* * *
Túcume lowered the pistol, then reached through the window and pulled Babin’s body upright. He had killed a number of men in his life as an army commander but never one so close to him.
He went around to the other side of the van and opened the door. He reached on the floor and picked up the cell phone, then dashed it on the street. It broke in two. Not satisfied, he stood over each piece and shot it. It took two bullets to hit the second piece, his hand was shaking so badly.
He threw the pistol aside and went back to the truck. He thought from Babin’s directions earlier that the waterfront was nearby somewhere; he’d drive the van into the water and be done with it all.
But which way was it? Left? Right?
Slowly, he backed down the road, struggling to see and control the van at the same time. As he reached the intersection, the ground began to shake with the heavy beat of helicopters overhead.
135
One of the crew members in the cockpit spotted the van backing down the dead-end street a few blocks from the historic district in downtown Philadelphia. Dean went to the side of the Pave Low, peering down through the open door.
“Yeah! Could be it,” he yelled into the interphone. He grabbed hold of the rail near the door and punched the button to the shared police channel, starting to describe the vehicle.
“They’re in the center of the city, not far from Congress Hall and the Liberty Bell,” the pilot of the Little Bird shouted to Lia. “We’re real close.”
“Get us there!” she yelled.
Karr jerked behind her, the whole helicopter seeming to rock as he leaned out the side and looked down. They were maybe fifty feet over the street, so close to some of the rooftops that they could have stepped off onto them. The pilot barked into his microphone, talking to another nearby helicopter.
“That’s got to be it,” yelled Karr. “Watch him — he’s going up Eighth.”
The helicopter veered left, spinning around a building and then running in the direction the van was taking. It went in the direction of 676, the arterial that ran between 76 and 95 north of City Hall. It cut left, then right, veered suddenly, and bashed the end of a police cruiser parked across the entrance ramp to the highway. The van veered onto the sidewalk, careened against the guardrail, and made it onto the roadway.
“Stop him!” Lia shouted to the pilot. “Use the machine-gun.”
“We’re going to.”
The small helicopter bucked and pitched almost straight down, its tail whipping around. The truck veered across the divider as the pilot began to fire; bullets flashed along the roadway and right under the truck. The wheels blew out as the chopper veered off.
“All right, all right, he’s stopping,” yelled Karr in the back. “Get us down! Get us down!”
“We’re in,” said the pilot, gliding for a landing on the roadway ahead.
As they settled down, Dean’s helicopter appeared right above. Lia closed her eyes, sure they were going to hit.
“Oh God, Charlie Dean,” she whispered. “Oh God.”
“Lia, come on!” yelled Karr, jumping from the rear as the Little Bird set down. “Let’s go, let’s go! I got the front; you got the rear. Go!”
Lia, in disbelief, pitched herself out of the cockpit, amazed that they hadn’t collided.
* * *
“No offense, but we’ll do better if I use that,” said Dean, putting his hand on the M4 carbine the crew chief had in his hand. It wasn’t a request; Dean took the gun firmly in hand and in the same motion leapt to the ground, running forward as the van slammed to a stop against the concrete road barrier and spun sideways.
Dean took two steps. The driver of the van turned his head toward him.
When you have the shot, fire. That’s the only thing that ever matters, kid. When you have the shot, fire.
The voice Dean heard was Turk’s, muttered in the jungle some thirty years before. It was the one piece of advice no experience had ever contradicted, the one thing anyone had ever told Dean that he knew to be true under any circumstance.
And by the time Dean heard it in his head, he had already pressed the trigger on the automatic rifle. Three bullets struck the driver of the van in the head, taking off a good part of the skull and killing him instantly.
“Charlie Dean!” yelled a voice close to him, and for a second Dean thought it was Turk, back from the dead, back from the war he would always be fighting, congratulating him. But it was Karr, yelling at him, telling him he was going to flank the van and to watch out for the rear.
“I got the back! I got the back!” screamed Lia, appearing to Dean’s right.
Dean covered them, advancing slowly, gun trained on the van.
“Dead guy!” yelled Karr. “They’re both down. We’re OK! We’re OK!”
“We have the bomb here!” said Lia in the back. “Jesus, Charlie!”
“I’m here,” said Dean. He went around to the back of the van. “Are you all right?”
She bent over the large crate in the back. “I love you,” she told him.
Dean stayed still for a moment, frozen. “I love you, too.”
Karr had climbed into the back, pulling off the blanket and wood to expose the guts of the bomb.
“There’s a timer here,” Karr told them. “Moving.”
“The bomb’s set?” said Dean.
“Oh yeah.” Karr got down on his knees next to the warhead. “We need the tool kit. Tool kit!”
Lia jumped from the van to get it. As she did, Dean grabbed her arm. They looked at each other, only for a moment; then he let go and she ran to the helicopter.
