Nuclear Reaction

by Don Pendleton

  Shankara had met Darius Pahlavi twice, at weekend outings organized for members of the lab team and their families. Darius shook his hand but frowned at him, as if he recognized the lust that simmered in Shankara’s heart.

  “Do not go to his home,” Darice had said, forgetting in her haste that Shankara had no clue where that might be. And then she’d given him directions to a small house in the country where her brother could be contacted in the event of an emergency. She’d thanked him, kissed him lightly on the cheek and turned away.

  The next morning, the lab was informed she was gone.

  Shankara had done nothing. He was not a hero, didn’t fully understand the politics or import of some of the things Darice had told him. If he was honest with himself, there had been times when he was frightened of his own shadow, but the bright lights of the laboratory kept all that at bay. Shankara had a gift in that department, was respected there—at least, for his abilities—and did not plan to throw it all away.

  Darice, he’d told himself, had meddled in some things best left alone. There was no real doubt in his mind that she’d betrayed the project somehow and had paid the final price. Shankara could not raise her from the dead, and frankly didn’t care enough about her brother to risk death himself, just for warning Darius.

  All that had changed within a few brief seconds, though, thanks to curry and coincidence. The curry was Shankara’s breakfast, and it sent him bustling to the men’s room midway through his morning shift. He had been huddled in a stall when two men entered, minutes after him, and he’d recognized Gazsi’s voice.

  “No, it doesn’t matter any longer if the bitch can’t tell us anything,” Gazsi said. “We can still use her as bait.”

  “I’m not sure that will work, sir,” the second man said. One of the guards, perhaps.

  “Well, I’m sure,” Gazsi answered with his trademark arrogance. “She’ll draw the brother like a fly to shit, and when we have him, we’ll soon have the rest of Ohm.”

  Shankara had already raised his feet to keep them out of sight beneath the half door of his toilet stall. Gazsi and his unknown companion finished urinating, washed their hands and left, while Shankara clenched his teeth and cheeks against a blast of flatulence that would reveal him as a spy.

  When they were gone, he’d slumped into relief, mind racing to interpret what he’d heard. The “bitch,” he took for granted, was Darice Pahlavi. No one else was missing from the lab, and it was evident from Gazsi’s words that she had been interrogated. Also, mention of “the brother” cinched it in his mind. And Ohm—the symbol for resistance in his scientific world—was simply the icing on the cake.

  Shankara took his time emerging from the men’s room, giving Gazsi and his sidekick a decent lead. The walk back to his workstation was torment, with his mind and heart in turmoil simultaneously.

  Darice was alive, that much was crystal clear. And she had suffered at the monster Gazsi’s hands. Might still be suffering, for all Shankara knew.

  But where was she?

  He’d never find out for himself, and even if he did, what could he do about it? Charge in like a knight on a white steed and rescue her from armed security guards who were trained to disable and kill? It almost made him weep, the image in his mind was so pathetic. So inadequate.

  He could not save her, but perhaps he could do what Darice had asked of him in friendship on the day she disappeared. He could do that, at least, and possibly in some small way relieve the agony of guilt he suffered for betraying her.

  Or maybe there was no relief. Maybe he had to suffer for his sin of silence, even as he tried to make it right. Too little and too late, perhaps, but Shankara would try his best.

  And he could not afford to wait.

  If he delayed until his shift was over, Gazsi might have put some plan in motion that would trap Darice’s brother and the rest. Logic told him the plan was already in place, the trap already baited, but he had to try.

  And that meant getting out, despite the stringent new security precautions Gazsi had enacted, while Dr. Mehran had fixed a hopelessly unrealistic two-week deadline for completion of their work. Shankara had raised no objection, even knowing that the goal was unattainable. The lot of them would fail together, but he knew from past experience that squeaky wheels were sometimes greased in most unpleasant ways.

  Now, it was time to flee, and curry might be his salvation. Stranger things had happened.

