by Gary Ponzo
McKenna’s face appeared to be fighting two or more emotions. “You have a hostage inside I don’t know about?”
“Yes, I do. The detonator. If we start a firefight, they could detonate the missiles early and make this entire mission a moot point.”
“What about Kharrazi?” McKenna said. “Isn’t he inside?”
Nick glance down at the satellite photos. “I don’t know.”
“That’s great,” McKenna said. He looked down at his watch. “We’ve got sixty-eight minutes until a missile takes out the White House. Even if we get inside the building in less than thirty minutes, that gives my bomb guys a half an hour to deactivate the detonator. If they can. And on top of that we have to be stealthy. Any other requests, Agent?”
“That’s enough,” Matt said, locking eyes with McKenna.
An awkward silence hung in the night air. Nick considered the restraints those sixty-eight minutes put on them. He thought about Julie lying in her hospital bed ordering him to kill Kharrazi. Her bruised face looking up at him, her eyes pleading with him for retribution. He wiped his temple and was surprised to find it moist with sweat in the cool autumn night. He needed to stay focused on the White House, though. He couldn’t afford to let Kharrazi force him into a mistake. Not now.
“You’re right,” Nick said.
McKenna raised his brow. The scowl deteriorated and the grandfather face returned.
“Yes,” Nick continued. “We don’t have time to do this my way. But we must get to that detonator first.”
McKenna nodded. “Okay. Where do you suspect it is?”
“Well,” Nick looked over McKenna’s shoulder and added his own penlight to the blueprint. “Something that important would be protected fairly well. I would have to say it’s in the basement.”
“Agreed,” McKenna said. He moved his finger around the perimeter of the diagram. “Here. This is the outside entrance to the basement. It’s in the back of the cabin below two second-story windows. We could get in there without entering the cabin. We secure the basement and gain control of the detonator before they can react.”
Nick asked, “How, um . . .”
“Stealthily?” McKenna finished for him. A slight grin tugged at the corner of his lip. He looked over at a young man who sat next to the group with his legs crossed. A small digital device sat on the ground in front of him. A pair of wires extended from the device to his ears where he covered them with his hands. He was concentrating so hard, his face looked as if he had an upset stomach.
McKenna waved a hand and snapped a finger to attract his attention. “What have you got, Kelly?” McKenna asked him.
Kelly made eye contact with McKenna for a moment, then returned to his trance. Ten minutes earlier an Apache helicopter flew directly over the KSF cabin and dropped a transmitter on the roof of the cabin. A sticky malleable device that would fasten itself to the A-frame with little noise. Kelly’s palms pressed even harder to his ears. “Singing, Sir.”
“Singing?”
“Yes, Sir. If I’m not mistaken, it’s an old Kurdish anthem. Apparently they’ve heard about the President’s press conference and sense victory.”
McKenna looked at Nick. “Let’s get over there before the party breaks up.”
“Sir.” A soldier stood under the dipping branch of a mature pine tree. His face was painted so dark that his eyes seemed luminescent. “We have a problem.”
“What’s that soldier?”
“The place is land-mined with motion detectors, Sir. A quarter mile around the entire complex. There’ll be no sneaking up on them.”
McKenna scooped up a handful of dirt and slammed it down. “This is getting better all the time.”
Nick reached into his duffle bag and came out with a green handle and flipped it a couple of times like a baton.
“What’s that?” McKenna asked.
Nick pulled up on the expandable antenna and admired the instrument. “Electronic jamming device. It’ll jam any frequencies within a mile radius. We cut off their power, destroy any generators, and jam any other signals. They won’t be able to see or hear us coming. Plus, the sentries outside won’t be able to communicate with the cabin, or each other.” Nick pushed a button on the plastic handle and a green light began to blink. “Let’s see if there’s still any singing going on over there.”
Chapter 36
Nick crouched low in a thicket of woods outside of the KSF cabin. He looked at his watch. They had forty-nine minutes to get inside and disable the detonator. Adrenalin pumped through his veins. Beside him, Matt worked his Glock with his hands while examining the terrain with hawk-like eyes.
