by Jack Mars
There was still time, and he yet had one drone, even if he had to carry out the rest of the attack by himself. As long as he still drew breath, there was still a Brotherhood.
They would know the name Awad bin Saddam.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
The first thing that Reid felt as he regained consciousness was cold—cold against his face, his hands, his body. Not just cold; he was wet. Sounds floated to him, the sounds of people shouting. Screaming. Splashing.
He opened his eyes and slowly pushed himself from the pavement, keenly aware of the pain in his joints, in every limb. He groaned; everything hurt, starting with a searing pain in his head and seeping downward to his fingers and toes. But he was fortunate. Nothing seemed to be broken.
There was at least two inches of icy cold water in the bottom of the tunnel, eking around the tires of stopped cars. The drone had detonated; at least, there had been an impact. But somehow the tunnel was not destroyed. He remembered the motorcycle jamming up in the narrow causeway. He remembered being flung from it, bouncing off of the top of a car—which had probably saved his life, or at least helped some measure from flying headfirst into pavement. All around him, the remainder of those that had not yet escaped fled for their lives, running, screaming, shouting, their rapid steps splashing across the shallow water.
He climbed to his feet and immediately stumbled, gripping the hood of a nearby car for support. A strong male voice floated to him from nearby: “Everyone out! Towards the exit, in an orderly fashion! Let’s go!”
He knew that voice; it was Watson, approaching from the western end of the tunnel. He was about to call out to him when another thought struck him.
Talia.
She too had been flung from the motorcycle when they crashed. He looked around wildly, forcing his body to move as he skirted around empty cars, looking…
“Talia.” She was lying on her side, facing away from him and the rear bumper of a car. Its back windshield was shattered and the fender dented; it looked as if she had been thrown right into it. “Talia, are you okay?” he asked as he knelt beside her.
“Mm.” She muttered something vague in Hebrew as she came around. Then she blinked twice and said in English, “Water?”
Reid nodded. “The tunnel must be compromised. Come on, we have to go.”
Talia sat up halfway and cried out in pain. “My arm… it’s broken.” She cradled the injured limb across her stomach.
“Alright, I got you.” A few feet from her was the black bag that held the last RF jammer. Reid slung it over one shoulder, and then put Talia’s good arm around his neck as he stood with her. She hissed a pained breath through her teeth and favored one ankle.
“Watson!” Reid called out.
“Zero?” he called back, closer now. The agent jogged down the elevated concrete walkway towards them. On his heels was another man in a yellow vest—an MTA employee. “Man, am I glad to see you… Jesus, you okay? You’re bleeding.” Watson gestured to his forehead.
Reid gently touched his temple with two fingers and came away slick with blood. “I’m fine. Just got banged up in the blast. What happened?”
“Let me take her,” Watson offered as he climbed over the steel railing. Reid carefully ducked out from under Talia’s good arm and transferred her to Watson. “The MTA just got a call, right after the hit. The Coast Guard was tracking one drone heading towards the Manhattan side of the tunnel when it suddenly veered off course and detonated another.”
Reid gaped in shock. There were two drones? Yet he knew who must have been responsible—Maria must have found a way to use the Parasite to take control of the first submarine. “Is the other tube evacuated?”
“Not yet,” he said, helping Talia along towards the Queens-side exit. “This one’s not nearly cleared out yet either. There are still a lot of people down here.”
“Take her and get out,” Reid told him. “I’ll help with the evac.”
“Are you sure?”
“Go,” Reid insisted. He turned to the yellow-vested MTA worker. “You should go too. Get out while you’re able, in case there’s another strike.”
The man shook his head. “No can do. This water is coming in from a crack in the outer wall. There’s a shutoff valve down this way that’ll separate the two chambers and keep the tunnel from flooding. If we don’t close it, that crack can widen and we’ll lose the tunnel—not to mention all the people still down here.”
