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 back—check 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 word—
another
—that 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 watch—”
“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.
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 punch—the 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 shaft—clear 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.