Critical Mass (42 page)

“Nabila! Nabila, get down!”

He had to shoot. There was no choice. And what did it matter if he hit her or not? They were all dead, anyway.

Incredibly, the plane rotated. Just like that, its nose turned skyward and it seemed to dance off the pavement and into the sky, and Nabby was hanging in the landing gear, her feet kicking as she struggled for purchase.

He stood there, his pistol raised, as the plane’s engine screamed and the aircraft wallowed, then heeled badly. He saw the rudder snap far to the right, saw the flaps work—and then the plane’s left wing struck a streetlight, and the fuselage wheeled, smashing into a house. The rudder hit Jim hard, causing him to lose his footing and topple forward, arms wind-milling.

He regained his balance, then froze.

The plane was still now, the engine silent. The reek of aviation fuel mixed with the smell of smoldering wires from the tangle behind the ruined dashboard.

When Jim tried to step closer, a searing blast of pain made him fall forward instead. From the lack of control and the waves of fiery agony, he thought he’d burst a tendon, or smashed his ankle altogether.

Grabbing an edge of the wing to support his weight, he peered into the twisted cockpit. Rashid was not only conscious; his hand was fumbling for something, undoubtedly the critical switch. Jim’s gun was gone, though, lost as the rudder hit him.

Then everything was black. The world was upside-down, turning slowly, slipping into the distance. He was losing consciousness; he must have taken a head injury as well. He fought it as hard as he could, but his hands would not work. He couldn’t get to Rashid. He had no strength. He felt as if his muscles were turning to water.

He was used to controlling his body. He could absorb a lot of punishment, handle a lot of pain. He was concussed though, maybe losing blood. Forcing himself, concentrating all his energy, he raised his right arm, and suddenly somebody else was there, a flash of white—he realized that it was Nabby and she had dived into the cockpit with her brother.

The reek of fuel filled Jim’s nostrils as the whole scene was flooded with light. Low overhead, a helicopter was lighting up the entire street. There
were voices then, and the sound of big engines—fire equipment coming closer.

An F-16 howled overhead at low altitude, waiting to pounce if the plane somehow managed to take flight. But this airplane was dead.

A single dot of consciousness remained, and it was telling him that Rashid could still detonate the bomb.

Rashid smashed his feet against the windscreen, which popped out of its housing with a loud, cracking protest.

He was out, just like that, supple as a panther. He staggered, stood—and suddenly, in the blazing floodlight, held up a remote control. Round and round he turned, holding it high. He was grinning, his teeth flashing.

Nabila, her clothes ripped, her body covered with blood, leaped through the broken windscreen and flew at him. She embraced him, also embracing the remote, and for a moment they were dancers, graceful in the steel-white light from above, dancing to the rough beat of the helicopter’s rotors.

Nabila had Rashid’s wrist in her right hand, bending his fingers back and tearing at it with her teeth, trying to get the remote from him. Her left arm was twisted in a way that could only mean it was broken. At any moment, Rashid was going to press the crucial button.

Breathing deep, Jim opened himself to his pain, accepted that it was now part of him, and began moving toward them.

Nabby cried out, “Why are you doing this?”

“Islam converts by the sword! Face it, Nabby!”

“Daddy sees you from heaven! Think of that! Daddy sees this; he sees you killing the world!”

They went down together, Nabby throwing her head back and screaming with agony when she rolled across the broken arm. Jim saw the white of bone protruding from her elbow.

As he forced himself forward, his eyes were on that remote. The light from above was too blinding for him to see much beyond the pool of it where Rashid and Nabby struggled, but all around them Jim could hear the clatter of deployment.

Then Nabby was on top. She grabbed Rashid’s shirt and slammed his head against the pavement, growling through bared teeth. His eyes registered surprise, but the remote did not leave his hand. She did it again, the growling louder now, and this time Jim saw that Rashid was stunned.

