Closer, closer still . . . And then there was a sudden jolt, enough almost to tear clinging arms from their shoulder sockets, as the parachute finally opened, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, barely enough to decelerate the bomb and the two people tied to it as they struck the ground and went tumbling over and over, striking rocks and plowing through undergrowth, down a narrow ravine until they finally came to a halt in the soft, damp earth beside a mountain stream.
Carver had suffered a hairline fracture in one ankle and badly sprained the other. The pain that stabbed through him with every breath told him that several of his ribs were cracked.
He reached over and untied the rope that connected them to the parachute harness and the bomb. As he loosened the loop around his waist, Alix rolled away from him. She came to a halt on the ground next to him, lying on her front, her head tilted away from him, motionless. He spoke her name, but there was no reply.
At first he assumed she’d been knocked cold by their fall down the hillside. And then he realized that his hands were covered with something wet and dark. For a second he thought it might be mud. He prayed it was mud. But then he realized that his chest was covered with it, too, and he knew that it must be blood.
“Oh, God, no . . .” he moaned, and he patted his hands over his body, desperately hoping that they might find the wound that had produced the bleeding. That could happen. You got cuts sometimes, deep ones, and just didn’t feel them.
But Carver had not been cut. He knew that.
So then he looked across at Alix and the moonlight cast a gray wash over the ragged, purple-black hole, high up by her shoulder blade, that could have been made only by Vermulen’s gun. Carver placed a finger to her throat, feeling for a pulse . . . and it was there, not a steady beat, but a delicate, barely perceptible flutter. He listened for the bubbling, sucking sound of a lung wound and heard nothing. That was some relief at least, but not much.
The entry wound was much bigger and messier than Carver would have expected, as if someone had punched a fist right into her. The bullet must have already been deformed by the time it hit her, maybe by a ricochet off a metal surface. That would explain why it had lodged inside her, instead of going straight through and hitting Carver as well. He tried not to think about the internal havoc the misshapen slug had caused. Even if it hadn’t hit any vital organs, she’d lost a lot of blood and more was still pouring from her.
Carver pulled off his shirt, ignoring the stabs of pain from his battered rib cage, and ripped it into strips. Then he gently lifted Alix into a sitting position, wincing as she gave a soft, semiconscious moan, and took off her shirt, exposing the shredded skin, splintered bone, and gaping flesh torn from her back. He crumpled one of the fabric strips into a wad and pressed it against the wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. He used the other strips to improvise a bandage around her shoulder to hold the wad in place.
It was, at best, a temporary measure. If Alix did not receive proper medical attention soon, she would die. All he could do now was take her body in his arms and hold her. He spoke to her quietly, telling her all the things that had gone unsaid for so many months. There were occasional moments when he thought she might have heard some of what he said, as she blinked or twitched her lips, but that wasn’t the point of his words.
He was still sitting there when the Black Hawk found him. It landed on a patch of flat ground not far away, and he saw the beams from the flashlights slicing through the darkness as the people walked toward him. Then there was a figure standing in front of him and a hand on his shoulder.
“You okay?”
It was a woman’s voice. He glanced up and saw a slim, petite civilian, looking ill at ease in army combats.
“Yeah,” said Samuel Carver, though the word was sighed as much as spoken. “We’re just fine.”
Then he rose to his feet, with Alix still cradled in his arms, and started limping down the ravine toward the waiting helicopter.
POSTSCRIPT:
This Much Is Also True
The U.S. government was shown advance tapes of General Alexander Lebed’s claims that Russia had lost one hundred suitcase nukes and had a response prepared before the interview aired on
60 Minutes.
State Department spokesman James Foley stated, “The government of Russia has assured us that it retains adequate command and control of its nuclear arsenal . . . appropriate physical security arrangements exist for these weapons and facilities . . . there is no cause for concern.”
Lebed, however, repeated his claims at a hearing of the Congressional Military Research and Development Subcommittee on October 1, 1997. The following day, he was backed by a senior Russian scientist, environmentalist, and member of the Russian National Security Council, Alexei Yablokov, who testified to the committee that he was “absolutely sure” that the KGB had produced miniature bombs, intended as terrorist weapons, in the 1970s.
The subject was debated in Congress in the autumn of 1999, when Republican congressman Kurt Weldon, a specialist in Russian affairs, stated that 132 suitcase nukes had been manufactured by the Russians. Weldon also claimed to have had a conversation with then FBI Director Louis Freeh in which Freeh “acknowledged the possibility that hidden weapons caches exist in the United States.” Weldon maintained, “There is no doubt that the Soviets stored material in this country. The question is what and where.”
There have been no public reports of any of the missing bombs being found anywhere in the world. The FBI, however, is believed to have searched an area near Brainerd, Minnesota, looking for possible weapons. Brainerd is close to Gull Lake.
Alexander Lebed died on April 28, 2002, in a helicopter crash in Russia’s Sayan Mountains. The official cause of the accident was given as a collision with power cables in foggy weather.
On October 20, 1999, the FBI published its Project Megiddo report. Numerous extremist Christian groups and ideologies were examined, but the report concluded that while the Project Megiddo intelligence initiative “has revealed indicators of potential violent activity on the part of extremists in this country,” there were “very few indications of specific threats to domestic security.”
Subsequent events have shown this assessment to be well founded. There have been no real-life Waylon McCabes.
