“Target acquired. Do I have a green light?”
“Take him out,” said Thorpe.
The sniper squeezed the trigger. The recoil rocked his shoulder as the bullet sliced through the air.
When he rises back up and turns to face me, I can finally see what it is that he has in his hand. Nitikin starts to run back toward us. He takes two long strides. His eyes connect with his daughter as his upthrust hand releases the heavy item, tossing it toward the bed of the truck. Just as he does it, the bullet rips through his upper body, sending a cloud of crimson mist out the front of his chest.
The wrench clatters across the smooth metal bed of the truck. I hear the shriek from Maricela as she tries to get past me and out the back. She is desperate to reach her father, sprawled on the pavement. From my knees I smother her in my arms and drive her back against the fiberglass wall of the truck.
As the helicopter peeled away out over the bay, Alim threw the assault rifle and the extra clip into some bushes, and ran toward Jamal, in the car down the street.
Afundi abandoned the two bags he’d left on the sidewalk across the street. There was no time. Pike’s computer and the newspaper from Castro were not worth dying for.
He closed the distance on the blue sedan. Breathless, he reached the driver’s side and climbed in. “Why didn’t you pick me up?” Alim looked at the ignition. “Where are the keys?” He saw a patch of blood on Jamal’s shirt and the fixed gaze of death in his eyes.
Liquida reached for Alim from the backseat and had the ether-soaked rag over his face before he could move. Alim fumbled for the pistol in his pocket, but it was too late.
With the sound of the shot that kills Nitikin, Herman jumps out from the opening in the side of the crate. He sees for the first time what has happened and within seconds he is over to help me with Maricela. He lifts her and carries her back into the darker interior of the sheltering truck.
I scramble across the floor to retrieve the six-inch crescent wrench that Maricela’s father purchased with his life. Two seconds later, my head is in the opening at the side of the wooden crate. I feel for the metal plug at the breech of the gun, adjust the spanner wheel until the wrench fits snugly over the hex head on the plug. Then I pull. It won’t budge. I pull again, this time harder. Then I realize I’m turning it in the wrong direction. I push on the handle. It doesn’t move. I jar the handle with my hand, giving it more muscle.
“You want me to try?” says Herman.
“Nooo,” I groan. But then the plug begins to move. A slow quarter turn at first, and then it loosens. I pull off the wrench and turn it with my fingers, twisting the two wires as I go. Suddenly the plug comes free in my hand.
Carefully I lift it straight out, away from the closed end of the barrel. I feel the heat from the radiation inside and quickly draw my hand with the plug away from the gun. The entire assembly comes free, the metal plug with the wires running through it. On one end of the wires is the electronic detonator. On the other is the small green circuit board with the timer.
I hold it gingerly in my hand as I get to my feet and walk toward the open door. I get down from the truck and throw the assembly as far as I can, out onto the street.
I yell at the top of my lungs, “The detonator is out. The bomb is safe.” Less than a minute later an explosion the size of an MD- 80, a large cherry bomb some say is a quarter stick of dynamite, goes off in the street.
Within seconds a federal agent on a squad car PA system tells us to come out of the truck with our hands in the air. Men in tactical gear surround us with rifles as officers throw us to the ground.
Agents in black Kevlar storm the truck and huddle around the crate inside.
Police stand over us holding rifles as others search our pockets, pat us down, and cuff our hands.
Maricela struggles to get to her father. One of the cops kneels on her back, jamming her face into the pavement as two of his burly brethren grab her hands and manacle them behind her back.
“Leave her alone,” I say.
“Shut up.” I get the muzzle of a rifle jammed into my back.
Liquida turned the key in the ignition and started the car. With all the confusion around the truck two blocks away, who could blame them for not noticing the small blue sedan as it pulled away from the curb, did a U-turn, and headed south toward the Coronado bridge.
SIXTY-EIGHT
It took a few days for the dust to settle. By then federal authorities had hauled the device to a safe location where they could study it and dispose of the fissile materials when they were finished. The press and the media never got wind of exactly what had happened.
The president had delayed his televised warning by an additional half hour to provide more time for logistical planning. In the meantime, the device had been defused and the need for a warning evaporated. None of the more than ten thousand people on the naval base that day ever learned just how close they had come to Armageddon. Nor did the thousands who lived in Coronado or those in San Diego, across the bay.
Within days of the event, government analysts, physicists, and weapons-design experts assessed the potential yield of Nitikin’s device and crunched the numbers. They determined that the distance between the giant aircraft carrier moored at the dock and the epicenter of the blast where the truck was parked was just over half a mile, which placed the carrier squarely within the zone of total destruction.
Structures within a mile of the epicenter would have been totally destroyed, either by the blast effect or by heat from the fireball. Within that one-mile radius, virtually no living thing above the surface of the sea would have survived. Those who were not instantly incinerated would have suffocated as a result of oxygen deprivation, all oxygen having been consumed in the blast, or from the lethal dose of radiation poisoning.
Within a two-mile zone the vast majority of those in the open, with out shelter, would have been killed. Any wooden structures would have been, for the most part, ignited by the superheated air from the blast and destroyed by fire.
Beyond that, radiation poisoning would have devastated those who survived the initial blast, some of whom would die within days, others over longer periods.
Much of the city of Coronado would lie in ruins. The blast effect, unimpeded by any structures on the water, would reach across the bay to wreak havoc on buildings along the waterfront in San Diego, and the effects of radiation would drift across the harbor and contaminate large portions of the city as well as the suburbs beyond. To those with visions of the California dream-balmy beaches and bikinied blue-eyed blondes- Southern California would never look the same again.
But for Paul Madriani and Katia Solaz, the most important item may not have been the bomb. Their salvation was found farther down the street.
In some brush near a house a half block from the location of the rental truck, police found an abandoned weapon, a Chinese Kalashnikov rifle along with an extra clip of ammunition. Ballistics tests showed that the rifle in question was the weapon used to kill three federal agents and to wound two others, all of whom were hit from behind as they approached the truck.
Fingerprints lifted from the rifle were run through federal computers and a positive match identified. The prints belonged to a man named Alim Afundi, the same name given to the authorities by Maricela Solaz. Military records showed that Afundi was a noncombatant detainee who’d been captured in Afghanistan and transported to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He and several followers had escaped, disappeared, and were presumed dead somewhere in the swamps or sea surrounding the base.