He turned from the table and left the room. They should have sent the message to the Rangers ten minutes ago. As it was, the men would have less than fifteen minutes to retreat before Abdullah did his thing.
Whatever that was.
TANYA COLLAPSED under a tree at the perimeter of the river clearing within minutes of Shannon's hasty departure. It occurred to her that there might be creatures in the brown water a hundred feet off, but she'd lost interest in her own safety.
The madness of eight years was slowly unwinding in her mind; she could feel it as though it were a snake uncoiling. She did not know how just yet, but somehow this was all forming a collage with meaning. The notes were beginning to make music. The words were carrying a message. And it was all flowing through her.
She spent the first few hours in a haze, barely aware of the curious birds squeaking above or the parade of insects crawling over her shoes and legs.
The words she had spoken to Shannon were not her own. Oh, they had come from her own mouth and even her own mind, but her spirit had handed them off to her mind. She knew that because a warmth had started to glow in her spirit and it wasn't her own.
God was warming her. He was holding her and breathing his words of comfort into her like a father whispering to a crying baby.
And with his breath came a new understanding of Shannon. An ache for him that burned in her bones. He had been tormented for years, she saw, much like she had been. But his tormentor had been from hell, grinding him into the ground. Her torment had been a gift from heaven, a seasoning to soften her spirit, as Father Teuwen had suggested. A thorn in her flesh, preparing her for this day. This colliding of worlds. This crescendo of clashing cymbals, like the finale in a grand symphony.
There was the matter of the dream and the bomb and all that, but in reality none of it seemed important to her anymore. Now it was all about Shannon.
Tanya lay her head on her forearm and closed her eyes. “Shannon, poor Shannon,” she whispered. Tears immediately flooded her eyes. That ache in her heart swelled for him. It wasn't love as in the classical sense of romantic love, she thought. It was more like empathy.
“I'm so sorry, Shannon.” The sound of his name coming softly from her lips threw her mind back to a time when they spoke in hushed tones to each other. I love you, Shannon. I love you, Tanya.
What's happening, Father? Speak to me.
Then Tanya tumbled into an exhausted sleep.
SHANNON KNELT on the edge of the jungle, breathing hard from the run. Before him the old plantation sprawled with awful familiarity, like a landscape pulled from an old nightmare and shoved before his eyes. He caught his breath and swallowed. The mansion had deteriorated to flaking boards several hundred meters to his right. The once manicured lawn on which his mother and father had been ripped apart now swayed with waist-high grass.
Tanya's voice whispered in his ear.
Are you ready to die, Shannon
? An absurd question. A wedge of heat ripped through his skull.
Are you ready to kill, Shannon?
Yes.
He jerked his gaze to the left, where the entrance into the mountain processing plant sat closed off by a large hangar door. Apart from two guards standing on either side of the overhead door, no other humans were in sight. The field hands probably lived in the old mansion, he thought. God only knew what they had done in there, who had slept in his bed all these years. He should burn it as well. To the ground.
Shannon stepped back into the forest and ran along the perimeter toward the hangar. He had encountered another set of guards earlier and found them incompetentâlazy from years of facing no trained adversaries. They might be able to butcher natives in their sleep, but today he would advance their training. He dropped to his knees now thirty meters from the nearest guard.
A single entry door opened, and Shannon pulled back into the shadows. A man dressed in a white lab coat stepped out briefly, talked to the guard, and then retreated back inside.
The grass between the jungle and the hangar stood two feet high, uncut in recent monthsâa foolish oversight. Shannon slid the green backpack loaded with explosives to his chest and lowered himself so that the bag dragged on the earth. He snaked from the tree line, keeping just below the grass.
He'd covered half the distance to the two guards before he stopped and eyed them carefully. Using the gun he'd taken off the Ranger would be like waltzing in with a marching band, but then he'd always preferred the knife anyway. Both guards leaned against the tin siding, their rifles propped within easy reach.
