Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel (31 page)

Caraway came into the room, seeing that Cox was badly wounded. “Whattaya got?”

“Get Samir,” Cox said, sinking painfully to his knees. “The bomb’s in the closet.”

80

SAN DIEGO BAY,
Coronado Island, Inside the House

Bworz and Tomas stood peering out through a crack in the drapes as Commander Brighton got out of the Bronco and strolled casually up the block toward where the cruisers were parked on the north side of the house.

“He has to be here for us,” Tomas said. “His truck is full of commandos.”

“They’re not commandos!” Bworz said sarcastically, slinging his AK-47. “Look how he’s dressed. Use your head. They wouldn’t send a man in sandals, they’d send the Marines. There are hundreds of them right across the street.”

“Then who are those other men in the truck? They look like Marines to me.”

“Yes, well, this island is full of military men. Rest easy.”

Brighton began to pass out of sight around the corner, but they couldn’t open the drapes to watch him for fear of being seen. “Someone check the other side of the house and see where he’s going.”

One of the men stepped into the bedroom on the north side of the
house and came right back out. “There are two policemen parked right across the street. He’s talking to them.”

Everyone unslung and primed his weapon as he moved to take a firing position.

“Admit it!” Tomas said to Bworz. “They forced your uncle to talk. They know we’re in here.”

In his heart, Bworz knew it was true, but he didn’t understand why the Americans were moving so casually. “Why would they send police instead of Marines?”

Tomas shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, you fool, it does matter! You don’t send two policemen and men in sandals to retrieve an atomic bomb. You send Marines! And there are hundreds of them right across the street. Something is wrong here. Maybe Kashkin did talk, but if he did, they obviously don’t completely trust his information. So keep your wits about you—all of you!”

He closed the gap in the drapes and glanced at his watch. They wouldn’t have to hold out for long before it would be too late for the Americans to disarm the bomb. Kashkin had wired a series of booby traps and false leads into the detonator that would make it impossible for even an expert explosives technician to decipher the nest of wiring in under a half hour. Once there was less than twenty minutes or so left on the clock, it wouldn’t matter whether Bworz and his men were still alive or not.

“He’s going back to his truck!” called a man from the other room. “And the police are leaving.”

Bworz smiled at Tomas. “See? They’re unsure of themselves, and they’re wasting time. We’ll let them continue to waste time. In half an hour, we’ll be in the presence of Allah, and these infidels will be burning in hell.”

“Hey!” someone shouted from the bedroom on the south side of the house. “Three black trucks are racing up the street! They’re coming right at the house!”

Tomas glared at Bworz and threw open the door to see three black SUVs screeching to a halt in front of the house. He tore off across the lawn firing from the shoulder, followed by another Chechen gunner, and Bworz kicked the door closed after them.

Running out to meet the lead SUV, Tomas fired point-blank into the FBI SWAT team as they attempted to dismount. His compatriot raked the other two trucks until his magazine ran dry, and both men disappeared down the sidewalk to reload, leaving more than half of the SWAT team dead or dying.

81

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA,
Edwards Air Force Base

The president of the United States stood in the command center at Edwards Air Force Base watching a live UAV feed coming in from five thousand feet over Coronado Island. Most of his cabinet was present, along with the Joint Chiefs, FBI Director Don Lassiter, and Andrew Sloan, the acting director of the Department of Homeland Security.

General Couture stood off to the side, his arms crossed. He and the rest of the Joint Chiefs had urged the president to dispatch squads of Marines—already stationed on Coronado Island—to investigate the suspect addresses, causing both the FBI and DHS directors to pounce, insisting that direct action by the United States military was unconstitutional and that the FBI was prepared to deal with the situation.

The president had vacillated for an entire minute before giving the nod to the FBI and setting their agents in motion.

Now everyone stood watching as three black FBI vehicles drove up Second Street toward the house on the corner.

Couture checked his watch. At least a half hour had been wasted
waiting on the FBI to arrive, and now they were racing boldly up the street like they were about to serve a warrant on a methamphetamine lab.

Moments earlier, there had been some confusion over who was in the black SUV that had already pulled up in front of the house, but when a man in sandals got out and sent the police cruisers up the street, the FBI director announced that it must be someone from the FBI’s lead element.

This had made no sense to General Couture or to Colonel Bradshaw, who exchanged skeptical glances. What kind of an FBI agent showed up to a raid in flip-flops?

