Nuclear Reaction

by Don Pendleton

“In general, that is. I mean to say—”

  “Bandits or rebels should have made off with the guns and ammunition,” Dalal said, forging ahead. “Would they leave nearly eighty rifles on the field, with handguns and a heavy machine gun? Ridiculous!”

  “If I may ask, sir, in that case…what is your theory?”

  “Theory?” The very word appeared to irritate Dalal. “I’m not employed to theorize. I deal in facts. My men were killed, their weapons left behind. Therefore, the men who killed them have no need of weapons. They are well prepared.”

  “Perhaps a small group,” Gazsi offered. “Very small, in fact, with no real growth potential.”

  “Small? How small?” Dalal demanded.

  “I would just be theorizing, Colonel.”

  “Then, by all means, do so!”

  “As you’re well aware, there is apparently a small but dedicated group of individuals committed to disrupting Dr. Mehran’s project.”

  “Ohm?” Dalal replied. “The academics?”

  “I believe—and, may I add, Deputy Minister Shabou appears to share my feelings in this matter—that we may have underestimated their potential for disruption. Since the woman was discovered—”

  “In your laboratory,” Dalal said. “Under your very nose.”

  “Since then, I have been forced to reconsider my original judgment of Ohm and its members. This Darius Pahlavi, for example—”

  “Oh, you want to talk about Pahlavi?” Dalal interrupted. “The last group of soldiers I lost were assigned to retrieve him. Or, rather, to frighten his friends and relatives until they betrayed him. The captain, it seems, was a negligent fool. I may have to award him a medal, to whitewash his failure.”

  “Colonel—”

  “And now, I suppose, you want more of my soldiers to help do your job for you?”

  “Sir, I am here, as I said—”

  “On the orders of others. I know.” Dalal sneered. “If it weren’t for those others, you’d never get past the front gate. May I tell you something, in confidence? Just between us?”

  Stiffly, Gazsi replied, “Of course, Colonel.”

  “I don’t trust private spies or meddlers in security. You’re all alike to me, in it for profit first, and never mind who wins, as long as you get paid. I hold you and your kind in absolute contempt. That said, you’ve found a niche where you’re protected—for the moment—by some influential men. Beware of what may happen with that influence removed.”

  “Surely you don’t suggest removing Minister Shabou?”

  “Deputy Minister,” Dalal corrected him, “and I’ve suggested no such thing, as you well know. The tape and transcript of our conversation will support me.”

  “Naturally. Colonel, may we discuss the purpose of my visit? Since it pains you so, I wish to keep it brief.”

  “We’ve been discussing it,” Dalal replied. “You’ve come to seek more men, more guns, more something I can ill afford to lose, with soldiers dying all around me. And you likely have authority to issue the request as a demand.”

  “I do, in fact,” Gazsi said. “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me, then, and we shall see if what you wish is even possible.”

  “Another fifty men to guard the laboratory for the next two weeks. I’m told a breakthrough is expected then, but in the meantime, it is critical to keep out all disruptive elements.”

  “Fifty? Why not two hundred? I can always go before the General Staff and tell them their allotment for our district is inadequate, because a scientist needs men to babysit his employees.”

  “I have good reason to believe the General Staff is well aware of Project X,” Gazsi replied. “But if you feel the need to tell them, sir, I obviously have no power to prevent you,” Gazsi said with a slight smile.

  Colonel Dalal considered that. “Not yet,” he said. “You ask for fifty men. I shall provide them. When the next attack comes—and I have no doubt that there will be another—if I find myself shorthanded, then I will inform the General Staff precisely why I cannot execute my duties as expected. I will leave them in no doubt as to responsibility.”

  “With luck and Allah’s grace, Colonel, no such report will be required. I hope, with Dr. Mehran and the others, that their work may be successful. If it is, you’ll find that Project X eliminates whatever small concerns you feel today, regarding your superiors.”

