And heard Yusuf ’s pistol bark and felt the burn in his right shoulder at the same time. The impact of the shot shoved him through the hole and into the snow behind the stable. He landed hard, and when he tried to catch himself with his right hand, a blast of pain shot up his arm and through his shoulder and stole his breath. He couldn’t even scream.
Then he heard the second shot. It missed, scattering the snow in front of him, giving him the strength to pull himself up and run for the woods. A few hundred meters to the south, on the back side of this hill, a narrow creek marked the boundary between the Repard property and the state park behind it. Eventually the creek reached the state road that connected Addison and Corning. If he could just get to the road.
He blundered through the woods, cracking branches and scattering snow with every step. He knew he was leaving a trail, but he couldn’t help himself. His shoulder still hurt, but instead of an electric charge, now he felt a solid lump of heat and pain, as though a charcoal briquette had been sewn into his back.
Behind him, and not far, he heard Yusuf, blundering through branches. His one hope: Yusuf wasn’t used to this terrain either. Every thirty seconds or so, Yusuf’s flashlight caught Bashir, but each time Bashir ducked and turned sideways to escape. He forced himself not to look back. Whether Yusuf was ten meters away or a hundred didn’t matter. The creek. And then the road.
Even so, Bashir felt himself fading as he topped the hill and made his way down to the creek. The snow was thicker here, and Bashir’s jeans and sneakers were soaked and his feet had turned to blocks of wood. Though he wanted to run, he had to step carefully. He couldn’t risk a fall. Yusuf would surely be on him. His shoulder was still leaking blood, a warm trail down his chest and right arm.
“Stop,” Yusuf yelled behind him. “Stop running. Let’s talk about this.”
“The tiger speaks,” Bashir yelled back, but his breath was faint and he wished he’d said nothing.
“What?”
Bashir saved his breath and ran, step-step-step, through the woods, lifting his legs as high as he could, thinking of the soccer drills that he’d done as a kid, bouncing the ball off his knees. A thin cloud cover had blown in but the stars still threw off enough light to reveal the contours of the rolling earth under the snow.
Step-step-step.
“Stop!” Yusuf yelled again, his voice stronger, angrier. “You can’t escape. Be a man.”
The truth. No false promises of safety. The glare of Yusuf’s flashlight caught Bashir again, more powerfully now, and Bashir knew he must be only a few steps ahead. A surge of adrenaline and fear powered through him and his steps came more quickly, and though his shoulder and arm and chest were slick with blood, somehow he drew away. Behind him, he heard Yusuf stumble and curse, and for the first time since the stable lights had snapped on he thought he might live. He reached the bottom of the hill and the creek and turned and—
His right leg slipped through the thin creek ice and onto the slick stones underneath. He lost his balance and fell and landed square on his shoulder and the charcoal in his back burned hotter than ever. He screamed, a vicious sound that seemed to come from somewhere outside him, and he knew he needed to try to stand, but the pain was overwhelming.
The flashlight caught him and he heard Yusuf coming down the hill. He made one more try, grabbing the trunk of a birch beside the creek with his good left hand and pulling himself up. He reached his feet and stumbled forward in the thin snow alongside the creek.
But the light got stronger and stronger and he knew the tiger had him now.
Then his feet were kicked out and he crashed down and knew he wouldn’t be getting up again. His burial ground would be a bed of pine needles in a country that wasn’t his.
“Turn around,” Yusuf said above him, and Bashir didn’t argue. The time for argument was through. He pushed himself against a log and rolled over and stared into the blinding glare of Yusuf’s flashlight. Behind the light, Yusuf’s breaths came fast, and despite his terror Bashir congratulated himself for making Yusuf run.
Yusuf reached down for him and Bashir promised himself that whatever happened he wouldn’t beg and then—
Yusuf reached under his good left arm and pulled him up and frog-marched him back to the stable, retracing his steps. Bashir could hardly see the path and twice needed to lean against a tree to rest. He supposed he was going into shock from the blood he’d lost.