A collective gasp swept through the room as two men burst out of the house firing AK-47s into the FBI vehicles. Meanwhile, thin wisps of smoke could be seen coming from the front of the house as the Chechens inside opened fire on the survivors of the onslaught, who fell out onto the pavement on the opposite sides of the vehicles.

Watching the fiasco was too much for General Couture, and he lost his temper. “
This
is why you send in the goddamn Marines!” he announced in an unprecedented display of disrespect for the commander in chief.

Everyone turned around in surprise.

He looked directly at the FBI director. “What did those men think they were rolling up to out there, Don, a goddamn barbecue?”

“Hey, I don’t have to listen to that! This is a highly—”

“The hell you don’t!” Couture retorted, his menacing glare passing over everyone in the room, including the president himself, before coming back to the FBI man. “This is a goddamn
war
! And if you people aren’t prepared to fight it, then you’d goddamn well better step aside! It’s a simple concept, gentlemen . . . lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way!”

The president cleared his throat, and everyone gave him their immediate attention. “General,” he said, pointing up at the screen, “do you have any idea who those men are?”

Couture’s eyes widened as he saw Brighton and his SEALs maneuvering against the house where all the firing was coming from. He knew instantly by the way they moved that they were spec ops troops. “My guess would be Navy SEALs, Mr. President.”

“Which means Pope?”

Couture shook his head. “Sir, I have no idea. This operation is such a mess, I don’t know how anyone possibly could.”

There came another collective gasp from the cabinet as the Chechen in the black T-shirt stepped out from the bushes and gunned down what was left of the FBI contingent before one of the SEALs shot him dead.

Sickened by what he saw, the president turned to the national security director. “Get every available civilian asset to converge on that location immediately. Make sure the police understand we have undercover Special Forces men on the scene.”

The security director nodded and disappeared from the room.

They watched as the SEALs stormed the house a short time later, with squad cars speeding toward the site.

“If they’ve got their finger on the button in there,” Couture said, “now’s when they’ll blow it.”

Within two minutes, the SEALs came running back out, waving the police away from the house, and a sense of urgency swept through the command center.

“My God, it’s gonna blow,” muttered the secretary of the interior, taking a step back as if there might be some danger in being too close to the screen.

The president looked at Couture, surprisingly calm. “Will we be able to see afterward? Or will it take out the drone?”

Couture looked at Bradshaw. “What’s our altitude, Colonel?”

Bradshaw answered, “Five thousand feet, sir. The cloud of a two-kiloton explosion can be expected to reach an altitude of fifteen to twenty thousand feet, but that’s not going to matter. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast will very likely fry the UAV’s circuitry. I doubt we’ll have a picture after detonation.”

The president looked across at the acting director of Homeland Security. “Forget, DC, Andrew. Get your assets moving toward San Diego. It looks like we’re in for a real nightmare.”

82

SAN DIEGO BAY,
Coronado Island

Samir shouldered into the room, moving Caraway aside as he reached into the closet and grabbed the seabag by the strap to drag it out.

Caraway snapped open a Benchmade fighting knife and gave it to the EOD man.

Samir cut the seabag open lengthwise, took one look at the corrosion around the bottom edge of the bomb casing, and said, “Everybody out, now!”

The SEALs fled the house like rats from a sinking ship, dragging the wounded Cox along with them. Only Brighton stayed behind with Samir. “How bad is it?”

Samir knelt down to examine the dead man who’d been trying to hide the bomb when Cox shot him. He thumbed back the Chechen’s lips, seeing he’d been bleeding from the gums for at least the past few days. “This is radiation sickness, sir. You’d better wait outside. He’s probably been getting sick for a while, but this room is hot.”

“Lethal hot?”

The EOD man shrugged. “There’s no way to know without instruments.”

Brighton stood beside him, taking a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and opening the screwdriver blade. “Can you open that access panel with this?”

“Yes, sir,” Samir said glumly, taking the tool. “I’ll come out and let you know what I find.”

They could hear vehicles pulling up out front, and they could hear Caraway hollering for everyone to stay out of the house, to get back, that the bomb’s core was exposed—and to get a corpsman for the wounded Cox and his other SEAL.

The weapon itself was slightly smaller than a footlocker and almost as long. Samir unscrewed the six screws securing the access panel to the battered green bomb housing and carefully lifted it up, checking for booby-trap wires attached to the underside of it before setting it aside. The modern digital clock inside read 00:22:14:03 and counting in green numerals.

