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 faster— 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’m—”
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 being— 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 craving—like 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.
RAMÓN 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.
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 atom—generation 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.