Authors: Russell Blake
“On short notice, you’re lucky you aren’t going in with daggers and slingshots,” Isaac said with a shrug. “I only had a few hours to round these up. It’s not like anyone gave me sufficient time. And I still don’t know enough about what you’re doing to be dangerous.”
Isaac had been kept out of the loop, other than being informed that the group was targeting terrorists. He didn’t know about the nuke, nor that their adversaries were ex-Mossad. The director had kept the need to know very tight; if the bomb went off, the fewer that knew what had actually happened, the better.
“Trust me, you have as much information as you want to. How long will it take to get us there?”
“At this hour? Maybe twenty minutes. You want to take one vehicle, or multiples?”
Jet considered the question. “You drive the van, we’ll take the two cars. I have no idea what we’re walking into, so might as well err on the side of maximum flexibility.”
Isaac nodded and stood, jingling his keys. “I have a pistol as well. Hopefully I won’t have to get involved in the shooting, but if you need help with this, just let me know and I’ll do what I can.”
“If all goes well, you’ll just be keeping an eye out on the street so we aren’t disturbed. But it’s never a bad idea to be packing,” Jet said.
Aaron and Eric checked their weapons as Jet studied the directions, and then they bundled the assault rifle into a rucksack along with a pair of bolt cutters. Jet fixed the earbud into place and the others followed suit, and the group moved outside, Isaac taking the van and Jet taking one of the cars while the men took the other.
The streets leading out of the area were congested with commuters bound for work, and Jet found herself frequently being cut off by drivers who seemed completely unfamiliar with turn signals or basic rules of the road. Isaac seemed utterly unfazed by any of it, gunning the van into seemingly impossible openings with the fearless dexterity of a Formula One champion. The flow lightened as they moved north, parallel to the seashore, as most of the traffic headed for the downtown districts and the towering buildings that housed many of Qatar’s largest businesses.
When they drew closer to the target, Isaac murmured into his earbud. “The house will be up on the right, two blocks, number 193. How do you want to do this?”
“Pull past it and let’s get a look at the parking near it,” Jet instructed. “If it won’t look odd, park within a hundred yards and begin surveillance. I’ll slow down, so we aren’t in a motorcade, and park further away. Gentlemen, see if you can find a spot around the corner, preferably on the next street over, so you can watch the back.”
The homes were typical of the region – high walls on the lot perimeters to act as a barrier against robbery, ornate iron gates protecting the driveways and entrances, the construction basic with few frills. The properties were smaller than the safe house, perhaps sixty feet wide by double that deep; an area without pretensions, where the residents worked long hours to pay for their dwellings. She hung back as Isaac braked and swung the van to a stop near the far corner, then backed into a space between two junker vehicles that looked like they were on their last legs.
She kept her speed constant as she drove by the target, noting that there were no cameras in evidence – just the ubiquitous satellite dish on the flat roof, along with air conditioning compressors and a propane tank, presumably situated there to discourage theft. The street itself was quiet, any children already in school, their working parents on their way to the job. Once she was past, she made a right turn on the next street, noting Isaac reading a paper as he watched the house in his side mirror, and then drove slowly around the block, looking for anything they could use to their advantage. As she was approaching the target’s street again, her cell vibrated.
“We’ve lost the signal,” the director said, his gruff voice taut.
“What do you mean, lost it?”
“The satellite stopped picking anything up about twenty minutes ago. We first thought it might be some kind of atmospheric interference, but not now. The signature disappeared, and the satellite has been confirmed as fully operational.”
“Isn’t that impossible? I mean, it’s radioactive. How do you stop something from being radioactive just like that?” Jet demanded, coasting to a stop near the corner.
“We’re still detecting a trace – background radiation from the house – but other than that, nothing. I don’t know what to say. It was there, then it just stopped being there.”
“Shit. Where does that leave us?”
“I can’t make the call from here. You’re on the ground, so I’ll defer to your expertise. But my gut says go in hard, and do it now. Time’s not our friend, and we know that the device was there until a few minutes ago. Ben, the technician, says that it’s possible that they opened the shielding for some reason, and then closed it back up. So there’s still a good chance that they, and the bomb, are still inside.”