Leaving Karr to help her might not have been the right thing to do, Dean realized. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Dean climbed into the back.
“You got a flashlight, Charlie?” said Karr, who already had one out.
Dean took out his penlight and shone its beam on the area where Karr was working. What looked like a large digital clock dial sat at the side of a metal cage with circuit boards in it.
“Tommy, Charlie, Lia, stand by for Mr. Rubens,” said Telach over the communications system.
“We’re here,” said Karr.
“Very good, Tommy,” said Rubens. “What’s your situation?”
“Looks like they grafted a cell-phone type trigger in, along with a backup timer, wired into the trigger section on a bypass. Taking the place of the proximity stuff, that’s gone. Cell phone setup looks like a Chechen IED.”
“The bomb people are on the line,” said Rubens. “What does the timer say?”
“Twenty-two minutes.”
“We can put it in the Pave Low and take it out to sea,” suggested Dean.
“Never make it, Charlie,” said Karr, looking at the circuit boards and describing them to the people in the Art Room.
“Tommy, go directly for the lookout code,” said Rubens.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
“You have much more time than you require.” said Rubens. His voice was cold and distant, an accountant adding a long and boring sequence of numbers.
Karr looked up at Dean. “You sure you want to be this close?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, I guess not.”
Lia slid the tool kit across the van floor. Dean took out a bigger flashlight and held it for Karr.
Emergency vehicles were arriving around them, and two more helicopters hovered overhead.
Karr took a tiny jeweler’s screwdriver and hex wrench and eased one of the circuit boards up from the assembly, being careful to keep the wire harness attached. He did the same with the second board, revealing a small panel with what looked to Dean like a miniature bicycle tumbler embedded in a long plastic box.
“OK, what I need here is more light,” said Karr. He straightened, blew a big wad of air through his teeth, and then took another long and thin jeweler’s screwdriver from the case. In the meantime, Dean took two of the flashlights
from the tool kit and held them over the work space.
“A little closer,” whispered Karr.
Dean lowered the lights. His arms were starting to get heavy and tired. He remembered holding a work lamp for his dad when he was thirteen or fourteen, trying to fix the family car in the driveway one night after dark.
“Ready for the code,” said Karr. He blew another long wad of air from his chest, hunkering over the bomb with his tiny screwdriver.
“Six characters, all the same? That’s their kill code?” said Karr after they were read. “You sure?”
The expert on the other end of the line assured him that he was.
“I’m not arguing with you,” said Kan. “But I really want to be correct here.”
The expert replied that there was no doubt.
“All right. But man, did these Russian guys go to MIT or what?”
Karr — an RPI graduate — moved the tumblers one by one to proper stops.
“Done?” asked Dean as he straightened again.
“Heh,” said Karr, fishing a set of probes connected by a nest of wires from the bag. He placed the needlelike tips of the probes into the board one at a time, then took a small oscilloscope from the tool kit, along with a voltage / resistance meter. He scowled at the interior of the bomb as he found the right places to connect the wires, but otherwise he could have been working on a copy machine rather than a nuke.
“You want the one with the red wires,” said the techie.
“Are you sure?” asked Karr. “I think it’s the yellow.”
“Yellow? Hold on, hold on,” said the techie.
Dean glanced at Lia, then at Karr, who remained bent over the front of the warhead, his head so near the device he could have kissed it.
“Red or yellow?” said Karr.
“It’s red here.”
“Are you positive?”
“I — let me double-check.”
“Don’t bother,” said Karr, straightening. He was grinning. He pointed to the oscilloscope. “Flatline, Charlie. See that? This baby is dead.”
“What?” said the techie.
Karr pointed at the scope. “That’s flat, right?” he asked Dean.
“Yeah,” said Dean.
“It’s disarmed.”
“How did you know which wire?” asked Dean.
“Sometimes you just got to go with your gut,” said Karr. He stretched his neck; Dean heard it crack.
Lia had her arms folded.
“They sent him to school last year to learn how to defuse Russian nukes for a mission we were on,” she said. “He memorized all of the tech manuals. He probably knows more than the experts they have in the Art Room. I’ll bet he didn’t even need them to read their kill code.”
“Still comes down to a guess, Princess,” said Karr, laughing as he hopped out of the van.
Dean looked at the framework of the now-inert warhead. There were no yellow wires to be seen anywhere.
“Tommy can be a real jerk, you know that?” Lia told Dean.
“That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking,” he said, leaning over to kiss her.
136
The president had never been to the Art Room, and so his visit to the NSA two days after the bomb had been defused presented Rubens with a rather unique problem: should the President of the United States go through the rigorous search procedure that everyone else had to?
