As Charlie turned a corner, Salim darted out of one of the nearby passageways.
“We have to get out of here!” Charlie shouted. “Follow me!”
And then Charlie led him right into a dead end.
“Shit!” Charlie muttered and doubled back through a narrow opening into one of the main corridors. Charlie could see the air-lock door. But it was a long way—half a football field at least.
“Faster!” Charlie shouted.
As they neared the massive door, Charlie felt a shock smash through him, as though he’d been hit with a hammer. Then a great resounding boom.
Charlie kept running, but couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder. For a moment or two, there was nothing. Then, at the far end of the corridor, he spotted it. A wave of fire rolling toward them like some inanimate beast.
They were only a few feet from the door and everything seemed to slip into slow motion.
“Hurry, Salim!”
The oncoming fireball roared and crackled like a thousand blowtorches.
Charlie turned the handle on the air-lock door, but it was heavy and tight and slow to open.
They weren’t going to make it.
And then suddenly Charlie had the door open.
“Go!” Charlie screamed.
Salim dove past him and crashed to the floor. Charlie followed, fighting to shut the door before the fireball devoured them. The great hinges groaned as the heavy door slowly but inexorably closed. Just inches before the door met the jam, the fireball hit with an all-consuming crash. A thin curtain of flame ripped through the gap, singing the air in front of Charlie’s face.
Then the door slammed shut with a deep bell-like clang, and the flame was gone, replaced by a thin pall of smoke that wavered, ghostlike, in the air before finally disappearing into nothingness.
Salim winced and reached for his leg, gasping in pain.
Charlie bent to him. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” Salim snapped, swiping away Charlie’s hand.
Charlie assessed the kid. He was brave and stubborn. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk. Where are we going?”
Charlie looked around. They were in a vast, high-ceilinged concrete bunker, the extent of the thing so immense that it dwarfed all human scale. There were lights here and there—but in this vast structure, they were like candles in a forest at night, barely beating back the darkness.
“What is this place?” Salim asked.
“It’s a missile silo,” Charlie answered and began walking toward the other side.
At the far end of the huge concrete space, he saw two thin lines, their dull sheen barely visible in the murky light.
Moving toward it, he thought he smelled something like diesel and as his eyes started to adjust to the darkness, he realized that those steel lines disappeared into a large hole in the wall.
“It’s a tunnel,” Charlie said. “They’re on a train.”
Chapter Forty-nine
Julie! Julie!”
She was sure it was Charlie’s voice, but then again, how could it be . . . ?
Julie felt as though her mind was being dragged from some half-waking, half-sleeping state in which dreams interpenetrated reality, but that voice—Charlie—it had to be a dream.
Because they had killed him.
She forced herself to open her eyes and found that she was slumped on a hard bench inside an immense room, her body aching, her face sore, her wrists raw. At first she imagined she was inside a cathedral, the ceiling was that high, the space that vast. But then she realized the entire structure was built of rough concrete—she was in some kind of underground bunker. It was so large, in fact, that it had room for a small train of flatcars with automobiles chained to their beds.
And then it all flooded back. She was with Byko and his gang of thugs. And this was part of the same network of underground structures that Byko had been hopscotching through all day.
Byko’s lieutenant—the sadist—was playing traffic cop in the murky light of the cavernous space, shouting and swearing at his men as they backed a number of large SUVs off the train. Julie winced as the voices and engine noises and ringing chains echoed loudly in the bunker. She had a crashing headache and with the headache came a deeper pain, the pain of regret and guilt. “Julie! Julie!” The voice from her dream was still echoing in her head. The dream grew sharper now as she recalled more details—someone holding the phone, someone restraining her, Charlie’s voice shouting her name from the tiny speaker. She could hear the desperation in his dream voice, a desperation that was all her doing. She’d brought him here, she’d caused his pain, she’d exposed him to danger. In the end, she’d killed him.
And she wept, wishing she could have died in his place.
Then she spotted Byko. Immediately the weeping ceased and her sadness hardened into outrage. As usual, Byko was impeccably dressed. It seemed a little absurd to her. Here they were at the back of beyond and he looked like he’d just walked out of an Italian tailor’s shop, wearing a distinctive white linen suit and white shoes. He was speaking with another man, a man she had never seen before. They were so similar in height and build that she might have mistaken him for Byko except for the fact that the man was dressed in traditional Uzbek garb.
Byko handed the man a suitcase then walked up to the top of the ramp leading to the surface, several of his bodyguards in tow. As he walked out the door, the surface was suddenly flooded with powerful lights.
Julie looked around furtively. For the first time since she’d been captured in L.A., nobody was watching her.
As she stood on tottering legs, she realized that she was wrong. A pair of eyes was tracking her from the open passenger door of one of the Cadillacs. It took her a moment to fill in the detail in the dim light, but then she saw that the watcher was a very attractive young woman staring at her without expression. She was dressed no differently from Julie—jeans and a conservative white blouse—but Julie had spent enough time in this part of the world to recognize the type. Despite her youth and beauty, her face showed her to be without expectations or hope. A prostitute, probably a heroin addict, kept in Byko’s orbit as a virtual slave.