The third time he tried to rest, Yusuf reached over and squeezed his bad shoulder and the pain brought him back to reality for a few seconds. “Coward,” Yusuf said. “We’re almost there.”
IN THE STABLE, Nasiji waited for them.
“Sit down, Bashir,” he said, and Bashir stumbled gratefully down.
“Stable floor,” he said. “No better or worse than pine needles.”
“Shut up and look at me,” Nasiji said. Bashir raised his head. “Are you a spy, Bashir?”
“No. Are you, Sayyid?”
“Then why?”
“It’s too much,” Bashir said. “Much too much.”
“So you tried to destroy all we’ve done? All of us, you included? Yusuf always said you were weak.”
Bashir’s head drooped. But he did mean to ask something. What? Then he remembered. “Did Thalia—”
“Tell us? Of course she did.”
Bashir closed his eyes. “Do what you want with him, Yusuf,” Nasiji said, and Bashir heard him walk away. And then Yusuf’s steady breathing was the only sound in the stable.
“You shouldn’t have run,” Yusuf said. “I would have made this easier. Traitor.”
Bashir opened his eyes to see Yusuf whetting a blade.
“Don’t worry, Yusuf,” he said. “It’ll be easy enough.”
And when Yusuf kneeled astride him and dug the knife into his gut and tore open skin and sinew and arteries—
And then repositioned himself and raised and lowered the blade into Bashir as rhythmically, mechanically as a jackhammer cutting concrete.
Bashir didn’t argue, didn’t even scream. He just closed his eyes and saw the tiger in the Cairo zoo. And, sure enough, the pain rose like the whine of a teakettle and then disappeared.
THEN ONLY A MAN and a corpse were left in the stable, twined as lovers, and Yusuf’s breath came fast and hot as he worked the knife into Bashir’s throat and face. Yusuf chopped until the body underneath him no longer had a nose or ears or eyes or a mouth. Even then Yusuf wasn’t satisfied, even then he wanted to do more, but he couldn’t think of anything else. So he dug the blade into Bashir’s chest and left it there and stood and walked out of the stable and into the clean white snow.
35
Wells opened his eyes and woke, as sharply as a bat snapped in half over an angry batter’s knee, to find Exley standing over him. He didn’t know how long he’d slept but he felt strong and ready, his reflexes fueled by the sure knowledge of combat to come.
“Time is it?”
“Eight.” Six hours. He’d been out longer than he thought.
“Did you sleep, Jennifer? You shouldn’t push like this.” She looked slack, exhausted, her face shiny with sweat. Even as he stood up, she sagged against his desk.
“We tracked them into the country,” she said. “They flew from St. John’s to Newark. January 13. Canadian passports.”
“We’re sure.”
“Checked their pictures with the crew on the Juno. It’s them. They came in under the names Jad Ghani and Kamel al-Bachary. From Montreal. The Canadians have addresses and are waiting for our go to kick down doors up there. That’s the good news. Bad news is there’s nothing on this end. The airlines and rental agencies don’t have anything in their databases. They used other names for the rentals, or didn’t fly or rent a car. Or didn’t use a national agency.”
“These guys.”
Exley closed her eyes. “FBI has every agent between Boston and Washington hitting rental companies, see if anybody recognizes their pictures. They’re trying to
get them done by noon, then on to hotels and motels. Meanwhile we got a warrant for the credit card companies. But those databases are so big it’ll take some time to check their names.”
“Anything else?”
“All the toll takers at the bridges and tunnels into New York and up and down Ninety-five have their pictures. Though if they have an E-Z Pass, it won’t make a difference. We put some radiation sniffers on the Beltway and the tunnels, too, but if the bomb’s properly shielded, they won’t do much. Specially if it’s HEU and not plutonium.”
“So basically if we can’t find them before they leave whatever safe house they’re at. ”
Now Exley looked at Wells. “The odds are bad, yes. Not impossible, but bad.”
“The Germans get anything yet?”
“The kid, Bernard’s son, Helmut, he’s talking, confirms he saw one of them. The guy who came in under the Jad passport. Says the guy spoke German and that Bernard always called him Sayyid. But nothing more, no phone numbers or e-mails or anything.”
