by Sean Ellis
“Go!”
They were only about fifty yards from the building, on the verge of the still settling dust cloud that marked the remains of the structure they had barely escaped a few minutes earlier, when the seeds of destruction sown by Mira’s new companion bore fiery fruit. She didn’t see the gray-clad figure climb onto one of the remaining ATVs, intent on giving pursuit, but she felt the hot pressure wave as the rigged grenade detonated behind them. The five-second delay on the fuse actually allowed the rider to move a few feet away from ground zero, but that did not significantly alter his fate. The spray of shrapnel stripped half the flesh from his torso, and the shock wave flung what was left of him, along with the quad he was riding, like a discarded beer can. The blast savaged the remaining ATVs as well as the men who were about to mount them, and then, as if to add insult to injury, the second grenade exploded, sweeping away what little remained.
Mira sensed immediately that there would be no more danger from that quarter and relaxed her posture just a little. A quip burbled in her head—You definitely leveled the playing field—and she almost said it aloud, but thought better of it. It sounded corny and he—I don’t even know his name—probably wouldn’t hear anyway.
Then a cold sensation swept over her and she knew beyond any doubt that they were not clear of danger by a long shot. The premonition accomplished little more than to get her mentally prepared. She barely reacted at all when several sets of headlights shone out from the gloom, directly in their path.
13.
For a few seconds, Collier felt like he was swimming, or more precisely, floundering in the surf. Debris swirled around him like a wave that had crashed over his head, pushing him down, squeezing the last vestiges of air from his lungs. He was a SEAL, and SEALs were swimmers, so he fought his way clear, using his arms and legs to propel him through the relentless maelstrom.
It did not occur to him, even for an instant that what he was doing was impossible. A five-story building had just collapsed on top of him, tons of concrete and steel in enormous chunks weighing several tons that should have squashed him flat like a bug under the heel of a giant’s shoe. Such concerns did not even register in his conscious mind as he stroked his way to the edge of the collapse and mercifully, was free.
He tumbled down a shifting slope of rubble and into the midst of a choking cloud of dust, but was nevertheless able to orient himself almost immediately. Even without his GPS, a map and compass, or even a single meaningful visual landmark, he easily homed in on his destination: the compound’s power plant, where the rest of the platoon was waiting.
Then, he ran.
He was barely aware of his environment. He could have identified any of the buildings that comprised the Atlas compound from his earlier map recon, or at the very least recalled the designators that had been assigned each—the actual purpose of most of the structures was based on supposition—but that was all irrelevant now. He was fixated on the goal and without even thinking about it, chose the shortest path to that goal.
Despite the urgency he felt, he moved languidly, or so it seemed to him. Anxiety served no purpose. There was time enough if he ignored all distractions, something which posed no difficulty. Nevertheless, it took him only two and a half minutes to reach the power plant. Under any other circumstances this would have been astonishing, particularly since he had been clinically dead five minutes earlier. But, like everything else that had no direct bearing on his new mission, he gave no thought to either miracle.
The SH-60 Seahawk helicopter lifting off from the rendezvous site however did get his attention.
The extraction helo was early. The call for a pick-up was supposed to be his to make.
He pulled up short and started waving his arms frantically to get the attention of the figures huddled around the open cabin door.
A hundred feet above him, the helicopter wavered in the sky for a moment and then descended. Collier strode forward, concern etching his features for the first time since his awakening.
Before the helicopter could touch down, and well before he could pose the question that was burning on his lips, one of the SEALs leaped to the ground and raced to meet him.
“Shit, sir! We thought you were toast.” It was Robinson. The young lieutenant grabbed his shoulder and urged him toward the Seahawk as its wheels crunched against the ground.
“Why are you leaving?” Collier said. He sounded petulant and he knew it, but he didn’t care. “You were supposed to wait for us.”
Robinson just shook his head. “Wasn’t our call, sir. When you guys went silent, the admiral advanced the timetable.”
“Advanced?”
“The bomber is on its way. We have to go, like right now.” As if it were an afterthought, Robinson glanced behind his commander. “Anyone else make it?”
Collier’s eyebrows drew together in a look of consternation, and when he spoke, it was with a distracted tone, as if he wasn’t sure how he knew what he knew. “Booker. He’s got the Trinity. We need to wait for him.”
“No can do.” Robinson tugged on his arm. “We’ve got to get in the air. We were cutting it close before we came back for you. Now….”
The lieutenant didn’t finish the statement and Collier didn’t resist as the younger man pulled him toward the helicopter. He knew he could have; he could have frozen Robinson like a statue if he’d wanted to, or shut down the Seahawk’s turbines with a thought, but that would accomplish nothing. If what Robinson said was true, then there was nothing any of the men in the helicopter could do to prevent what was about to happen.
But there was a chance that he might be able to.
He climbed into the cabin and felt the deck lurch beneath his feet; the pilot wasted no time in getting aloft. Collier glanced around the nearly empty cabin. “Where is everyone?”
“Left five minutes ago on the first bird. We stayed behind until the last minute, just in case.”
“Any casualties?”
“Negative.”
