There were two guards in each tower. Their night-vision systems were mounted on unipods. The guards took turns at the huge binoculars while the others manned what looked to be 50-caliber machine guns. The machine guns were positioned on mobile tripods, no doubt for daylight concealment.
But there was something else about the guards that Hawker found even more disconcerting. They were dressed in uniforms unfamiliar to Hawker. Their jackets had the pleats and drawn blouses usually associated with British officers. But these guards weren’t British. They wore white turbans instead of field caps. And they certainly weren’t Gurkhas.
It stunned Hawker momentarily. He could make no sense of it.
But then he remembered what the lapidarist had said about the rumor that Nevada Mining and Assay was controlled by Middle Eastern money. Money from the Islamic nations. Iraq or Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Iran, or one of the other oil nations.
Suddenly all the little pieces fell neatly into place. And the picture the completed puzzle made was frightening as hell.
How could such a thing happen in a country as powerful as the United States? But then, without another moment’s thought, Hawker knew. America was controlled by a Congress that was all too soft on outsiders who wanted in; a Congress that insisted the laws of business acquisition be applied to aliens with the same free hand that was extended to Americans. They had, in effect, opened the doors of the vault and ushered the enemies in, bidding them to sit down, relax and take what they wanted.
This was the Congress of the limousine liberals. Rich kids disguised as adult intellectuals. Men and women with egos proportional to their families’ wealth, who sneeringly dismissed the middle-class conservatives as Archie Bunker clones. And just as all spoiled children one day turn against their parents, these “public servants” had turned against the source of their parents’ wealth—America. These were the destructive ones. They shielded themselves with humanitarian banners while methodically trying to break the backs of the middle class with their welfare states and open-door policies.
Hawker could not stomach them.
But now they had opened the door too far. If what Hawker suspected was true, even the liberals of the Democratic far left could not ignore this threat.
Or perhaps they could. Perhaps they would welcome it.
Hawker slowly lowered the Star-Tron scope. It crossed his mind that what he had uncovered was a danger of such great magnitude that he should perhaps contact federal authorities. Get help. Because, after all, there was the possibility that he might fail.
But what would he tell them? That he had seen guards wearing turbans?
They would laugh him right out the door.
No, he needed proof. Then and only then could he risk bringing in the authorities.
Hawker sat in the darkness for a long minute, thinking. When he was confident that what he was about to do was right, he moved off quickly toward the complex.
There was a twenty-yard killing area between the fence and the tree line. Hawker stopped just within the tree line, about a hundred yards from the front gate. The chain link fence, he noticed, wasn’t constructed of standard galvanized steel. It seemed to be made of a darker, glossier metal, as were the strands of barbed wire atop it.
It could mean only one thing: the fence was electrified.
Once again, Hawker looked through the Star-Tron scope, checking to see if anything extended over the fence—a tree limb, a telephone drop line, anything he could use to cross.
There was nothing.
It gave him only two options. The first option left a lot to luck: he could wait and hope a delivery truck or some such came down the road, then sneak a ride on it.
Hawker settled on the second option.
He made his way back up the hillside to the main road. He followed the power lines to one of the secondary transformers. It was no easy job shimmying up the pole and planting the small charge of plastic explosives, but he managed.
He was still sweating by the time he got back to the tree line outside the complex. The mining company would have a generator override system, of course. But Hawker was betting he could get through the fence before the generator kicked in.
He pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and laid out the heavy wire cutters before aiming the electronic detonator in the direction of the transformer. He hit the toggle switch.
The explosion was small: a sharp whoof and a shower of sparks in the distance. He had heard much louder transformer explosions, and was sure this one would cause no undue concern inside the complex.
The moment the lights on the guard towers flickered and went out, Hawker sprinted toward the fence, cut a vertical slash in it and crawled through.
The darkness, he knew, wouldn’t last long. Once he got to his feet, he ran toward the closest building—a corrugated toolshed—and dove behind it.
A second later, there was a generator whir, the vapor lights glowed, and soon the complex was brightly lighted again.
The blackout, though, had brought the camp to life. Voices called to each other from unseen sources. Doors opened and slammed shut. Dark figures moved into the open area beneath the guard tower. Many of them wore turbans. All looked to be East Indian. The man obviously in charge wore a neatly tailored officer’s uniform, the jacket unbuttoned as if he had been roused from an easy chair.
Hawker could not see him clearly. And he could not understand the language they spoke. But he did hear the man’s name spoken once, voiced loudly as one of the guards called for him.
His name was Hamadan.
Hawker knew he would have to wait until things settled down. To move now would be to commit suicide.
It was 10:18 according to his Seiko Submariner.
He flattened himself against the ground and carefully planned his course of action as he waited. To his left were the guard tower and the main gate. Ahead of him was the four-story steel building. Behind that was the imposing cement structure.
Hawker decided he would break into the concrete building first. It looked like a laboratory, and the laboratory was probably where they would have records of their dealings with Jason Stratton.
By 11:10, it was sufficiently quiet to move.