Shannon rubbed a small stone he'd brought from the jungle and waited. A full five minutes passed in sweltering stillness before the guards both faced away.
Shannon hurled the rock to the far side of the hangar door, in the direction they faced but to the tin eaves. The stone clattered and they jerked.
He came from the grass then, while their senses were taken by the initial start. Before the stone thumped harmlessly to the ground twenty yards past the guards, Shannon was halfway to them, a knife in each hand. The bowie he hurled at the closest guard, while he ran; the Arkansas Slider he flipped to his right hand while the bowie was still in flight.
From his peripheral vision Shannon saw the bowie take the first guard in his temple. The second guard whirled then, but Shannon's throwing arm already swept forward with the Slider. It flew through the air and buried itself in the man's chest, to the right of his breastbone. Neither man had cried in alarm; both gasped and sank to their seats.
Shannon veered for the single door, snatched the bowie from the closest guard, and flattened himself against the wall, adrenaline pounding through his veins. The euphoric buzzing that always accompanied his killing tingled up his spine. He swung the pack at his chest onto his back, gripped the doorknob, and pulled out the Ranger's nine-millimeter Browning.
One of two things would happen when he opened the door. They might spot him, in which case he would find himself in a full-scale firefight. Or he would slip in unnoticed. He couldn't remember the last time he'd left the success of a mission to such poor odds, and he ground his teeth thinking of it now. Either way he was committed.
Shannon twisted the knob and pushed very slowly. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose and splashed onto his knee. The door opened a crack and he held still.
No response.
He stretched his neck and peered into the slit. His heart thumped in his chest like a basketball being dribbled in an empty gym. A single helicopter rested in his narrow view. He pushed the door wider. Two helicopters. And beyond, a door that led to the processing plant.
But the dimly lit hangar was still, unguarded. Shannon drew a breath of the humid air, slipped through the door, and eased it shut behind him. Without pausing, he ran to the cover of a tall, red tool chest and crouched behind. Working quickly now, he pulled the pack off his chest and withdrew three charges. He set each timer to thirty minutes and slung the bag over his shoulder.
Shannon peered around the tool chest, saw that no one had entered the hangar, and eased over to the nearest helicopter. He shoved a bundle of C-4 under the fuel tank and went for the other one. The third bundle he tossed behind a large fuel tank at the hangar's rear. When the explosive detonated in twenty-eight minutes, the hangar would come down. If they managed to get one of these birds airborne, it would go off like a bomb in the air. Shannon shook the sweat from bangs hanging like claws over his forehead.
The door leading into the processing plant rested closed. Shannon ignored it and ran for the corner beams that arched to the ceiling. His luck so far had been good.
Maybe too good.
THE RANGER teams penetrated the jungle in a conventional three-pronged fork foray. Rick Parlier led his team up the center, stepping through the brush light-footed. A dozen insects droned around him, but only those honing in on his neck bothered him and then only after an hour of high-stepping through the valley and finding nothing. He would have preferred to move much fasterâ take the team in on the run. But three self-repeating facts kept tumbling through his mind.
One, they didn't know the geography. This wasn't like picking a point over a few sand dunes and racing on over. It was more like crawling through a thicket of thorns. At night.
Two, although they knew that the valley was occupied, they didn't know precisely how many others hid beneath the canopy.
And three, the agent was still at large, running about these trees like some kind of maniac. Best they could figure, he'd laid Phil out cold back there a few hours ago. Nothing else made any sense.
Parlier slipped behind a large palm and slapped at his neck, thinking it was time to speed things up when Mark snatched his fist to the air behind him, motioning a full stop. He dropped to his knees and waited for Graham to reach them from the rear of the file.
Graham slid in beside Parlier. “We got a problem, sir. Uncle has ordered us back.”
Parlier stared at the communications man. “Are they nuts?”
“You got me. They refuse to give an explanation. Just get out and get out fast. We got five minutes to get back to the cliffs.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them that was impossible.”
