The Omega Theory (25 page)

Luckily, he and his men finished the task quickly, pulling the truck out of the ditch on the first try. They were unhooking the towline when Angel received a transmission from Brother Cyrus. “Headquarters to Angel. Are you there, Angel?”

He fumbled for his radio and pressed the talk button. This was the call he’d been waiting for. “This is Angel,” he said. “Ready for instructions. Over.”

“The Lord has provided, Angel. We will meet in heaven. Over.”

He grinned. The message meant that everything was ready. Brother Cyrus had finished double-checking the code, running the program on his powerful computers to confirm that it was consistent and complete. Now the Lord’s plan was in its final stage. The Redemption was less than forty-eight hours away.

“Roger,” Angel said into the radio. “Requesting permission to proceed with the cleanup. Over.”

“Permission granted. Peace be with you, Angel. Over and out.”

Angel hooked the radio to his belt and ordered his men into the pickup. Then he got in the driver’s seat and turned the truck around and headed back to the Darvaza camp. He usually wasn’t fond of cleanup operations, and he wasn’t looking forward to shooting Tamara—until her loss of faith, she’d been an excellent soldier—but he knew he’d get some satisfaction from killing the boy. He was a stubborn child who needed to be taught a lesson. As Angel drove east, gripping the pickup’s steering wheel, he imagined that his hands were around the boy’s throat. He wouldn’t even have to waste any bullets.

TAMARA JUMPED WHEN SHE HEARD THE EXPLOSION. IT HAPPENED ONLY A
few seconds after she smelled the smoke, and at first she assumed that a crate of ammunition had exploded because of a fire in one of the other yurts. But there was a terrible silence after the blast, no shouting soldiers or squawking radios or clumping footsteps in the sand. She listened carefully and heard the distant crackling of a fire, but nothing else. Then she heard something much closer, the sound of her door being unlocked. Tamara stood up, ready to pounce on whoever stepped inside. When the door opened she saw a tall, barefoot nineteen-year-old with matted hair and a swollen black eye.

“Michael!” she shouted. “What happened to you?” She rushed toward him with her arms spread wide, but at the last moment she stopped herself. He didn’t like to be touched.

He took a step backward. “Excuse me,” he said. “We should leave the camp as quickly as possible.”

She looked him over. It had never been easy to read Michael’s expression, but now he seemed blanker than ever. Aside from the contusion around his left eye, his face was pale. “Oh God!” she cried. “Did Angel do that? Or one of the other soldiers?”

“Four of the soldiers are dead. I recovered two weapons from their flak jackets.”

He raised his hands and for the first time Tamara noticed what he was holding. In his right hand was an M-9 pistol and in his left was an MK3A2 concussion grenade. “Michael, give me that thing!” she yelled, reaching for the grenade. “It’s dangerous!”

But Michael took another step backward and held the grenade away from her. “I know how to use this weapon,” he said.

His voice was slow and monotone. Tamara stared at him and shook her head. Something terrible had happened to the boy. Something had changed him. She felt a chill as she looked at his bruised face.

“We should leave the camp as quickly as possible,” he repeated. “Angel and the two other soldiers will return very soon.” He tucked the pistol in his pants and put the grenade in one of his pockets. Then he turned around and walked out of the yurt.

Tamara followed him outside. The sky was black and moonless but the light from the burning yurt flickered across the camp. Within ten seconds they reached the pair of Land Cruisers. Tamara peered through the window of the nearer car and saw that the keys were in the ignition, thank the Lord. She got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Michael opened the passenger-side door but didn’t get in.

“Come on!” Tamara yelled. “What are you waiting for?”

He was staring at something in the distance. He raised his arm and pointed. “Headlights,” he said. “In the west.”

ANGEL COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. ONE OF THE YURTS WAS BURNING OUT OF CON
trol. And none of the soldiers at the camp had radioed him. It didn’t make sense. Unless his men had deserted, which was very unlikely, they would’ve contacted him in this kind of emergency.

His eyes were focused on the fire, so he almost didn’t notice the movement to the left. One of the Land Cruisers was hurtling across the camp. Its headlights were off, but Angel could see the firelight reflected off its body. The vehicle got on the trail and headed east, toward the burning crater.