  He approached Dr. Mehran, wearing a pained expression on his face, and waited for the great man to complete his scribblings on a clipboard.

  Glancing up at last, Mehran asked, “What is it, Manoj?”

  “With most sincere apologies, Doctor, I have, er, that is…something of a medical emergency.”

  16

  The house stood out in the middle of nowhere, approached by a single-lane track that had never been paved. Bolan might have called it a farmhouse, but there was no farm in sight, just weed-choked fields with scattered trees, then forest rising up behind the house to shield it from north winds.

  The place appeared to be deserted. Bolan couldn’t tell how recently another vehicle had passed along the rutted access road, but there were no cars visible around the house or its dilapidated outbuildings. As they approached, rocking and rolling over potholes, Bolan saw that certain shingles from the roof had either fallen in or blown away, leaving rafters exposed.

  “You’re sure this is the place?” he asked Pahlavi.

  “I am sure.”

  “Looks like we missed the party.”

  “They will be here.”

  Bolan heard the quiet certainty in his companion’s tone, reckoned Pahlavi thought he was correct in any case, whether the other Ohm members showed or not.

  The idea of an ambush by Pahlavi’s people had never entered Bolan’s mind. They’d come too far and done too much together for the Pakistani to prove false.

  But what if someone else had learned about the rendezvous before they got there?

  “Are your people solid?” Bolan asked.

  “Solid?”

  “Trustworthy. Is there any chance at all you have a mole inside the group?”

  Pahlavi frowned and shook his head. “It is impossible. I stake my life on that.”

  “Friend, you already have,” the Executioner replied grimly.

  They closed the gap to fifty yards, then thirty. As they entered what would normally have been the house’s yard, Bolan made out a flicker in the nearest window, as if someone passed quickly on the inside.

  “There’s company,” Bolan said.

  “Yes,” Pahlavi said. “My friends.”

  And suddenly, they were surrounded. It was no great trick, considering the waist-high grass and weeds, but Bolan gave them points for avoiding the car as he’d pulled off the dirt track, closing in behind him while the bulk of his attention focused on the house.

  It wasn’t Special Forces good, by any means—but maybe it was good enough.

  The people who had risen from the weeds around his car were all Pahlavi’s age or younger, dressed in hiking clothes and heavy on the earth tones, going for the next best thing to camouflage. Befitting Pakistan, they had no dearth of weapons, every one of them holding some kind of automatic rifle, submachine gun, or police-style shotgun.

  Bolan realized that they could take him now, if they were so inclined and didn’t mind Pahlavi dying with him. If they opened fire in concert, they could strafe the car and kill both occupants—together with a few of their own number, since they hadn’t calculated fields of crossfire and were begging for a deadly accident.

  “They’re on your side?” Bolan inquired.

  “Our side,” Pahlavi stressed. “You’re one of us.”

  That said, he stepped out of the car and started greeting members of the ambush party, shaking hands and slapping backs, kissing a female cheek from time to time. Bolan unfolded from the driver’s seat, keeping his hands in plain view all the time and making no moves toward the pistol
in his shoulder rig.

  The Ohm guerrillas on his side watched him, their weapons held discreetly angled toward the ground, with index fingers never far outside their trigger guards. So far, considering the fact that only two or three of them had any kind of military background, Bolan was impressed.

  Pahlavi made the rounds, a full 360-degree circuit of the car, before he started in on introductions. Bolan listened carefully, repeating names aloud to match them permanently with the earnest faces in his mind. His mental mug file hadn’t reached its limit yet, although he kept expecting that the next person he met would force him to delete one of the older dossiers he’d logged between his ears. When that day came, Bolan hoped he could start by weeding out the dead.

  He counted nineteen faces, nineteen names. A twentieth was waiting for them on the porch of the old house, the youngest female out of seven in the group, and seemingly unarmed. Pahlavi kissed her on the lips, rather than on the cheek, and clutched her to his chest a moment longer than he would have done a simple friend.

  That done, he turned to Bolan, beckoning. “Please, come inside with us. Pitri will hide the car.”

