Murdock ran up to the door, but held the rest of the SEALs back. He stepped inside and saw two dead Arabs. Both had submachine guns and bandoliers of ammo across their chests. A third Arab sat on the floor, his hands trying to hold blood in his chest. He coughed and blood flew from his mouth.
“We almost made it,” he said in English.
Murdock saw the men shaping the lead blankets around a three-foot-high muddy wooden box in the middle of the room. It was made roughly in the shape of a squared-off ball. The lead blankets were doubled.
The Arab didn’t notice them. He looked at the nearest Scotland Yard inspector and asked him something.
“What?” the inspector asked.
“Could you get my watch? It has a picture of my wife and two daughters in it. In my pocket. One last look.”
The inspector looked at Anthony. He nodded. The Yard man fished out the gold-plated pocket watch with a chain. The man opened the top of it and looked at the inside of the cover.
Then he laughed. “Fools,” he yelled. “Damn fools. I’ve won after all. All I have to do is press the stem and in ten seconds the bomb detonates and half of London and all of us simply vanish from the face of the earth as we vaporize in a glorious atomic explosion.”
“Don’t do it,” Anthony said.
The Arab laughed and blood sprayed out of his mouth. He looked at the red stain on his hand and his watch, and said something in Arabic that Murdock figured was a prayer. Then he screamed and pushed the stem on the pocket watch. He screamed again and counted on down from seven to zero.
Nothing happened.
The Arab opened his eyes and stared in disbelief at the bomb. Then he began to cry.
“The lead blanket prevented the signal from getting to the bomb,” Murdock told him in Arabic.
The dying man looked at Murdock and shouted something, but this time nothing but a froth of blood came out of his mouth. His eyes glazed; then the blood stopped and he tilted to the left, then fell over dead before he hit the floor.
By the time Murdock left the building, an armored truck with siren blasting pulled up outside. Men were equipped for the job. A ramp opened in back and a small forklift rolled out and into the building.
Murdock called the SEALs around and told them what had happened inside.
“That wraps it for us then, Cap?” Bill Bradford asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
Inspector Anthony came out and found the SEALs. He wiped a line of sweat off his forehead.
“Too close in there. We’ll never know if that was a real trigger that he had in that watch or not. Oh, we’ll check out the watch, but would it have set off the bomb without the lead shield around it?”
“Ours is not to wonder why,” Jaybird said.
Anthony laughed, and it broke the tension for him. “True, how true. Now, let’s get you men back to Crawley and some dry clothes and lots of good chow.”
His radio came on and he listened to his earpiece. A moment later he nodded. “Yes, sir. Yes, I’ll tell them. Good night, sir.”
He looked over at Murdock. His grin grew to cover his whole face. “That was my boss. He said to thank you for your help on this little project. Without you we probably would never have found the damned bomb. We’ve had a message for you from Mr. Stroh.”
“Oh, boy,” Paul Jefferson said. “This can’t be good.”
“Mr. Stroh says that you should get some food and then a good night’s sleep. However, just because this little game of hide-and-seek is over, you won’t be going home. He says he has a new project for you that starts bright and early in the morning.”
“Oh, yeah,” Frank Victor said. “Just exactly what we need — another surprise.”
“What the hell is it?” Colt Franklin asked.
“It’s a surprise,” Senior Chief Sadler said. “If we knew what it was, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Let’s shag ass out of here. I’m hungry.”
9
The next morning Murdock and DeWitt met with Don Stroh at the small officers’ mess on the military base. Murdock wasn’t quite sure what kind of a base it was. There were Royal Air Force planes there, also Royal Naval units, and he had seen companies of soldiers marching around.
There were only ten tables in the mess. Three of them were occupied. The Americans feasted on bacon and eggs, hash browns, and cups of scalding coffee. After the dishes were cleared away, Don Stroh put a folder on the table from his slender briefcase.
“This may seem slightly unusual, but I’m telling you this before it’s official. It’s still just a suggested plan by a foreign power, and the President and the CNO and even the Secretary of Defense have not given me a report on it, or a decision.”
“The British want to strike back at the extremists who they think orchestrated this nuclear blackmail,” Ed DeWitt said.
Don Stroh looked at him with a jolt of surprise. “Ed, how could you know something like that? You’re right to a degree. That’s the general idea; however, they want to go about six steps farther. The Brits are furious with the terrorists and want to annihilate the three or four elements of the Arab extremist movement that have been causing the world so much trouble over the past forty years. They want to blast them into hell, to ruin them so completely and so thoroughly that they never will be able to reorganize or ever have any power again.
“The President told my boss that he didn’t have any real objection to a payback strike, something to tell the extremists that we know what they did and we want to hurt them. He is worried about taking it the next few steps, in effect conducting a war of attrition against the various Muslim hate groups. They include the Arafat Palestinians, the Fatah movement in Ramallah on the West Bank, and even the Mohammad Medein originally thought to be active only in Chechnya and Dagestan. Plus Hamas, the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah, and even the London-based Al-Muhjiroun. Now it is believed the Medein had a major hand in the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen, where those seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and the billion-dollar state-of-the-art missile destroyer was seriously damaged and put into a repair dock for a year.”
“Just the U.S. and the Brits would be in this?” Murdock asked.
“Oh, no, in fact we would be junior partners. The main cog in the machinery would be Israel, who has the most to lose here and the most to gain.”
“The West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” DeWitt said.
“What are the Brits planning?” Murdock asked.
“We’re not sure. They haven’t told us. We know that once this story of the nuclear blackmail breaks, it will be documented within an inch of its life. There will be pictures of the dead Arabs, the complete scenario of what happened. The dead Arabs and the two who were caught alive will be tied to certain terrorist organizations by the British right up front. Once the story breaks, Britain will hit them quickly. We think it will be an air strike that will pulverize certain known headquarters. Beyond that, we have no idea what their plans might be.”
“What is Israel saying?” DeWitt asked.
“We know they are planning something, but we don’t know what. They have strongly urged that we should handle it on a triad basis, sharing equally in the planning, financing, and personnel. They have been feeling out our people on the idea. It would be scalpel-clean; it would be pinpointed at certain headquarters and people. It would be continuing until those involved in terrorism were blown off the face of the Middle East.”