Authors: Christopher Reich
A grenade sailed over his head and rolled toward Sultan Haq. One of Balfour’s guards jumped on it, his body lifting into the air a second later, the blast inaudible in the cacophonous gunfire. Another grenade followed. Haq caught it on the bounce and threw it back. But he did not throw it at the attacking troops. Instead, he turned toward the stack of crates where Balfour had sought protection and lobbed it expertly into its center. Jonathan read the words “.30 caliber ammunition” stenciled on an exposed section of pine. The grenade bounced once, and Balfour scrambled to pick it up, fumbling with the ovoid canister. Jonathan watched as he cocked his arm to throw it. The grenade exploded, Balfour disappearing momentarily inside a blossom of orange and black.
The explosion died and he was still standing, half his arm obliterated, bone and muscle dangling, his face sheared off by the force of the blast. Dazed, he spun and saw Jonathan looking at him. His one eye opened wider, as if he were confused at how this might have come to pass. Another grenade landed in the webbing. There was an explosion, and the .30 caliber rounds began to cook off. Balfour’s body jerked as the bullets tore into his body, hurling him to the floor.
The hangar shuddered. Overhead, the lights flickered.
The assault troops pulled back, and Jonathan spotted an American flag sewn to one man’s shoulder. It had to be Connor who’d sent them, but how had he known the site of the exchange when Jonathan himself hadn’t?
Nearby a fire broke out among the crates. In seconds, flames were shooting into the rafters. More ammunition began to cook off. Tracers arced above his head. Explosions grew more frequent. Shrapnel whizzed through the air like bottle flies. A girder broke from the ceiling and fell to the floor, crushing a soldier.
Desperate to escape, Jonathan lifted his head and peered around him. Ten meters away, Haq stole the warhead off the table and carried it to the flatbed of a jeep. Jonathan rose to a knee. A bullet slammed into a crate above his shoulder and he fell back to the floor, watching as Haq closed the tailgate and ran to the passenger seat. A man
climbed into the driver’s seat, was shot, fell, and was replaced by another.
“Get him!” Jonathan waved his arms and pointed at Haq, but his voice was a whisper among the murderous symphony. Fed up, he climbed to his feet and dashed across the floor toward the truck. Bullets sizzled past, one shaving off the top of his ear, upsetting his balance and toppling him to the ground. He pushed himself up. “Haq!”
A body slammed into him, knocking him to the cement floor, winded.
Mr. Singh threw himself on top of him, rammed a pistol into his jaw, and pulled the trigger. The gun fired empty. Jonathan kneed him in the groin and heaved him off. Jumping to his feet, he managed one step before Singh grabbed his ankle and dropped him. In place of his pistol, the Sikh held the long curved kukri in his hand. He slashed, but the blade missed Jonathan’s calf and struck the floor. Jonathan kicked at him, striking his cheeks, knocking his turban loose. Another blow landed squarely on his nose, breaking it, and a third connected with his chin.
Singh shook off the blows, matted braids of hair falling about his face, blood streaming from his nose. Rising to his feet, he held the blade high, a killing blow. In vain Jonathan threw up an arm to protect himself. But the blade did not fall. Singh shuddered time and time again, geysers of blood and fabric erupting from his chest. The Sikh fell to his side, his chest rising spasmodically.
A soldier pulled Jonathan behind a crate and helped him sit up.
“Get him,” said Jonathan, disoriented, gesturing toward the jeep. “Get Haq! He has the warhead!”
“He can’t go anywhere,” the soldier shouted in Jonathan’s face. “The place is sealed tight as a drum.”
A female voice. So familiar. “Emma?”
The soldier pulled the black balaclava off her face. “Are you okay?”
Jonathan looked into the woman’s face. Blue eyes, not green. Hair a raven’s black. “Danni? You’re here?”
“I tried to alert you last night.”
Jonathan blinked, recalling the assault on Balfour’s estate. “Connor sent you?”
“No,” she said. “I came on my own. This morning I found out he’d been trying to reach me ever since you left. He hooked me up with Delta. My orders were to keep an eye out for you and make sure none of the good guys took you out by accident.”
“But Haq,” said Jonathan rolling to one side, seeking out the jeep, no longer seeing it.