Julie met the young woman’s gaze and put her finger over her lips. The young woman stared at her for a moment, then looked away with drugged-out incuriosity. Julie peered around and saw a half-open door set into the nearby wall. Maybe she could get to it and slip away unseen.
But before she’d gone twenty feet, she felt a powerful hand close violently around her upper arm. It was one of Quinn’s mercenaries.
He propelled her roughly across the concrete in the opposite direction from the door.
“Where are you taking me?” Julie asked, stumbling toward the far side of the bunker.
The mercenary said nothing and soon they reached an old Soviet military truck.
“Don’t move,” he warned as he yanked back the canvas tarp over the tailgate.
Julie’s eye caught Byko again. He was bawling orders at his guards as the man in traditional dress stepped away from him and began disrobing.
“What are you waiting for?” someone else barked.
Julie looked toward the sound of the voice. It was Quinn, bounding toward her, yelling at her chaperone. “Get her ass in the truck!”
The hulk lifted Julie and threw her over the tailgate into the truck like a rag doll. As she rolled over, wincing from the pain, the canvas tarp descended, leaving her alone in the darkness.
Outside the truck she heard the convoy of Cadillacs and Mercedes drive by, then roar up the ramp to the surface. There was some brief shouting, barely discernible at this distance, then the sound of the convoy fading away.
Why is Byko still keeping me alive? she wondered.
She couldn’t begin to imagine. She had begged Byko to kill her—back at the compound—after she’d heard that they’d murdered Charlie.
She realized now how foolishly melodramatic and selfish she had
been. If there was anything that was demanded by Charlie’s sacrifice, it was that she find a way to get out of this. Death would be too easy, a cop-out. She needed to live. To get back to Meagan and Ollie, to labor every day to make it up to them. To be able to explain to them what had happened, and how heroic their father was. How he had flown across the world, facing down killers whose numbers, arms and resources dwarfed anything that he could bring to bear . . .
Charlie had come for her. And had gone down fighting. She couldn’t allow guilt or grief or pain or exhaustion to overwhelm her.
Somehow, some way, she would escape.
Chapter Fifty
Sir. It’s him.”
The comms tech pointed at the phone on Frank Hopkins’s workstation in the front of the War Room.
Hopkins snatched it up. “Davis?”
“She’s still alive!” Davis said, his voice almost rising to a shout. “She’s with Byko. They were at the command facility of the Vasilevsky Missile Complex. There are two tunnels leading out of the facility here. One is a road. I’m pretty sure it leads to the bathhouse. No way he’s going back there because he knows the location is blown. But there’s a second tunnel with a railway track. I think they somehow loaded the cars onto the track and took them somewhere.”
Hopkins rubbed his face, letting the burst of information settle into his brain. “Wait a moment, Mr. Davis, just . . . slow down, will you? How do you know all of this?”
Hopkins listened in wonderment as Davis explained that he’d broken into the missile complex with a team of hired guns, that he’d subdued a skeleton crew of Byko’s men, that he’d found Byko’s computer, rigged with explosives and that he’d managed to get some information off of it before Byko remotely detonated the equipment. Davis closed his story insisting that Byko had gotten away through the tunnels with Julie . . . “I know you must have maps or something,” Davis said. “Figure out where that train comes out and you’ll have a chance of catching up to him. I’m assuming the SAS is en route as we speak.”
“Hold,” Hopkins said. He cupped his hand over the receiver and called to his comms tech, “Get Eric Nielsen on the line.”
“Let me guess,” Davis said. “Karimov’s giving you problems?”
“We’re in the process of trying to straighten that out.” Hopkins cleared his throat. He rebelled at the notion of giving sensitive details of the operation to a civilian. On the other hand Davis had already proved himself to be quite an asset. The comms tech signaled to Hopkins that he had his NSA counterpart on the phone. “Hold the line again, please.”
Hopkins quickly explained to Eric Nielsen that they suspected Byko had used some kind of underground train to dodge the birds.
“Jesus,” Nielsen said. “There’s a narrow-gauge rail underground. It was intended for transporting missiles from one silo to the next.”
“Do your maps show any logical place where they’d be able to stop the train, unload the cars and then take off again on surface roads?”
“Give me a second,” Nielsen said. Hopkins heard him conduct a hushed conversation with an assistant in the background. Then he came back on the line. “As far as we know, there are only two places that have access to surface roads from the train. There’s a terminus at the command center and another at the last stop on the line, Silo Thirty-nine. All the other stops just lead to subterranean silo service bays. No direct contact with surface roads. I can give you the GPS coordinates.”
“Can you put a bird on it and route us the visuals? We’ll keep TopSat on its current location just in case.”
“I’m on it.”
Hopkins rang off, then pulled up the line where Davis was holding.
“You said you found Byko’s computer?”
“That’s right. And I think you might have the wrong target cities . . .”
Davis went on to explain that the information he’d gleaned from the computers implied that Byko had expected Western intelligence agencies to track the nuclear-material shipments. As a result, he’d sent the material to decoy cities. And he’d chosen his decoys well—Berlin, Boston, Stockholm—cities that seemed like perfect targets.