Well, that was something at least. He turned to one of the helo’s crew chiefs and cupped his hands over his ears. The man handed him a headset, which he promptly slid over his ears as he settled onto the deck.
He didn’t bother with radio protocols or brevity codes, but spoke as if making a private phone call. “Why did you push up the timetable?”
The voice that scratched in his ears was recognizable as Admiral Pentecost. “Collier? You made it? Did you get it?”
“Booker has it and he’s still down there. You’ve got to call off that bomber.”
There was a long uncomfortable silence. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Captain. I have my orders as well.”
“Sir, we can get it. All we need to do is set down at Booker’s location and we’ll have the damn thing!”
“Or you’ll lose the rest of your platoon. Negative, commander. Get clear of the target.”
Collier started to protest, but then something tickled at the edge of his awareness. He cocked his head sideways, as if trying to isolate a distinctive voice in a crowded room…and there it was.
Some six miles above him, a B2 stealth bomber was starting its run. It was still more than ten miles out over the Gulf of Sirte, but at a cruising speed of more than six hundred miles per hour, just shy of supersonic, it was only seconds away from the target. Its bomb bay doors were open, and in the very instant that Collier fixed it in his mind’s eye, he sensed something dropping away from beneath the boomerang shaped aircraft.
A thirty-foot long cylinder with a pair of stubby wings and four paddle-like lattice fins arranged around its tail end, the falling object looked like a second aircraft detaching from the bomber. It was, Collier knew, a bomb, and not just any bomb, but one of the largest non-nuclear explosive devices in the U.S. arsenal, the GBU/43-B Massive Ordnance Airburst Bomb, more popularly known by the acronym formed by its descriptor—MOAB—widely, and erroneously, believed to mean “the Mother of All Bombs.”
The cylinder wobbled in
mid-air for just a moment before straightening out to begin its arrow-like downward plunge. It would take a few seconds for its guidance system to establish a link with the GPS satellites orbiting the planet, and once that happened, the tail fins would begin making minute adjustments to its glide path, ensuring that it would strike the target—the center of the Atlas compound—with unfailing accuracy. Six feet above the ground, a primary detonation would scatter an enormous cloud of powdered aluminum into the air. An instant later, that fine metal mist would react with the oxygen in the atmosphere, culminating in a massive thermal shock wave that would flatten every building in the compound. Nothing would remain.
The blast would knock the concrete buildings down like dominos. Anyone unlucky enough to be inside the reach of the fuel cloud would either be vaporized, pulverized or would suffocate as the oxygen was consumed in the fuel-air explosion.
Booker would die.
And the Trinity?
He didn’t know if the talisman could survive the energies that would be unleashed when the MOAB detonated; it might. It had survived for thousands of years, weathering catastrophic upheavals that had erased entire continents, but it was by no means indestructible. One of its segments had already been damaged beyond repair.
He couldn’t take the chance of any further damage to it; he understood that now. If the Trinity died, so would the world.
As easily as he had reached out with senses to find the bomb, he now reached out with something more. How he did it was as much a mystery to him as how his hands, arms and legs responded to the nervous impulses from his brain, and just as irrelevant. He did not need to understand how; he just did it.
He seized hold of the bomb.
The helicopter lurched beneath him, and suddenly the cabin was a tumult of shouts and electronic alarms. The distraction was just enough to disrupt his concentration and he felt the bomb slip free, resuming its one-way journey.
As the Seahawk leveled out, Collier understood that he and everyone on the helicopter had almost fallen victim to a basic law of physics.
For every action, an equal and opposite reaction.
The bomb weighed more than ten tons. His hold on it had been more psychic than physical, but in the instant that he tried to stop it, the energy of that massive falling object had pushed back, with nearly fatal consequences.
Collier was only peripherally conscious of what was going on inside the helicopter; the bomb dominated his awareness. He had to stop it, and yet that was plainly impossible….
Impossible. What does that even mean? Touching a falling object from miles away with his mind was impossible. The fact that he was still alive after being blown up and buried under a collapsing building…that was impossible.
A Bible verse came to him. “With God, all things are possible.”
Now more than ever, he believed that. The problem wasn’t whether he could do the impossible; it was figuring out how to do the impossible in the thirty or so remaining seconds before the bomb reached its target.
14.
There was nothing but open desert ahead of them now, and with each passing second, they moved further away from the rendezvous and escape. Nevertheless, there were four gunmen riding ATVs right behind them, and getting to the pick-up location would require them to either go around or through the pursuers. The odds didn’t favor the latter, so Booker saw no better option than to let Mira take the lead and hope that an opportunity to outmaneuver Atlas’ men would present itself.
When they had first spied the approaching lights, Mira had reacted instantly, carving a tight turn and shouting over the buzz of engine noise for Booker to follow. He had, even as the men on the quads began shooting. In a matter of seconds, they were speeding back the way they’d come, past the ruins of the laboratory building and the wreckage his grenades had caused. At least that part had worked out; if there were any survivors from the enemy force, they had run for cover.