Jim came to Nabby, and found himself beside a savage being, somebody
he did not know, and he understood for the first time what it means to say that somebody has blood in their eye. She glared at him, teeth bared, cheeks sucking, and the growls turned into tears, bitter, agonized. She raised her head and stared up into the light of the churning helicopter, into the blasting wind of its rotors, and the sound that came out of her was the pain of love denied, a sister’s tortured heart, and the agony—even deeper—of women across the world. He heard the vast history of frustration that was in that cry, the despair of women denied the only things they want, which are an equal embrace and equal partnership on the human journey.

She had killed her own brother, and this was how it sounded when a woman’s heart tears itself apart.

But the remote,
the remote
—

Jim threw himself across the pavement, grabbed it, blood covered but intact. So why were they all still here? Why hadn’t Rashid used it?

Then Jim saw why. This remote wasn’t going to trigger a bomb. It was just an infrared TV remote with a range of maybe twenty feet, assuming no obstacles. A remote trigger for a bomb would emit radio frequencies that could broadcast farther than infrared.

So this was a decoy. His eyes snapped to the wreckage of the plane.

Screaming to make his pain easier to bear, he dragged himself to his feet and headed toward the wreck. “Timer,” he said, but his voice was not loud enough, would not carry over the crashing echoes of the rotors above. “Timer . . .”

He beckoned the darkness until he saw men come into the light at last, men in blast gear and reflective face guards. Had there been time, he would have laughed.

He crawled into the blood-soaked cockpit through the shattered windscreen. The dashboard was ripped open, wires pulled out. Rashid had been trying to repair the manual firing mechanism, and when he couldn’t do it he’d produced this TV remote and used it to gain time.

He’d thought to bring it with him. Rashid was a careful man. Chess, not poker. He didn’t trust luck. He was always many moves ahead.

The bomb was a darkness behind the seat. Jim pulled its bent frame aside and saw it, black, about the size of a beach ball, hidden in a mass of wires that led to the detonators, each one a black plate plastered against the blue steel of the bomb’s housing. The plutonium core would be positioned in the center, surrounded by the triggers that would almost instantaneously
compress it. But you would never see that. That would happen in well under a second . . . and it could happen any second.

Where was the countdown timer? It had to be running or Rashid wouldn’t have bothered to decoy it.

Then Jim saw it, a tiny plastic square no larger than a watch face. Its wiring was concealed under the black tape that held to the body of the bomb. The counter was reading down. He saw it go through 58, on its way to the end of its final minute.

There was no time to disarm this. That sort of thing could only be done in the movies. Actually running down the wiring of a timer like this and safely neutralizing it took hours.

He backed out, turned, and grabbed one of the explosives experts who were now crowding in behind him. “It’s on a timer,” Jim shouted above the din of the rotors. “Get explosives suppression on this thing!
Now! Now! Now!
”

They tried to pull him out, but there was no time, and he slid over the bomb and into the tiny space behind it. Here he could be of help. He could place charge suppressors. If they did enough of them in the right pattern and they worked, the plutonium wouldn’t be compressed correctly and the bomb would never go critical.

They knew what they were doing; they had probably simulated this a thousand times. One after another, the suppressors went onto the firing mechanisms, covering them like gray beetles.

A hand thrust three at him. “Where?”

Twenty-two seconds.

No time. He simply placed them at random, forcing them down over the explosive caps, hoping for the best.

Darkness.

A QUESTION OF TIME

Ahead, the light. This was death, then. So quiet! The light . . . beautiful. Calling
him, a silent, sacred song. Then an angel looking down at him. God’s good angel.

“Jim!”

Pain, then, sweeping dreams of heaven away. It surged up and down his chest, running in his guts like a pack of starving rats.

This was not heaven and the light was just the damn chopper and the angel had a busted arm because it was Nabila. “Oh,” he said, and heard his own voice displace the ringing in his blast-shocked ears.

“Medic,” she shouted. Then she stood up, sweeping out of Jim’s field of view. “
Medic!
”

Vans came, and a larger truck, a SWAT vehicle.

He felt himself being moved, heard voices speaking quickly, saw an IV appear, and a needle, and knew that the needle was going to shut him down.

