by Jeff Abbott
Once the explosives were in the United States, the construction of the bomb was completed in a suburban garage outside of Houston, Texas, by an American woman who felt a deep and abiding hate for the government. Her nickname was Snow. It did not matter who was in power; Snow loathed all authority figures within the government with a fevered intensity. Snow had learned how to make Semtex-based bombs when she was a youngster, from her father, before he died. She refreshed her knowledge by perusing instructions found on the internet and studying worn, tea-stained manuals left over from the Irish Republican Army’s campaign in the 1980s that she had acquired on an online auction site.
Snow made many of them, in careful and rote fashion, one after another, for weeks, working in the quiet of her aunt’s house. Her aunt had died a year before and Snow’d kept the house as a workshop. Her boyfriend grew tired of her long absence; they fought on the second day, when she came home exhausted, her fingernails nicked from cutting wires, her nerves raw, and he left for his mother’s house. She was glad he was gone, he wasn’t committed to the cause, he was a pain in the ass. Fortunately he didn’t know about the bombs. She went and bought her own supplies: cell phones, wire, blasting caps.
Then she made one special bomb, shaping the plastic to detonate in a certain way, with a calculated force to produce an exact result. Snow was so proud of it; she called this bomb Baby. She was drinking coffee, waiting at her house for the man to pick Baby up, hoping that her boyfriend wouldn’t show up, wanting her back. She was done with the boyfriend.
‘It’s lighter than I thought it would be,’ Mouser said when he picked up the bomb. He stood in Snow’s suburban kitchen; she had, as ordered, placed the bomb inside a reinforced canvas carryall. He picked up the duffel bag, measured the weight. Heavy but manageable.
‘I do good work,’ Snow said. Mouser thought the nickname fit her; her hair was dyed a stark white, cut short. Her gray eyes were like flecks of ice. Her body was muscled, not afraid of hard work. There was a thin crinkle of scar on her jaw and her neck; she’d been burned once. Maybe one of the bombs had backfired on her. She watched him with crossed arms. ‘Assuming your people provided the correct specifications.’
‘They did.’
Snow raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re wrong about the tank thickness, we’ll have a problem. Or rather, you will.’
‘It’s been double-checked. Three-fourths of an inch thick, non-normalized steel. More brittle. The cars are old.’ Mouser didn’t much like his facts being called in question. ‘You put in too much explosive, we’ll have more burn than drift.’
‘I guarantee my work.’ Snow sipped orange juice. ‘You don’t look like how I pictured you.’
She was not at all what Mouser expected in a bomb maker. He knew a few and they were foreigners, often older guys (he suspected incompetent bomb makers died early), and frequently missing fingers. But she was supposed to be one of the best.
‘How did you picture me?’
‘Arab.’
Mouser cracked a grin with no humor in it. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘I’m not disappointed,’ Snow said. ‘If you were an Arab I wouldn’t have let you have the bomb. I don’t much like Arabs. They’re worse than the government.’
Mouser said, ‘Nothing’s worse than the Beast.’
‘The what?’ A light hit her eyes; she tilted her head to look at him.
‘The Beast – that’s what I call the government. I’m curious as to how you could have gotten the bomb away from me if you didn’t like the look of me.’
‘Oh, I would have just detonated it once you were about three miles away,’ she said lightly.
‘Ah.’ Mouser raised an eyebrow.
‘Joking,’ she said.
Mouser was careful to keep his neutral expression on his face. ‘I’m not much for jokes.’
‘No. You shouldn’t be. This is important work. Take good care of my baby’ – she put a proprietary hand on the duffel bag – ‘and she’ll take good care of you.’
It creeped him out a bit to hear her call a bomb a baby. ‘And the rest?’
‘Ready when you are.’ She watched him with a bright interest. Maybe making bombs, living on the constant edge of disaster, made her eager for physical sensations, for release. He had no interest in complicating his life with a woman. He had the mission he had appointed himself in life; to him, the mission was everything. The government had to be shown for the Beast incarnate that it was, the ravager of liberty, the ruination of hope, the devil that destroyed what made America great. That was all that mattered.
