What are they, environmentalists?
In minutes, he would learn that the answer was just the opposite. As the Enola Gay banked north — as it had once turned, high above its Hiroshima target — he watched a sludge pond filled with millions of gallons of toxic runoff burst the earthen walls that contained its liquid death.
“Circle back!” he ordered.
As the pilots complied, Holmes watched the black waters race down a chewed-up mountain and swallow entire towns. He beat his knees in frustration, realizing that the enemy had given him clues to their deadly plan that he’d never made sense of. First the TVA dams. Now this. He should have seen it coming.
But he knew, despite his roiling anger and regret, that even if he’d been able to imagine such grotesque disregard of human life, there was no way for anyone to have warned those poor people. Rural electric power throughout most of the South had failed when the TVA dams collapsed.
The sequence, Holmes knew at once, was part of the plan. The countdown was getting crueler. And the best scientists in the country had not been able to penetrate the firewalls thrown up by the enemy that had taken control of the nation’s nuclear arms.
The day’s damage was hardly done. Unknown to Holmes, the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, two thousand miles away, to the west of Phoenix, went into full-scale meltdown. The exodus from the city — already suffering from temperatures approaching 130 degrees, the highest in its broiling-hot history — had proved riotous and furiously violent. People with four-wheel-drive cars and SUVs tried to blast their way across open desert. Road rage took on new, even more lethal dimensions as racing gun battles ensued among carloads of men and families trying to shoot their way free of radiation sickness and death.
Palo Verde, with its containment buildings rising above the desert floor, was the first nuclear power plant to go into meltdown, but operators of other plants were also facing record-low river and lake levels — and doing all they could to try to keep their reactors cool enough to prevent catastrophes that could take thousands of years to recover from.
The helicopter with Lana and the SEALs landed in another desert half a world away. No landing strip, only three unmarked concrete helicopter pads. Two were occupied by Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks clad in radar-absorbent materials. In short, they were stealth birds, exactly like the one used on the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Lana wondered if they were the same Sikorskys.
A Quonset hut hangar was the only structure at the “base,” and she understood, as she walked across the searing Arabian Desert sand, that the hut could probably be dismantled and carted away in hours. The desert would have no difficulty burying the concrete pads on its own.
The hangar provided shade, but little relief from the scorching daytime heat.
She spotted unnerving evidence that the hangar had been a black site: Wall and ceiling-mounted pulleys lay on the floor; discarded steel cables and shackles collected dust nearby; and buckets and ragged towels that could have been used—No, they were. Don’t kid yourself—for waterboarding were jammed into a corner.
That was when she knew the hangar had been out there for some time, for who would have left behind a grisly display of evidence like that? It would never be a stop on a congressional junket that included U.S. military bases. The only people who would ever see the hangar were prisoners, those who minded them, and the intelligence personnel like her who used the hangar in emergencies.
She also realized that in all likelihood, they had landed in Yemen. The Saudis permitted U.S. drone bases on their desert, but their imperial pride never would have countenanced such a brazen display of antiterror tools — not evidence that could undermine the moral authority of the royal family.
A propane camp stove sat on a rudimentary counter.
“Coffee?” asked Gabe, the New Yorker who had held her life in his hands as they roared out of Riyadh. “Or do you wanna get some shut-eye?”
He nodded at cots with blindingly white sheets. Odd, she thought, for such an otherwise grungy redoubt.
Lana answered with her feet, trudging to the nearest cot to lie down, fully clothed. She might have fallen asleep before her head hit the pillow.
“You think she liked our song?” Gabe asked Travis.
“I sure hope so,” the commander replied. “Because there’s no encore. Sun goes down, and our bird goes up. And we’re not singing a single note on our way to Sana.”
Travis set up a computer with a satellite link. In minutes he clicked onto a European website and began to update his team on the embassy takeover: “They say they’re going to put the ambassador on trial.”
“Good; I hope they convict him of being a pussy,” said the SEAL who’d pushed Arpen against a wall to keep him from following the team assigned to rescue Lana.
The officer who’d driven the Delica carried over half a dozen folding chairs and doled them out.
“Nothing from the palace yet,” Travis went on, “so they’re letting all the action at the embassy play out.”
“Kissing some militant ass,” said the driver. “Anybody killed yet?”
“No reported deaths. Hey, that’s a good sign,” Travis offered.
“Only if you like Arpen,” Gabe volleyed. “I hate those Yalies.”
“He went to Harvard,” Travis replied. “Just like you. Christ, you make a lousy good ol’ boy, and I know my good ol’ boys.”
“Well, you make a lousy Aggie, and Arpen makes a lousy ambassador.”
“Okay, guys, here’s a German news report with video.” Travis pointed to the screen.
“What the fuck is that?” Gabe demanded, pointing to the screen, where it looked like thousands were rioting at Chicago O’Hare Airport.
“Veepox has hit the Windy City,” Travis said, back to watching the news scroll. “It’s under quarantine, and—”
“Those people are totally out of control,” Gabe finished Travis’s comment without looking away from the monitor. “And that’s Santa Monica,” he added when video appeared of an Army tank rolling down Highway 1.
“Right,” the driver said. “You know your cities.”
“And my beach towns. Tell you something else I know. I’ll never lose money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” Gabe shot back.
“And even an Aggie knows you ripped that line off from a guy named Mencken,” Travis said.
“It’s weird being where the action isn’t,” Gabe replied, ignoring the plagiarism charge.
“Don’t worry about that,” Travis told him. “We’ll be heading into the darkest night soon enough.”
A couple of hundred miles away, Ruhi still sat between two Mabahith agents in the Ford Expedition. Lennon, in the passenger seat, controlled the playlist, so Ruhi had been forced to listen to an endless stream of Arabic music, which he loathed. He was more of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, or just Simon would do. Maybe some John Denver. A girlfriend once told him that he had “atavistic taste.” He readily agreed. A loop of “Country Roads” might have played in his head if the racket from Lennon’s iPod could have been silenced.
He’d complained, of course, but Lennon had looked at him like he was a bug badly in need of insecticide.
But hard as Ruhi tried, he could not drive out the grating sounds of buzzes, dafs, tablahs, and the other screechy Arabic instruments ripping at his ears.
Signs for the Yemeni border appeared, now only a few kilometers away. Given its import, Ruhi would have liked a little more warning.