His conversation with Maya ran through his head; he had told her that he couldn’t ignore a situation if there was something he could do about it. And he wasn’t about to let this man go alone. “Then you’ve got help. Lead the way.” He climbed over the metal railing and up onto the walkway, his sore limbs aching in protest. “Take her and get clear,” he told Watson. “We’ll be okay.”
The tunnel groaned loudly, as if in disagreement with his statement. The sound of it sent an involuntary chill down his spine. “Go,” he said again to Watson’s dubious expression. The other agent didn’t argue further; he nodded tightly and hurried along towards Queens with Talia Mendel in tow. Reid hurried after the MTA worker, the two of them running towards the western end.
“Thanks,” the man huffed. “Are you like him? CIA?”
“Yeah,” Reid said, struggling to keep pace with his pain in his legs. His knee burned; he had definitely irritated his old injury. He looked out over the two lanes of motionless cars, at the people still fleeing the tunnel. “Get clear!” he shouted to them as they ran. “Get out of the tunnel!”
The sounds of splashing footfalls echoed; the water level had risen to the rims of the tires. The tunnel groaned again, the sound of it loud as thunder and sounding as if it was all around them, making Reid painfully aware that they were making their way further from the exit in a concrete tube more than thirty meters underwater. The groan was accompanied by the startled screams of several people.
Reid desperately wanted to know what had happened on the surface—and what was happening at the moment. He imagined the city of New York was in utter turmoil; the police would have shut down all tunnels and likely all bridges as well, and if the hundreds of abandoned cars in the Midtown Tunnel were any indication, it was probably pure chaos above sea level.
“Where is this valve?” Reid asked breathlessly, his knee throbbing in pain.
“Just up ahead,” the MTA guy told him, “at about the midpoint of the tunnel. They built the tubes with an outer chamber so that if the structural integrity was ever compromised, the outer chamber would flood first, before the tunnel. But this water coming in tells us there’s a crack in that outer wall. The valve will close off the outer chamber, and then the MTA can pump the water out. But if that crack gets any wider… well, let’s just hope it doesn’t.”
“Yeah,” Reid muttered his agreement. “Let’s hope.”
The MTA employee slowed to a trot at a steel door in the curved tunnel wall, painted beige to resemble the concrete. He quickly pulled a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked it, shoving it open with a heave. Several inches of cold water rushed out over their shoes.
“That’s not good,” he muttered as he entered the dark, narrow space beyond the door.
Reid lowered the black duffel bag to the ground and started to follow when he caught something in his periphery that made his blood run cold.
He leaned over the railing to see a small girl, no more than six or seven years old with brown hair, wandering between the cars, her short calves sloshing through the water. Her eyes were wide in bewilderment, and a thin rivulet of blood ran down her forehead from a cut. She appeared to be looking for someone, glancing around cars as she jogged through ankle-deep water.
“Hey!” Reid shouted. “What are you doing down here?”
The girl looked up, startled. “My mommy,” she said, her voice wavering. “Sh-she needs help.”
Reid climbed over the metal railing and splashed into the freezing water, hurrying over to the girl. He lifted her up out of the wa
ter and set her on the hood of a car. “Where is she?”
The girl pointed behind her. Reid surveyed the area, squinting—and then he saw her. The woman was lying face-down in the water, one arm floating on the surface. He sucked in a breath as he rushed over, already knowing that the worst was true. As he turned her over he could see that she had struck her head on something during the impact that shook the tunnel. She was gone.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” Reid told the girl. “Hang onto me, okay?”
The girl’s lower lip trembled. “But what about—”
“We’ll get her some help as soon as we get out, okay?” Reid lied. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. “Now hang on.” He lifted her onto his back, her arms around his neck, as he painfully climbed back over the railing and up onto the elevated walkway, out of the water.
“How’s it going in there?” Reid called into the dim space beyond the door. Inside the utility space was dim, lit by yellow caged bulbs in the ceiling. It smelled earthy and damp, like an unfinished basement, and he could hear water dripping from several places.