‘I’ll call you when it’s done,’ he said.
‘I’ll watch it on the news.’
‘And then the next stage.’
She nodded, but she didn’t seem to care so much about the money. She watched him with an intensity that made his stomach twist. Strange woman, he thought, but useful.
He got into his car and drove through the quiet streets. Spring break was this week. Freed from the mind-numbing indoctrination of government schools, lots of kids played on the lawns, riding bikes with those dorky helmets that the Beast insisted they wear for their protection, another emblem of its constant meddling. One girl waved at him and he raised his hand in a brief wave.
Honey, I’m going to set you free, he thought. Bring you a different world where the Beast has broken legs and dulled claws.
Mouser drove through Houston, the bomb sitting on the passenger seat, the duffel bag wrapped in a cloth cover. He listened to speeches he had written for himself on his cassette player and thought he needed to polish his metaphors a bit; he spoke too much of purpose, not enough of war. He was firing the first, carefully considered shot in a long war and the realization thrilled him to the bone. More shots would come in the next couple of days.
The resting place for Snow’s baby had been selected with great care: a quiet bend close to the rail switch station in Ripley, Texas, forty miles north-east of Houston. Ripley was a small town of two thousand people, a few farmers and ranchers, mostly blue-collar workers employed by the oil refineries and related service industries. Mouser had no specific quarrel with the people of Ripley; but he had no regard for them either. They’d chosen to live in a dangerous place. Ripley lay in a small depression along the railway, with a heavy growth of trees ringing the entire town. The people of Ripley could suffer the consequences of their poor planning, he thought. It had taken him weeks to find and select the right spot.
He wore a carefully chosen costume: jeans, a shirt with the logo of a railway freight line. No jacket because he wanted the railway’s logo visible. He walked along the railroad with a cell phone in his hand, pressed to his ear, laughing as though someone on the other end had told a joke. The duffel bag was fashioned from camouflaged fabric, painted to match the gray puzzle of stones along the rails. He set the bag down close to the rail as he walked, in view of the train station, but no one saw him. He put a foot on the rail and waited until he felt the barest vibration of the approaching train. He walked across the grassy slide down to the road where his car was parked, closing the phone that he wasn’t looking at, and glancing at his watch. Three minutes, he guessed.
Mouser got in the car. No one had seen him, no one had noticed him. A pickup truck drove past him, loud country music spilling from the windows. Two young men, laughing, on their way to an evening shift at the railway. Mouser liked the song they were playing; he started to hum it under his breath. He used to sing, back in church when he was a kid, and he had a fine tenor.
He drove away from Ripley, the farm-to-market road that led back to the highway. The pavement threaded alongside the rail track. A pickup truck, with a bunch of young Mexican workers in the bed, shot past him. Then another car, a minivan, a harried mother at the wheel. He could see she was yelling at the kids bouncing in the back.
You should take the time to tell them you love ’em, lady, Mouser thought, instead of yelling at them.
He heard the approaching train before he
saw it; a long low whistle of approach. Ripley was a scheduled stop – a water treatment plant was nearby that served much of the northern stretches of suburban Houston.
He pulled his cell phone back out, dialed a number, poised his finger over the button. Snow had given him a choice on the bomb: timer or detonation through calling the phone. He’d picked calling.
The train wasn’t impressively long, just a stretch of old, weathered rail cars, each carrying 90,000 tons of chlorine gas.
He pushed the car up to a hundred miles an hour, counted down another minute, and pressed SEND.
Ashley Barton drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The kids were wearing on her last nerve but the morning was nearly done. Thank God. She’d had her two boys and her sister’s girl and they’d zoomed like little rockets. She was exhausted. As it was she would get home from the shopping trip to Houston just in time to get a lunch of hot dogs and carrot sticks and an ice-cream sandwich in each kid. Park them in front of Cartoon Network while she could catch up on laundry and have a glass of iced tea and a moment’s delicious peace and quiet.
