There was another bomb.
And if there was another bomb in Florida, then who was to say that the same terrorists hadn't hidden one in Chicago or Los Angeles or any other city? Wouldn't it make more sense to spread the weapons for greater impact?
Within three hours of the detonation, the nation ran amuck in panic. The truth settled in like a gut punchâthe impossible had just happened and no one knew what to do.
SHANNON DROPPED into the processing plant behind one of the five large white tanks, each marked respectively with the chemical that it held: calcium bi-carbonate, sulfuric acid, ammonium hydroxide, potassium permanganate, and gasoline. Chemicals used to refine cocaine. He peered around the tank marked “gasoline” and scanned the room. Pipes fed from the tanks to the mixing vats clustered in the room's center. The vast operation was controlled from the glass room that hugged the east wall opposite the tanks.
Two armed guards loitered by the door leading from the lab. An additional eight to ten men worked in the lab. As things now stood, crossing the room without raising an alarm would be impossible. He had roughly twenty-four minutes before the first helicopter exploded.
Shannon slipped the pack from his back, set a timer to twenty-two minutes, and wedged the plastic explosive under the gasoline tank. He slipped to the ammonium hydroxide tank on the far left, laid a small bundle of C-4 on the cement floor behind it, set the timer for one minute, and retreated back to the right side.
He crouched and waited. Directly across the room from him, the tunnel through which he and the woman had escaped ran into the mountain. Tanya. Her name was Tanya, come back from the dead to speak to him about her God. She was as beautiful as he remembered. Possibly more. His heart pounded steadily.
And the priest? It was too late for the priest.
The air shattered with an explosion. Immediately all heads jerked to the far corner and Shannon bolted from his cover. Steams of ammonium hydroxide jetted from the ruptured tank to his far left. Yells of alarm filled the air as pipes hissed the potent gas. Before any of the men had fully registered the nature of the accident, Shannon was across the room and in the tunnel, sprinting down the earth floor toward the elevator shaft he and Tanya had used.
He tossed a single bundle of C-4 under the conveyor track as he ran. It would close the tunnel. Then he was at the gaping elevator shaftâclear to the bottom with the car resting above him. He looked back toward the processing lab from where the ruckus now carried. If he'd been spotted, they weren't pursuing.
He reached into the shaft, grabbed the thick steel cable, and lowered himself to the basement level, ten feet above rock bottom. He withdrew the bowie knife, jammed it between the elevator doors, and wrenched hard. The steel doors gaped and he shoved his foot through the opening. Five seconds later Shannon tumbled into the hall that had sealed him in just two days ago.
ABDULLAH STOOD slightly hunched in the upper room, drenched in sweat, his facial muscles twitching spastically.
He considered calling the coast for confirmation of his blast but the fidgeting Hispanic before him was right. They couldn't trust anyone now. In fact, they should leave, before a fighter jet dropped one of those bombs on them that drilled through mountains. Before Jamal arrived by helicopter.
“But they can't attack us. They know the second device is already on a countdown. They will assume that only I can stop it. You see, that's the power of true terror.” He couldn't remember such a feeling of satisfaction.
The room suddenly shook under the rumble of an explosion and Ramón bolted from his chair, terrified.
Abdullah sprang to the window. A dozen men scrambled about below, fleeing what appeared to be the contents of a ruptured tank. An accident? It was too coincidental. The seconds slogged off in his mind with the surreal pace of a huge pendulum.
And then he saw the half-naked man disappear into the tunnel to his far left and he swallowed.
The agent. Casius!
He spun to Ramón. “It's the agent!” For a moment he couldn't think. He stared at Ramón, who'd already drawn his gun.
“Casius?” Ramón said.
The Americans had sent the killer after him again! Instead of withdrawing, the CIA was going for the jugular.
It was time to leave. “Bring me the priest!”
He leapt over to the desk and snatched up the transmitter.
“The priest?”
“The priest, you idiot! The hostage! I need a hostage!”