  SHANKARA HAD RETREATED to the men’s room, fretting, after Dr. Mehran had refused to let him leave the complex. Mehran had been stern, referring to their deadline and the earlier announcement that they would be staying at the plant and working around-the-clock in shifts until their goal was met.

  If Shankara felt unwell, Mehran reminded him, the plant had many toilets and a doctor constantly on call. The medic likely could dispense something to cure him within the hour, but no member of the staff would leave the complex short of mortal injury.

  Shankara was polite, no storming off to draw further attention. He had played his only card and lost. It was the point where he would normally give up, follow the path of least resistance, but he could not bear the guilt already gnawing at him from within.

  Darice had been his one friend at the plant, although he’d wanted so much more. Never expressed, his yearning for her tortured him, as Gazsi’s goon squad had to have tortured her.

  I must warn Darius! he thought. But how?

  If Mehran would not let him go, Shankara knew he had to escape by other means. It would require a desperate effort, but he could not bear to live with the alternative.

  First, he required a plan. That was the easy part, since theories and calculations comprised his life. He would prepare a dummy file and transport it by hand from Building C, the lab where he had worked for nineteen months, to the administration block in Building A. That would put him near the exits to the parking lot where he had left his car eight hours earlier, not knowing that he might not sit behind the wheel again for fourteen days.

  There would be guards, of course. That part would call for unaccustomed courage on his part, but once he reached his car, Shankara only had to crash one checkpoint and a chain-link gate to reach the highway and escape.

  Only.

  It sounded simple in his mind, but he knew the reality was something else again.

  He left the men’s room, careful to first wash his trembling hands, and walked back to his workstation. Shankara had a whole box of manila folders there, although most work was filed on disks and on the hard drive of the plant’s mainframe computers. Gathering a random stack of papers, several of them blank, Shankara squared them neatly, placed them in the folder and began his walk to Building A, praying that he would not meet Dr. Mehran on his way.

  Nor did he, passing by the workstations of colleagues and the empty place once occupied by she whom he was bent on rescuing. The others barely glanced at him, absorbed by calculations and equations, test results, schematic drawings and the like. Shankara was not popular among his fellow workers, never had been. He supposed that none of them would miss him when he’d fled—or when the guards had murdered him.

  He cleared the lab proper and reached the first checkpoint. A guard in uniform stood watching his approach, arms crossed, a submachine gun slung across one shoulder, pistol on his hip.

  “Where are you going?” the guard asked.

  “I have a file for Building A.”

  “Clearance?”

  Here was the sticking point. “Apparently,” Shankara said. “They called for it, just now.”

  The guard could check that easily enough. It would only take an in-house phone call, or a short chat on his two-way radio. In that case, Shankara thought, he would be as good as dead.

  He wondered whether he would catch a last glimpse of Darice, as he passed by her holding cell en route to a bloodsmeared torture chamber, or if Gazsi’s men would merely shoot him on the spot.

  “What’s in the file?” the guard inquired.

  Shankara stared at him, as if the man in uniform had grown a second head before his very eyes. “It’s classified, of course,” he answered stiffly.

  “Hmph. All right, then. Go ahead,” the guard replied.

  Shankara nearly wilted with relief, then thought that it might be some kind of trick. The guard would let him walk a few more steps, then shoot him in the back. Police and soldiers sometimes did such things, or so he’d heard. Still, having once received the go-ahead, Shankara had no choice but to proceed.

  He passed the guard with shoulder muscles clenched against the impact of a bullet, only let himself relax once he had cleared the building, moving freely through the open air toward Building A. It was a relatively short walk, only fifty yards or so, but in his mind it seemed to stretch for miles. Guards passed him on the way, staring into his eyes and at the folder in his hand, but none saw fit to challenge him.

  He reached Administration, cleared the outer door and paused for just a beat, to get his bearings. Even though Shankara followed that same path five days a week, going and coming, to and from his work, it all seemed alien to him at the moment. He had to pause, locate the exit that he wanted, casually veering off in that direction. Taking one step at a time.