Angel floored the gas pedal and his pickup lunged over the sand. As he got closer to the camp he saw bodies near the flaming yurt. No, not bodies—pieces of bodies. Torsos and arms and legs, still wrapped in khaki. Four of his soldiers were dead. And the prisoners who’d killed them were trying to escape.

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he looked over his shoulder at the truck bed. His two remaining men sat on ammunition crates next to the tripod-mounted M240. One of them, Angel thought, could jump out of the pickup and get into the Land Cruiser that was still parked at the center of the camp, a hundred yards ahead. The other could open the crates and start feeding the machine gun.

TAMARA KEPT HER HEADLIGHTS OFF AS SHE DROVE OUT OF THE CAMP, HOP
ing to plunge unseen into the vast black desert, but Angel spotted her too fast. He headed straight for her in his pickup, his high beams glaring in her rearview mirror. Her only chance now was to outrun the bastard, so she stomped the gas pedal. She’d gone off-roading in Land Cruisers many times before, and she knew all the pluses and minuses of the car. It had a big V-8 engine, but it handled like a fucking elephant. And the pickup behind her was a Toyota Tundra, which had the same damn V-8. To make matters worse, another pair of headlights soon appeared behind her—the second Land Cruiser. Shit, she thought, what the hell was I thinking? She should’ve punctured its tires before they left the camp.

The trail ran up the slope of a long ridge, skirting sand dunes to the left and right. The pickup and the other Land Cruiser were about two hundred yards behind. At first the pursuing vehicles drove in tandem, but then the two pairs of headlights diverged, with the pickup moving to the right and following a second trail that ran parallel to the first. She worried now that the parallel trail was slightly shorter, which would allow the bastards to cut her off. For a moment she considered leaving the trail altogether, but she knew this was the riskiest option—if she got stuck in the sand, she and Michael were as good as dead. And while she was thinking about all this and trying to drive as fast as she could without flipping the car or diving into a sand dune, she heard a distant, chugging noise. Then she remembered what Angel carried in the truck bed of his pickup.

She turned to Michael, who sat rigidly in the passenger seat. “GET DOWN!” she screamed. “GET—”

One of the bullets from the M240 smashed into the Land Cruiser’s rear window. The safety glass shattered and Tamara felt a sudden blast to the left side of her face. Pain shot across her ear and scalp, and blood streamed down the side of her neck. She panicked, assuming the bullet had hit her, and almost let go of the steering wheel, but then she noticed that the driver-side window was gone. She touched the left side of her head and felt bits of safety glass embedded in her skin, but no bullet wound. The round had missed her and hit the driver-side window instead. She glanced to her right and saw Michael huddled in a ball under the glove compartment.

“Michael!” she screamed. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t reply. Her left ear was ringing and wind was rushing into the car through the shattered windows. “Michael! MICHAEL!”

“Yes, I’m all right.” His voice was low. “You should drive faster.”

She pressed the pedal to the floor. The Land Cruiser bellowed and tore up the trail, leaping through the air and bouncing hard against the sand. They flew past the field of industrial debris and the first crater, the smaller one that hadn’t caught fire, a yawning pit of blackness on their right. The machine gun in the pickup stopped chugging; because the parallel trail ran around the other side of the crater, the debris and sand dunes blocked the gunner’s line of fire. But soon they would reach the crest of the ridge and come down the other side and the two trails would converge at the burning crater. The other Land Cruiser and the pickup were working as a team, the Cruiser lighting them up with its high beams so the gunner in the pickup could target them. Sooner or later another bullet would streak into the car and the race would be over.

“Michael!” she yelled. “Do you still have that pistol?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I’m going to tell you how to use it. First you have to—”

“I know how to use this weapon. It’s a nine-millimeter M-9, the standard sidearm in America’s Army.”

“Okay, great. I want you to fire it at the headlights of the car behind us.”

“The vehicle behind us is approximately a hundred yards away. The maximum effective range of the M-9 is fifty-five yards.”

“What? What are you—”

“The weapon isn’t accurate enough to hit the headlights, especially when fired from a moving vehicle.”