SHANNON PLACED four charges in the basement where they'd held him before swinging back into the elevator shaft and climbing hand over hand to the second level.
Using the bowie again he pried his way into the middle floor, gun in hand. Apart from three closed doors, the hall lay empty.
Shannon slid up to the two doors on his left, listened for a brief moment with his ear pressed to the wood, and cracked them open only to find each empty. The men had probably rushed to the explosion in the lab. A barroom and a mess hall each received a timed explosive.
He ran back to the elevator and pressed the call button, ignoring the third door, which he knew must lead to the large processing lab. Only the third floor remained above him. Abdullah would be there.
The elevator whirred to life behind the door. Shannon blinked at the sweat leaking into his right eye and took a deep breath. He would go up there and kill Abdullah as he had always planned. And then he would leave the jungle forever. A picture of Tanya flashed through his mind and his head twitched.
Are you ready to die, Shannon?
Soon. I will be soon.
He flattened himself on the wall, leveled his gun at the elevator doors, and exhaled.
RAMÃN PRESSED himself into the elevator car's corner, squatting low. He'd taken the priest up to Abdullah and then he'd been sent to deal with Casius. The agent had eluded him once, but he wouldn't escape again. The elevator bell rang loudly and he shrank farther down.
The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors parted. Ramón's gun hand wavered before his eyes. Nothing. He held his breath and waited, straining for the first glimpse of movement.
But there was nothing. The doors slid closed and the elevator sat still, waiting further instructions.
Now what? If Ramón pressed any button, he might very well give himself away. Unless the agent was on the basement level. But then why didn't the car descend? Someone else had called the car, not he.
For a few moments Ramón remained crouched in the corner waiting, undecided. Meanwhile the agent was no doubt below or above. He wouldn't be on this floor. The thought finally prompted him to lean forward and press the “open” button.
The doors spread again and Ramón trained his gun on the opening. Still nothing. He stood and eased to the door's edge.
SHANNON SMELLED the musty scent of sweat the moment the doors opened and he was back-pedaling to the corner before they stopped. He sighted down the wall and waited.
The doors closed on the occupant, but the elevator sat still. He waited with his gun arm extended. The charges in the hangar would explode in less than five minutes. He didn't have all day.
The door opened again and after a moment a gun poked past the wall. Still he waited, his patience wearing thin.
A hand followed the gun. Shannon shot then, into the hand. The slug took it off at the knuckles and he ran forward. The hall filled with the gunman's wail.
Shannon's mind echoed with another wailâa wail suggesting that he didn't have the time for this. He stepped into the elevator just as the doors began to close. The man he'd wounded knelt in a gathering pool of blood. It was the one-eyed man. Shannon shot him through the forehead and had a hand on his collar before the head lolled back. The man's eyes remained open. He angrily jerked the body from the car, leapt over it, and stabbed the third-floor button.
Too slow. Any minute the mountain would begin its collapse under heavy explosions.
The elevator groaned upward. Shannon cursed the heat flashing along his spine. Anger blurred his thinking. What if Abdullah waited in ambush on the third floor? Had he thought
that
through? No. He only wanted to kill the man, a blind desire that ran through his blood like molten lead. Eight years of plotting had finally come to this moment.
And what if Abdullah wasn't up there at all?
Shannon ground his teeth. The bell sounded and the door slid open before his extended gun.
The hall was empty.
He stepped from the car, thinking even as his foot cleared the threshold that he was in a fool's game now. Acting before thinking.
The hall lay vacant and white-walled excepting two brown doors. Shannon ran for the first, tossing the Browning to his left hand midstride. The door was locked. Any minute now that C-4 would start blowing the helicopters. Grunting against a surge of panic, he stepped back, pumped a single slug through the handle, and smashed his foot against the door. It snapped open and he jumped through, gun extended.
The contents of the room barely registered. Some kind of storage. What did register was that they did not include Abdullah.