She aimed the air conditioning vent toward her face; the day had grown warm and she felt sticky. She’d taken the kids to one of the big Houston malls to get clothes, where the kids begged her to buy toys for them. She knew she was an easy mark. She’d let them pick out a toy each, nothing too expensive, though. They were still paying for Christmas.
‘Give it back!’ Her seven-year-old, Kevin, yelled behind her, and she heard the familiar sound of a boy-fist hitting a boy-shoulder.
‘Kevin’s hitting Brandon,’ her niece Megan announced in a tired voice. ‘Over those stupid trading cards.’ Megan’s tone made it clear what she thought of trading cards.
‘Kevin,’ she said, glancing back at him. ‘We don’t hit.’
‘You don’t but I do,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s gonna tear my card, Mom!’
‘Brandon, give him his card back. Kevin, do not hit your brother. If I have to get on y’all again, no dessert.’ She drove past the Ripley rail yard; her own house was only two minutes away.
In the rearview mirror she saw Kevin had his face pressed to the window glass, watching the long freight train lumber into Ripley. Kevin and trains. He’d been fascinated with them from when he was a toddler. God, that was only a few years ago. They were getting so big so fast.
Suddenly a roar pounded her ears, the minivan bucked on the road, and at first Ashley thought she’d blown a tire. The sound of the derailment was deafening, steel hammering onto steel, metal tearing in a horrific screech she felt in her bones.
‘Jesus!’ she screamed. Then Kevin was hollering and she braked to see that the windows were broken, one of the back ones blown in, glass dusting the kids. The noise had been so loud she hadn’t heard the shattering. All three of the children screamed. She stood on the brakes, wrenched around in the seat.
‘The train derailed!’ Kevin screamed. ‘Mom, I saw it, I saw it!’ His forehead trickled blood from a cut, Megan kept shrieking, Brandon covered his face with his hands, still clutching his brother’s Japanese game card. Ashley only had eyes for the children and she did not see the men in the rail yard – some of them men she had gone to high school with, to church with – staggering, dropping as they hurried toward the accordion of derailed tanks, as though slapped down by an unseen fist.
‘Mom! It hurts!’ Kevin started to cough, started to rub at his eyes.
‘What?’
‘Throat… my throat,’ Kevin moaned and then Ashley felt it too, a terrible burning in the back of her throat, her eyes. Her eyes, her throat, burned like matches had been jabbed into the skin. A heavy smell, like an ocean of bleach, swamped her. The children clawed at their eyes, their mouths.
Get out of here, Ashley thought. Something awful had been freed from the broken jumble of rail cars. A haze blanketed the ground, coiling, the green-yellow of a snake’s scales.
Oh my God. Not my kids, no, she thought. She managed to shift gears, her eyes and nose and throat aflame. Nausea gutted her stomach. Her upper airway constricted like a fist closing. She jammed the accelerator to the floor. Blinking and gasping through the agony Ashley saw the turn to her house, half a block away. Best sight in the world. Get home, call 9-1-1, wash the kids in the tub, everything would be okay, it would have to be okay.
She was dimly aware of people running on the streets, running from the rail yard. Collapsing as she roared past them.
Just get away, get away, get the kids inside, this can’t happen to us.
Ashley Barton took the turn too soon and far too fast, fueled by her blind panic. She missed the street and plowed through the front of a small liquor store. She went through the windshield and she thought not happening not happening and then the pain was gone, the screams were silent.
The explosion wasn’t as loud as he thought it would be; but then the bomb had to be calculated to precision. Big enough to rupture the chlorine tanks, but not so powerful for extreme heat to oxidize the chlorine, rendering most of the gas non-toxic or to burn up much of it. The shape of Snow’s charge was designed to puncture the tanks. Derailment was a given.
He could imagine the chaos in his mind’s eye: everything within a thousand feet of the derailment site would be enveloped in a choking cloud of chlorine. The cloud could expand, if lucky, to a mile and a half in width, and with the boost from the wind, carry close to eighteen miles.