A monstrous blast rocked the foundations of the hangar. Giant pan lights fell from the ceiling. A second rafter broke loose, crashing to the floor.
“We have to get out of here,” said Danni. “Before the whole place goes up.”
Before he could protest, she grabbed his collar and hauled him to his feet. Together they ran back through the canyon of crates and boxes until they emerged into the daylight, coughing and sputtering.
An American officer directed them to an aid truck at the side of the hangar, but Jonathan was still too amped up to worry about himself. “Haq,” he managed, bent double and clearing his throat. “Did you get him? Black jeep … he has it … he has the bomb.”
“Sir, you need water and medical attention.”
Jonathan ignored the offer of assistance, forcing himself to stand upright and confront the officer. “Did you get him?”
“Sir, we’re handling this operation. Right now you need aid. Corpsman! Take this man to the aid truck.”
“I’ll do it,” said Danni.
“Didn’t you hear me?” shouted Jonathan. “He’s a got a WMD. I saw it—it’s in there!”
“Get him out of here! Now!”
“Cool it,” said Danni, restraining Jonathan. “There are over a hundred troops here. They’ve got the perimeter sealed. Haq isn’t going anywhere.”
Danni guided Jonathan around the side of the hangar to a spot fifty meters across the tarmac where two Humvees and a half-ton
truck were parked. A Pakistani soldier offered them water and tea and energy bars.
“Who are they?” Jonathan asked, eyes glued to the hangar doors. “Where did they come from?”
“Delta Force and regular Pakistani army,” said Danni.
“How did they know where to be?”
“The information you forwarded to Connor. He contacted U.S. Central Command and they called out Delta.”
“The information I forwarded?”
“The files started coming through soon after my diversion. It was smart of you to take advantage of it to break into Balfour’s office.”
“And Connor told you all this?”
“He said he’d gotten the files you sent from Balfour’s. He called them a goldmine.”
“But I didn’t …”
Jonathan left his words unsaid. His world had momentarily divided into parallel tracks. While one part of his mind replayed the events in Balfour’s office last night, another watched in fearful surprise as a dozen soldiers ran out of the hangar en masse, heads bowed, followed by a Humvee reversing at full speed. At the same moment that Jonathan recalled Emma holding the flash drive in her open palm and realized that it could only have been she who had sent Connor the information, he spotted the obdurate American officer at the head of the fleeing soldiers, waving his arms furiously and shouting, “Get back!”
The words were slammed to the ground by a flash of orange, a burst of light so bright it eclipsed the midday sun. And in that instant before the shock wave struck him, Jonathan saw the Humvee rise up on one end, as if standing on tiptoes, and a soldier suspended in midair, and he thought, This is what it is like to see a nuclear weapon explode from two hundred meters away.
Jonathan blinked and opened his eyes. Stunned that he was alive, he rose to an elbow and watched as huge sections of the corrugated iron roof tumbled from the sky amid coils of black smoke and plummeted into the fire and debris.
“Stay down,” shouted Danni, knocking the elbow out from under him. “It’s a hellstorm. The whole place went up.”
Jonathan ignored her. He had seen something else, something besides the fire and the debris and the Humvee traveling end over end. Lifting his head, he stared across the tarmac, squinting to see into the distance.
There, beyond the flames and smoke and mayhem, two jeeps were driving rapidly away from the hangar. A fireball blossomed from the carnage, obscuring his view. When the flames receded and the smoke cleared, the jeeps had disappeared into the airport’s busy ground traffic.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Frank Connor sat on the edge of a desk in the middle of the op center, jaw agape and not giving two shits about it, as he watched Hangar 18 disintegrate before his eyes. The screen blinked repeatedly, then went black, and he knew he’d lost the feed from Islamabad Airport.
“Get me hooked up with the on-scene commander,” he said to his telecom tech.
“Audio is intact, sir. We just lost the picture.”
“Well, get it back.”
The room was packed with Division’s senior staff. Victories were few and far between, and it was doubtful that any person present, Connor included, would ever again witness one of this magnitude. He had followed the operation from inception via a camera attached to the assault commander’s shoulder harness. He had witnessed the breaching of the hangar, the killing of Lord Balfour and Massoud Haq, and the subsequent firefight. And now he was having a very difficult time remaining calm as he waited for the boys from Delta Force to bring him his prize.