“What about the visual sat feed?”
“That’s why we thought it might be an atmospheric glitch. It’s taking longer than we thought to bring it online and grab the stream. The techs say the data’s still there, so they can recover the small window of time since the radiation emission went dark, but it’ll take a few more minutes – hopefully only a couple.”
“All right. I’m signing off. I’ll report back once we’ve taken the house. If you know any good prayers, I’d start saying them.”
“Believe me, I exhausted my repertoire hours ago.”
Jet punched the call off and considered the new information. A bad situation had just gotten far worse. At least as long as the satellite was picking up the radiation emission, they knew that the nuke was in the house. But twenty minutes was a lifetime without any sign of it, and her unease soured her throat as she tapped the earbud on.
“We’re going in. I’m heading straight to the entry gate – if the lock is the usual for this level of place, I should be able to get it open in half a minute, tops. Aaron, I want the rear of the building watched. I saw an alley running between the houses for garbage collection. You have two minutes to get into position. Eric, you come up the street behind me. Give me thirty seconds of lead time. Isaac, stay put. But if you see anyone but us come out the front door, check in on the comm line and then follow them. If we all go down, you’re the last link. You’ll need to call headquarters and get instructions. Okay, everyone, I’ll be making my approach in one minute. It’s show time.”
Jet caught a glimpse of her emerald eyes in the rearview mirror as she pulled on her veiled headdress – the bourga and shayla worn by devout Muslim women in Qatar, along with the ubiquitous abaya – the long black robe that served as perfect cover for toting a Kalashnikov. She double-checked the magazine in the assault rifle and chambered a round before doing the same with her silenced pistol, more a reflex than a necessity given that she’d already done so a half dozen times at the safe house. Satisfied that she was as ready as she would ever be, she patted her front pants pocket, where she carried the lock picks Isaac had given her, and then took a deep breath and exited the car. With a measured glance in both directions, she moved to the trunk and withdrew a bulging sack, then proceeded down the street carrying an opaque white canvas shopping bag filled with paper towels and water from the safe house, her date with a suitcase nuke and ruthless enemies only footsteps away.
Chapter 34
As she rounded the corner she spotted Eric near a corner market at the far end of the block, across the street from Isaac, where he’d been dropped off by Aaron and had raced for the alley to get into position. Jet took her time on approach, senses tingling, wary of any observation. So far she didn’t detect anything, but that didn’t reassure her – they’d had zero time to do any reconnaissance, which made this the very worst kind of operation right from the get-go. Even now the crosshairs of a sniper rifle could be trained on her head from one of the curtained windows of the two-story structure, a nervous finger tic away from vaporizing her skull. Her pulse pounded in her ears as the acrid taste of bile tickled her throat, and she choked it back as her eyes scanned the street, then the houses, her steps slow, befitting an older woman burdened with a thankless day’s chores and a future of endless more.
She spotted the gate twenty yards up on her right and slowed further, now shuffling more than walking. In the gutter, sheltered from the sun by a dull gray pick-up truck, a mangy cat arched its back as she locked eyes with it, and for a moment everything seemed to freeze in her awareness, synthesized into that one second, the insanity of the pending nuclear devastation suspended as she considered the sad, frightened animal, and it looked back, seemingly into her core, an unspoken message in its glittering eyes.
A car backfired down the street, the report sounding like a cannon to her ears, and the spell was broken; then she was alone, the rifle clutched in her left hand, hidden by the folds of her robe, the barrel held tightly against her body as she set down her shopping bag a few steps from the door.
To any observer, Jet would have appeared to be pausing for a rest, leaning against the wall by the gate, catching her breath as the sun’s baking rays beat down on her. Few would have caught the fleeting movement as she fished the picks from her pocket and, with her body blocking the gate from view, set to work on the lock, all her concentration focused on the tumblers, everything else filtered out.
