Then the red hand was at the top.
It occurred to Ramón that he had stopped breathing. He jerked his eyes to the Arab. Abdullah's face quivered, shaking a final drop of sweat free of his upper lip. His eyes bulged at the clock like two black marbles.
But he hadn't pushed that green button.
Ramón pried his eyes to the wall. The second hand was falling, past the large five, then the ten. Then he heard a loud exhale and he jerked his eyes back.
Abdullah sat slumped in his chair, his eyes closed, expressionless. Ramón dropped his gaze to the man's hand. The Arab's forefinger still rested on the green button.
It was depressed.
DAYTONA BEACH had always been known for its beaches and worshiped for its sun. On most Saturdays the sky stretched blue. But today clouds had swept in from the west on cool winds, shielding the tourists from the rays. Consequently the beach lay gray and nearly empty. Where thousands of tourists normally slouched on the white sand or splashed in the surf, only the bravest slogged along the beach.
Twenty miles out to sea, the
Lumber Lord
steamed steadily north, up the coast of Florida. A flock of sea gulls fluttered over the ship, snatching up whatever morsel they could find. A dozen crew members were engaged in an enthusiastic water fight led by Andrew. Captain Moses Catura had assumed his typical position in the pilothouse and watched the men below drench each other. He smiled to himself. It was the kind of moment that made him glad to be alive.
It was also his last moment.
A single signal, invisible to the human eye, boosted and relayed from the coast of Venezuela to the southeastern coast of Cuba, found the
Lumber Lord
then. It penetrated her hull, located the small black receiver resting in one of the logs, and triggered it.
The detonation in the
Lumber Lord
started innocently enough. Krytron triggering devices released their four-thousand-volt charges into forty detonators that surrounded the core of the silver sphere. The detonators simultaneously fired the fifteen kilograms of shaped charges that Yuri had meticulously positioned around the uranium tamper. With absolute precision, just as the Russian had designed them to perform, the shaped charges crushed the natural uranium tamper into an orange-sized ball of plutonium.
It was an implosion rather than an explosion at this particular point.
The implosion compressed the plutonium core so forcefully that an atom at its core split and released a neutron. At exactly the same moment, the shock from the initial implosion broke the initiator housed within the center of the plutonium. When the initiator was crushed, beryllium and polonium contained in its core combined and released a flood of neutrons into the surrounding plutonium.
Within three-millionths of a second, the first neutron split from its parent atomâgeneration one.
In fifty-five generations the mass of plutonium reached a supercritical state and the little plutonium sphere shredded the boundaries of nature.
The entire episode lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second.
Suddenly the little orange-sized sphere of plutonium was no longer a sphere at all, but a 300 million degree sun, reaching out at over a thousand miles per second. Twenty miles off the coast of Daytona Beach, history's third offensive nuclear explosion had been detonated.
In one moment the
Lumber Lord
's massive steel hull was lumbering through calm seas, and in the next, a blinding ball of light had vaporized the ship as though it were made only of crepe paper.
The explosion lit up the horizon like a sputter of the sun. A huge fireball rose from the sea and stared the unsuspecting bathers in the face. In the first millisecond, a thermal pulse of light reached to the beach, effectively giving nearly a thousand onlookers what amounted to a bad sunburn. A dozen fires ignited along the coast.
An electromagnetic pulse from the blast cut off electricity and communications in the city. A huge mushroom cloud rose over the ocean and rumbled for several long seconds.
Then all went silent.
After an endless pause, the city slowly began to fill with sounds once again. Police sirens wailing up and down the streets, aimless and desperate without radio contact. People running helter-skelter, screaming.
The tidal wave rippling in was a small one by tidal standards, but enough to surge a hundred yards inland. The water spread past the beaches roughly ten minutes after the blast.
Then the vacuum created by the blast caved in on itself and the winds, which had earlier brought the clouds, resumed their push out to sea. The radiation fallout drifted away from the land, for the moment.
The detonation was a mere sniff of the destruction within the grasp of the much larger sister device, now already in a countdown to its own detonation.
Twenty-three hours, forty-eight minutes and counting.
TANYA SLEPT beneath the towering trees, ignorant of the passing jaguar, unaware that not one but three crocodiles eyed her from the far shore; oblivious to the little sun that had lit the sky off of Florida's coast. For her it was darkness. The sweet darkness of sleep.
Until the sky opened up suddenly, like a tear in space. The beach lay before her and the surf lapped at sandy shores. The vision was back. Only this time Shannon was there calling for her to come.
Shannon. Sweet Shannon. I love you, Shannon.
She flinched in her sleep. I love what he was.
Come, Tanya.
The boy was calling to her.
Please save me
.
The sky in her mind erupted then, like a flash grenade. The wind was sucked from her lungs by a white-hot fire and the world returned to black.
Tanya bolted upright, panting under the towering tree. Sweat streamed down her neck. The bomb had gone off!
The bomb had just gone off!
MARK INGERSOL stood in the basement room among the computers and teletype machines with one arm across his belly and the other lifted to his chin. He had never been the type of man to bite his nails, but for the last twenty minutes he had managed to draw blood from his right forefinger. He had spoken directly to the Ranger team this time, bypassing the regular communication channels. A soldier named Graham had told him they couldn't withdraw in time.
“What do you mean you can't withdraw in time? You're a Ranger! Hightail it, man!”
Twice he'd been tempted to call backâcheck on their progress. But in the end he just paced. The operator on duty had come over once and asked if he could be of help. Ingersol had sent the man packing.
And now the clock on the wall had ticked off two minutes past the deadline and nothing had happened. That was good. That was real good. Ingersol felt this shoulders ease.
Ingersol blew some air from his lungs and walked for the bathroom.