Nick looked up at the night sky and felt the stillness of the night. A hundred federal employees surrounded the cabin, yet Nick couldn’t hear a twig snap. They’d set off the jamming device and had made easy work of the twenty KSF soldiers patrolling the exterior of the cabin. With silencers and superior night vision, they’d taken their positions and readied to encounter the strength of Kharrazi’s force who would certainly be waiting for them inside the building.
But Kharrazi had months, maybe even longer to prepare for this battle. Nick had thrown together a crew of Marines and FBI agents in just a couple of hours. Kharrazi would leave little to chance.
Nick smelled drifting smoke from a distant fireplace. A mile or so away a father was probably reading bedtime stories to his children, blissfully unaware of the danger that lurked just over the ridge. Nick wondered what it would be like to be so insulated from the harsh realities of the world. While parents tucked in their fragile youngsters, people like Nick were chewing Rolaids by the handful, acutely aware of the threats that awaited them.
Now, Matt was to his left and Jennifer Steele to his right. Both had rifles tight against their cheeks aiming at the two upstairs windows, the only openings on their side of the cabin. Flanking them were a team of Marines. Agents Rutherford and Tolliver were tucked in behind the Marines with Silk. The night covered them like a blanket of moss.
McKenna tapped Nick’s elbow and gave a silent thumbs up. Then he nodded toward a Marine Sergeant twenty yards away in the brush and got a nod back. McKenna raised his right hand. He let it hang there while the chain of command responded with their appropriate signals. It seemed he was about to drop his hand when something peculiar occurred.
The upstairs window opened abruptly and a balloon slipped out. Just as quickly the window was shut. Nick heard the flutter of night vision visors flapping up and down. Unlike the forest they hid in, the cabin stood in a clearing and the moon bathed the walls of the cabin with significant light. That made night vision somewhat superfluous, yet some soldiers still tried both ways.
Matt looked over at McKenna awaiting instructions. He seemed frustrated. McKenna had given orders not to shoot until he gave the signal, but he couldn’t have anticipated this. Matt twisted his attention back and forth between McKenna and the window, then to Nick. McKenna appeared unsure, his hand still frozen over his head. Nick saw the balloon moved downward in a gradual angle toward the tree line where they hid.
Nick saw Steele aim her rifle at the balloon.
“Don’t,” Nick said, louder than he should. He knew that it didn’t matter now. Kharrazi obviously knew where they were.
“Call off the attack,” Nick said to McKenna.
“What?”
“No time to argue. Call it off.”
McKenna waved his hand signaling a stand down. The balloon slowly drifted toward them. Only it didn’t quite drift. It seemed to move in a straight line. The wind was having no effect on the balloon’s direction. Nick’s stomach twisted into a tight cramp. With the time constraints given them, they had frantically planned for a sudden offensive with little regard for a defense.
“Do you have gas masks?” Nick asked McKenna.
“Sure,” McKenna answered, with paralyzed confusion on his face.
It was too late. The balloon only had another twenty feet to go. Maybe ten seconds befo
re it hit the tree line. But where was it headed? Nick calculated the spot where the balloon would first contact the pine trees. He aimed his binoculars to the contact point, scrambling to see something. Anything.
Then, he saw it. A razor sharp spike fastened to the first pine tree it would contact. Maybe fifteen feet up the trunk of the tree. The balloon was now ten feet away from the needle. Nick only imagined what kind of gas the balloon contained. He crouched next to Matt, handed him the binoculars and pointed to the spike. “See that? A spike sticking out of from tree.”
Matt squinted through the lenses and said, in a surprised voice, “Yeah.”
“See the line going from the spike to the cabin? Thin, like a fishing line.”
“Yeah,” Matt said, seeming to get it now.
The balloon was five feet from the spike. Ready to burst open with an array of poisonous gas.
