murdering morons for Mohammed and acing assholes for the one true God!” Elias’s psychotic laughter reverberated through Jules’s headset like a rolling howitzer barrage.
“But why?” Jules asked, hoping against hope to talk him down. “This doesn’t have to happen.”
“It sure as hell does. Over there I found out who the real bad guys were. Like Pogo said: I met the enemy and guess what? He … is … fucking … us! And then my mother told me I was a bastard and that my real old man was Iraqi and that I probably blasted some of my own relatives into Muslim hell. Well, know what I said to that one? Too bad for them, old lady!! Tell it to somebody who gives a shit!!”
Again, his hideous howls rang dementedly in Jules’s headset.
He turned the Good Sister up to skull-cracking levels:
When there’s no more prayers,
When it’s too late for cryin’,
When there’s flames all around,
And the missiles are flyin’,
When you’re all out of time,
When you’re all out of dyin’,
You’ll be rockin’ the apocalypse,
Rockin’ the apocalypse,
You’re rock-rock-rock-rock-rockin’ the apocalypse.
“Wait, wait,” Elias screamed. “Here’s the bridge! Don’t you love the bridge?”
When the last lie is told,
When the last word is said,
When the heart grows cold,
When the world is dead,
You’ll hammer hard and bold,
You’ll hammer straight ahead.
“But Elias,” Jules asked, yelling frantically above the music, “there has to be some way to stop this. Sure, our country has made mistakes, but melting down the HRNPS will kill hundreds of thousands of people—”
“Millions of people, if I have my way.”
“But, it doesn’t have to be. We can—”
Elias cranked up the decibels, drowning Jules out with more of the Good Sister:
You’ll get your ass pumpin’,
When it all comes down.
You go out jumpin’
When the bombs hit the ground.
No point in cryin’,
When there’s dyin’ all around.
You go out with a bang,
With a hell-fired sound.
When you’re rockin’ the apocalypse,
Rockin’ the apocalypse,
When you’re rock-rock-rock-rock-rockin’ the apocalypse.
When you’re rockin’ the apocalypse,
Rockin’ the apocalypse,
When you’re rock-rock-rock-rock-rockin’ the apocalypse.
PART XXI
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled up; and every mountain and island were moved. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men hid themselves in the dens and in the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne.
—Revelation 6:12–16
1
“You know, kid, I always loved you. I hope it is you who punches my ticket.”
—Hasad ibn Ghazi
Elena entered Hasad’s suite, still in jet-black leathers, holding a matching helmet in her left arm along her side. Hasad stared at her, speechless. Her right hand was empty, her jacket unzipped. He opened it and removed the 9mm Beretta tucked under her leather pants. He stuck it under the waistband of his black Levis. He then removed another one shoved under her pants beneath her jacket in the small of her back. He checked her boots as well; none were there.
“I see you’re well armed,” Hasad said.
She followed him into the suite. From the room’s center, she took in the all-embracing 360-degree view of D.C.—including the 180-degree western view of the Capitol Building one mile away. Beyond that lay the District’s monuments and museums and its many legendary structures and edifices—the National Mall, the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the great Georgetown School of International Studies, the Mayflower Hotel, the Watergate, and, of course, the Potomac River.
“Room with a view,” Elena said.
“Nothing but the best,” he said, staring at her, curious.
Elena glanced around the suite, which occupied the needle tower’s entire floor. It was over ninety feet across. A huge white leather semicircular couch faced the Capitol dome. Each end was flanked by a pair of leather armchairs and footstools. Glass-and-steel end tables with brass lamps sat in between the couch and the chairs. A circular glass coffee table fifteen feet in diameter stood in front of the couch on a stainless steel base. Elena thought it matched the couch’s curvature so perfectly it had probably been custom-built to fit into it. Near the kitchen area was a large glass dining table with stainless steel armchairs with white leather seats and backs. A few very good black marble replicas of Michelangelo’s David, Moses, and the Pieta stood along the sides of the room. At opposite ends of the big room, two flat-screen TVs were on stands—each a good hundred inches across. In front of them were more stuffed leather chairs, couches, and more glass tables.
And that was only half the suite.
Elena, however, focused solely on the bank of computers, monitors, two-way radios, and receivers on wheeled carts and folding tables in the room’s center. Also the tripod binoculars pointed at the street in front of the Capitol Building.
Then she saw the remote detonator on the dining-room table.
Oh shit, this is control and command.
She looked at Hasad, revealing no emotion or expression, but he knew she knew. She could tell from the small smile forming at the right corner of his mouth.
“Elena, I love you like life itself, but I must say you’ve arrived at a very inopportune time.”
“I can see I’m interrupting something. Care to tell me what?”
Suddenly one of the monitors caught her eye. On the screen was a master shot of two ivory-white domes, surrounded by concrete buildings and gray steel sheds—
And—
And—
Those were nuclear power plant containment domes.
Shit, those are HRNPS’s containment domes.