Regardless of this crazy bomb threat, a few annoying loose ends still dangled in his mind. David Lunow for instance. He relieved himself, thinking already of what it would feel like to take out someone like David. A rogue agent was one thing, but David? He was a friend.
He pushed through the bathroom door, turned for the exit, and glanced at the teletype machine. White paper rose past its roller like a tongue. A chill fell down Ingersol's back.
The message could have come from a hundred different sources. A thousand sources. He veered to his right and leaned over the machine.
At first the words didn't place clear meaning in his mind. They read quite simply:
If you do not deliver the agent as requested, then another bomb will detonate. In
Miami. A much larger device, which is already triggered. You have precisely
twenty-four hours.
The Brotherhood
It was that wordâ
another
âthat suddenly came to life like a siren in Ingersol's skull. His knees went weak and that chill washed right down to his heels. He reached trembling fingers for the white sheet and ripped it from the teletype. He whirled about and ran from the room.
Ingersol reached the director's office four stories higher in twenty-five seconds. Friberg was on the phone, his face white, his eyes wide. He did not look up when Ingersol shook the message at him. His mind wasn't in the room.
“ . . . Yes, sir. I understand, sir. But that was under different pretenses. Things have obviously changed.”
He's talking to the president
, Ingersol thought.
It's happened!
Friberg spoke again. “Well, if he had one, yes he could have more.”
“He does,” Ingersol said. Friberg's face was still white. Ingersol swallowed and lowered the message.
Friberg listened for a moment. “Yes, sir.” He then hung up.
They stared at each other for a few seconds, silent.
Friberg's face suddenly settled before he said, “NORAD recorded a twenty-kiloton blast two miles off of Daytona Beach five minutes ago.”
Ingersol blinked rapidly several times. He sat in the guest chair, numb.
Friberg looked out the window, still white but otherwise expressionless. “Fortunately it was a bad beach day; no reported casualties yet. They've reported heavy structural damage on the beachfront.”
“This wasn't supposed to happen.”
“It happened. Get used to it.”
“What is the president doing?”
Friberg faced him. “What do you expect he's doing? He's going ballistic. Calling in the troops. He's ordered the closing of all airports. The Europeans are already screaming about the fallout headed their way. They've got a squadron of F-16s on the tarmac and they're screaming for a target, and now I suppose they'll begin the evacuation of southern Florida. Like I said, they're going ballistic.”
“You gave the F-16s a target?”
“No.”
Ingersol shoved the message to Friberg. “Well, you'd better. We've got another bomb.”
Friberg took the communiqué and glanced over the message. “You see, this is precisely why we can't give the Air Force their target.”
“What do you mean? This changes everything! I'm not going to just sit by and watchâ”
“Shut up, Ingersol! Think, man! That device was remote detonated. We can't just sweep in and carpet bomb the jungle. Anybody crazy enough to set off one bomb because we didn't deliver someone's head on a platter is crazy enough to detonate a second at the first sniff of an attack!”
“The second bomb is already triggered.”
“So he says. Could be a bluff. If it is, we're pretty much done.”
“We should suppress any signals coming from the region.”
“We're on it.”
That set Ingersol back. So the man was thinking beyond his own problems finally. “Can't they drop a smart weapon on the compound? Something that hits them before they know it's on its way?”
“And accomplish exactly what? If he
has
already triggered the second device, killing him now would only remove any chance of terminating this twenty-four-hour countdown of his. If he hasn't triggered it, we can't afford to set him off.”
“So what, then?”
Friberg glanced at the message again. “We evacuate southern Florida. We look for the bomb in every nook and cranny surrounding Miami. We curse the day we allowed Casius to live. We locate Abdullah Amir using whatever resources exist and we hope we can isolate any signal he's using for the detonation.”
A thought dropped into Ingersol's mind. The thought that a highly skilled operative dropped into that jungle might be their best bet.
“Then we should send Casius after him.”
Friberg blinked. “Casius?”
“He's the best operative we have, he knows the lay of the land, and he's already there.”
“He's also AWOL. We have no way of contacting him.” Friberg stood. “Forget Casius. We've got some briefings to run. We'll give the president an update from the car.”
He headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Ingersol asked, still short on breath.
“
We,
Ingersol. We are going to Miami.”
THE SIMPLE fact that very few United States residents had ever seen the effects of a nuclear blast rendered the news that a detonation had just occurred off the coast of Florida at first impossible to believe. The terrorist activities in New York had been horrifying; this was simply incomprehensible. When the pictures finally flashed on the tube, the nation came to a literal standstill.
The first live images came from a jetliner flying high enough to avoid the electromagnetic pulse. They showed a coastline dotted by a thousand small trails of smoke that news commentator Gary Reese of CBS said were scattered fires. By the time the first helicopter flew over the region against specific orders to clear the air space, 90 percent of the country hovered around television sets, gawking at images of fires and gutted buildings.
A hand-held video taken from a hotel room in Daytona Beach was first played by a local ABC affiliate. But within minutes the networks had picked it up and the simple image of the eastern horizon lighting up, midday, replayed itself a thousand times on every television set across America.
The largest freeways ran bare through silent cities. Bars with televisions were crowded with customers, their necks cocked to the sets.
All regular programming was canceled and the talking heads began their analysis to a gaping public. The president begged the country's patience and vowed swift retribution. It was a terrorist attack, everyone quickly agreed. Some analysts suggested responding with nuclear weapons immediately and overwhelmingly. Others insisted on a surgical strike. Against whom or where seemed almost beside the point.
Then news of another kind came and a new terror spread through the nation like a raging fire. Residents of south Florida were being asked to evacuate their homes. In a calm manner, of course, controlled by the National Guard along five selected routes running north. But leave quickly and take nothing. Why? Well, there could only be one reason regardless of what the official word insisted.