Nabila would not let them give her any pain medicine, not with Jim in such grave condition. His chest and stomach had been laid open when the detonators fired. He’d literally been cradling the bomb.

A colonel came into the meat wagon as the doors closed. “Is he gonna make it?”

Only a miracle would keep him alive, even this very powerful man. All
bodies have their limits. She put her hand on his gray forehead. It was cold, dry. It felt as her father’s had felt when he lay in his coffin.

She looked at Jim. Closed her eyes.

The colonel came up beside her. “He pulled this thing out,” he said. “Those suppressors he placed were the key.”

Ignoring the pain that her every movement sent surging through her own broken arm, she bent close to Jim. “Jimmy, you hear that?”

The vitals monitor’s faint, slow beeping was his only answer.

From in front, she heard: “Hey, lights!”

She turned, looked between the drivers, out the front windshield of the windowless ambulance.

The lights of the city were coming on, flickering at first, then erupting in long, glorious streams of street lamps, in dancing signage, in traffic lights, store windows, and houses. And in the light, cars began to appear honking their horns in joy, people who had been hiding came out from their houses, police cars whooped the delight that the young men and women inside felt.

Then, a high-pitched sound. Instantly both medics leaped into action in the careening ambulance, and Nabila knew that Jim’s heart had stopped. She threw herself onto the floor beside the stretcher on which he lay, and gave to Allah the greatest, the strongest, the most heartfelt prayer of her life, that her life be one with God’s will, and vowed to always be faithful, and to raise her and Jim’s children in faith, if only she could have this chance.

On and on, the screaming, empty whine continued. One of the medics did CPR, his breath interrupting the deadly wail. Then they had paddles, and they got her to go back to the bench in the crowded space, and they shocked Jim. His body hopped, and there was a stench of burning hair, and they shocked him again.

He’s gone,
she thought. Just when she had finally found a way to love him, to accept what he had to offer, which was the toughness and compassion of a true soldier, his soul had departed.

But then the beeping started. Not slowly, not dramatically, but all at once.

“Oh, wow,” one of the medics said. He looked toward her. “This guy’s hard to kill.”

“He’s alive?”

“Lady, right now, the answer is yes.”

Six months later, Nabila’s arm was long since out of its cast, but Jim was just get
ting up on a cane, and would be on one for a while. His internal injuries were healing well, but the ankle hadn’t been broken. He had somehow walked with a severed Achilles tendon, and healing that was going to take time.

Nabila drove them to the White House for the presentation.

There was still a great deal to be done, but an enormous danger had passed in these months. Beyond the bombs in Washington, Rome, and Las Vegas, there had been five other actual devices. The owners of this particular hard disk had also been in control of bombs in Paris, Madrid, Moscow, London, and Los Angeles.

Of course, there could be more still out there, and the penetration of the U.S. intelligence system was far from resolved.

Inshalla was harmed, though to an unknown degree, as the hard disk had given away few secrets about its personnel.

But for now, the full catastrophe was averted.

Italy remained in political chaos, and the European Union was striving to assist it in reconstructing some sort of functional central authority. Virtually every organized country in the world now had a continuity-of-government plan that addressed the danger of sudden decapitation.

Helped out of the car by a Marine in formal uniform, Jim was still getting
used to the idea of being alive. Waking to find Nabby with him had surprised him, and he was still not absolutely sure that this new life that they were sharing was not, after all, some outpost of heaven.

He sucked in the sweet air of spring. “Smell the roses.”

“Yes, Sir,” the Marine said.

“I didn’t mean you.”

“No, Sir.”

As they moved toward the entrance, Jim saw that a Marine honor guard was saluting them. He snapped one back. They did not lower their hands.

Jim and Nabila entered, and as they crossed the lower hall, Marines in their dress uniforms and Secret Service in their black suits came to attention. “I thought it was supposed to be classified,” Nabila whispered, her shoulders hunched.

“Better keep our traps shut, then.”

They were conducted down to the West Wing Lobby, then immediately into the Roosevelt Room.