His heartbeat pounded behind his eyes and he felt a fuzziness creep into his brain as his body consumed the last molecules of oxygen left in his system.
Wait, he commanded himself. Wait…
He counted to five, then ten, and then seeing nothing above him, he kicked to the surface. He gulped air until his vision cleared, then looked to where the Duroc had been.
There was nothing. Chunks of fiberglass and tiny pockets of burning fuel dotted the surface, but the yacht was gone, sinking toward the seafloor.
To his left he saw a twinkle of light. In the distance, still a few miles away, a searchlight played over the water’s surface. The Bahamian Navy and the FBI to the rescue, Fisher thought. It was time to leave.
He punched up the IKS’s control menu on the OPSAT and pressed buttons until the screen read, IKS: MODE: HOME TO SIGNAL. He keyed his subdermal. “Lambert, get Bird to the extraction point.”
“Status?”
“Mission clean.” No footprints, no evidence, no nothing. “Very clean.”
“Explain.”
“Later. I’m on my way home.”
He turned and started swimming.
Kuan-Yin Zhao heard a knock on his door, then feet softly padding toward his desk. He knew without looking who it was. Xun. His hesitant, mincing steps were unmistakable. Xun stopped before Zhao’s desk and stood quietly, waiting.
Zhao’s desk was covered in an array of newspapers from London, New York, Moscow, and Beijing. So far, the coverage was remarkably similar. No significant variations. The board was intact, all the pieces and players being taken at face value.
Zhao looked up. “Yes?”
“Message from Lei, sir. They’ve weighed anchor and are under way. The job is done.”
Zhao sighed. Even Xun’s voice was weak. The boy was smart enough, with degrees from Oxford and MIT, but he had no Lān-hút—no stones, as the Americans say. Xun was a distant nephew, one of the few with his family name left alive. This, he thought, is what I am left with. A boy who had a mind for this business, but no heart for the brutality it required to not only survive, but to rule. Given time, Xun might be a worthy successor to the empire; but time was a precious commodity. During war, time was a luxury you couldn’t afford to squander.
“No complications?” Zhao asked.
“No, sir.”
Zhao nodded. Another pawn steps forward, joining the first two, shielding the king.
“The emergency bands?”
“We’re monitoring. The island is small; it shouldn’t take long. May I ask, sir… ”
“Go ahead.”
“What are we listening for?”
“We’re listening for the faint scrape of our opponent’s piece moving across the board.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Watch and learn.”
Zhao waved Xun out. Alone again, Zhao closed his eyes and visualized the board. He imagined his opponent reaching out, fingers hesitating over one piece, before lifting it from the board.
Your move.
15
Having only been gone for fifteen hours, Fisher was stunned at what had changed during that time.
The town of Slipstone was lost.
Within minutes of local environmental officials determining that the source of the water supply’s contamination was neither natural nor accidental, the small New Mexico town had became the focal point of a massive relief effort, starting with the President’s order to activate the Radiological Emergency Response Plan, or RERP.
Assets from every branch of government, from the FBI to the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Energy to Homeland Security, sprang into action, dispatching first-responder teams. Within six hours of the RERP’s initiation, Slipstone was quarantined. Every road, highway, and trail leading to and from the town was put under guard by state troopers. Those residents who had panicked upon hearing the news and hurried to leave the area were quickly rounded up and placed in the mobile quarantine and treatment camp that had been established by the Army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division. Unfortunately, this camp was one of the first scenes captured by news cameras: families being unceremoniously marched by biohazard-suited soldiers into a sterile white tent in the middle of the desert. The image sent shock waves across the country as Americans realized their worst nightmare had finally become reality: Terrorists had attacked the U.S. with a radiological weapon.
Meanwhile, the first responders to enter the town, a NEST team, found a greater nightmare waiting for them. Slipstone was a ghost town. Investigation would later show the water supply had been poisoned sometime in the afternoon, shortly before residents finished work and started heading home. Consquently, the streets were mostly deserted, with only a handful of bodies found, most of them in their cars as they had tried to escape the town. The bulk of the corpses were found in their homes, asleep, in front of television sets, in their bathrooms, and, heartbreakingly, sprawled beside the beds of their children, dead where they had fallen trying to reach their children.
Those few residents found alive shuffled through the streets like zombies: glassy-eyed, hair falling out in clumps, blood streaming from their eyes as the radiological poison slowly killed them. Those with any strength left headed toward the edge of town and the quarantine barriers, where they were stopped by state troopers and National Guard soldiers. This, too, was broadcast across the country: ghostly-white Slipstone residents, begging to be allowed to leave, while stone-faced soldiers and police officers forced them back into the hell they knew was killing them.
In the Situation Room, Fisher watched, stunned, as the images paraded across the monitors. Across the country every broadcast and cable television channel, from the Food Network to Home Shopping Central, had either switched to emergency programming or had surrendered their signals to cable and network news coverage.
Sitting on either side of Fisher at the conference table, Grimsdottir and Lambert also watched in silence. Anna stifled a sob, then stood up and walked away.
“Good God,” Lambert muttered.
“How many?” Fisher asked. “Any idea?”
“Official figures won’t be released for a couple days, but Grim’s been monitoring the RERP’s secure frequencies. So far they only found fourteen survivors.”
“Out of how many?”
“According to the last census, five thousand plus.”
It took a moment for Fisher to absorb this number. He exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose. Unless the response teams were wrong and somewhere, somehow, there was a large group of survivors yet to be found in Slipstone, the death toll would far surpass that of 9/11.
“What’s happening in Washington?” Fisher asked.
“Both the House and Senate are in emergency session. The vote will be unanimous, I’m sure.”
“Declaration of war,” Sam murmured.
Lambert nodded. “Against nations unknown. The President is scheduled to talk to the nation at noon, our time.”
“What does this do to our mission?”
“Nothing. I spoke with the President while you were in the Bahamas. War is coming; there’s no way around that. Against who is the only question. He wants no stone left unturned, and no doubt about who’s responsible. Things are starting to snowball at the FBI and CIA now. Conclusions will be reached; recommendations made; targets chosen. Our job is to make sure — damn sure — we’ve got the right targets.”