Hawker crawled on elbows and knees across the clearing, aware that at any second, one of the guards could open fire. The small outbuildings were the only cover he had, and he used them. Once he passed so close to a dormitory that he could hear the men laughing and talking through the open windows.
When he finally arrived at the cement building, the nerve-racking work began. The painstaking work of careful burglary. From his knapsack, Hawker took two vials. One was an extremely powerful but inert acid. The other was the catalyst that would activate the acid. Using an eyedropper, Hawker deposited drops in both locks of the steel door. The acid fumed and hissed, eating away the internal works.
When that was done, Hawker took a long wire with alligator clips on both ends. The burglar alarm, he hoped, would be standard in that the door would be wired to an internal electrical circuit. Any break in the circuit would set off the alarm.
Hawker cracked the door just enough to see the conductor plates on the door and door seal. He hooked an alligator clip to each conductor plate, then opened the door enough for him to slide through—and was damn careful not to kick the wire loose as he did.
Once the door was closed behind him, Hawker breathed easier.
The hallway of the building was dark. The floor was cold linoleum. The place had an astringent odor, a mixture of alcohol and industrial-strength cleaner.
Hawker went quickly down the hall, peering into the rooms. It was, indeed, a laboratory. The place was filled with complex-looking electronic equipment and rooms with long marble tables.
He knew there had to be some kind of office center, and he finally found it. A wide, efficient room with modern desks, personal computers and typewriters. An unfamiliar flag was draped on a pole in the corner. Hawker took the time to unfurl it: red, white and blue horizontal bands
. In the center were three green stars.
It took Hawker a moment to place it.
It was the flag of Iraq. The country of the lunatic dictator and his lunatic followers.
One of their jets had once attacked a Navy Phantom. And the Iraqi had been blown into the wild blue yonder.
Hawker released the flag. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The bastards were really doing it. They were really going to try it right under America’s nose.
Hawker moved quickly now. The file cabinets were locked, but it was an easy matter to lift them and extract the lock bar from beneath. But that did not help. All the files were in Arabic.
Frustrated, Hawker turned to the computers on the desks. Their keyboards were locked, and there were no keys to be seen. But then he realized something that he found astounding. As evidenced by the disc drives, the computers weren’t hooked in to a main computer bank. All their information was kept on 5½-inch floppy disks—and the disks were stored in ready view in plastic files atop the desks. The stupidity of such a thing in a compound protected by such a complex security system almost made him laugh.
But he didn’t take the time to laugh. He cracked open the plastic files and began packing the disks into his knapsack.
When he had them all, he hurried through the doorway and back down the hall so that he might retrace his steps to the mountainside and freedom.
But it wasn’t to be.
As he passed one of the hallway intersections, a dark figure jumped out at him. The figure had something in its hand. Something dark and heavy and very, very hard.
And then the world went all dreamy and star bright, and James Hawker was falling, falling, fighting to stay in the world of the conscious … and the world of the living.
seventeen
Hawker battled the unconsciousness, fought the withering pain as he went down.
He knew that to fall unconscious was to die.
And the stakes were much too high for that. The stakes were far more important than his own life.
As Hawker tumbled downward, his right hand swept toward the shoulder holster that held the Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. The weight of it was cool and solid in his fist.
His attacker was a bulky dark shadow to the left, stooped from having just delivered the blow. There was something in his hand. A club, maybe. Or perhaps the butt of a revolver.
Hawker hit the floor with his shoulder and rolled. The attacker’s boot slammed the floor behind him, trying to smash Hawker’s head.
The vigilante squeezed off two quick shots. The .44 magnum sounded like a cannon. The explosions rang down the hallway, and there was the good smell of gunpowder.
His attacker was catapulted backward against the wall. The sound of bone and flesh cracking against cement was sickening. It was as if he had been hit by a speeding truck.
But the man never felt the impact of collision.
The powerful .44 slugs had ripped his chest apart. He was dead before he ever hit the ground.
Hawker got woozily to his knees. He touched his head and wondered why he was sweating so badly. He studied the black sheen on his hands stupidly. It took him a long moment to realize he wasn’t sweating. He was bleeding.
He sat heavily on the floor, fighting the urge to lie down and rest for a moment. He had been in that gauzy, slow-motion world of near-unconsciousness before. Back in his boxing days. And he knew that if he held on, the worst of it would pass.
He sat and waited. After the two gunshots, he expected to hear the alarms and gongs and sirens of warning. He expected lights to flash on as the Iraqi soldiers came running to kill him.
But there was only silence.
Maybe the laboratory was better insulated than most buildings. Maybe the sound of the gunshots had not passed through the thick cement walls.
Hawker didn’t want to wait around too long to find out.
To his right was a door on which was posted the silhouette of a man wearing a hat.
A restroom.
Hawker got shakily to his feet, pushed through the doorway and switched on the light.
An eerie stranger looked back at him from the mirror. The left side of his face was covered with blood. Beneath the blood was the khaki greasepaint. It made him look like some jungle creature who had snuck to a water hole after devouring its fresh kill.
