She moved violently on the bed, trying desperately to make a bad target, Joselyn drove her hip into the crack between the wall and the mattress. Something moved.
She squeezed her eyes shut tight and prayed, an out-of-body experience, waiting for the bullet to rip into her.
The force of the concussion registered behind her, hitting the wall with a thud, a vibration that passed through her body. The blast resounded in her head nearly puncturing her eardrums. It hit the wall like a bowling ball. Joselyn waited for the searing pain to register. A shower of dry plaster peppered her face.
When she opened her eyes, she realized she was no longer on the bed but down on the floor. Her last wild gyrations had shifted the mattress. Joselyn had gone between the bed and the wall. The bullet had hit just above the edge of the mattress, punching in the drywall a hole the size of her thumb.
Now she saw his face, flushed with anger.
“Goddamn it.” He took aim a second time. She could see his eye leveled on the sights as he lined up and carefully angled the muzzle over the edge of the mattress. Joselyn was trapped, unable to move, wedged against the wall.
The explosion was muffled, almost quiet. It sounded like someone popping the tab on a beer can. A red dot appeared on his forehead just above the line of the sights on the gun. It expanded like red ink on a porous paper, then ran down his nose in a rivulet. A quizzical and vacant expression spread across his face. His eyes open, the man with the gun toppled onto the bed and bounced on the mattress.
Joselyn issued a muted scream through the gag in her mouth. She lay trapped on the floor between the bed and the wall and watched in horror as the man’s hand twitched on the bed just inches from her nose.
Suddenly there was automatic weapons fire outside the house. Glass shattered in the window, breaking the pane.
He was wearing a black neoprene wet suit and came through the window, a single leg followed quickly by his head and shoulders. In a fluid motion, he hit the floor, turned, and began firing out through the broken window, rapid coughs from the tiny machine gun in his hand. It had a bulbous black cylinder over the end of the barrel. The shots came in staccato bursts.
Bullets punctured the wall around him and ripped through the wood frame of window. Several more shots punched through the shade. Exploding glass from the upper pane sprayed the room. The man dropped to the floor of the bed, and for an instant Joselyn thought he was dead. He turned his head and looked at her.
“You all right?”
All Joselyn could do was stare at him bug-eyed and nod. Quickly he got to his hands and knees, then removed the gag from her mouth, and in a single motion produced a knife from somewhere near his ankle and sliced the rope from her wrists and legs, freeing her body.
“I’m OK.” She rubbed the chafed flesh of her wrists.
Another volley of bullets ripped into the window. This time the shade fell to the floor and sunlight streamed into the room.
“We can’t stay here. Green Giant’s gonna shred this place in a minute.” He grabbed her by the arm and led her across the floor, both of them crawling on their hands and knees as fast as they could go. Bullets punctured the wall above them and smashed into a mirror over the dresser. Shards of slivered glass showered down, catching in Joselyn’s hair and nicking the flesh on her cheek.
“Who are you?”
“No time for that now,” he said.
She wiped the blood from her cheek absently with the back of her hand, then saw it. Joselyn crawled toward the window where the bullets were hitting.
“Not that way.”
She ignored him, then reached up and grabbed the business card Belden had left on the bedside table. Joselyn scampered back across the floor.
“Lady, you’re out of your mind. You’re gonna get shot.” He crawled toward the door, and she followed him. The man in the wet suit opened it a crack and stuck the fat cylinder of a muzzle through, then peeked out. The fact that he didn’t fire told her it was clear.
He threw the door open and crawled through. She followed him closely until they sat propped against the wall, shoulder-to-shoulder in the hallway outside. There were no windows here, no other opening except the end of the hall that emptied into the living room. He kept his gun pointed in that direction as he pulled a canvas bag from his shoulder and reached inside.
When his hand came out it was holding a pistol, small and black with a tube on the end.
“Have you ever fired a handgun?”
Joselyn shook her head.
“If I get hit, you may have no choice. Listen up.” He unscrewed the tube from the end. “I’m taking the silencer off. It’ll be loud. It’s better. They’re more apt to keep their distance.” He figured the chances of her hitting anything were slim. The noise might provide some cover.
“There’s fifteen rounds in the clip. The little red dots on the side.” He pointed to them. “When they’re uncovered— when you can see them—it means it’s ready to fire. When you can’t see them, it means the safety’s on.” He clicked the safety back and forth several times so she could see how it worked. Then he handed it to her.
“You got it?”
She nodded like she understood.
“When you put the safety on, the hammer goes down automatically. In order to fire, you just take the safety off, cock the hammer back, and pull the trigger. Aim before you do it. Every time you pull the trigger after that it will shoot.”
Joselyn was nodding at every word, but he could tell by the dazed look that she probably was not going to get it right. He pulled the slide back and chambered the first round, then handed it to her. “Keep it pointed away from me.”
They were shooting up a storm outside, bullets hitting metal with a dull thud, the clink of broken windowpanes. The curtains in the living room danced as if inhabited by ghosts.
He checked his watch. “There’s a gunship coming in in three minutes. They’re gonna shred this place. It’s ground zero. We gotta get the hell out.”
