by Ted Dekker
ABDULLAH STOOD slightly hunched in the upper room, drenched in sweat, his facial muscles twitching spastically.
He considered calling the coast for confirmation of his blast but the fidgeting Hispanic before him was right. They couldn’t trust anyone now. In fact, they should leave, before a fighter jet dropped one of those bombs on them that drilled through mountains. Before Jamal arrived by helicopter.
“But they can’t attack us. They know the second device is already on a countdown. They will assume that only I can stop it. You see, that’s the power of true terror.” He couldn’t remember such a feeling of satisfaction.
The room suddenly shook under the rumble of an explosion and Ramón bolted from his chair, terrified.
Abdullah sprang to the window. A dozen men scrambled about below, fleeing what appeared to be the contents of a ruptured tank. An accident? It was too coincidental. The seconds slogged off in his mind with the surreal pace of a huge pendulum.
And then he saw the half-naked man disappear into the tunnel to his far left and he swallowed.
The agent. Casius!
He spun to Ramón. “It’s the agent!” For a moment he couldn’t think. He stared at Ramón, who’d already drawn his gun.
“Casius?” Ramón said.
The Americans had sent the killer after him again! Instead of withdrawing, the CIA was going for the jugular.
It was time to leave. “Bring me the priest!”
He leapt over to the desk and snatched up the transmitter.
“The priest?”
“The priest, you idiot! The hostage! I need a hostage!”
SHANNON PLACED four charges in the basement where they’d held him before swinging back into the elevator shaft and climbing hand over hand to the second level.
Using the bowie again he pried his way into the middle floor, gun in hand. Apart from three closed doors, the hall lay empty.
Shannon slid up to the two doors on his left, listened for a brief moment with his ear pressed to the wood, and cracked them open only to find each empty. The men had probably rushed to the explosion in the lab. A barroom and a mess hall each received a timed explosive.
He ran back to the elevator and pressed the call button, ignoring the third door, which he knew must lead to the large processing lab. Only the third floor remained above him. Abdullah would be there.
The elevator whirred to life behind the door. Shannon blinked at the sweat leaking into his right eye and took a deep breath. He would go up there and kill Abdullah as he had always planned. And then he would leave the jungle forever. A picture of Tanya flashed through his mind and his head twitched.
Are you ready to die, Shannon?
Soon. I will be soon.
He flattened himself on the wall, leveled his gun at the elevator doors, and exhaled.
RAMÓN PRESSED himself into the elevator car’s corner, squatting low. He’d taken the priest up to Abdullah and then he’d been sent to deal with Casius. The agent had eluded him once, but he wouldn’t escape again. The elevator bell rang loudly and he shrank farther down.
The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors parted. Ramón’s gun hand wavered before his eyes. Nothing. He held his breath and waited, straining for the first glimpse of movement.
But there was nothing. The doors slid closed and the elevator sat still, waiting further instructions.
Now what? If Ramón pressed any button, he might very well give himself away. Unless the agent was on the basement level. But then why didn’t the car descend? Someone else had called the car, not he.
For a few moments Ramón remained crouched in the corner waiting, undecided. Meanwhile the agent was no doubt below or above. He wouldn’t be on this floor. The thought finally prompted him to lean forward and press the “open” button.
The doors spread again and Ramón trained his gun on the opening. Still nothing. He stood and eased to the door’s edge.
SHANNON SMELLED the musty scent of sweat the moment the doors opened and he was back-pedaling to the corner before they stopped. He sighted down the wall and waited.
The doors closed on the occupant, but the elevator sat still. He waited with his gun arm extended. The charges in the hangar would explode in less than five minutes. He didn’t have all day.
The door opened again and after a moment a gun poked past the wall. Still he waited, his patience wearing thin.
A hand followed the gun. Shannon shot then, into the hand. The slug took it off at the knuckles and he ran forward. The hall filled with the gunman’s wail.
Shannon’s mind echoed with another wail—a wail suggesting that he didn’t have the time for this. He stepped into the elevator just as the doors began to close. The man he’d wounded knelt in a gathering pool of blood. It was the one-eyed man. Shannon shot him through the forehead and had a hand on his collar before the head lolled back. The man’s eyes remained open. He angrily jerked the body from the car, leapt over it, and stabbed the third-floor button.
Too slow. Any minute the mountain would begin its collapse under heavy explosions.
The elevator groaned upward. Shannon cursed the heat flashing along his spine. Anger blurred his thinking. What if Abdullah waited in ambush on the third floor? Had he thought that through? No. He only wanted to kill the man, a blind desire that ran through his blood like molten lead. Eight years of plotting had finally come to this moment.
And what if Abdullah wasn’t up there at all?
Shannon ground his teeth. The bell sounded and the door slid open before his extended gun.
The hall was empty.
He stepped from the car, thinking even as his foot cleared the threshold that he was in a fool’s game now. Acting before thinking.
The hall lay vacant and white-walled excepting two brown doors. Shannon ran for the first, tossing the Browning to his left hand midstride. The door was locked. Any minute now that C-4 would start blowing the helicopters. Grunting against a surge of panic, he stepped back, pumped a single slug through the handle, and smashed his foot against the door. It snapped open and he jumped through, gun extended.