  “Hold on, there!”

  Turning toward the voice, off to his left, he saw another guard. This one was taller, somewhat older, with his chin cleft by an ancient scar. His stare felt like an X-ray, penetrating through Shankara’s clothes and flesh to find the treachery inside his heart.

  “Yes?” Shankara said. His voice cracked, as if he were on the verge of puberty.

  “Where are you going?” the guard asked.

  Shankara raised his folder like a shield. “I have a file for Building A,” he said.

  “For who in Building A?” the guard demanded to know.

  Allah help me! Shankara thought.

  “I don’t know,” Shankara answered, trembling where he stood. “A secretary called. Said to bring the file. My supervisor didn’t give a name.”

  “Come over here,” the guard commanded, “while I check on this.”

  Shankara did as he was told, stepped closer, fighting waves of sudden nausea as the guard half turned his head, angling his lips toward the radio microphone clipped to his left epaulette.

  Shankara did not plan to drop the file. His fingers simply could not hold it any longer, let the folder slip between them, spilling its mismatched and pointless contents all around the guard’s spit-polished boots.

  The whimper of embarrassment escaping from Shankara’s throat was genuine, as he bent to fetch the papers, but it changed almost at once into a snarl of rage, surprising him.

  Instead of picking up the folder, Shankara found himself clenching both hands into fists, whipping one through a short arc into the guard’s unprotected groin. He scored a hit, half-surprised when the guard doubled over in pain, still reaching instinctively for his holstered pistol.

  Shankara rose, slamming his knee into the stranger’s face. He didn’t wait to see the guard go down, but rather turned and bolted for the exit and the parking lot that beckoned like salvation. He ran for his life, as somewhere in the depths of Building A, a siren blared.

  BOLAN REVIEWED THE TROOPS, such as they were, while Pahlavi talked about the details of his
plan. In essence, it involved approaching the stronghold of Project X in force and somehow getting past the outer fence, then dealing with the guards as they appeared and raising hell inside the lab to render it inoperable.

  Bolan listened to the broad strokes, while he studied the assembled rebels and their arms. As he’d supposed, their weapons came from bootleg arms bazaars all over Pakistan, heavy on AK47 variants and CETME autorifles, but including one Galil, a Belgian FNC, a Skorpion machine pistol and a pair of French MAT submachine guns. The rifles weren’t a problem, when it came to ammunition, since most armies had converted to the standard NATO rounds, in 5.56 mm or 7.62 mm. The shotguns were 12-gauge pump-actions. Side arms were a motley collection, ranging from an old .38-caliber revolver with rust spots on its four-inch barrel to Browning Hi-Powers, a couple of Makarovs, and a surprise Desert Eagle chambered in .41 Magnum.

  As for the “soldiers,” Bolan had seen better—but he’d also seen much worse. They all seemed fit enough, no anorexics or candidates for heart failure from morbid obesity, none with any apparent disabilities. The grim determination in their faces told him they would fight—or that they meant to, anyway. He wouldn’t really know, until he saw them on the firing line, if that was courage or a cool eleventh-hour bluff.

  “I need to see a layout of the plant before we start,” he told Pahlavi, when the Pakistani finished talking through his plan. “Draw it to scale, the best you can, including all the fences and security equipment you’re aware of.”

  Smiling as he spoke, Pahlavi said, “It’s done, already. Janna, please?”

  Pahlavi’s girlfriend from the porch produced a rolled-up tube of paper, stepped between them and began to spread it on an oblong table, using ashtrays, plastic glasses and a snubby automatic pistol to secure the corners. Homely paperweights, Bolan thought.

  The drawing wasn’t bad. Someone had spent a fair amount of time on it, perhaps with drafting tools, to get it right. They had proportions penciled in, giving the scale, with buildings labeled A through E—or so Bolan discovered, as Pahlavi translated the legends into English.