“Slow,” the MTA employee grunted from somewhere beyond. “But it’s coming…”
The satellite phone chimed from Reid’s pocket. “Zero,” he answered quickly.
“Kent! Get out now!” Watson shouted in his ear. “Coast Guard picked up a third drone on infrared, heading dead center for the tunnel! I repeat, there is a third drone… impact in thirty seconds!”
A third drone.
Thirty seconds.
It wasn’t nearly enough time for them to get clear. There was no point in trying to outrun the blast. Instead he tore open the black duffel bag.
“There’s another bomb!” he shouted to the MTA guy inside the utility space.
“What?!” the MTA worker cried back in shock.
Reid didn’t bother repeating himself. They had only one chance of making it out alive; they had no other defenses that could possibly stop the submarine drone in such a narrow time frame. He pulled out the radio frequency jammer and flicked it on—but the green indicator did not light up.
“Come on!” he grunted in frustration as he smacked at the black box. The little girl, still clinging to his shoulders, trembled behind him. He smacked the RF jammer again. It must have been damaged in the motorcycle crash, he realized. “Please work. Please work.” He flicked the switch off, closed his eyes, and then flicked it again.
He opened his eyes.
The jammer was on. The light was green, but it flickered intermittently.
Please be enough, he thought.
Their time was up; in a few seconds, either he would open his eyes, or he never would again.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
The distance meter on Awad’s remote guidance system spun down rapidly from one hundred yards as he pushed the control stick forward. In mere seconds the Queens Midtown Tunnel would be destroyed, and in the aftermath he would make his name known…
At just under seventy-five yards the infrared view flickered, the screen jumping as if he was experiencing some sort of glitch.
Then it flickered to black.
For a long moment he sat there in utter disbelief, his hand still on the control stick.
“No,” he murmured. “It can’t be.”
He had somehow lost control, just as Ahmed had. He had failed, just as Hassan had.
But my plan was perfect. No one could have predicted this.
Awad screamed in fury as he lifted the silver case from the table. He smashed it down, again and again, as keys and shards of screen flew in every direction. He heaved it across the cabin and into a wall. He snatched the silver pistol from the table and emptied the clip into Hassan’s lifeless body, firing nine times. Then he threw the gun, cracking the wood paneling.
Panting and furious, Awad sank to his knees. He had failed. He had ruined the Brotherhood, bankrupted their only source of money, sent his brothers to their deaths or to incarcerations, and all for nothing.
But you’re still here, he told himself. So get up, and get going.
“Yes,” he said aloud. “There can be other plans. Other opportunities.” But not if he waited around to be discovered.
He may have lost control of the final drone, but it was close to the tunnel, and upon impact with the sea floor it would still detonate. While the Americans were distracted, he had to make his escape, or else there would be nothing to look for but him.
He scrambled to his feet and hurried out of the cabin to tell the Armenian it was time to leave.
*
Reid stood with the girl clinging to his back. It had certainly been more than thirty seconds, yet there was no impact. No explosion. No fiery death or watery grave. But he had no idea if the threat was past.
“It’s done!” the MTA worker called out from inside the utility space. “Let’s get the hell out of—”
The explosion came so suddenly, so loud that Reid fell to his hands and knees. Nausea immediately rose in his stomach, bile in his throat as the tunnel quaked beneath his limbs. The concrete groaned; steel strained. The girl behind him shrieked in his ear.
He was vaguely aware that it could not have been a direct hit, or else he would be dead. But the drone had still detonated, its path likely cut short by the jammer.
A crack split the ensuing silence like a gunshot. Reid winced and jumped to his feet.
An instant later a geyser of water erupted from the open doorway to the utility room, powerful and bursting with the intensity of a hundred fire hoses. A yellow blur passed before his eyes—the MTA worker was thrown from the room and against the steel railing.
The force of the surging water bent his body in half in the wrong direction.