The contents of the room barely registered. Some kind of storage. What did register was that they did not include Abdullah.
Shannon spun around and ran for the second door. This time he didn’t bother trying the handle. He simply shot through the lock and crashed it open with the sole of his foot. He leapt through and fell to a crouch, swinging his weapon in a quick arc.
A desk strewn with papers was on one end of the office; a tall bookcase stood against the other. The office was empty! Impossible!
Shannon stood, at a loss, his mind spinning. This could mean only one thing: Abdullah had escaped! A growl started in his throat and rose past his gaping mouth in a ferocious snarl. A red surge swept through his mind, momentarily blinding him.
He looked back to the desk. A book on nuclear proliferation lay facedown. The bomb.
Yes, the bomb.
Across the room a glass picture window was shaking and it occurred to him that the explosions had started. Then the sound came, deep-throated booms that shook the floor under his feet.
Shannon’s mind snapped then as instinct took control of his body. He bent low, snatched a thin rug from the wood floor, and ran from the room. When the gasoline tank went, the main complex would collapse. Screams drifted over another detonation, still in the hangar, he thought. Those helicopters were popping.
He punched the call button and the elevator doors sprang open. The car suddenly quaked badly and he knew one of the basement explosives had detonated early. If the one in the tunnel went, he would be finished.
The elevator ground down a floor and opened to the tunnel that housed the conveyor. Shannon sprang from the car and sprinted away from the processing lab. The ground suddenly shook with a string of explosions and the overhead lights winked to black. The gasoline tank had gone! The caverns would come down around his ears!
He pelted forward. The freight elevator waited in darkness thirty yar
ds ahead, powerless now. But he could still take the shaft up to the tube.
It was suddenly there, barely lit by the flames raging in the lab far behind. He vaulted over the rail and grabbed at the framework built into the vertical shaft. He flung the rug over his shoulder and clawed his way up, knowing that at any moment the explosives in the tunnel below would blow.
And then they did, with a steel-wrenching thunder. Stone crumbled and fell past him. Shannon slung the rug into the tube and scrambled over the lip for the second time in as many days. This time it would be belly down—he had no time to adjust his position. The rug slid forward and the elevator framework behind him tore loose from the rockface.
Shannon gripped the rug with both hands and fell toward the river far below.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“IT APPEARS that we might, and I want to stress the word might, have another device located somewhere in southern Florida.” The president’s face looked white on the tube, despite the makeup CNN had hurriedly applied, David thought.
It was happening. And he was learning about it with the rest of the department— heck, with the rest of the country. He had suspected something, but never this. The briefing room was silent.
“It is very important that any residents within a fifty-mile radius of the pier head north using the recommended routes as quickly and as calmly as possible. This is only a precaution, mind you, and we can’t afford panic. I cannot tell you how important it is for you not to panic. Everything in the realm of possibilities is being done to search the area with highly specialized sensors. If another nuclear device is located near Miami, we will find it. But we must take the precautions the Office of Homeland Security has laid out.”
The president was talking, but another voice was whispering in David’s mind as well. It was Casius, and he was telling David to leave town for a while. Far away. Which meant that Casius knew, or at least suspected more than any of them.
WHILE AMERICA glued its eyes on Miami, a U.S. registered clipper bearing the name Angel of the Sea slipped up the Intracoastal Waterway best known as Chesapeake Bay. It was one of hundreds of boats on the water that day. The small cargo vessel had made the trip from the Bahamas to Curtis Point—just south of Annapolis and a stone’s throw from Washington, D.C.—dozens of times, each time with a variety of imported goods on board, usually with at least a partial load of exclusive lumbers that sold by the pound rather than by the foot.
The small business had made its owner—best known as John Boy in the local bars—quite wealthy. Or more accurately, the extracurricular business he conducted with Angel of the Sea had made him well off.
For every week John Boy spent traipsing back and forth to the Bahamas, he spent two dealing the coke. His price from Abdullah was half what every other dealer paid to get their hands on the white powder—the benefits of establishing this new route.
Fine by him. The less he paid, the more he made and, judging by the ease of his trips, this route could hardly be safer. Jamal had done his homework. Heck, on more than one occasion he had waved to the Coast Guard while steaming through the bay. They all knew John Boy.
John Boy had been nursing a beer behind the wheel when news of the nuclear blast off Florida’s coast reached him. He stared dumbfounded at the tube for half an hour and his beer had gone warm. He had just cut through those waters himself, less than twenty-four hours earlier. If he’d stopped off in Freeport as was his custom, he might be . . . toast. Literally. But Ramón had insisted on making the trip a straight shot this time.
“You see, you can never tell, John Boy,” he muttered to himself at the wheel. “You live and let live, and you die when it’s your time.” That’s the way he’d always lived his life.
“Holy Moses.” Next you know, some mad man’ll be wheeling a bomb up to the Capital. Maybe it was time he thought about moving west.