Matt didn’t wait for Nick to say anything. They tuned into each other’s rhythm like a lead and bass guitarist. He aimed his rifle at the narrow gap between the balloon and spike. “You going to catch this thing?”
“I’d better,” Nick said, scrambling out from the thicket and into the open field.
“Where are you going?” McKenna said.
But he was ignored. Matt tightened his finger around trigger and yelled, “Cover Nick.”
Matt squeezed the trigger and the bullet pierced the night sky with a thunderous scream. It was the only shot he would need. He clipped the wire perfectly. The balloon didn’t drop straight down, however. It swung back in an arc away from Nick. He was caught off guard and slipped on pine needles as he shifted his weight from his back foot to his front. From his knees he could see the balloon angling toward the ground thirty feet away from him. He wasn’t going to make it.
Nick was working off adrenalin rather than intellect; he rushed toward the balloon. It was merely five feet from the ground when it came completely free of the fishing line it was attached to and became vulnerable to the laws of inertia. The external force that maneuvered the balloon was a favorable gust of wind. Nick managed to leap at the ground and cup his hand under the balloon as it gently bounced into his fingertips. He held it above his chest, just inches from his face while he tried to control his erratic breathing.
Nick sensed the clumsiness of the balloon in his fingers. He carefully rolled it and felt dense molecules shifting its mass to the bottom of the balloon while his fingers twitched involuntarily. He sat up and cradled the balloon like an infant. His feet wanted to run for cover, while his hands fought to keep the stretched latex in one piece. He was up on a knee when he heard the creak of a window opening.
Nick stiffened. He could barely hear the muffled cough of a silenced rifle behind him, but he felt the bullet buzz past his face. One second he was staring at the balloon between his hands, the next second he was staring at his open hands. The balloon had burst.
Time stood still. His vision blurred and his feet were planted to the ground like cement posts. He saw Matt screaming at him while firing his rifle over Nick’s head. A thousand muzzle flashes sparkled from the tree line as he stood in front of them like a firing squad.
With his eyes almost swollen shut he ran. He dove through a thin bush and landed on a jagged rock that stabbed his ribcage with the pressure of a barehanded uppercut. He groaned as he rolled behind a wide tree trunk. He couldn’t see anything now, but the cacophony of gunfire raged around him like he was in the center of a fireworks display.
Nick wasn’t sure if he’d lost consciousness or if he’d become incapacitated. He reached for his eyes and his hand came back wet. He forced and eye open and saw that his hand was bright red. Blood. Was he hit? He felt something powdery sticking to his fingers.
“Nick.” Jennifer Steele’s voice sounded muffled. He thought his hearing had been damaged until he saw that Steele wore a gas mask. She quickly wiped his face with a wet towel, gently blotting up whatever was there. McKenna shouted orders over the barrage of bullets splintering up the cabin.
Nick found it hard to breath. His chest heaved up but little air was getting to his lungs. This was how it happened. Depending on the chemical, or germ, Nick had a dwindling amount of time left. “I can’t see,” he said.
“Hang on.” Steele forced his left eyelid open and ran a cotton-tipped applicator around the inside of his left eye. Then she blinded him with a blast from her penlight. She moved his head back and poured a sterile saline solution into his eyes, then poured the remainder on his left hand and exposed an open laceration.
“We’re on top of it,” a male voice said. Nick wiped his face and peered through a slit of his blinded eye to see the silhouette of a young soldier. He sensed it was the same one who eavesdropped on the KSF cabin just a while earlier. Nick squinted and was able to focus on the young man. He wore a black baseball cap over his buzzed-cut short hair and an emerald stud on his left earlobe. He had his head down and was working with a black probe that resembled a miniature umbrella. The wide tip had a blue glow to it. He moved with precise little movements back and forth from the probe to his black medical bag. Nick noticed that he worked without a gas mask.
“What are you doing?” Nick blinked constantly trying to improve on the shadows he was coming up with. “I need atropine. Do you have any?”
“Yeah, in my bag.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“What’s your name?” Nick asked.