  “It’s my inferiors that trouble me,” Dalal answered. “They try to rise above their place, and thus unbalance everything.”

  “It is the nature of humanity,” Gazsi replied.

  “Humanity?” For the first time in Gazsi’s personal experience, the colonel smiled. “Were you humane, Gazsi? With your young traitor? With the woman? Did you show her your humanity?”

  Gazsi remained impassive, would not let himself be baited.

  “In the circumstances,” he replied, “I’d say I was extremely generous.”

  DARICE PAHLAVI WASN’T sure how long she had been kept in darkness, but she knew it had to have been days, at least. Not weeks—it didn’t feel that long—but time was meaningless when total deprivation of the senses was imposed.

  That wasn’t strictly true, of course. Her cell was blacker than the bottom of a coal mine, but her other senses were intact. She heard the drip of water, sometimes, and the scurrying of unseen insects, which in turn raised goose bumps on her skin. She smelled the filth that they refused to clear out of her cell, along with mildew, dampened stone and the unpleasant odors of herself. She tasted perspiration on her upper lip, and twice a day the filthy gruel that passed for food.

  Delivery of meals was the only time the darkness of her cell was broken. Then, after a muffled sound of footsteps from the corridor outside, a plate or hatch was opened near the bottom of her cell’s iron door, light spilling briefly through it to illuminate a tin plate filled with goulash or stew or whatever it was called. It always tasted bland or bitter, and it never satisfied her hunger, but she ate it just the same.

  They brought no water to her cell, but she had found a dripping spigot in a corner of the tiny room, and she could wet her tongue, one rusty-tasting droplet at a time. The bucket in another corner was her toilet. It had not been emptied yet, which told Darice her estimate of time was probably correct—or else, her jailers simply did not care.

  That might be true, since they had ceased to question her. Soon after she was captured, Gazsi and his minions had been at her constantly, demanding information, names, addresses, explanations. They had broken her—no human being could endure such pain and still keep silent—but the rules of Ohm dictated that she had known little of the group itself. There was not much for her to share.

  Except her brother’s name, and the location of their native village. That was in her file, of course, all part of what she had disclosed to get her job with Project X, before she knew that it was evil. As for other names, she knew none, could not help her tormentors find others to abduct and torture.

  That had angered them, increased her suffering, until they realized at last that she was keeping nothing from them. Darice had been on the verge of fabricating things, drawing fictitious characters from her imagination to relieve the pain, and in the hope that when Gazsi discovered she was lying, he’d be furious enough to grant her the release of death.

  But she was still living, still entombed.

  Darice had no idea why they were keeping her alive. By any common definition of the term, she was a traitor to her country—or, at least, to those who wished to sacrifice it for a fleeting dream of glory etched in fire and fallout. It made better sense to kill her than to keep her caged, in case their plan fell through and she was found by someone else, compelled to testify against the men and women who controlled the nightmare known as Project X.

  Still, she supposed there would be time enough to dispose of her if the tide turned against them. If they were successful, if the weapon was completed and they sent it out into the field, nothing Darice could say would matter. She could not call
the bombers home, turn back the calendar, erase the catastrophic damage that was done.

  She knew no magic, could not work a miracle.

  But her brother, if he was still alive, might find a way to stop the worst of it. She trusted him, without even the vaguest of ideas how he’d accomplish such a thing. He was intelligent, courageous and had contacts in the outside world, although he wisely never shared the details of those links with her.

  Would Allah help her brother, she wondered, or was He in league with the destroyers, as so many of the ultra-fundamentalists proclaimed? If so, their cause was lost and she was on the wrong side of it, anyway, fighting against the will of Allah.

  But Darice didn’t believe that.

  Allah, by whatever name his human followers might call him, was supposed to be all-powerful. He did not need a weapon in a suitcase to destroy the world, if that was His intent. He could send famine, floods, earthquakes—most anything, to purge the Earth of human life, if He so chose.