Mira seemed to know exactly where to go, weaving through a maze of smaller buildings toward the outer edge of the compound, and then they were on the main road leading out into the desert. The gates stood open and unmanned; aside from the security force pursuing them, the entire facility seemed to have been abandoned. Booker found that a little troubling. Had Atlas received a warning that the place was about to be leveled?
Booker didn’t think so. Atlas had ordered his men to demolish the laboratory, along with the Trinity; why would he do that if he’d known the U.S. Air Force was about to save him the trouble. That realization led to still more questions, none of which could be answered, so he pushed all speculation to the back of his mind and focused on staying alive.
Mira turned off the road and headed out across the loose sand of the Libyan Desert. As the tires of her ATV left the compacted gravel road, they threw up an enormous cloud of grit that obscured her exact location but left no doubt as to where she was or where she was headed. Booker accelerated ahead, trying to stay beside her, and was soon throwing up his own dust trail. Their headlights illuminated a low dune directly ahead. Mira charged up it without a backward glance, and Booker followed.
He felt the wheels slipping underneath him, struggling for traction on the nearly fluid surface. Off to his right, Mira was similarly struggling, but then he saw her wiggling the handlebars back and forth, carving a tight serpentine path up the dune face, and remembered his own experience with off-road driving. He imitated her technique, maintaining constant pressure on the throttle lever and turning the wheels left or right whenever he felt the machine begin to slip.
Okay, that takes care of the immediate problem, he thought. But we’re still going the wrong way.
He pulled even with Mira at the crest of the dune and then suddenly he was airborne. Without any resistance against the tires, the engine revved loudly, drowning out the whoop of elation that slipped unbidden from him lips as the ATV shot out into space above the downslope.
As the quad started to nose forward, he checked his emotions and focused on not getting himself killed. He shifted his weight back, keeping his muscles loose and his knees slightly bent in anticipation of a jolt that never came. The slope was steep enough that all four of the wheels touched down at almost exactly the same instant and the soft sand almost completely absorbed the impact of landing.
I actually made that look easy, he thought. He glanced over to see if Mira had fared as well.
She wasn’t there.
The dune face beside him was smooth and undisturbed.
He craned his head around and spied a dark shape, contrasting starkly against the sparkling sepia sand, perhaps fifty feet below the crest. He knew that it was Mira’s quad, but its headlamps were off and it was barely moving, sliding rather than rolling down the slope.
What the hell?
The haze of dust and sand above the dune glowed brightly as one of the pursuing ATVs reached the crest and screamed into view. At that same instant, a tongue of bright yellow fire licked out of the darkness above Mira’s evidently derelict vehicle, and an instant later, the buzzsaw report of fully-automatic rifle fire confirmed what Booker already knew to be true; Mira was shooting at the rider.
A shriek of pain pierced the mechanical thunder of engines and guns, and as the ATV soared past her, it heeled over, as if the rider were attempting some kind of aerobatic display. However, instead of correcting at the last instant and landing as Booker had, the machine crashed heavily to the sand and rolled end over end down the slope. The headlights cast a crazy light show in all directions, briefly illuminating the mangled remains of the rider, then winked out as the ATV came apart.
Mira’s carbine fell silent—empty—and as a second quad crested the dune right behind the first, she could do nothing but roll out of the way. This rider was less aggressive—his rear tires never left the sand—but his more cautious approach yielded no better results. When his headlamps illuminated Mira’s cast-off quad directly in his path, he wrenched the steering column left to avoid a crash. Gravity and inertia
had other plans however. Instead of swerving around the obstacle, his quad simply buried its front end in the sand and then somersaulted right into the other vehicle. There was a wet crunch as the man’s body was crushed between the two machines.
Not for the first time, Booker wondered about this woman who had appeared out of nowhere, wearing pajamas and combat gear. He was used to dealing with professional operators—sometimes he got frustrated with civilians because they lacked the skill and drive to achieve excellence—so he hadn’t automatically dismissed her as a helpless damsel in distress. Just the opposite, based on how confidently she handled the block of Semtex back in the lab building, he was pretty sure she could take care of herself. But, this was more than just knowing how to ride and shoot. She had lured their pursuers up the dune, set up a hasty ambush, and taken out two of the riders.
A hundred yards down the slope, Booker felt a twinge of humiliation. I should have been the one to think of that.
There was a flurry of noise and light as the remaining quads leaped the top of the dune right behind him, and he realized that he would have at least two more chances to make up for it.
15.
Mira’s decision to climb the dune had indeed been a tactical, if somewhat impulsive one; gaining the high ground just made sense. It was only as she rolled over the top that she saw the opportunity to strike a blow. She hadn’t anticipated being able to take out two of the ATVs; that had just been dumb luck.
Maybe not so lucky after all, she thought, glancing down at the barely discernible tangle of metal, plastic and flesh where her quad had sat a moment earlier. “Looks like I’m walking the rest of the way,” she muttered.
The last two quads broke over the top and charged down the slope. If the riders noticed her, they gave no indication; their attention seemed fixed on the lights of the escaping quad at the bottom of the dune…lights that Mira now saw were coming around, turning to face back up the hill, turning toward her.