Samir looked up at Brighton. “Sir, there’s no way I can disarm this thing in twenty-two minutes. Even if I had the necessary equipment, it’s been rewired by an expert who almost certainly booby-trapped it. I’m sorry, but we’re out of time. We have to get it off the island and out to sea.”

“Which means a helo.”

“Yes, sir. A helo with a kamikaze pilot. Can you fly a helo, sir?”

“No,” Brighton said quietly.

“Well, we can’t send him out there alone. I guess we’ll be a three-man crew.”

Brighton shook his head. “There won’t be any point in you coming along, sailor.”

“Sir, I’ve been kneeling beside this son of a bitch long enough already that I can probably guarantee myself a case of ball cancer within the year, and there ain’t no fuckin’ way I’m cursing my wife with that—not before she’s had a chance to get pregnant with a healthy baby. Just get us a helo, sir . . . a fast one.”

Brighton knew if he went outside and tried asking for a helo in all
of that craziness, the bomb would go off before anyone could even make a decision, so he took his iPhone from his pocket and made a call.

Pope answered immediately. “I’ve been watching from above, Commander. I’m hacked into the overhead UAV feed. Do you have the weapon?”

“Roger that,” Brighton said. “It’s set to detonate in twenty-one minutes, and my EOD man says he can’t disarm it in that amount of time. We need a helo, and we need it now.”

“To get it off the island?”

“Right.”

“That’s almost no time,” Pope said, “but I’ll do my best. Stand by.”

Brighton set the phone aside and looked at Samir, giving the bomb a kick. “I think it’s got us. What do you think?”

Samir stood up and put out his hand. “Can I borrow your phone, sir?” He swallowed hard. “I need to call my wife . . .”

83

SAN DIEGO BAY,
Coronado Island, Naval Air Station North Island

Ensign Joseph Fivecoat was an SH-60 Seahawk pilot who specialized in search and rescue (SAR). He was attached to the maritime helicopter strike squadron HSM 71. They called themselves the Raptors, and when they were not stationed at NASNI, they were deployed with Carrier Strike Group Three aboard the USS
John C. Stennis
(CVN-74). Fivecoat was twenty-four years old and three-quarters Cherokee on his father’s side. He’d grown up near the reservation in western North Carolina as the youngest of five children, entering the navy through the ROTC program.

The moment the base went on alert, he scrambled to his helo and warmed up the engines in preparation for emergency takeoff. His CO had been taken off of flight status the day before due to an ear infection, and so far no one had been assigned to replace him. He had no idea why the base had been put on alert, but he knew the national defense condition was set at Cocked Pistol, and he wasn’t about to let his helo be caught on the ground in the event of an attack, so he kept the rotors turning slowly. He was still sitting in the cockpit awaiting
orders when his squadron commander pulled up in a Marine Humvee and got out.

Fivecoat opened his door. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Do you know where Second Street dead ends into Alameda?” the commander asked.

“You mean right outside the base, sir?”

“That’s right. I just received a call from the secretary of defense ordering me to send the first helo smoking to that intersection. You’re the helo with the rotors turning, so you get the nod. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, Ensign, but it’s goddamn serious, whatever it is, so get this bird in the air and get over there.” He clapped Fivecoat on the shoulder and shut the door.

Fivecoat didn’t have time to even guess at what the helo was needed for. He was airborne within sixty seconds and flying southeast across the base less than two hundred feet off the deck. Within a few seconds, he could see the intersection of Second Street and Alameda Boulevard. There was a large circle in the street made of road flares, and dozens of cops and firemen standing around waving their arms like madmen.

“Christ,” he muttered to himself. “Somebody real important must be dyin’ down there.”

He didn’t like the looks of the power lines, so he chose to set down on base property right across the street inside the eight-foot perimeter wall where a pair of Marines were already opening a maintenance gate, apparently having anticipated his desire to avoid the power lines.

Before he had the wheels on the ground, the young ensign could see two men rushing toward the helo pushing a medical gurney. There was a green lump on the gurney about the size of the footlocker back in his billet. He noticed everyone cutting the gurney a wide birth while rushing past. Even the Marines moved quickly aside as the two men—one of whom was dressed in shorts and flip-flops—rolled the gurney through the gate onto base property and right up to the helo.

They each grabbed an end of the lump and heaved it aboard the aircraft. The guy in flip-flops climbed in on the copilot’s side, and the younger-looking Arabic fellow got into the back with the green lump.

Fivecoat saw the bone-frog tattoo on Flip-flops’s arm and realized he was a Navy SEAL.