In June, July, and August 1998, CIA agents in Tiranë, the capital of Albania, carried out the forcible captures and extraditions of five senior members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an organization with extremely close, long-standing ties to al-Qaeda. The men were flown to Egypt, where they were tortured, tried, and found guilty of terrorist offenses. Two were executed, one sentenced to life imprisonment, and the others given lengthy jail terms.
Despite the presence of these known terrorists in Albania, ethnic homeland of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and despite the certain presence of jihadist fighters in Bosnia, U.S. and U.K. policy remained—and still remains—predicated on the conviction that there were, and are, no links between the Kosovo Albanians and Islamic terrorism. This view is hotly disputed by the Serbs and their traditional allies in Russia and Bulgaria. There is, however, considerable evidence that the KLA received both weapons and training from U.S. sources—civilian, corporate, and official—and had similar links to the German BND intelligence service. It would be embarrassing, to say the least, if Western governments had, yet again, been assisting the very forces that were most bent on their destruction.
But what of the terrorist threat, so feared by Kurt Vermulen?
In July 1998, the U.S. Commission on National Security issued the first of three wide-ranging reports analyzing expected global developments up to 2025, the threats they posed to U.S. national security, and the measures that should be taken to make the United States and its allies better able to deal with the threats facing it. None of these reports, whose later editions appeared in 1999 and 2001, included any specific suggestion that Islamic terrorism might be a danger to the United States or its allies, let alone strike directly at their territories and citizens.
On August 7, 1998, terrorists acting on behalf of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders—a coalition of groups spearheaded by al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—drove trucks laden with explosives into the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. More than two hundred people were killed and over four thousand wounded, the vast majority of them local civilians.
On October 12, 2000, during the last months of the Clinton administration, the U.S.S.
Cole
guided-missile destroyer was attacked by a boat manned by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, during a goodwill visit to Yemen. Seventeen U.S. Navy personnel were killed, along with the two bombers, Ibrahim al-Thawr and Abdullah al-Misawa. The
Cole
’s sailors were prevented from firing on their attackers by their rules of engagement, which only allowed them to shoot if shot at first. There was no defensive perimeter around the boat because government policy demanded “a small footprint” so as not to antagonize Arab opinion. The navy’s own investigation concluded, “The commanding officer of
Cole
did not have the specific intelligence, focused training, appropriate equipment or on-scene security support to effectively prevent or deter such a determined, preplanned assault on his ship.”
On September 11, 2001 . . .
Acknowledgments
Samuel Carver’s continuing survival is only possible thanks to the people who so carefully tend to him in London, New York, and L.A. They include (but are by no means limited to) . . . Aislinn Casey, Andrew Duncan, Ben Petrone, Bill Scott-Kerr, Clare Ferraro, Gavin Hilzbrich, Giles Milburn, Josh Kendall, Julian Alexander, Lucinda Bettridge, Mark Lucas, Martin Higgins, Michelle DeCoux, Nick Harris, Patsy Irwin, Peta Nightingale, Sally Gaminara, and Selina Walker.
As always, I was blessed by the kindness and generosity of people who shared their professional expertise. I thank them all. It goes without saying that any mistakes, or deliberate distortions caused by the process of turning fact into fiction, are entirely my responsibility. Specifically . . . Andy Missen attempted to teach this aeronautic ignoramus about the finer points of flying and aircraft technology. Duncan Falconer’s book
First into Action
told the true story of the SBS raid into Iraq, with a U.S. SEAL as a passenger, that inspired Carver’s nightmare. The SBS and SAS books of Don Camsell and John “Lofty” Wiseman were also great sources of information on Special Forces and their procedures. Professor Cary Cooper OBE spared the time to discuss Samuel Carver’s psychological traumas, and his possible recovery, while Danielle Nay’s personal experience of a similar case aided my understanding of the effects of a victim’s personality changes on loved ones. Craig Unger’s December 2005
Vanity Fair
magazine article, “American Rapture,” opened my eyes to the apocalyptic side of Christian evangelism and its political influence.
The Secret History of al-Qa’ida
by Abdel Bari Atwan was both a gripping first-person account of a journey into the heart of international terrorism, and an invaluable aid to understanding Osama bin Laden, his history, and his ideas. Nick Gaskell and Tony Turnbull, of Nordic Challenge U.K., gave me the benefit of decades of experience skiing around Narvik. Pal Hansen not only allowed me (for the second time) to steal his appearance and good nature for the character of Thor Larsson, but also discussed the behavior of Norwegian traffic cops. Charlie Brocket loaned the villa near Nice that got me thinking about the South of France, and enabled me, like Carver, to lunch at Eden Roc. Radenko Popovic provided me with a whole new insight into Kosovo (and, yes, those underground aircraft hangars really exist), while Tim Judah’s book
Kosovo: War and Revenge
and
Soldier,
the autobiography of General Sir Mike Jackson, both provided invaluable background to the conflict. The staff of Bombardier Business Aircraft in Belfast and Quebec gave serious consideration to the problem of cutting a hatch in the fuselage of a private jet, and then opening it midflight, entirely unaware of what I intended to drop through that hatch. Dr. Frank Barnaby, nuclear-issues consultant to the Oxford Research Group and author of
How to Build a Nuclear Bomb: And Other Weapons of Mass Destruction
, kindly helped me build my imaginary bomb.
Finally, and most important of all, I offer my heartfelt love and thanks to my family, especially my wife, Clare. Many other authors told me that the second book is the hardest of all to write. But however tough it is for the author, it is far worse for the people who have to live with him. Bless you for your tolerance.