An elevated level of dust in the atmosphere would surround the earth for a few months, but would not, according to the calculations, result in anything approaching a nuclear winter.
The purpose behind this test was not unlike Trinity, the early Alamagordo tests of the atomic bomb. Leffort’s clients had to be sure they got it right before bringing the second weapon closer to home and risking self-annihilation. The people paying him had to know how much dust and rock would be ejected. They wanted to have some sense of the heat that would be generated, the volume and the range of any fiery ejecta that gravity carried back through the atmosphere. They had to know how far fires would spread, as well as the effect of the ground shock waves as the impactor mostly vaporized and buried what was left of itself a mile deep in the bedrock at ground zero. In the end, all that would be left would be a vast crater.
It was the similarities of the desert with its geologic characteristics so much like those of their homeland that gave Leffort’s clients the idea-setting up in the jungles of Mexico and targeting the area around Phoenix and Scottsdale in the state of Arizona would make for the perfect test.
Once the first asteroid was proven to work, they would know with a high degree of confidence what to expect when they launched the second, the larger of the two asteroids, into the desert just outside of the city of Tel Aviv in Israel. It was to be the fulfillment of the promise to wipe Israel off the map.
Leffort was confident that with enough practice and the right space rock, he could penetrate the earth’s atmosphere to create a supersonic shock wave that would level everything beneath it-a blast similar to the Tunguska event.
On June 30, 1908, a sudden flash of light, brighter than the sun, followed by an ear-shattering shock wave, struck the area over the Tunguska River in a remote region of Siberia. It leveled trees, stripped their foliage, and set wildfires over an area of more than eight hundred square miles. Virtually nothing was left standing.
It has been estimated that the offending meteor may have been no more than thirty to sixty feet in diameter. Scientists believe that it never actually impacted the earth but disintegrated in the skies above. Its mass coupled with its extreme velocity caused a massive shock wave as it collided with and finally exploded in the thickening atmosphere of the earth. Had it occurred over Manhattan it would have destroyed the city and killed almost every living thing in the five boroughs below.
Leffort watched the telemetry readings on the large left-hand screen as the rockets fired up. Within seconds they began to nudge the asteroid from its raceway behind the moon. Everything looked smooth until suddenly…
A hundred and twenty miles above the Mare Orientale, a largely featureless plain on the southeast rim at the far side of the moon, the rear lateral thrust rocket attached to A-1 began to vibrate. It shimmied and sent the asteroid into a yaw as it began to tumble.
The rocket was programmed to fire for a minute and forty seconds. At fifty-seven seconds a large amorphous section of iron, what rocket engineers at NASA had called the dorsal fin, tore itself free from the asteroid and began to spin toward the surface of the moon.
Leffort watched in horror as the telemetry data began to pile up on the screen. Something had gone badly wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, but A-1 had given up any semblance of equilibrium. The readings for yaw, pitch, and roll all exceeded acceptable parameters for anything close to controlled flight. From all the readings, A-1 was nothing but a tumbling iron anvil in space. Caught in the moon’s gravity, flung like a stone from a blind man’s sling, it could end up anywhere.
Leffort stood there paralyzed. There was nothing he could do but watch as the numbers stacked up. With each passing second, the blood in his veins grew hotter. All he could do was turn off the monitors. The minute he opened the door, they would want to know what was happening. Dark screens would be a dead giveaway. Leffort’s mind raced. All he wanted now was to survive, to get away from them.
A quarter of a million miles away, beyond the edge of the moon’s southern hemisphere, the tumbling train of iron finally ceased its twisting tails of fire. The three remaining rocket motors shut down, though by now the tumbling asteroid was a perpetual motion machine.
Moments later a silent ball of fire erupted on the dusty plain below as the errant engine and the two tons of iron to which it was attached slammed into the surface of the moon. From space it looked like a pebble in a pond as the shock waves spread out into rings of ground matter rippling up, forming a new crater near the southern edge of the Orient Sea.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Liquida would have to leave most of his luggage behind. He grabbed a few things from his suitcase, including an extra stiletto from the bundle in his bag. He put one of the knives in a scabbard that was sewn inside the lining of his light jacket and slipped the other into a separate sheath and slid it into his pants along the side of his hip.
The prefabricated metal building was designed like a fortress, steel walls with small slits for windows in some of the rooms, none of them large enough to crawl through.
Liquida’s room didn’t even have that. It had only an air- conditioning register high on the wall pouring cool air into the room. There was a larger rectangular return duct in the ceiling that sucked the warm air back through the system.
The oversize commercial air-con system was one of the few concessions to comfort in the facility. Liquida assumed it was necessary to maintain cool temperatures for the electronics, banks of large industrial computers housed in a room down the hall. Beyond that was the control room where Leffort worked. Armed guards were installed at several locations along the corridor. The entrances and exits were all sealed by solid steel doors, each one controlled by an electronic passkey.
Bruno hadn’t given Liquida a key. When Liquida asked for one, Bruno apologized, claiming it was an oversight, and told him he would get him one as soon as he could. But the key was never produced.