Parlier stood and snatched the transmitter from Graham's hand. “We've got some imbecile ordering us around! I'mâ”
An explosion suddenly shattered the air no more than a hundred meters to their right. Parlier whirled toward the sound.
The jungle shrieked with the response of a thousand creatures. “That was Gamma!” Graham snatched the transmitter back. He fingered the mike and spoke quickly into it. “Come in, James. What was that?”
The radio hissed its silence.
Graham's hand trembled, and he depressed the transmission lever again. “Gamma, Gamma, this is Alpha. Come in!”
The receiver shrieked to life. “Alpha, we got trouble here! We got a man down. Tony's down. I repeat, we got a man down from some kind of mine!”
Parlier grabbed the microphone from Tim. “James, this is Parlier. Now listen carefully. Get your man and get back to the cliffs. Do not, I repeat, do not proceed forward. Do you copy?”
“Copy that. Retreating now.” The radio fell silent.
A land mine? To protect what? “Beta, you copy that last transmission?”
“Copy, Alpha. Standing by.”
“Get the heck out of there, Beta. Get back to the cliffs, you copy?”
“Copy, sir.”
Parlier tossed the mike back to Tim and signaled a retreat to Mark, who passed the signal back to Ben and Dave in the rear file.
“Go.” Graham slung the radio over his arm and moved out quickly.
Parlier turned and took one last look at the jungle that descended into the valley. Four days in the jungle and they'd seen only one other human beingâ and him for a brief moment before being cold-cocked. Now they had a man down. If they didn't get some clarification by nightfall, he was coming back to finish this job on his own. Maybe bring Graham.
Parlier turned and retreated toward the cliffs.
ABDULLAH SAT at his desk and watched the clock. He'd never noticed its faint ticking before, but now it was louder than the soft clicking of the bugs.
Sweat trickled slowly down his chin and dripped onto a white sheet of paper on which he'd scrawled his first transmission. Several flies sat unmoving on his knuckles, but he hardly noticed them. His eyes remained fixed on that clock as his mind crawled through a fog.
He breathed steadily, in long pulls, blinking only when his eyes stung badly. Ramón sat cross-legged, staring at Abdullah through his one good eye, breathing, but otherwise motionless.
Something had changed. Yesterday the notion of detonating a nuclear weapon in the United States had been exhilarating, to be sure. But it had been a project. A plan. Even an obsession. But always more Jamal's obsession than his.
Now it had become his own. A desperate cravingâlike a gulp of air after two minutes under water. He felt as if
not
pushing this little plastic button might suck the life from his bones.
The effect seemed surreal. Impossible, actually. His mind skipped through the chain of events as Yuri had described them so many times.
Who was he to change the world? Abdullah Amir. A tremor ran through him at the thought. He almost pushed the button then. A high ringing sound popped to life in his head and the clock shifted out of focus for a moment. Then his vision was back.
The Rangers now had five minutes to pass the perimeter defense wire. Abdullah mumbled a word of prayer for their failure. It was in Allah's hands now.
RAMÃN WATCHED Abdullah and felt a new kind of fear overtake his soul. His right leg had fallen asleep fifteen minutes ago and his back ached from his static posture.
Abdullah sat there sweating profusely, dripping on his desk, unmoving. His reddening eyes slowly shifted from the clock on the wall to the transmitter at his hand. His right cheek twitched every few seconds, as if a fly had lighted there. His lips twisted in an odd grimace, one that might just as easily be fashioned from delight as bitterness.
Ramón glanced up at the wall clock and saw the second hand pass through the bottom of its arc to the top. He swallowed, suddenly struck by the absurdity of it all. It would not just be this plastic button pushed in thirty seconds; it would be a fist down the throat of an unsuspecting world. Not one but two atomic weapons detonated twenty-four hours apart. In the name of God no less.
The second hand climbed, and Ramón suddenly thought that he should stop the man. He should lift his pistol and shoot him through that wet forehead. The thought screamed through his mind, but Ramón couldn't get the message out there, to his extremities where frozen muscles waited.