Shannon spun around and ran for the second door. This time he didn't bother trying the handle. He simply shot through the lock and crashed it open with the sole of his foot. He leapt through and fell to a crouch, swinging his weapon in a quick arc.
A desk strewn with papers was on one end of the office; a tall bookcase stood against the other. The office was empty! Impossible!
Shannon stood, at a loss, his mind spinning. This could mean only one thing: Abdullah had escaped! A growl started in his throat and rose past his gaping mouth in a ferocious snarl. A red surge swept through his mind, momentarily blinding him.
He looked back to the desk. A book on nuclear proliferation lay facedown. The bomb.
Yes, the bomb.
Across the room a glass picture window was shaking and it occurred to him that the explosions had started. Then the sound came, deep-throated booms that shook the floor under his feet.
Shannon's mind snapped then as instinct took control of his body. He bent low, snatched a thin rug from the wood floor, and ran from the room. When the gasoline tank went, the main complex would collapse. Screams drifted over another detonation, still in the hangar, he thought. Those helicopters were popping.
He punched the call button and the elevator doors sprang open. The car suddenly quaked badly and he knew one of the basement explosives had detonated early. If the one in the tunnel went, he would be finished.
The elevator ground down a floor and opened to the tunnel that housed the conveyor. Shannon sprang from the car and sprinted away from the processing lab. The ground suddenly shook with a string of explosions and the overhead lights winked to black. The gasoline tank had gone! The caverns would come down around his ears!
He pelted forward. The freight elevator waited in darkness thirty yards ahead, powerless now. But he could still take the shaft up to the tube.
It was suddenly there, barely lit by the flames raging in the lab far behind. He vaulted over the rail and grabbed at the framework built into the vertical shaft. He flung the rug over his shoulder and clawed his way up, knowing that at any moment the explosives in the tunnel below would blow.
And then they did, with a steel-wrenching thunder. Stone crumbled and fell past him. Shannon slung the rug into the tube and scrambled over the lip for the second time in as many days. This time it would be belly downâhe had no time to adjust his position. The rug slid forward and the elevator framework behind him tore loose from the rockface.
Shannon gripped the rug with both hands and fell toward the river far below.
“IT APPEARS that we might, and I want to stress the word
might,
have another device located somewhere in southern Florida.” The president's face looked white on the tube, despite the makeup CNN had hurriedly applied, David thought.
It was happening. And he was learning about it with the rest of the departmentâ heck, with the rest of the country. He had suspected something, but never this. The briefing room was silent.
“It is very important that any residents within a fifty-mile radius of the pier head north using the recommended routes as quickly and as calmly as possible. This is only a precaution, mind you, and we can't afford panic. I cannot tell you how important it is for you not to panic. Everything in the realm of possibilities is being done to search the area with highly specialized sensors. If another nuclear device is located near Miami, we will find it. But we must take the precautions the Office of Homeland Security has laid out.”
The president was talking, but another voice was whispering in David's mind as well. It was Casius, and he was telling David to leave town for a while. Far away. Which meant that Casius knew, or at least suspected more than any of them.
WHILE AMERICA glued its eyes on Miami, a U.S. registered clipper bearing the name
Angel of the Sea
slipped up the Intracoastal Waterway best known as Chesapeake Bay. It was one of hundreds of boats on the water that day. The small cargo vessel had made the trip from the Bahamas to Curtis Pointâjust south of Annapolis and a stone's throw from Washington, D.C.âdozens of times, each time with a variety of imported goods on board, usually with at least a partial load of exclusive lumbers that sold by the pound rather than by the foot.
The small business had made its ownerâbest known as John Boy in the local barsâquite wealthy. Or more accurately, the
extracurricular
business he conducted with
Angel of the Sea
had made him well off.
For every week John Boy spent traipsing back and forth to the Bahamas, he spent two dealing the coke. His price from Abdullah was half what every other dealer paid to get their hands on the white powderâthe benefits of establishing this new route.