“Who are you?”
“Navy SEAL. Time for introductions later.” He went into overdrive and started crawling on his hands and knees down the hall toward the living room.
Joselyn looked down at the gun in her hand, made sure she couldn’t see the red dots, then followed him so that the highest points on each of their bodies were their hind ends, like two hounds sniffing the carpet.
COLONEL, PLEASE TELL me what your plan is?” Gideon yelled over the thwop-thwop-thwop of the helicopter rotors as the chopper approached at slow speed, three miles out from Padget Island.
“We’ve got to wait until they soften the place up.” The Marine officer in charge was juggling incoming messages from the other choppers in formation, a few Black Hawks, but mostly older HI-1 Hueys from the Air National Guard that had been grounded for inspections. They were now pressed into service by executive order, the only means of close transport that they had. The entire force had been patched together at the last minute. It was all they could assemble on short notice from Everett.
He’d managed to dig up two Cobra gunships, one of them an AH-1G left over from Vietnam, nearly an antique, to provide covering fire when his men hit the ground.
“We don’t know what they’ve got down there. I’m not sending my men in to get killed on the ground. I’ve got a handful of non-coms with combat experience, and that’s it. Most of these men have never seen any fighting.”
“Could you not get more experienced men?” said Gideon.
“There wasn’t time,” said the colonel.
“I understand, but I am still worried about Ms. Cole.”
“You think she’s on that island?”
“That is my guess. The sheriff back at Friday Harbor found the piece of paper with the telephone number, the one I had given her before I went out to the docks. It was on the ground in the parking lot. He also found minute traces of blood next to it.”
“She’s probably dead,” said the colonel.
“I don’t think so.” Gideon had to
shout to be heard above the rotor wash and the noise of the engine. “Why would they carry away a dead woman? If they took her and if that island is the center of their operations, my guess is, she is down there.”
The colonel didn’t turn to look directly at him, but Gideon could read his pained expression even in profile.
“I’m afraid I’ve got my orders, Mr. van Ry. There are protocols for dealing with this kind of scenario, NBC’s, nuclear, biological, and chemical. That island is off-limits to anything that moves right now. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out. And we’re about to unleash hell on them.”
“What kind of hell?” said Gideon.
“As you can see, I don’t have much by way of firepower with me. A few old choppers to transport my men. No artillery and no armed vehicles. I could use a couple of Bradley fighting vehicles, but getting them here and down onto that island in the face of fifty-caliber machine gun fire is another story. I’ve got to silence those guns before we do anything.”
Gideon shook his head and gave the Marine a quizzical look like he didn’t understand.
“We’re lucky,” yelled the colonel. “We had some equipment out here on the coast for testing.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“It’s a palletized gunship. C-130. Those people down there are about to get a lesson in modern urban warfare. Hundred-and-five-millimeter howitzer rounds, precision-guided and very deadly. I’ve got to bust up those bunkers before we hit the ground.”
“I’m very worried about Joselyn Cole,” said Gideon.
“We will do our best to confine our shots,” said the colonel.
“Colonel.” The chopper pilot turned his head toward his commander in the jump seat behind him. “We got contact.”
“Lemme have the headset.” The colonel held the earpiece in place with one hand and talked into the mouthpiece.
“Able, this is Charlie. Where are you?” He listened for a second.
“Good. Test your guns out over open water, then check back. And don’t sink any fishing boats out on the sound.” He handed the headset back.
“Jolly Green Giant,” said the colonel. “You know what that is?”
Gideon shook his head. “I think you should wait, Colonel.”
“Why?”
“Because if one loose round hits that device, you could get a very dirty explosion.”
The Marine officer now turned and looked at Gideon over his shoulder with a quizzical expression. “What are you talking about?”
It was the only reason he’d brought the Dutchman along. The NEST team couldn’t move north fast enough. It would be three hours before they arrived at Friday Harbor with their equipment. Gideon was the only nuclear expert on site. The military needed him in case they found the device.
“That Russian artillery shell is very old,” said Gideon. “It’s a style of munitions made in the early nineteen-sixties. It contains conventional high explosives wrapped around a core of plutonium. We cannot be sure how old those high explosives are. They could be quite unstable due to age. If you hit them with a round, a piece of shrapnel, anything hot, they could explode.” The Dutchman said this in a matter-of-fact manner that caused the colonel to sit up and take notice.
“That’ll set off a nuclear blast?”
“Probably not,” said Gideon.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“An explosion like that could pulverize the plutonium core. It could turn it into dust and send it into the atmosphere. I would not want to be downwind if that happens.”
“Radiation?” said the colonel.
Gideon nodded.
“How far could it travel?”
“That depends on the prevailing winds, how high the dust is carried. It could certainly reach the mainland, parts of Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, depending on the direction of the winds.”
This gave the colonel something to chew on. A possible international incident. He thought for a second. Then tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Gimme those photos.”
The pilot handed him a file from the rack on the inside of the door. The colonel opened it and looked at the pictures inside, satellite reconnaissance photos of the island.
“It’s the only sizable building,” he said. He showed the pictures to Gideon. “If the device is on the island, chances are it’s inside that house. They wouldn’t put it in one of the bunkers unless they were crazy.”
