Craig pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster and leveled his weapon at the driver’s side window. “Step back.”
Raising his forearm to shield his eyes, Craig fired at an angle into the window, which splashed into a spray of cobwebbed cracks. He fired again, and this time the remains of the safety glass shattered. Craig turned to the side and lashed again with his foot, this time kicking in the sheet of glass shards held together with fiber strands.
Panting, Craig said, “Now that we’re inside, I don’t have the first idea how to disarm that thing. All yours, General.”
Ursov crossed his arms over his white shirt. “I have helped to disassemble this model of weapon.” He peered inside the land rover. “Perhaps I can figure out something to do.”
“You’d better hurry, comrade.” Craig reached in and unlocked the doors. “Quick! Open the back!”
Ursov jogged around to the rear of the vehicle. He fumbled with the latch and yanked the back hatch open.
“What can I do to help?” said Craig, feeling terror claw up his throat. Stay calm, he thought. The last thing he needed to do was to spook Ursov.
“Nothing — yet,” said Ursov, bending over the warhead. He ripped the plastic sheet away and let it drift across the rocky ground. The wind caught it and whipped the plastic away like a lost kite. “Give me room to work.”
Craig backed off, feeling awkward and desperate for something to do. “I’ll, uh, see if they left any clues on how to stop this thing.”
Craig stuffed his pistol back in its shoulder holster, then hauled Mike Waterloo’s body out of the front seat. No time for ceremony, no time for sadness or anger. He dumped the DAF Manager on the muddy ground, then frantically began to search the vehicle. He sprawled across the front seat and banged on the glovebox. It fell open, and he rummaged through it.
In back Ursov stood over the warhead, studying the device as if he had all the time in the world. But a sheen of sweat sparkled across the blustery Russian’s forehead — and that frightened Craig most of all.
From the cluttered glovebox he pulled out AAA maps, a National Park Service map, and a folder of vehicle maintenance records. Nothing about the warhead. Craig tossed the material away. He patted under the front seat, finding only an old wrench and a long screwdriver. He couldn’t feel anything else, no How to Disarm Atomic Bombs in Your Spare Time manuals.
The warhead would go off any minute, and he and Ursov didn’t have a chance of getting far enough away. Even Paige would be killed along with any other personnel too close to Groom Lake.
Pulling himself back out of the front seat, he turned to Waterloo’s corpse lying in the dirt. Sally had shot him three times, well placed and effective. The DAF Manager’s gaunt features were pale from death, his body sprawled at an angle.
Craig quickly patted down the man’s body. He found only a wallet and a heavy handgun. Then he pulled out a thin RF card from Waterloo’s bloody shirt pocket, thicker than a credit card; it reminded Craig of the security access cards he had seen near the DAF. It might have something to do with the warhead, some code for the interlocks.
Protecting it from the rain, Craig jogged around to the back of the land rover. “General, I found an RF card.”
Ursov’s torso was half inside the back, bent over the warhead. He had opened the casing, but the red LEDs continued to blink, counting down the seconds. Six minutes.
The Russian used his finger to follow wires from the timer to a shoebox-sized package sitting on top of the warhead. He looked up, his eyes red with concentration. “Let me see it.”
Craig handed him the card; Ursov flipped it over, scowling. “Do you know the security code for this?”
Craig shook his head. “No.”
“It is useless without the code.” Ursov tossed the card away and hunched back over the unit. “But it would have helped us a great deal.”
Craig stared at the LED readout, still ticking down. “What kind of code would it be?”
“Numbers,” said Ursov, his head buried in the workings of the warhead. “A long sequence of numbers. Mr. Waterloo could have set it to be anything he liked. But if you don’t have the code, Agent Kreident, then leave me alone so I can work.”
“The numerical sequence could be anything.” Craig tried to think, watching the Russian work on the warhead’s control systems. A matrix of buttons next to the LED took up most of the side of the shoebox, next to the RF card reader. “Can we guess?”
Ursov continued to stare intently, his teeth on edge, as he traced the wires. He didn’t look up. “There are too many permutations to try at random. That would be a waste of time. Now stop bothering me.”
But it wouldn’t be random. What would Mike Waterloo use — a combination of his dead wife’s birthday and Paige’s birthday as well? But even if that were true, Craig didn’t have a clue what those dates were. What could be important —
Craig snapped his head up. “Wait, try a date, today’s date. October 24.” The date the Eagle’s Claw had written on the plastic explosives back at the transformer towers at the Hoover Dam.
Ursov inserted the card into the unit and punched in the numbers.
Nothing. A loud crack of thunder rolled across the sky.
“Maybe the month and day are reversed — sometimes people do that,” said Craig. Why wasn’t this working?
Ursov withdrew the card, then re-inserted it. He tried another sequence. He repeated the procedure — still nothing. “Useless! We are wasting time!” Scowling, he tossed the card to the side, then turned back to the PALs inside the warhead casing.
Craig drew in deep breaths. He felt totally helpless.
The weapon itself looked sleek, highly polished. Seams were barely visible around the steel-colored, conical nose section and toward the flared back. Although not more than two feet in girth at its widest point, the commandeered device took up a good part of the back of the land rover. The nuke looked like an old artillery shell, except smoother and shinier. And much more deadly.
Craig glanced at the countdown clock. They were down to a little over four minutes. Yet Ursov took his time, methodically tracing the wires that led to the rectangular package sitting on top of the warhead.
He heard approaching vehicles, more aircraft, helicopters — but the thought sickened him instead of filled him with elation. They should be evacuating at full speed — but he had no way of getting in touch with them.
Craig leaned over and tried to see what the Russian officer was doing. Here he stood two inches from ground zero with a Russian Strategic Rocket Forces officer — a man who had been trained all his career on how to blow up the entire western hemisphere. Now, Craig’s life was in the hands of this ex-communist.
But what could he do — run? The military helicopter overhead couldn’t even get far enough away now. They would all be dead in a flash. If the weapon went off, the crater itself would be thousands of yards in diameter, and the fireball would incinerate everything within miles. The wind would carry radioactive dust and debris across a thousand miles.
Ursov straightened, then whirled toward Craig, snapping in a hoarse voice. “I need a metal bar.”
“A what?”
“Something sharp. A crowbar. Quickly. We do not have much time.”
“What are you going to do, hit it?”
Ursov looked Craig coldly in the eye. “Agent Kreident, we will both die within three minutes unless you stop asking questions and just assist me.” He bent into the back of the land rover and started ripping loose a side panel.