He glanced at the chart spread out before him. If the weather held, he’d make Curtis Point in four hours, anchor in the bay, and head home. The log with the goods would have to wait this time. He always waited until all eyes were firmly off the ship before unloading that last log—forty-eight hours at least. But now with this Florida thing . . .
“Holy Moses.”
ABDULLAH HAD just stepped from the underground passage, dragging a blindfolded priest, when the mountain began its trembling. Around him the jungle came to life with fleeing creatures and Abdullah crouched low. The escape passage behind the bookcase had been his idea from the beginning, but he’d always imagined using it to flee his own men, or Jamal, not some assassin from the CIA. Either way, he had chosen well in sending Ramón down in the elevator to deal with Casius.
The Caura River’s current waited half a mile to the south. He had pushed the button on Yuri’s transmitter and if all had gone well, the bomb aboard the Lumber Lord had detonated. But had it? He ground his molars, desperate to know this one detail.
Nothing here mattered now. The second bomb would soon detonate and nothing would make him stop it.
Actually, nothing could stop him.
Yes, that was right, wasn’t it? He had the codes, but he hadn’t memorized them. And now they had just gone up in smoke because of the American’s own foolishness. So no one could stop the second bomb. Other than Jamal, of course. But Jamal wasn’t here to stop it. He had only to make his way out of the jungle now.
He shivered and suppressed the urge to send the second signal, detonate the second bomb, in case the first had failed.
Abdullah closed his eyes. It was the second bomb that would make history— not this little firecracker he’d sent them. The second bomb was now close enough to Washington, D.C., to destroy the CIA. And the Capital. The thought pushed a soft groan through his chest.
He considered shooting the priest and leaving him here—it would be much simpler than taking him. But another thought stopped him. There were others out there, the ones who’d crossed the perimeter sensors. American soldiers. A hostage would be wise. He would kill him downriver, after the Caura joined the Orinoco.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Sunday
AT TEN thousand feet, peering from a military transport’s bubble, David Lunow thought metro Miami looked like an octopus with long tentacles of creeping automobiles reaching out from the bloated city. The lines stretched north two hundred miles along five major routes that had hemorrhaged into several hundred smaller escape routes.
Based on reports from the National Guard, the scene on the ground brought new clarity to the meaning of “chaos.” Driven from their homes at the president’s urging and by relentless television images of a blackened Daytona Beach, twenty million city dwellers scurried like rats from a rising tide. Honking cars clogged the streets within hours. Bicycles wobbled in and out of stalled vehicles. Some of the more fit jogged. In the end the runners led the exodus. No mode of transportation moved as fast as they.
And where were they all going?
North. Just north.
David glanced at his watch. Ten hours. Across the aisle, Friberg gazed out another window with Mark Ingersol. David caught Ingersol’s attention and thumbed outside. “There’s no way they’re going to get away in time. You know that.”
The man’s eyebrow lifted. “They’re doing better than I imagined. If they had any brains, they’d just leave the cars and walk.”
“For the record, sir, I want to make it clear that I believe we’re going about this wrong. We should be looking north as well.”
“You’ve said that. We don’t have the time to check Miami and you want us to spread ourselves even thinner? You have a hunch. We have a threat on paper that puts a bomb in Miami. I’m not sure we have any choice.”
He had a point, of course. But David’s hunch was making his skin crawl. The plane dipped a wing and began a quick descent to Miami International. They were the only plane on pattern and within ten minutes they were down.
The air seemed thicker than David remembered and he couldn’t help but wonder if the detonatio
n out to sea had affected the weather. They were ushered into the terminal where a solemn gray-haired Lieutenant John Bird met them with an outstretched hand.
“I hope you have some information for us,” Bird said, taking each hand quickly. “I’ve got a thousand men scattered over southern Florida and we don’t even know what we’re looking for. A picture or a description wouldn’t hurt.” He spoke without smiling. By the rings under his eyes, he hadn’t slept for a while, David thought.
“If we knew what you were looking for, you would know by now, wouldn’t you?” Friberg’s tone earned a hard stare from the National Guard officer.
“Tell me what you’ve got,” Friberg demanded.
Bird hesitated only a second before spitting out his report in staccato fashion. “We’re sweeping every port south of the blast site in ten-man teams with Geiger counters. So far, nothing has turned up. We’re manually picking through every storage bin waiting for customs inspection, but like I said, without a specific description the process is slow. We’ve isolated every shipment received in the last three days and are currently searching their deliveries, but again, we’re shooting in the dark. If we at least had a size on this thing—”
“But we don’t have a size on this thing. What about the DEA leads? Have you traced the suspected trafficking routes?”
“Not yet, sir. We—”
“Not yet? I thought the DEA gave that top priority. These terrorists are operating out of drug country, Lieutenant. Don’t you think it would make sense for them to use trafficking routes?” The director’s face flushed red. “Bring me the DEA intelligence.”
“Yes, sir.” Bird eyed Friberg for a moment.
“Now, Lieutenant.”
Bird turned and strode for the door.
“Excuse me, sir,” David interjected. “But have we established contact with Casius?”
Friberg faced him. “What would Casius have to do with this, Lunow? If we’d made contact with him, he’d be dead, wouldn’t he?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Friberg’s nostrils flared.