  Allah did not need Project X.

  Darice knew that was the brainchild of demented human beings who would rather sacrifice their nation, and perhaps their very race, than live in peace with those whose politics and personal beliefs were slightly different. Because they were insane, willing to slaughter millions in pursuit of their own warped agenda, they thought nothing of a simple lie, claiming that Allah had endorsed their scheme. She knew simple believers—sometimes mentally unbalanced, often raised from infancy to trust their “betters”—took the lies as truth and offered no objection.

  When they knew about the master plan at all.

  Deception was another part of Project X that told Darice it was a fraud. She understood the need for secrecy in politics and national defense, but this was different. The project had no benign aspects, served no one but a handful of conspirators who risked the end of human history to write its final page themselves.

  If there was something more Darice could do to stop them, she would gladly sacrifice herself and—

  She heard footsteps in the corridor.

  She didn’t think that it was feeding time. That could be a mistake, of course, but she would simply have to wait and see. There might be other cells along the corridor, but when she stretched her mind back to her first day of captivity, she could not recall footsteps coming for anyone but her.

  She counted off some thirty seconds in her head, then heard a key scrape in the lock of her cell’s door. It opened with a flood of light that stabbed into her eyes and made her close them, grimacing against the sudden pain.

  Several men entered, and she recognized Kurush Gazsi’s cheap aftershave lotion before her eyes swam into focus, picking out his form flanked by a pair of guards.

  “Darice,” he said, “we’ve come to speak with you.”

  “I have nothing to tell you,” she replied. “You already know everything.”

  Gazsi chuckled. “If only it were true,” he said, “my job would be a great deal easier. Unfortunately, you’re mistaken. I have much to learn, and you will help me.”

  “No,” Darice said plainly.

  “Oh, yes,” he said with chilling confidence. “You may not know it yet, but you’re my secret weapon.”

  “What, another one?” she asked.

  “For now,” Gazsi replied, “the only one I need.”

  15

  Pahlavi gave Bolan directions to their target, the home of Project X. The Pakistani was convinced that they couldn’t crack the lab compound alone, and so—despite Bolan’s objections to the contrary—they were proceeding instead to meet the members of Ohm.

  The Executioner wasn’t sure what to expect from the group, and Pahlavi was playing it close to the vest, keeping the names and profiles to himself. Perhaps it was a sense of loyalty, or fear that Bolan might be captured and interrogated, but it hardly mattered at the moment. Even if he praised his comrades in effusive terms, the Executioner could only judge them when they stood before him in the flesh, when he could gauge their willingness to fight.

  As for their skill, Bolan wasn’t expecting too much.

  Pahlavi’s first two helpers, Adi and Sanjiv, had both shown courage on the firing line, but raw guts hadn’t been enough to get them through it. Both were dead now, and while Bolan shouldered no responsibility for that, he hoped he wouldn’t leave more friendly ghosts behind him when he left this country.

  He drove, Pahlavi navigating without maps, filling the gaps between directions with the story of his life. Near the beginning, Bolan had considered telling him to can it, but he thought maybe it helped the young man to detail his roots, his upbringing, and Bolan had a knack for tuning out small talk when it got in the way. He reckoned that Pahlavi’s monologue was better than whatever unintelligible songs he would’ve gotten on the car’s radio.

  And it was good, sometimes, to know your allies, understand the burdens on their minds and hearts that had propelled them from an ordinary life of nine-to-five conformity, into a course of action that could get them killed. No one in his or her right mind joined a revolution on a whim, at least when it was clear the rebels were the losing side. No normal person gave up home and family and future if there was another viable alternative.

  Pahlavi and his friends in Ohm would share a sense of mission. That was basic to resistance movements everywhere, but as history had amply demonstrated time and time again, some causes were not worth pursuing, even if their boosters were the most committed people in the world. In Ohm’s case, Bolan happened to agree that stopping World War III was a worthy cause—if he could pull it off.