Hawker took off the Navy watch cap and inspected his wound. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. The skin had split like a ripe plum, but the skull was still firm. If it hadn’t been for the cushion of his wool cap, the blow might have killed him.
He rinsed his head under cold water until the bleeding slowed, then went back out into the hall.
All was still quiet. The corpse lay sprawled on the floor in a lake of blood.
Hawker’s mission had been accomplished for the night. He had stolen the computer records undetected, and now all he had to do was make his escape.
So why was he so reluctant to leave?
He knew. Getting in had been relatively easy. Getting out was another matter. The fence was still electrified, and there was no way he could futz the power lines from within. That meant he would have to blast his way out. And that would bring him a lot of attention. Deadly attention.
There was the very real chance he wouldn’t be able to outrun them. Maybe Wendy Nierson, the free mountain spirit, was right. Maybe he would die very soon.
Maybe he would die tonight.
If so, Hawker was damn determined to take “Iraqi” Mining and Assay and most of its men with him.
Pulling a blue sausage roll of plastic explosives from his knapsack, Hawker began molding heavy charges to the foundation of the building and to the complex electronic apparatus in the lab.
Into each charge he inserted an electronic detonating device.
It was just after midnight when he finished. He made his way back to the front door and crawled outside, once again being careful not to trip his own extension wire.
The compound was quiet. The guards in their towers surveyed the tree line beyond the fence, obviously confident that they need fear attack only from the outside. Shortly, Hawker knew, they would discover just how wrong they were. Because soon he would have to blast his way out and run for his life.
Hawker’s eyes settled on the massive corrugated ore processing plant fifty meters away. Until it came time to run, he might as well do all the damage he could.
He crawled on elbows and knees to the wall of the factory. Flush against the back wall were two massive steel pods built on stilts: chemical storage units.
The vigilante planted heavy charges beneath each of them and inserted the detonators. He would have liked to get inside the factory and plant charges there, but he would have had to go through the time-consuming burglary ritual again.
Besides, when the chemical tanks went, half the ore processing plant would go with them.
Satisfied with his work, Hawker began to consider through which portion of the fence he should try to escape. It seemed unwise to return the way he had come, for that would put his pursuers on a beeline course to the Jaguar.
Hawker had just settled on using one of his grenades to blow open the gate at the railroad dump track when he noticed the silhouette of a man against the window of one of the smaller outbuildings.
There was something familiar in the man’s face structure and carriage; something in the unbuttoned officer’s jacket that touched one of the memory electrodes.
Then Hawker knew. He had seen him earlier. Just after the lights came back on. It was the man who had shouted out orders in Arabic. It was the man they called Hamadan.
Hawker couldn’t resist the opportunity.
He put the grenade away and crawled to the cottage. He stood and stole a look through the window. It was, indeed, Hamadan. He sat in a chair, with his feet on an ottoman. There was a drink on the table beside him, and there were papers and charts in his lap.
Hawker had seen his silhouette when he’d gotten up to get the drink.
&n
bsp; The vigilante went to the door and tapped twice.
Hamadan called out something in Arabic.
Hawker tapped again.
The moment the door opened, Hawker jammed the barrel of the Smith & Wesson .44 into the Iraqi’s face and forced his way in. He closed the door quietly behind.
“What do you think you are doing!” Hamadan blurted, instantly regretting that he had spoken in English.
Hawker smiled. “That’s just what I wanted to hear, Hamadan. I need some answers, and I had a feeling you were the man who could give them to me. I came here to look for a friend of mine. A guy named Jason Stratton.”
“Stratton? I know no one named Stratton. Now please, let go of my hair and take that gun from my face—”
Hawker pulled back the hammer of the Smith & Wesson. “I know too much for you to lie to me, Hamadan. Remember that. Because the next time you lie, I’m going to pull this trigger. No more warnings, no more second chances. Just bang, and you’re bound for a closed casket funeral.” Hawker yanked the man’s head roughly. “Now talk!”
Hamadan had the olive complexion and carefully tended mustache common among his countrymen. But the whimper that escaped his lips suggested he lacked the zealot’s courage. “Yes, yes, maybe I do remember that name,” he said quickly. “A man named Stratton brought some minerals to us for testing. He said he lacked the proper equipment.”
“He brought some samples of pitchblende, right?”
Hamadan’s eyes grew more worried. The American obviously did know at least part of the story. “Yes,” he said. “It was pitchblende. Mr. Stratton was very excited. He had found several samples in sedimentary clastic deposits in an ancient riverbed near Las Vegas. But he was uncertain if the pitchblende was of the uranite variety.”
“And it was?”
Hamadan hesitated. “Yes. Yes, it was.”
“Now,” Hawker coached, “tell me why Stratton would find that so exciting. What’s so special about the uranite variety of pitchblende?”
“I think you already know. So why is it you ask me—”
“Talk, damnit!” Hawker demanded in a hoarse whisper.
“Uranium. Uranium is processed from the uranite variety of pitchblende. To find a reliable source of pitchblende is a discovery greater than a gold mine, for it is far more valuable. Mr. Stratton was quite certain he had found such a source.”
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