And smoke is pouring out of two of the plant’s buildings.
She forced herself to look at the adjacent monitor. It looked like some kind of crudely transmitted ceremony at the Teller Lab—maybe sent via an iPhone. She recognized the energy secretary and the governor of California sitting behind the podium.
Jamie had hacked into a lot of communications from Hasad to the general and to Ambassador Shaiq. He had picked up hints about something happening at the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station and something going on in D.C. Something called Operation Trojan Horse. She and Jamie just couldn’t figure out what the Trojan horse was. Hasad had the Teller Lab on a monitor, so something was clearly happening there.
Maybe Hasad wasn’t running that one.
If so, he’d have had no reason to discuss it with anyone.
Elena could barely take her eyes off the two monitors. It was like watching a bullet-train wreck or a nineteen-spiral car crash. She had to drag herself over to the third monitor. It was a great, gaudy gold limo—only it was stuck in traffic. The hood was up, and the driver was bent down staring at the two collapsed tires. She suspected someone had put an ice pick in them. Angry drivers we
re milling about pissed off at the jam. She knew the car’s owner. Everyone did. It was the Saudi ambassador’s Golden Chariot, as he gloatingly called it.
“You sonofabitch,” she said, turning to Hasad.
She went over to the high-powered tripod binoculars. They were state of the art. She’d used the same model several times in Islamabad and twice in Peshawar: a Vixen BT125-A Binocular with a Lanthanum Wide 1.25-inch eyepiece, a fork mount, and a tripod. It had a wide-angle range and at the same time offered highly detailed depth perception. With its 34x magnification, if the Capitol Building was two thousand yards away, through the binocular it would look to be less than sixty yards.
Elena looked through them. It was as she figured. They were focused on the gold limo, hopelessly mired, the hood up, its two front tires flat.
Oh fuck.
Looking back at Hasad, he was now—
—crossing the suite toward the remote radio detonator on the glass dining-room table near his left hand.
The receiver-trigger would be in the nuke. The nuke in—
in—
in—
In the Trojan horse.
In Shaiq’s garishly grotesque limo.
His Golden Chariot.
So that was it.
She pulled a 10mm semiautomatic Glock out from under the black scarf in her black polymer helmet, still cradled in her arm. Pointing it at Hasad, she said:
“Locked, cocked, and ready to rock.”
“Why you little bitch,” Hasad said, turning to her, smiling and shaking his head, “you had a gun in your fucking hat. You were always smarter than I was.”
“And always will be. So don’t touch the detonator. Don’t even look at it. You can walk out of here. I promise.”
“No-can-do, Elena. These people are just too bad. Always thought I could work for anyone, but I was wrong. These guys are going down.”
“Maybe, but if I have to, I’ll end you first—here and now. Keep you from killing all those innocent people down there.”
“I took some explosive out of the nuke. It’ll yield a kiloton or two—enough to wipe out every asshole in that State of the Union address. It won’t burn down the whole city, though.”
“There’d still be a lot of undeserving dead when it was over.”
“True, but how else can I get Caldwell, Shaiq, and his bunch off the board? When this is over, they’re planning a military takeover with them in charge. Is that what you want?”
Hasad was right. She and Jules had suspected it all along. All this was a nuclear Reichstag fire—the phony terrorist plot to blow up the German parliament, which Hitler himself had fabricated to force marital law on Germany and declare himself Führer.
Hasad was right twice. It was the only way to get them all—and to stop Caldwell and his gang.
Still, she couldn’t let him do it.
She just couldn’t.
She began inching closer to him.
He saw what she was doing.
“You know, kid,” Hasad said, “I always loved you. I hope it is you who punches my ticket.”
“Really?” Elena said with a sardonic half smile.
“You’re the only thing I ever loved. No shit. You and that crazy friend of yours, Jules. I’ve torched it for you my whole life long.”
“Then let’s bolt on out of here. Forget these bastards. There’s a beautiful world out there. Let’s go. You can still find some of it.”
“Never happen, kid. The shit ends here.”
“Nothing’s worth this.”
“You got no idea how bad these guys are, do you? Who do you think paid me to set this up? Shaiq and Jari with Caldwell’s ignorant complicity.”
She and Jamie had imagined as much.
“Caldwell and Shaiq just never figured you’d do it to them?” Elena asked.
“That I’d shove the nuke straight up their constipated assholes with the rest of their shit? Then blow them off the face of the earth?”
Elena had to smile. “I like it. I really do. But you reach for that detonator, I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
“Maybe, but the driver actually detonates the bomb. I’m just a failsafe system—backup in case he can’t do it. Unfortunately, I’m afraid now he didn’t.”
Elena raised the Glock with both hands, sighting it on his face.
“Doesn’t matter. You go for that detonator, I’m putting a 10mm 180 grain Hydra-Shok hollow point right between your eyes. It’ll hit your cerebellum at a thousand feet per second, shorting out your somatic nervous system on impact. Before you can think or blink—let alone touch a detonator—you’ll be deader than Kelsey’s nuts.”