  As for the help Ohm could provide, beyond directions to the front and briefings on his opposition, that remained for Bolan to discover when he met the other players. If he sized them up as people who could do the job—or give it their best shot, in any case—he would construct a plan incorporating them in whatever capacity he deemed appropriate.

  That didn’t mean that all of them would wind up being front-line fighters. In the Executioner’s experience, a willingness to die wasn’t the same thing as ability to fight, to kill, or even to make dying count for something on the battlefield. Any moron could throw himself beneath a speeding tank or walk around exposed to sniper fire until a bullet took him down. For all the good it did their side, those “soldiers” may as well have stayed home in the first place, left the fighting to the ones who knew that dying was a risk but didn’t court it like a long-lost lover.

  Every morning of his life, Mack Bolan thanked the Universe that he was still alive and fit for duty. When his time came, he would meet the rush head-on and take it like a man. But in the meantime, he had no interest in teaming up with suicidal dilettantes who thought that dying for their cause was the primary goal of waging war.

  “We have another thirty minutes, I believe,” Pahlavi said, cutting into Bolan’s thoughts. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”

  “These friends of yours,” Bolan said. “Are they like you, or is it more an ivory-tower thing for them?”

  Pahlavi paused to weigh the compliment, seemed pleased that Bolan saw him as a soldier, even if an inexperienced and amateur one.

  “They are like me,” he said at last. “All have lost loved ones to the prisons, the interrogation rooms, the firing squads. Most are young. Only a few of them have children, but they don’t want crazy people to destroy the world.”

  “And what about experience? Are any of them former soldiers?”

  “Two or three,” Pahlavi said. “Not many. We have no conscription here in Pakistan, although the law of 1952 permits it. Volunteers may join the army at sixteen and fight at eighteen years of age. So far, the volunteer rate has been adequate, but most of those who have complaints against the government do not enlist.”

  Okay, Bolan thought. Two or three trained fighters in a group composed of earnest wannabes. That didn’t mean some of the others couldn’t shoot or fight, but he would have to check them out himself.

  “How many friends are you expecting?” he inqui
red.

  “Thirty were summoned. I can’t say how many will respond,” Pahlavi answered.

  “What about equipment?”

  “We have weapons,” his guide said. “Don’t worry about that. If you had not arrived, we were prepared to do this by ourselves.”

  “You may be willing,” Bolan said. “We’ll have to wait and see if you’re prepared.”

  “You won’t be disappointed,” Pahlavi said.

  Bolan drove on through the night in silence, hoping that his guide was right.

  A CHANCE ENCOUNTER had led Manoj Shankara to the move that changed his life forever. He had never dreamed himself a hero, never thought he would do anything extraordinary, but sometimes an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances could surprise himself.

  It was Darice Pahlavi’s fault, of course. If she had not befriended him, if she had left him to admire her beauty from afar, Shankara likely would’ve managed to ignore the comment he overheard in passing from Kurush Gazsi, the chief of plant security. Indeed, if Darice had not introduced him to the concept of freethinking and resistance to misguided power, then Shankara thought he probably would have accepted the reports that she had left the job to wed a childhood sweetheart, or the rumors that she’d quarreled with a supervisor and was fired.

  But he knew those were lies.

  To start with, there had been no lover. He was certain Darice would have mentioned one at some point in their conversations, and Shankara would have filed the name away, hating the man who touched what he could only worship in silence.

  As for an argument, Darice was capable of flare-ups, but there had been none the day she disappeared, or for at least two weeks beforehand. And she never talked back to superiors around the lab. It would have been unthinkable.

  Aside from his analysis of Darice and her character, Shankara knew the stories told around the lab were lies because Darice had warned him in advance that something bad might happen to her. On the very day she disappeared, she’d taken him aside and whispered urgently, “If anything goes wrong, please warn my brother. You know Darius?”