The picking seemed to take forever, and then the lock gave with a soft click, just as footsteps clumped across the road at an unhurried pace – Eric, right on time, the only other figure on the street, a serious young man with a spring in his step. She gathered up her grocery bag, and when he was a few feet from her, she pushed open the gate and darted inside, followed immediately by Eric, who drew his pistol once he was in the courtyard. Jet set down her bag and whipped the AK-47 into firing position, finger on the trigger, then ran to the side window as Eric took the front door. She peered inside through a space between the heavy drawn curtains, but saw nothing except a darkened empty room, no sign of life in the living room or the kitchen.
“The front room is clear. I’m going to try the rear door – it’ll have one,” she whispered as she inched along the side of the house. “Wait for me – I’ll be back in a few seconds.”
Jet took cautious steps, eyes roving over the windows, and then she froze as she approached the kitchen window, her foot inches away from a nearly invisible strand of monofilament strung six inches off the ground, running from the perimeter wall to a junction box on the side of the house. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the box, then she lifted the bottom of her abaya and carefully stepped over it, marking an X in the soil to the side of the line before proceeding even more carefully, each pace hesitant, watching for anything suspicious.
There.
An almost imperceptible rise, a slight bump in the dirt, the surrounding earth marginally lighter in color – no doubt a land mine triggered by either a pressure plate or the tripwire. Not a particularly crafty device, but crudely effective against a trespasser in the dark. If they’d tried to go in a few hours earlier, they would have been hamburger – the only thing that had saved them was the morning light.
She tapped her earbud and murmured, “The place is rigged. Mine on the side. Tripwire. We have to assume the entire exterior is like this. I’m coming back to the front. There’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ve wired the rear door and any of the windows – I would have.”
“What about the front door?” Eric whispered.
“Also probably wired. I’m going to give you the AK, and then I’ll scale the side of the house and try the second floor. Worst case, there’s got to be a way in from the roof.”
She retraced her steps and avoided the trip wire, then fixed Eric with a steely gaze as she handed him the Kalashnikov.
“Time for a little workout. Don’t touch the door. I have a bad feeling about this whole deal,” she said, then spun and sprinted for the side wall next to the house. Her boots struck the coarsely finished mortar and she moved laterally a few yards up before thrusting herself away, toward the house. Her fingers caught a second-story molded concrete windowsill. She paused, then heaved herself upwards, the soles of her Doc Martens fighting to grip on the rough mortar as the muscles in her arms knotted from the effort. The left toe of her boot found a slight indentation and she pushed herself higher; she then swung her legs to the side and, using the momentum, hurled herself at the small second-story balcony that had attracted her attention.
Eric watched her progress, a black-clad ninja defying gravity, and then returned his focus to the door when he saw her alight on the terrace, the weight of the Kalashnikov in his hands slim reassurance given what they were up against.
Jet squinted through the drapes at an empty bedroom, spartan, occupied by only a bed and a floor lamp. Her hands felt along the perimeter of the glass door frame as she pored over every inch of it before trying the handle, twisting it gingerly.
Locked.
But she hadn’t been decapitated by a concealed grenade, so net positive.
The picks made short work of the largely cosmetic lock, and in seconds she was easing the glass door open, pulling it toward her, and slipping inside, her pistol now steady in her hand.
The rich smell of recently prepared food wafted up from below through the partially open bedroom door. As she drifted through the space like a ghost, nerves close to the surface of her skin, she didn’t detect anyone – whoever had been in the house wasn’t there any longer. Jet crept to the next door and listened for a few moments before cracking it open – a bathroom. Empty. The one beside it held another bedroom, also uninhabited. Ditto for the last.
Her hopes sank as she slipped down the stairs and quickly confirmed that the lower floor was also empty, although vacated so recently that the odor of breakfast still hung in the air like a taunt. She tapped her earbud.
“They’re gone. No sign of them. I’m going to come out the front door. I’d back off from it if I were you – I see a keypad,” Jet advised, then approached the crudely mounted box adjacent to the doorjamb. Her gaze followed the wire up to the ceiling and across to a potted plant on a molded ledge in the corner. She looked the box over, the contact points on the door mounted without finesse, and then flipped out a butterfly knife and sliced through the cable. They hadn’t expected anyone to tackle disabling it from the inside, obviously. Another bit of luck – if losing track of the nuke that would change the world order could be considered in the same sentence as luck.