“You’re forty feet from me, and you aren’t that good with a pistol. I know. I taught you how to shoot back in Texas. Remember?”
“You want to bet a Hydra-Shok on it?”
“Too late.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“You know I always loved you, Elena.”
“I love you, too.”
“Then maybe I’ll see you on the other side.”
He reached for the detonator, and the Glock jumped in her fist. Before he could touch it, a bloody smoking hole materialized in the upper bridge of his nose, and his head snapped back. His legs buckled. He crumpled like a puppet unstrung he dropped to his knees inert and fell on his side. The penthouse floor was filling with blood from the massive opening in the back of his head before she could reach him.
Somehow his eyes remained locked on hers, their expression quizzical, asking a mute question.
How did you do it?
Elena bent over him until their faces were only inches apart.
“Remember how you get into Carnegie Hall?” The light was fading from his eyes, but still she got it in. “Practice, practice, practice.”
Grabbing the detonator, she placed it on the floor, bent over it with her left hand shielding her eyes, and fired three rounds into it.
It happened anyway.
Eleven seconds later.
She knew what it was, even with her back turned.
The limo driver had pushed the red button after all.
The big suite’s 180-degree windows dazzled with the brilliance of a thousand suns, but she knew not to look at it.
She did notice that the monitors went blank, and the suite’s lights went out, too.
Lights were going out citywide.
Since she was barely a mile from the epicenter, she heard no sound. Like Hiroshima’s silent flash, it was too loud to register on human eardrums unless listeners were miles away. Nor did she turn to watch. She knew not to stare into the thermal blaze, thereby searing her retinas forever.
She put on her helmet and shoved the Glock under her waistband. As she ran toward the door, the needle tower began rocking violently, destabilized by the blast wave.
Bad news, Hasad. That was more than a one- or two-kiloton yield.
Somehow, she kept her footing, and made it out the door, lurching and stumbling like a drunken sailor on a rolling deck, bouncing off the hallway walls.
She went straight for the stairs, the skinny skyscraper swinging convulsively, a weak reed whipsawed by wild winds. Slamming off the hallway walls, she leaped down the fire stairs five at a time, desperate to escape the tottering tower before it went down.
2
And then the Apaches were no more.
Jules and Sandy were closer to the plant now—less than a half mile away—and Jules could see everything with agonizing clarity. The bases of the two white containment domes were seething with a pale, dense, infernal haze. The windows and doors in their adjacent buildings were filled with flames, while coils of black radioactive smoke writhed out of those openings high into the starry, moonlit sky.
Jules had the camera/transmission control laptop on her knees. The HD nose-cam was ready to roll, the video-assist monitor already on. She eased the joystick gently toward twelve o’clock. The blazing, smoking sheds and blockhouses promptly appeared on the small vid
eo-assist monitor, confirming that the camera was zeroed in on them.
“Check your three o’clock!” Elias warned them.
Glancing over her shoulder, Jules saw an interminable queue of two dozen state cop cars and SWAT vans on Highway 9 with flashing rack lights on top. Coming toward them from the other direction on the same road toward the intersection of Highways 9 and 12 was a caravan of over a dozen Armored Personnel Carriers. At that intersection they would have to turn onto Highway 12, which ran in front of the HRNPS, to reach the plant.
The lead APC and the lead cop car, however, had rushed to the crossroads, each anxious to block the other and get their people to the plant first. Both drivers had pulled into the middle of the intersection, each refusing to yield. The two men got out and began yelling at each other. Jules wondered if there was going to be a fight.
The first half dozen of the National Guard’s APCs were M1097 HMMWV troop carriers, otherwise known as Humvees. They were sixteen feet long, weighed three tons, and were rated for payloads of two and a half tons. The soldiers sat in long-bed canvas-covered cargo carriers. The tarpaulins were desert tan, the sides and end-curtains rolled up in case the troops needed to engage the enemy. Another dozen troop transports followed the line of Humvees. They appeared to be old army trucks with rolled-up tarps above the cargo beds which also contained soldiers.
They were all stopped stock-still, bumper to bumper.
Suddenly the sniper in the tower was back on: “Hey ladies, you checked out the traffic jam at the junction crossroads?”
“Roger that,” Jules said.
“Get cameras on both of them.”
Jules swung the tail-cam around till it was locked on the intersection’s traffic jam. Through her handheld minicam, though, Jules fixed on Elias as well. She could see him, kneeling, sighting in some kind of big rifle, which he balanced on the middle rail.
“That’s some cannon you got,” Jules said.
“Barrett M82,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Jules said. “You couldn’t get a 155 Howitzer?”
“I could but it stretches the holster.”
Again, the hysterical howls.
Again, the upturned whiskey bottle.
“Very funny,” Jules said. “But do we really have to do this?”
And Into the Fire Page 28