“Perhaps,” said Gideon.
The colonel tapped the pilot one more time, then snapped his fingers for the headset.
He held it up. “Able, this is Charlie. Change of plans. Scratch the house. Do you read?” He waited for the response, which Gideon could not hear over the engine and rotor noise.
“Do not hit the house. Everything else is fair game. Do you read?” He listened again. “That’s affirmative. You can go in but don’t hit the house.” He handed the headset back to the pilot.
“That plane’s got a palletized hundred-and-five-millimeter howitzer. Fires terminally guided munitions. It can put a round through a fart from ten thousand feet, before the gas comes out your ass.”
Gideon wasn’t sure about the metaphor or the wisdom of the man’s actions. “Colonel, if they took Ms. Cole, she’s alive and she’s on that island.”
“That may very well be, Mr. van Ry. But I’ve got my orders. I’ve got men on that island, too. We’re not going in there until we’ve pulverized those bunkers.
“We’ll leave the house alone and hope for her sake that she’s inside.”
ALTITUDE FOURTEEN THOUSAND FEET: SAN JUAN CHANNEL, WA
It emitted a streak of fire that looked more like a flame-thrower. Four rounds thundered through the airframe of the reserve KC-130 in less than two seconds.
They tested the gun out over water. Four distinct plumes rose thirty feet in the air like white feathers all in a line, as the rounds hit the surface of the sound and exploded.
The targeteer checked the coordinates from the global positioning satellite, as well as the link to the mission data computer.
“We’re set. Take her in on a left-hand orbit, maintain one-four triple zero.”
If they flew at fourteen thousand feet in an orbit that would not cross over the island at any point, the men on the ground would never hear the plane. Their first clue would come in the form of bunker busters, high-explosive shells that could be pinpointed, designed to rip into revetments and tear up sandbagged emplacements. Not knowing where the rounds were coming from, and with no enemy to shoot at, was a prescription for panic. The ground war in the Gulf proved that even trained soldiers would throw down their weapons and run when faced with an enemy who was killing them with invisible precision.
Once this occurred, phase two would kick in. The bunker busters would be followed by antipersonnel rounds. When these hit the ground, they would release small baseball-sized bomblets that would bounce ten feet up before exploding. Fired in rapid four-round bursts, they would spread a carpet of death, sending out thousands of ball bearings, ripping into flesh and tearing up everything in a radius of hundreds of feet.
The gunship would take the starch out of anybody on the ground who wasn’t sitting in a concrete bunker ten feet down. By the time the Hueys swung in over the beach to off-load their troops, the people on that island would be running in panic, tripping over their weapons, and looking for anybody who would take their surrender without killing them. It was mismatch—a total turkey shoot.
GUEMES CHANNEL, WA
As the motor launch skimmed over the waters of the channel, Thorn stayed to the far side, away from the ferry landing at Anacortes.
“Here, take it.” They changed seats and Taggart took the wheel. “Keep her straight down the channel.”
Thorn got the field glasses out of a case in the cuddy cabin. He trained them on the docks and focused. Two Coast Guard patrol boats were moored a hundred yards off the docks.
“What’s wrong?” Taggart looked over at him.
Both of th
e state ferries were tied up, and a line of traffic snaked up the hill and out onto the highway.
“What do you make of that?” said Thorn.
Taggart squinted. Even without glasses, he could see the traffic. “Pretty busy, even for a weekend.”
“Busy, my ass,” said Thorn. “Take a better look.” He handed the field glasses to Taggart, who held them to his eyes with one hand while he steered with the other.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“The shoulder of that road coming down to the ferry terminal.”
Taggart let go of the wheel long enough to focus the glasses. There, off to the right of the road, was a string of dark, olive-drab vehicles each with a distinctive white cross painted on the top and sides.
“Humvees,” said Taggart.
“Not just any kind,” said Thorn. “Military ambulances. Looks like they’re expecting patients. And they’ve stopped all ferry service.”
“What do you make of it?”
“I’d say it’s obvious,” said Thorn. “They’re not interested in having any civilians out on the waters in the San Juan Straits, at least not today. I’ll bet there’re military vessels patrolling. We might have just made it past them. They don’t want the good citizens getting in the way, maybe seeing something they shouldn’t.”
Thorn looked at his watch. His worry now was Oscar Chancy. If he was on schedule, he would already be onboard the Humping Goose along with the tanker truck. It would be an unremarkable sight out on the waters of the sound: a small private working ferry with a septic pumper on its open deck, shuttling between the islands, or in this case between the island and the mainland.
Thorn unrolled a small laminated chart of the islands from inside the cuddy cabin. “If he’s on time, Oscar would be right about here, heading down the Rosario Straits.” He traced it with his finger on the chart. “Two hours would put him off of Whidbey, another half hour to Keystone.”
“If there are military vessels patrolling out there, there’s a good chance he won’t get through.”
Thorn knew that this was the most problematic part of his entire plan. Until he broke out of the sound, onto the mainland with the truck and the device, he and his entire project were in peril.
Critical Mass Page 28