Twenty thousand people would be within the cloud’s path.
The Beast would of course order evacuations, fight like the wounded giant that it was, but the death toll could easily be in the hundreds or even the thousands. He smiled.
He hoped, as a first shot, this would prove a great success.
He drove fast on the empty road, heading toward Houston. He had a gas mask but he didn’t feel he needed it; Ripley was far enough behind and he was driving into the prevailing wind.
He drove south back to Houston, to Snow’s house without calling, because he thought the Beast, with its thousands of eyes, would be tracking every cellular call made near Ripley as part of the town’s postmortem. He listened to the radio, the music interrupted by a news bulletin, the increasingly frantic coverage, and the order for immediate evacuation.
When he got back to Snow’s house, the yards were empty. He saw cars filled with families, heading out, even though the cloud was far away and the wind wasn’t moving the poison in this direction. People panicked so easily.
He got out of the car, breathed in the cool air, and walked inside the house.
Snow sat on her couch, watching CNN, eating pretzels and sipping a congratulatory beer.
He watched the coverage, the panic, the horror, thinking, I did that. Good for me.
She looked up at him. ‘I guess my baby delivered.’
Mouser had a sudden hunger to touch her throat, feel the taste of her skin. But he barely knew her, so it would be wrong. The mission first, the mission always. He went and got a glass of water.
‘Only one car punctured by the blast,’ she said, watching the TV coverage. A satellite image of the derailment was on the screen. ‘The cloud is going to be big. They’re evacuating everyone within twenty miles.’
He could see the dead by the rails, on the streets of Ripley. He counted a dozen bodies as the camera’s eye moved along the main drag. He saw a wrecked minivan, halfway in a storefront close to the rail yard, a flipped pickup truck. The chattering experts said the chlorine cloud was not likely to move south toward Houston and heavy rain pushing in from the Gulf would help ground the chlorine. But the situation was already being labeled a chemical attack. Not simply an accident, and the words al-Qaeda and terrorists were already on the commentators’ tongues.
‘Al-Qaeda. They always think of them first,’ Snow said.
My God, Mouser thought. That was simple. And cheap. What blows to the Beast could he inflict with real money, money to last him for years, now that he had proven his worth. He nearly laughed in joy.
&nbs
p; The doorbell rang. Snow glanced up at Mouser. ‘You expecting anyone?’
‘Maybe my ex. We broke up, he might come here begging.’
Mouser pulled the gun, went to the window. ‘Answer the door. Move out of the way if you don’t know ’em.’
‘If it’s police…’
‘I’m not being taken. You?’
She shook her head without hesitation.
Mouser positioned himself. Snow answered the door.
‘I thought you were in Washington,’ Snow said.
On the porch, Henry Shawcross said, ‘We have a serious problem.’
8
‘Please tell us you’re here to celebrate,’ Mouser said. He knew it wasn’t the case but he wasn’t ready to let go of the euphoria he felt.
‘No. My stepson has been kidnapped.’ Henry stood against the living room wall, arms crossed. Exhaustion marked his face.
Mouser sat on the edge of Snow’s couch. ‘And I care why? That’s not our problem.’
‘Wrong. Luke’s kidnapping affects everything – the first wave and the Hellfire attack.’ Henry told him about Luke, the demands of the kidnapper. ‘They want the fifty million for his safe return.’
‘Then no safe return. They can’t have it,’ Mouser said. An absolute statement, no room for discussion.
‘I am not going to let them kill my kid.’
‘I’m not going to let them have our money,’ Mouser said. ‘And he’s Warren Dantry’s kid, right?’
A long pause, a curled lip that told Mouser Henry was uncomfortable with Mouser’s knowledge of his family. Mouser studied the professor in front of him. Henry always looked like he was running late for a lecture and he looked the same now, except in his gaze an intense anger steamed.
‘Yes. He was Warren’s son.’ Henry folded his arms. ‘I think of him as my son now.’
‘Answer me one question. Do you have our money, Henry?’