“Kelly.”
“Kelly,” Nick blinked, “are you listening to me, or has the biological weapons impaired your hearing?”
Kelly pushed a button on the probe and the blue light grew more intense in the darkness. Nick sensed soldiers advancing on the cabin behind him.
Kelly smiled. “No, Agent Bracco, my hearing is just fine. And there is no chance that we’ve been exposed to any biological weapons.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick gasped, sucking up thimble-sized pockets of air.
Kelly smiled at his handheld device. “This here is the TIMS 2000. It’s the latest in fiberoptic biosensors.” He pointed to the tip of the umbrella-shaped tool like a proud father. “You see this probe is covered with antibodies that bind to specific bacteria—anthrax and the like—then the system pipes light from a laser diode through the fiber probe. It turns orange, we’re in a heap of trouble.” He held the probe closer to Nick. It glowed with a deep purple mist. “You can see that we have a strong negative result. Virtually no chance for a false negative. If there were any biological agents within 100 yards of this spot, this thing would be a sparkling shade of orange.”
Nick tried to get his elbows, but a jolt of pain ripped through his chest. His ribcage pinched every time he took a breath. Steele was tightening a thin butterfly bandage around his index finger to close up the laceration. “What about chemicals?” Nick asked.
Kelly nodded. He reached over to his right and returned with a flat plastic tray that had ridges symmetrically etched into the face. An LED display beamed a numerical value across the screen. It read zero. He showed it to Nick. “Primary Ion Detector,” he said, as if he were handing him something as simple as a screwdriver.
Nick looked up at him. He was confused and Kelly seemed to sense it. He traced a penlight over Nick’s eyes and said, casually. “It hasn’t detected anything pernicious. Plus, if you were exposed to any nerve agents, you’d have tiny, little pupils. Your pupils are quite large, despite constant attacks from our penlights. If it were a blister agent, you’d have obvious lesions. And if it were a choking agent, you’d be, well . . . choking.”
The more Nick listened to Kelly, the more confused he got. He could hear McKenna ordering his troops to teargas the windows and moments later the whoosh of the propelled canisters flung upward.
“Then what the fuck was in that balloon?” Nick asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Kelly grinned.
Nick’s breathing had slowed considerably. His anxiety
lowered itself to a level he could control.
Kelly took the tip of his pinkie, licked it, then dabbed it into the inner part of the busted balloon. He stuck his tongue out and, with sharp precision, lightly touched his pinkie. He methodically moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then looked skyward and appeared in deep thought.
Steele removed her mask and she and Nick took to the time to look at each other.
“Well?” Nick asked, after he waited almost a full minute for Kelly to contemplate his taste test.
“If I were to guess,” Kelly said, then took a swig of water from his canteen and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I would say mustard.”
“Mustard gas?” Nick said, appalled at the cavalier manner the man investigated an unknown substance.
“No. More like dry mustard.”
“Dry mustard?” Jennifer Steele asked. “Why in the world would they put dry mustard in a balloon, send it down a wire, then shoot it with a rifle? It’s a complete waste of time.”
Nick looked at his watch. Thirty-nine minutes before the White House missiles ignited. They’d wasted ten minutes dealing with the damn balloon. Nick knew exactly what Kharrazi was doing with those precious minutes.
He pulled out the satellite photos taken of the cabin just before sunset. He forced himself to sit up and the grimace he made seemed to startle Steele.
“Please,” she said, holding him upright to prevent him from toppling over. “You need to stay still. You could have broken some ribs.”
In between short, well-paced breaths, Nick said, “There’s not much that could be done for that anyway.” He worked his way to his knees and his peripheral vision began to clear up. Matt was only a few yards away, crouched down, providing cover for the assault on the cabin. It didn’t seem as if there was much resistance left. Matt was close enough to hear everything that Nick and Kelly had discussed. He looked at Nick and said, “You got lucky, partner.”
Nick spit powder from his mouth. He realized that it tasted like mustard. “Are they inside yet?”