The president took the weight off him when he arrived, telling Rubens that he wanted to “experience everything like your people do.” Still, Rubens worried — irrationally, he admitted to himself — that the security people would inadvertently find some reason to require the president to go through a strip search. Downstairs — two Secret Service people accompanying him — Rubens let Telach describe some of the capabilities and functions of the Art Room. Marcke was duly impressed and even asked Rockman if he played reruns on the monitors when he got bored.
“Just joking, son,” said the president as the runner blanched.
A small awards ceremony had been arranged in one of the upstairs lounges. Tommy Karr beamed as the president strode over and shook his hand.
“We meet again, Mr. Karr,” said Marcke, who had stopped by Karr’s hospital room in Europe several months before. “Where’s that girl of yours?”
“At school in France, sir.”
“You better hook up with her soon, or whatever you young people are calling it these days,” said the president. “Don’t let her get away.”
Karr blushed.
“Ambassador Jackson, I was hoping I would see you,” said Marcke, taking Jackson’s hand. “You did a good job with Aznar. He told our ambassador he owes many favors in the future.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll see how much that means when we actually want something down the line,” added Marcke wryly. “Mr. Rubens told me what a help you’d been. I hope you’ll stay on.”
“He asked me to, sir.”
“Good. Please do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marcke turned to some of the young people on Johnny Bib’s staff, congratulating each one by name. His recall was incredible, thought Rubens; he’d given the president a list with faces the day before when the visit had been arranged, but how much time could he have had to memorize it?
Marcke worked his way through the small group, then said good-bye; he was on his way to Pennsylvania to thank the people of the Commonwealth for coming through the crisis.
“I understand the warhead has been taken to Nevada to be disassembled,” said Marcke as they rode down in the elevator.
“Yes, sir.”
“Would it have exploded?”
“No question.”
“Some people think it would have been inert.”
“No. It would have gone.”
“Good work on this, Billy. It was a gutsy call on Philadelphia.”
“It was — the product of a great deal of staff research,” said Rubens. “I was only the messenger.”
Marcke smiled at him. Rubens glanced at the two Secret Service people at the back of the elevator car. This was as alone as they were going to get.
“I wonder, sir — about the national security adviser’s post. I–I would like to be considered.”
“George told me you didn’t want it.”
“I believe I made a mistake. I was hasty, and did not give it the proper consideration.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” The door opened behind them. The president’s aides were standing in a knot nearby.
“Oh.” Rubens felt as if the elevator had suddenly plunged a hundred feet. “Ms. Collins?”
“At the present time, I don’t think anyone from the CIA would do well in the spotlight. I’ve gone ahead and chosen Donna Bing out at Stanford. She worked for George Bush as undersecretary of defense; I believe you know her.”
“An excellent choice,” said Rubens softly. He remained in the elevator, watching as the president and his aides strode away.
137
Dean climbed up the small rise from the stream and gazed in the direction of the narrow clearing where the huge buck had appeared a few days before. He brought his binoculars up, scanning the nearby woods carefully, hoping he would see the buck again.
“You’re not really quitting, are you?” said Lia, trudging up behind him.
“Ssshhh.”
“You can’t leave.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it.”
“Mr. Rubens is going to get that girl from Peru a job. He thinks he can find something in the non-secure section of the agency. Or over at State.”
“That’s good.”
“I know you’re not leaving,” she added.
“Maybe not,” Dean admitted. “This is where I saw that buck I told you about.”
Lia took out her own binoculars and examined the woods. They stood there for five, ten minutes, neither talking. Dean had suggested they come here after the mission was over. Rubens had called yesterday
to tell them that the president wanted to honor them as heroes; Dean had told him, not with much diplomacy, that he’d prefer to stay in the woods.
And Lia said she wanted to be with Dean.
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you when you came to help me,” Lia told him now, putting down her field glasses. “I–I thought that being helped meant I was weak. All my life, I guess, I’ve thought that.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I don’t like being scared, Charlie Dean.”
He turned and looked down into her face. “It’s not the worst thing.”
“What is?”
“Being scared for somebody else when you can’t do anything about it.”
“Being alone is worse, I think. Not on a mission — really alone. I think that’s really what I’m afraid of. That’s the real fear. Everything else — it’s a reaction to it.”
“You’re not alone.”
As he bent to kiss her, he thought he heard something moving in the woods. How perfect it would be, he thought, if the big buck appeared now.
He straightened and picked up his glasses. Lia did the same. But they saw nothing, and though they stayed on the knoll for more than an hour, the big buck never came.
STEPHEN COONTS
As a naval aviator, STEPHEN COONTS flew combat missions during the Vietnam War. A former attorney and the author of fourteen New York Times bestselling novels, he resides with his wife and son in Nevada. He maintains a Web site at www.coonts.com.
Deep Black co-author JIM DEFELICE’S most recent solo effort is Cyclops One. He lives in upstate New York and can be reached at [email protected].
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