“How about Penn State? Anything there?”
“Nothing yet.”
“So when do we go public?”
“Hasn’t been decided.”
“What about the Russians?”
“We gave them the names and pictures and they said they’ll get back to us. Last I heard, they still haven’t told us what’s really in the crates or even confirmed these guys are connected to the missing material. The president’s going to talk to Medvedev directly as soon as possible, but who knows what that’ll do. And the White House is trying to figure out whether they should cancel the State of the Union tonight. So there’s your update.”
Wells laid the back of his hand on Exley’s forehead to test her temperature and found her running a fever. “You ought to lie down, Jenny.”
“I’ll sleep in the infirmary for a couple of hours.”
“Why don’t you go home?”
“Why don’t you come with me?”
He was silent. Her eyes went wet and then her cheeks and eyes hardened, her face becoming a mask, the emotion disappearing inch by inch. Say yes, he told himself. You don’t have to do this. But he did.
“You know,” she said. “I’ll go home, wait for you. You don’t even have to come. If you can promise me one thing. Promise me when we find these guys, you won’t go after them. You’ll sit tight here with Ellis.”
“It’s my op.”
“They’ll put half the army in the air. They don’t need you. You’re in the way. And it goes off, what then? You going to outrun the fireball?”
“I can’t ask someone else to take a risk I won’t take myself.”
She put her arm around his neck. A peace offering. “You’ve taken enough risks. Some might say you’ve gotten greedy. Let someone else have this one. Come home.”
He didn’t know how to convince her. Probably because she was right. After a minute of silence, she ran her hand down his arm, took his hand.
“This thing you have in you, this thing that won’t let you stop, I have it, too,” she said. “I came back here. I swore I wouldn’t, but I did. The difference between you and me is that I have some other things, too. My kids. I thought I had you. You, you just have this.”
“I have a son. I have you.”
“You haven’t seen Evan in how long? And you don’t have me, John. You don’t.” She stood and kissed him on the lips, a wet openmouthed kiss that brought him back to their very first kiss, barely two years before, on a day when she’d saved his life and nearly died in the process.
The kiss went on and he closed his eyes and pulled her to him. But she put a hand on his face and pushed him away. And without another word, she walked out.
THE CALL CAME three hours later. An FBI team had found the Avis office in Morristown, New Jersey, where “Jad” and “Kamel” rented their car. The agent who’d been working on January 13 wasn’t at the office when they arrived. But when they tracked him to his apartment, he immediately recognized the photographs. Jad had rented a Pontiac G6, dark blue, 11,347 miles, for a month. He’d used an international driver’s license and a Turkish passport and a MasterCard, all in the name of Dawood Askari. How exactly he’d gotten those useful items was a question they’d answer later.
For now they had the name he was using in the United States. And something even more precious. Avis equipped its vehicles with LoJack, the antitheft system, which could be activated remotely to broadcast a stolen car’s location. According to the system, the G6 was parked on a farm outside the town of Addison, New York — three hundred miles from Washington, and slightly closer to Manhattan. The farm belonged to a surgeon named Bashir Is’mail, who worked at a hospital in Corning.
Now two companies of Rangers had been scrambled from Fort Drum, a big army base about 150 miles north of Addison. FBI agents were en route from Buffalo and Albany. The New York State Police had been given the plate number and description of the G6 and asked to set up observation posts — not roadblocks — on the highways and state roads around Corning. And a half-dozen F-16 fighter-bombers were being put in the air from Andrews Air Force Base.
Meanwhile, the job of taking the house had been given to a Delta unit that was officially called the 9th Special Operations Group/Emergency Response and unofficially known as Red Team. Red Team had two squads, one based at Andrews and the other at West Point. It worked alongside the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a group of scientists responsible for finding and defusing nuclear and dirty bombs. The Red Team soldiers carried gamma and alpha ray detectors and radiological protective gear and were authorized to shoot on sight anyone they reasonably suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon. Each Red Team squad had twelve soldiers and two Black Hawks dedicated to its transport and was ready to scramble within thirty minutes, twenty-four hours a day.