Earlier in the day when Liquida made a bid to take a walk outside, he was turned back by one of the guards. He was told that without a key he was not allowed to leave the building. Liquida didn’t press the matter. Instead he went back to his room. He poked around carefully, looking for hidden camera lenses. He didn’t find any. At least they didn’t have him under surveillance. It was while looking for cameras that he realized his only way out was through the air-conditioning register in the ceiling.
He put on his jacket, stood on a chair, and found the catch on the hinged metal vent over the register. He opened it, dropped the covering vent down so that it hung open from the two hinges, and pulled out the rectangular fiberglass filter.
Liquida stepped down from the chair and looked for a good place to hide it. A cheap particleboard cupboard that served as a closet rested against one wall. He slid the thin rectangular filter behind it and walked back to the chair in the center of the room.
He looked up. The opening into the sheet metal duct system was easily large enough for Liquida to fit through. It was a good two and half feet wide, and at least eighteen inches deep. He had shimmied into much tighter spaces before. The only problem now was, the partially healed muscles under his arm from the knife wound given to him by Madriani’s detective, the big black guy Liquida had killed in Washington. This was still painful and weak.
Liquida grabbed a spool of heavy thread from the sewing kit in his luggage. He took a stick of chewing gum from a package in his jacket pocket, popped the gum in his mouth, and pulled out a good length of thread from the spool. He looped the thread over itself several times until he had four strands, each one about fifteen feet long. Then he snipped the end of the thread with his teeth. He passed one end of the four-strand thickness around the top slate on the back of the light metal chair, then tied the ends of the thread together so that the entire fifteen feet formed a single continuous loop. The other end of threaded strands he passed through his belt. He tugged on it to make sure it wouldn’t come free.
Then Liquida stood on the chair and took a
deep breath. He chewed the gum. It was better than breaking his teeth on a bullet. As he reached up with his hands inside the frame of the register, he felt the first twinge of pain under his arm. He didn’t wait. Instead, with a pull from his arms and a healthy jump from his legs off the chair, Liquida hoisted his upper body up into the opening in the ceiling.
He felt the sharp pain, the tearing of scar tissue as the muscles under his arm reminded him of the slashing cut. He paused, his weight on his chest just inside the sheet metal duct, his legs dangling into the room as the sweat dripped off his forehead.
Liquida breathed heavily and chewed on the gum as he waited for the searing pain to pass. It took almost half a minute to subdue the agony before he could move.
Slowly he slid his hands forward and pulled his body along the inside of the sheet metal tunnel. Each move was a new experience in pain. Finally everything but his toes was up inside the metal ceiling duct.
Then slowly he reversed the process. He shimmied backward, pushing himself back over the hatch in the ceiling until only his head and shoulders remained over the open register.
With his right hand he reached back and fished for the end of the threaded loop under his belt. He found it and pulled it free.
Liquida took up the slack in the thread and pulled on it gently until all four legs of the chair cleared the floor. Slowly swinging the chair like a pendulum, back and forth, he made three full passes toward the wall near the head of the bed. On the fourth pass, he let out the thread and dropped the chair so that it landed neatly with the back against the wall.
Liquida smiled to himself as he nibbled through the four strands of thread. Once he had severed them he pulled the continuous loop from the back of the chair and reeled it in until all of the thread was in his hands. He balled it up and stuck it down the neck of his shirt as the forced air from the conditioning system whistled past his ears.
He reached down and lifted the vented register cover closed. He took the chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it to the metal edge of the frame around the louvered vent, then pulled it tightly closed. The gum sealed the cover in place. Anyone looking in the room now would think Liquida had simply vanished.
At a point roughly a hundred miles north of Havana, the flight engineer on Adin’s C-130 radioed to the base in Israel. He asked to have an uncoded message sent to Joselyn Cole at her e-mail address, making an urgent request for information using Herman’s name. He needed to know Madriani’s location as well as the precise location of the antenna array and the facility in the jungle. It was now two hours later and they had heard nothing.
Forty miles out, the pilot turned off the plane’s transponder. He dropped down to wave-top height and hugged the water, trying to stay below ground radar.
Twenty minutes later the C-130 crossed over the white-foamed breakers and sugar-sand beaches of the Mexican Riviera. The pilot nosed the plane up to clear some low-lying cliffs and the buildings on top of them. They were just south of the island of Cozumel on the Yucatan Peninsula.
Herman sat up front behind the pilot looking out the windows for any landmarks that seemed familiar. “You’re too far north,” he told them.
The pilot dipped the left wing and took a heading due south.
Herman could see the coast highway out in front of them through the plane’s windshield. The white sand beaches and resorts along the water’s edge raced by beneath the belly of the plane. “Just follow the highway,” said Herman.
Every once in a while the pilot would have to pull the nose of the plane up to avoid a building or the fronds of an occasional tall palm tree. The shadow of the large four-engine plane rippled along on the beaches and bluffs beneath them as they flew.
Eight minutes later the reflection of the sun on the white coral facade of the ruins at Tulum appeared just above the nose of the plane.