Horrified, Reid took several quick steps backwards as the rushing water blasted out over abandoned cars. People that were still down in the tunnel, those that had not yet evacuated, were swept away in the sudden onslaught of water before they could even cry out. Further down the tunnel, another access door burst from its hinges. The outer chamber was flooded, Reid realized. The explosion had widened the crack in the tunnel and there was nowhere else for the water to go.
The Midtown Tunnel groaned again, starting from somewhere further away and running down its length to just over his own head, like a tingle running down a spine.
It’s not going to hold.
Reid ran. He left the black bag and the unfortunate but undoubtedly dead MTA employee and he sprinted down the concrete walkway as fast as he could. The little girl clung to his neck so hard he could feel her fingernails digging into flesh, but adrenaline overpowered the pain. He pumped his legs as if his life depended on it, because it very much did.
The exit is half a mile away, he thought desperately. Even at his best it would take him three minutes, maybe more, to reach it. The water was rising rapidly, more than two feet deep already. Behind him came another earsplitting crack, so loud he felt it in his bowels. The sound of screams and rushing water filled his ears but he refused to look behind him, only forward, as he kept running.
There was something up ahead, an object in his path; as he drew near, he sucked in a hopeful breath.
It was the motorcycle that had flung him and Talia from its back.
He reached it and yanked it upright, praying to every unseen deity that it still worked. He kick-started the motor; it chugged twice and died. The water in the tunnel had nearly reached the walkway, up past the doors of the cars in the two clogged lanes below, random detritus and a few bodies rushing by on the forced current.
“Don’t look,” he said hoarsely to the little girl. “Keep your eyes closed.” He kick-started the bike again and the engine revved to life. Reid swung one leg over the side and opened the throttle as the water level reached the walkway, seeping over it like a rising tide. “Hang on tight!”
The rear tire kicked up a wake of spray as he steadily drove towards the exit, keeping the bike between thirty and forty miles an hour. The last thing h
e needed was another accident; he doubted he’d be as lucky a second time.
Reid’s heart leapt into his throat as an equally awful threat loomed, quite literally, overhead: the white lights of the tunnel dimmed and flickered.
Please don’t go out. Stay on. The thought of drowning underground in the dark was too horrifying to even consider, yet it lodged in his brain like a kernel in a tooth.
He dared to open the throttle further, jumping up to fifty. There was a sound, something behind the rushing water; the girl was sobbing in his ear. He wanted desperately to tell her it was going to be okay, but he didn’t dare make that promise.
His focus was entirely in front of him, keeping the bike steady and straight. He felt the front tire slip, almost an imperceptible wobble, but enough to force him to slow down a little to keep them from hydroplaning out of control.
The lights dimmed again and Reid’s heart leapt into his throat. The powerful white lights that ran the entire length of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel flickered twice and, before Reid could even mutter a curse under his breath, they went out.
The young girl behind him shrieked and squeezed tighter as they were thrown into complete darkness. Reid slowed the bike further, but did not stop. They couldn’t stop. He had to keep it going, even if he couldn’t see. Keep it straight. Keep it steady. Don’t stop…
He squinted ahead. It wasn’t complete darkness; there was light at the end of the tunnel, in both the metaphorical and factual sense. He could see the exit, and though it did little to illuminate his path, it was enough to heighten his hope, to steel his hands against the handlebars, to keep going…
A crack emanated through the tunnel so loud and powerful that it felt as if the earth itself was cleaving in two. Reid twitched, startled by the sound, the sheer feeling of it, and the bike wobbled dangerously. The left handlebar scraped against the railing; he course-corrected with as tiny movements as possible, back to the right, and the other handlebar bumped roughly against concrete. He couldn’t keep the bike straight. He couldn’t concentrate with the little girl behind him squeezing so tight she was almost cutting off his air supply. He couldn’t stay calm with the thunderous sound behind them, like standing directly beneath a cascading waterfall.