“When are they taking off?” Wells said. He’d been sitting in Shafer’s office as Shafer flicked between calls and e-mail and IM to track the plan. But Shafer was focused on his screen and paid no attention to the question. “Ellis.”
“Company C is shipping out in fifteen from Andrews,” Shafer said. “They’re gonna set down in Corning, switch over to SUVs that the state police will have waiting, go in on the ground instead of helicopter so whoever’s at the farm won’t hear them coming. I don’t want to tell you this, but they’ve got a spot for you. They’ve got eleven guys and you’ll make twelve. You want to ride with them?”
“What do you think?”
“What I think and what I wish are two different things.”
“Aren’t they always?”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells stood on a helipad at Langley, shielding his eyes from the winter sun as the Black Hawk swept in. He wore a helmet and his lightweight bulletproof vest and carried an M-4, an automatic rifle with a grenade launcher attached below the barrel.
The helicopter touched down and Wells ran through the frigid wind-storm whipped up by its blades and jumped into the cabin. He strapped himself in and the crew chief hopped out to check on him and then they took off. He didn’t expect to know any of the men, but as he looked around he recognized one, Brett Gaffan, a sergeant he’d met a few months before in Afghanistan. Gaffan and he had spent a long night together, pinned on open ground under fire from Taliban guerrillas.
After the mission, they’d traded e-mail addresses and vowed to stay in touch, but they hadn’t. Wells guessed that his reputation intimidated Gaffan, who wouldn’t want Wells to think he was sucking up, keeping in contact in case Wells could do him a favor. But Wells had no such excuse. He’d simply forgotten. He remembered the men he killed but forgot the ones he saved or fought beside. You just have this, Exley had said. He didn’t want to believe her, but she was right.
The Black Hawk’s cabin was frigid as they flew over the hills of western Maryland and then into Pennsylvania, roughly tracking U.S. 15. They passed a stretch of open fields, two low ridges facing each other, the landscape as familiar to Wells as a dream, and as the helicopter swept
by he realized he was seeing Gettysburg. But even before he could imagine Grant and Lee and the armies in blue and gray, the fields were gone. They were running at 170 knots, roughly 200 miles an hour, the effective maximum cruising speed for these modified Hawks.
They rolled north along ground that was heavily wooded and hilly, blurred towns disappearing as fast as they came, heating oil tankers and tractor-trailers chugging on the roads beneath them. At Harrisburg, the State Capitol flashed before them and then was gone. For a while they flew along the Susquehanna, the river flowing wide and sluggish, chunks of ice floating in its dark brown water. In front of them, the hills grew until they were the Appalachians and the patches of snow on the ground thickened until they weren’t patches anymore.
No one in the cabin spoke and no one smiled. Wells understood. The quickest reflexes and all the Kevlar in the world wouldn’t matter if this bomb blew. So Wells closed his eyes and listened to the music in his head, Springsteen asking, Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? / Or is it something worse?.
Would he ever see Exley again? Whether or not he survived?
THE HELICOPTER SLOWED and Wells opened his eyes. They came down in an empty parking lot outside an abandoned factory, its bricks cracking and its smokestacks stained. The other three Black Hawks were already down, and eighteen soldiers stood beside them, checking their gear, along with about fifteen state troopers. Four Suburbans, two marked and two unmarked, and two unmarked Crown Vics waited for them, lights on and engines running.
As the fourth Black Hawk landed, the Deltas began to huddle around a tall man who, unusually for a Special Operations officer, wore a standard camouflage uniform, a lieutenant colonel’s oak leaves on his shoulderboards, and Giese on his name tag. As Wells joined the huddle, Giese looked at him and nodded. Wells nodded back, all the introduction he needed, and all he would get. Giese spread a four-foot-square satellite photo of the Repard farm on the hood of one of the Suburbans. The property had two buildings, the main house and a stable behind it. The G6 was clearly visible, parked in front of the main house, along with a second vehicle, a Ford Expedition.
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