Hopkins shook his head. If what Davis had just told him was true, then MI6 had been barking up the wrong tree for months.
“Mr. Davis, I trust you won’t be insulted if I express a certain skepticism about your story.”
“I took photographs of all of the files. Give me an email address and you can look at them yourself in three minutes.”
Hopkins held his breath for a moment. This bloody scribbler had just built his own private mini-army, attacked a hardened facility, killed off half a dozen trained operatives, infiltrated Byko’s security apparatus and come away with hard evidence.
He gave the man a secure email address.
Ninety seconds later, Hopkins was leaning over the shoulder of the comms specialist, surfing through the information. Not only was Davis correct in his assessment about the target cities, but there was information here that could lead them to the cells in each of those cities. Shipping manifests, credit card statements, bank transfers, an odd cell phone bill or two—even an operation trying its best to remain hidden left ghost footprints everywhere. And perhaps it was Byko’s obsessiveness, his impulse to micromanage and control, along with his businessman’s bias toward record keeping, that had led him to centralize what little information was available about the comings and goings of his terrorist cells.
Hopkins didn’t have exact locations for the cells or their safe houses, but there were intimations about their codes and communications patterns and tangential evidence that would clearly point MI6 in the right direction.
Hopkins only hoped it wasn’t too late. The anniversary of Andijan was tomorrow and tomorrow began in roughly thirteen hours. The intelligence agencies would have to be notified that all of the target cities were wrong—security units in Melbourne would have to be moved to Sydney, Osaka to Tokyo, Berlin to Hanover. The French would have to be told to stand down while the Austrians would have to be alerted. Same with the Swedes and the Danes now that he knew Stockholm was the decoy and Copenhagen the real target. And finding the members of those terrorist cells in such a short time—with most of them hiding in safe houses, preparing for the attack—would be beyond difficult. They might be able to get to some of them, to stop some of the attacks, but without knowing the actual targets in these nine cities, they were still in deep trouble.
The big screen at the front of the room blinked and a satellite image flashed across it. Hopkins couldn’t help but feel a sense of envy at the clarity and detail of the image. The bloody Americans—all their gear was so much better than anything MI6 could afford.
Hopkins stared at the screen, orienting himself. The image appeared to be nothing more than a large empty parking lot. Then he saw several human figures emerging from what must have been a ramp from some underground structure, its entrance half concealed because of the high angle of the bird’s view. Even with the superior quality of the American bird, it was impossible to make out faces. But it was clear that several of the men were carrying assault rifles.
Hopkins jumped back on the phone and briefly sketched what he saw to Davis.
Suddenly the analyst stabbed his finger at the screen. “That’s him! That’s Byko.”
The analyst pointed at a white figure at the center of a number of darker-clothed figures. “Notice how he’s giving all the orders? Pointing, gesturing. And everyone else is responding to him. Then there’s the distinctive dress. This man is wearing a Western-made suit of a light-colored fabric. Everybody else is either wearing black suits or plate carrier vests and baseball caps. The black suits are his personal bodyguards and the guys with the plate carriers and baseball caps are mercenaries commanded by John Quinn.”
“Okay,” Hopkins said to Charlie on the phone, “it appears you were right. Byko is just leaving Silo Thirty-nine.”
“What about Julie?” Davis demanded.
Hopkins ga
ve the analyst a quizzical glance. The analyst, who was listening to Davis on a pair of headphones, shook his head.
“Not yet,” Hopkins said.
As they watched, five vehicles nosed out of the exit from the bunker.
The analyst watched closely. “Escalade, Escalade, Toyota Land Cruiser . . . no, sorry, wait, that’s a Mercedes G series, another Escalade, another G series . . .” He nodded. “Right, these are the usual vehicles in Byko’s convoy. Look how this one rides heavier. That’s Byko’s personal car. Very heavily armored. It’s quite distinctive, as you can see.”
Hopkins could see no such thing. But the analyst knew his business.
“Right, now they’re getting into the vehicle. They’re . . . wait, Byko’s walking back down into the bunker. Okay, okay, he’s gone now . . .” After a moment the white-clothed figure came back, striding confidently toward one of the SUVs. “Ah! He’s back. Now he’s in the Escalade.”
Another figure emerged from the underground ramp, this one being pushed or perhaps even carried by two larger men.
“Wait! That’s a woman. See the hair? Western clothes, slim build . . .” The analyst looked at Hopkins and smiled. “That’s Julie Davis.”
The woman was quickly transferred to Byko’s car and the door slammed shut. Then the convoy began to move.
“We’ve got her, Mr. Davis,” Hopkins said into the phone. “She’s going with Byko.”
Charlie’s heart was vibrating with excitement.
“You see her? You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” Hopkins said. “Byko’s convoy is in motion. Dirt road. Bloody great plume of dust. It’s getting too dark to see . . .” Hopkins’s voice changed as he issued an order to somebody in the room with him. “Switch to thermal and decrease magnification.”
Charlie waited nervously. He could hear a bustle of activity behind Hopkins, bits and snatches of shouted comments and commands.
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