“I just want you to try—”

The Land Cruiser suddenly jumped over the crest. They were airborne for what seemed like an eternity and then the front wheels hit the trail and they were speeding down the other side of the ridge. The burning crater was straight ahead, a bowl of fire in the center of the windshield, growing larger as they barreled downhill. Tamara saw the junction where the trails came together, only a hundred yards away, and when she looked in the rearview she saw the pickup truck closing in from the southwest. Its machine gun chugged again and the bullets hit the sand behind them. There was no point, she realized now, in shooting out the headlights. The gunner could see them by the light from the crater.

The terrain flattened near the crater’s rim. After they passed the junction Tamara made a hard left, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the pickup. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. Michael was climbing through the gap between the bucket seats, heading for the back of the car. “Go over there,” he said, pointing through the windshield at the northern end of the crater. “Close to the edge.”

“Michael, get the fuck down!”

“The other weapon I took from the soldiers is a concussion grenade. I’m going to throw it behind us. But first you need to get closer to the crater.”

She glanced over her shoulder. Michael was in the backseat now, holding the grenade in his right hand. “Oh Jesus. Be careful with that . . .”

“I can time the throw so that the grenade explodes near the vehicles. But they’re far apart and I need to disable both of them. So you have to drive near the edge.”

This is insane, Tamara thought. But she didn’t argue. She was out of ideas and willing to consider anything. She cut the wheel to the right, aiming for the crater’s northern end.

She looked in the rearview again. The pickup and the other Land Cruiser had passed the junction and were less than fifty yards behind. They were trying to catch up to her by rounding the crater as quickly as possible, veering to the right and driving within twenty feet of the crater’s edge. Michael turned around and looked through the space where the rear window used to be. He knelt on the backseat, clutching his grenade and silently moving his lips, probably counting in his head. But Tamara saw it was hopeless. The other Land Cruiser was about forty feet ahead of the pickup. If Michael was lucky he could knock out the Cruiser, but not the truck. And then the gunner in the truck bed would start firing at them again.

Then Michael yelled, “Turn left!” and threw the grenade.

Without thinking, Tamara cut hard to the left. An instant later she heard the explosion. In the rearview mirror she saw the other Land Cruiser jump off the ground, as if it had just hit a tremendous speed bump. The car bounced on the sand and the pickup swerved to avoid hitting it. And then the crater’s edge fractured. A thousand cracks spread from the rim, and the sandy ground buckled. The Cruiser and the pickup plowed into the sand and began to slide sideways. Tamara stepped harder on the gas and turned away from the rearview, but as she sped from the rim she heard a low-pitched groan behind her. When she looked in the mirror again the vehicles were gone. The burning crater had grown still larger, with a new jagged edge at its northern end, and she saw nothing inside it but the insatiable flames.

22

“WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN, LUCY?”

The director was pissed. Although he was more than five thousand miles away, in his corner office at the FBI headquarters in Washington, his disapproval registered loud and clear over the phone. Lucille had to hold her BlackBerry a couple of inches from her eardrum. “I’m still in Israel, sir,” she said. “At a location on the West Bank.” Specifically, she was in a van belonging to Olam ben Z’man, speeding north toward Ramat David Air Base, but the director didn’t need to know this detail. If spies had infiltrated the Bureau, as Olam claimed, it would be unwise to reveal too much. “And I’m still working the kidnapping case. But we’ve run into a few complications.”

“The West Bank? I thought you were in Jerusalem.”

“Yes, sir, let me explain. I told you this case might have implications for national security and I was right. The guy we were looking for turned out to be a computer scientist who did classified work for the IDF. And he found evidence of a theft from the Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab. The stolen device is called an X-ray laser. The code name of the project is Excalibur.”

There was a pause, a long one. The director’s silence confirmed Lucille’s suspicions. She knew he had to be aware of the situation because the Bureau was in charge of investigating security lapses at the national labs. “I heard about that report,” he finally said. “The Israeli government contacted us last Tuesday and said they had satellite images showing Excalibur at the Iranian test site. But when we called the Livermore director, he said the X-ray laser had been dismantled and sold for scrap two months ago. And he had the records to prove it. So we told the Israelis they were wrong. Their analysts must’ve misidentified the object in the image.”