“Get us out to sea as fast and as far as you can!” the SEAL said over the whir of the rotors. “And keep it on the deck. We only got five minutes until the damn thing goes off.”

Fivecoat stole a startled look in the back, where the younger man sat against the bulkhead staring at what he now saw was a green metal box. “Until
what
thing goes off?”

“That!” Brighton said, pointing into the back. “The nuke. They didn’t tell you?”

Fivecoat shook his head, feeling cruelly betrayed. “Nobody told me shit—just to get the hell over here!”

“Fuck! You were supposed to be a volunteer!”

“I didn’t volunteer for a goddamn thing!”

“Four minutes!” Samir shouted from the back.

Brighton looked Fivecoat in the eyes. “The choice is yours, son. You can take off and die a hero by saving San Diego Bay, or you can sit here on the ground and die with half a million other people. I’m sorry those are your only options, but we’re outta fuckin’ time here.”

Fivecoat’s mind went numb as his training kicked in, and he put his feet on the antitorque pedals. He twisted the collective lever to lift the helo back into the air and eased the cyclic forward, nosing the aircraft toward the Pacific Ocean. “If you’re gonna jump out,” he heard himself say, “now’s the time.”

Brighton smiled. “We’re coming with you.”

Fivecoat nodded, minding the power lines as the helo picked up speed and left the base behind, flying barely 150 feet off the deck toward the southwest. “If we fly due west,” he said, grabbing a headset and handing it to Brighton, “we might still be too close to Point Loma when it goes off.”

“Understood.” Brighton pulled on the headset and adjusted the mike. “We go wherever you take us.”

“Three minutes!” Samir called out.

“Does he gotta call out the time like that?” Fivecoat asked over the mike.

Brighton glanced into the back, where Samir’s eyes were glued to the timer. “Yeah, I think he does. He’s hoping it won’t go off because of the corrosion.”

Fivecoat nodded. “Okay, we’re at a hundred forty-six knots. Maxed out at a hundred seventy miles an hour.”

Brighton returned his gaze to the northeast, still able to see Point Loma. “Can you squeeze a little more out of it?”

Fivecoat frowned at him. “Who’s flying this thing?”

Brighton could see the conflicting emotions in the young ensign’s eyes: mixed feelings of betrayal and determination. “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry as hell about this.”

“It’s not all bad,” Fivecoat said, looking forward at the horizon, wondering if he would feel anything when it happened. “I’ll be the twenty-ninth Indian to win the Medal of Honor. That’ll make my mother proud.”

“I’m sure she’s proud already.”

“Two minutes!”

“Barely time enough to sing a song,” Brighton muttered, thinking about his son. He hadn’t called his wife because he was too afraid, too afraid of making her cry, something he’d been putting off for months now.

He chuckled ironically, befuddled by how much easier it was to die than to break the heart of a woman who did not deserve it.

He heard Fivecoat’s voice asking him in the headset, “What’s funny?”

“Nothing really. Just pondering my cowardice.”

Fivecoat gave him a look. “You’re willingly riding a fuckin’ nuke into the wild blue yonder.”

“Yes, I am,” Brighton said. Then he laughed. “You bet your ass I am.”

“One minute!”

Brighton looked into the back, the mirth still visible in his eyes. “Any last confessions?”

Samir looked at him for a sorrowful moment, but then his face finally cracked into a grin. “I used to jerk off to my aunt Rida when I was kid! She doesn’t speak any English, but she’s got great tits.”

Brighton laughed. “Mine’s worse. I was going to leave my wife for another woman.” He smacked Fivecoat on the helmet. “What about you?”

Fivecoat looked at him with a melancholy smile. “One time I
was—” He spotted the silhouette of a trimaran-hulled warship a thousand yards to starboard steaming due north at flank speed. “Oh, shit . . . we’ve killed the
Coronado
.”

Brighton whipped his head around, seeing “The Crown of the Fleet,” the USS
Coronado
(LCS-4), an independence-class littoral war ship designed with stealth technology to combat potential asymmetric threats in the littoral zones close to shore.

Brighton touched the glass with his fingertips. “Sorry, guys.”

The RA-115 detonated just under seven miles southwest of Point Loma with a blast of 1.8 kilotons, vaporizing the helo and everyone aboard in a microsecond. The shock wave shot out to a radius of two kilometers, wiping out not only the
Coronado
but also three trawlers and a handful of sailboats. Hundreds of tons of sea water flash-boiled, and the mushroom cloud zoomed to almost twenty-thousand feet over the next few minutes, visible for miles inland.