“Shit!” Luke yelled inside his Hornet as he pushed the nose of his airplane down hard and right and tried to get out of the way. As soon as he was clear of Stoller’s falling airplane, he pulled up to get on top of him and began a gentle left turn to stay near him. Luke looked over at his left wing with terror in his heart. “Mink! You got it?”
Mink’s voice was strained and high. “Negative. I’m missing half a wing! I can’t stop the rolls!”
Luke could tell that he wasn’t going to recover. Luke was at ten thousand feet above the desert, and Mink was passing through seven thousand feet. “Eject! Eject!” Luke yelled.
Mink heard him and tried to read his altimeter. Then he realized it didn’t really matter how high he was. He had no chance of recovering control of an F/A-18 with half a wing bent up. He reached between his legs and pulled the ejection handle.
Luke watched as the canopy came off the falling Hornet and silently drifted away from the jet. The rocket motor on the seat fired, and Mink came hurtling out of the cockpit into the dry desert air. The Hornet spiraled downward and slammed into the desert floor.
3
The ramshackle building stood at the end of a nearly impassable dirt road outside of Peshawar. Most of the men crowded into the room were accustomed to much more desperate conditions. Riaz Khan had known both a life of deprivation and a life of privilege. He lived in both worlds in Pakistan. The people he worked with were mostly privileged, but those he identified with—those he planned to die with—had never owned anything of value and didn’t care whether they ever did.
Khan was desperate. His entire plan had turned on getting the material through the border. And now the man who had helped him come up with the most dramatic scheme to embarrass all three of his enemies at once, was about to abandon him. He was the one who had brought them inside information from India. He could stop everything just by withholding his approval. “You cannot cancel your part—”
“You have left me no choice,” Shirish said in a quiet, authoritative voice. “I told you that we had a small window of time. You said you could get the material through the border. You have failed.”
“No,” Khan replied, trying not to explode. “No, I didn’t. Mahmood did.”
Shirish turned and regarded Mahmood behind him. He looked around the room, which was full of Pakistanis except for himself and the tall Russian. “It doesn’t matter to me. These are your people. You can divide blame as you see fit.” He shook his head in complete frustration, the kind that grew from knowing that someone else would hold him accountable somehow, and it was completely out of his hands. “What you do is now up to you. I can no longer help you.”
“Yes!” Khan roared. “It will still happen! We will get to the United States. We will not fail!”
Shirish smiled ruefully. “You said you had an inside track! That you could get your men into TOPGUN. You couldn’t even do that. Then this border incident! You have brought the attention of the entire world down on our heads! My country does not want that kind of attention. Our help must be withdrawn—”
“Mahmood!” Khan yelled. He balled his hands into fists and glared at Mahmood, a man much smaller than himself, with the soft hands of a politician, the man who had embarrassed him in front of the world and, more particularly, in front of Shirish, the Indian intelligence agent whom Khan had convinced to help them. Khan’s face was barely perceptible in the shadows as he hissed at Mahmood, “You promised you would get us into the TOPGUN school. You had your man in place in Washington, you said. And you promised the material would make it through the border. You promised the guards would be no problem. I was almost killed just trying to salvage your plan. Now our friend here,” he said, pointing to Shirish, “is about to abandon us because of our incompetence. And who could blame him? We have shown him nothing,” he said in exasperation. “We may not be able to do any of it, because of you!” he went on, pointing at Mahmood’s chest—Mahmood, who was trying to say something but whose mind was failing him.
“We have here,” Khan said, gesturing toward the Russian, “the one who was going to turn the plutonium into a weapon that would have put us in front of the world.” Everyone in the room knew who the humorless Russian was. He was the one who had come out of nowhere to help them. The men thought it proved that Riaz Khan could get anyone to do anything for the cause, even a Russian nuclear scientist. “All he needed was the materials. And you failed us!”
Mahmood was petrified. He knew Riaz Khan’s reputation. “How could I know that the one border guard in all of Pakistan’s mountains who was not drunk would decide to stop this truck? How could we know?”
“Always an excuse!” Riaz paced. He looked at the Russian. “Is it possible to get more? Can it be done?”
The tall Russian looked grim and shook his head slowly as he considered. “The material from the border is gone? There is no way to get it?”
Khan replied, “I told you. The truck blew up. The border guards shot at the tires and hit the gas tank. The whole truck went up.”
The Russian suddenly went pale, understanding the implications for the first time. He knew that the attempt to get the plutonium across the border had failed, but no one had told him there had been a shoot-out and a conflagration in the process. He dreaded the answer to his next question. “Were the containers with the plutonium broken?”
Khan thought about it for the first time. “How would I know? We never got close enough to the truck to see the containers. For all I know they weren’t even on the truck.”
The Russian rubbed his forehead. “Has anyone tested you for exposure?”
“Exposure? Exposure to what?”
“To radiation,” the Russian whispered. He quickly went to the corner of the room and took a small electronic device out of a box. He turned it on, crossed to Khan, and put a microphonelike device up to Khan’s chest.
“What are you doing?” Khan asked, frustrated with such odd behavior.
“Checking for exposure.”
Khan watched as the needle jumped. The Russian frowned.
“What is it?”
The Russian looked grim. “Who else was there?”
Khan pointed to two others who were nearby. The Russian checked them.
“I’m afraid you have been exposed to radioactive material.”
“So what?” Khan said dismissively.
“So you have radiation sickness.”
“I feel fine.”
“Based on the levels I just saw, you will almost certainly be dead within a year.”
“What?” Khan exclaimed. “What did you say?”
“You have been damaged by the plutonium. I told you not to get too—”
“We didn’t do anything! I never got closer than fifty meters to the truck!”
“That is close enough, given the right circumstances. I’m afraid there is nothing you can do about it.”
Khan looked around the room, at the others who had heard everything. “Then we move up our timetable.” He paused as he absorbed the idea of dying in twelve months. He asked the Russian, “Is there any more material we can get through your contacts?”
“Our best chance would be Berdsk, but even that would be difficult. Oziorsk and Miass also”—he shrugged—“but better than those that would be Almaly and Olar. They are in Kazakhstan, right on the border with Kyrgyzstan. But after the border incident…” He frowned. “I don’t know, I think we must wait at least six months—”