“There!” Herman pointed over the pilot’s shoulder. “See those ruins up ahead?”
The pilot nodded.
“Off to the right there should be a paved road, two lanes as I recall, into the jungle. It connects with the main highway between Cancun and Merida. It’s the road to Coba. After that I don’t know,” said Herman. “I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
“Nothing more specific?” Adin was in the chair next to him.
“The area around Coba is all Paul told me,” said Herman. “Whether he had more information I don’t know. Nothing back on the e-mail yet?”
Adin looked at the navigator who doubled as the radio operator. The man shook his head.
“We’ll just have to look,” said the pilot. He dropped the starboard wing and edged the plane toward the right. Moments later they picked up the narrow thread of light-colored asphalt leading into the jungle, the two-lane highway to Coba.
“What have we got for a landing strip?” asked the pilot. “Anything in the area?” He was talking to the navigator seated to the right of Herman and Adin at a kind of desk. The man was scanning a computer screen looking at charts and global positioning satellite (GPS) maps.
“Looks like one unimproved short strip, but it’s quite a ways out,” said the navigator. He did some quick calculations using the computer’s keyboard. “It’s halfway to Merida,” said the navigator. “Off a federal highway. Mexico one-eighty, it looks like. It’s a long way from Coba.”
“Great,” said the pilot. “Somebody better tell Uncle Ben we’ve got a logistics problem. Tell him to get up here.”
“I got it.” Adin unbuckled and headed back toward the cargo area.
“What’s the problem?” said Herman.
“Nowhere to put down,” said the pilot. “We can’t run the jeep and the trailer loaded with troops and munitions on a public highway. Not that far. We’ll end up in a firefight with the Mexican army.”
Herman nodded.
“We’ll have to look for something else,” said the pilot. “There’s bound to be other strips, but they’re not always marked on the charts.”
“Places prepared by the cartels,” said Herman.
The pilot nodded. “We may have to shoot our way in and out. I’m going to pull up to seventy-five hundred feet and level off in just a couple of minutes, as soon as we get some more eyes up front here to help us look. Tell some of the guys in the back to strap themselves on the ramp and lower it a little so they can see what’s behind us, in case we missed anything.”
Herman got up and followed Adin out of the flight cabin and down the ladder.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Liquida began the painful shimmy like a snake through the ducting, pushing with the rubber toes of his running shoes, pulling with his hands as best he could. He tried to make as little noise as possible, though the constant roar of the air conditioner sucking air through the return would have swallowed almost any sound coming from the vents.
He was moving away from the control room and the space next to it with the banks of computers. As he approached the next register, Liquida pulled the stiletto from the sheath in his coat. He used the sharp point to part several openings in the glass fibers of the filter so he could peek through the slatted metal vents down into the room below.
There was a long counter that separated the room into two sections. The door to the main corridor outside was closed and, if Liquida had to guess, it was locked. It wasn’t a solid-core wooden door like the one to Liquida’s room. This one was steel with a sensor on the wall so it could be opened with an electronic key card.
A man was seated at a desk against the wall on the left side of the room behind the counter. Liquida could see the back of his head as the guy worked over what looked like a set of books.
Against the opposite wall behind him was a large industrial safe, double doors, thick tempered steel that looked to be at least eight inches with two large cylindrical stainless-steel bolts protruding from each of the two open doors. Inside were stacks of cash, what looked like greenbacks, U.S. currency, enough of it to fill a small van.
Liquida wondered how
many people worked here. Whoever they were, they weren’t taking their salary by check or in pesos. And neither was he.
With the ramp on the belly of the Hercules C-130 partway down, the noise from the four roaring Allison turboprop engines was deafening. Sarah had to cover both ears with her hands as wind swirled through the cargo hold. Herman held on to Bugsy’s leash as the three of them huddled against the side of the plane in front of the smaller cargo container.
Every once in a while Sarah would crawl to the corner of the container and look toward the back of the plane to see what they were looking at. All she could see from where she knelt was an endless green carpet of jungle. She felt the plane gaining altitude. She crawled back to Herman, petting Bugsy with one hand on the way.
“Good luck finding a place to land,” shouted Herman.
She nodded. “What if they can’t find one?”
Herman shrugged a shoulder and gave her a face like he had no clue.
“You think they’ll try to parachute?” she asked.
Herman shook his head. “Not into that.” What he meant was the jungle canopy. Anybody jumping into an area of dense foliage like that was asking for trouble. Most, if not all, would get hung up in the trees. Those who didn’t break bones or get killed in the fall would be easy targets for anybody on the ground with a rifle.
“Sarah!”
When she looked up, Adin was at the top of the ladder looking down from the flight deck. He waved them up and motioned for her to tie off the dog.
Sarah looped Bugsy’s leash through the cargo net on the side of the plane and tied it. She settled him down into a prone position on deck and petted him, then followed Herman up the ladder.
Once they were inside the flight compartment, Adin pointed out through the small windshield in front of the pilot. Off in the distance were two looming white dishes, one of them large enough that it looked like a giant parasol someone had dropped in the jungle.
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