“Have you retrieved the package?” he asked the commander.
“No, sir. We can’t get near the place. The way that ammo is still cooking off, it’s a war zone. Right now I’ve got to look after my men. I’ve got two seriously injured and one KIA.”
The news sent a sobering chill through the assembled viewers.
“Keep me posted,” said Connor.
It had been a long day. Upon receiving Balfour’s files, he’d immediately run the batch through a keyword search. The results yielded a
mountain of information about Balfour’s various businesses and over a hundred articles about cruise missiles and the American nuclear arsenal, but precious little about the nuts and bolts of his operation to retrieve the warhead from Tirich Mir.
After three hours of sifting through thousands of individual files and letters, Connor chanced upon an e-mail retrieved from Balfour’s trash addressed to Massoud Haq, agreeing upon a time and place for the exchange of the weapon. Again there was no overt mention of a WMD, just a cryptic and oft-repeated reference to a “carpet for sale.” This e-mail, coupled with inquiries to a team of Pakistani nuclear physicists about traveling to Blenheim to examine “an object that required their expertise,” was all Connor had to go on. Disappointingly, there had been no photographs or other concrete evidence of the weapon.
Connor looked to his side, where Peter Erskine stood, arms crossed, a glum expression aging his boyish features. “See, Pete, we did it. We took a risk and it paid off. If we’d sent this info upstairs, that WMD would be in Times Square by now and New York City would be a smoldering ruin.”
“I agree, Frank,” said Erskine. “It looks like your gamble paid off.”
“Gamble my ass. It was a calculated endeavor. It was us or nobody.”
“If you say so.”
“I do, Peter. I say that and more.”
Connor stood, keeping an eye on the screen. He would have enjoyed confronting Erskine about his treasonous activities, here in front of all his colleagues, but Connor hadn’t received sufficient proof. The NSA’s probe of Erskine’s telephone records showed nothing more interesting than a propensity to call his wife at any and all hours of the day, whether at home or at her work at the Justice Department. No unlisted numbers. No overseas calls to unknown individuals or organizations. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had yet to report back one way or the other about Erskine’s financial situation. For all his certainty about Erskine’s divided loyalties, Connor was hamstrung without hard evidence to back up his claims.
There was a commotion at the entry to the ops center. Connor saw his executive assistant, Lorena, speaking to three men he didn’t recognize and one he did: Thomas Sharp, national security adviser and a former deputy director of Division.
Sharp pushed past Lorena and made his way through the gawking crowd to Connor’s side. “You’ve gone too far this time,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “I’ve been on the horn with CENTCOM for the past hour. They were pretty damned curious about why I wasn’t in the loop on this op. You didn’t think they’d give me a call?”
“Frankly, Tom, I didn’t give a shit. If I’d wanted your opinion on the matter, I would have told you myself.”
Sharp rode out the insult like the professional he was. Tall, sleek, and cunning, he was the perfectly evolved bureaucratic animal. “Luckily,” he said coolly, and with a victor’s confidence, “Mr. Erskine felt differently.”
“Mr. Erskine?” Connor shot Erskine an incredulous glance, but Erskine refused to meet his gaze. “Peter called you?”
Sharp stepped closer, moving in for the kill. “You suspected Ashok Balfour Armitraj was trafficking a WMD—one of our own cruise missiles, no less—and you didn’t see fit to inform me, or anyone else, for that matter. Are you out of your mind?”
“It was time-critical intel. I didn’t tell you or the boys at the Pentagon because you would have screwed the pooch.”
“How long have you known about this?”
“Days. A week, tops.”
“Mr. Erskine said it’s been two weeks.”
“Two weeks since we began working the lead. If you want to get out the stopwatch, we only got confirmation that he has the thing a few hours ago.”
“So you have proof that this weapon exists?” asked Sharp.
“The proof is in that hangar.”
“Two weeks. And you sent in a rank amateur who hasn’t even received an official security clearance to do the job?”
“It’s that rank amateur who got us the information about where the exchange was taking place.”
“Who is this man Ransom, anyway?”
“A doctor we’ve used in the past to help us execute our operations.”
“A doctor? Well, I’m glad he’s had some formal training, even if it has nothing to do with covert activities. Where is he now? I’d like to speak with him.”