Still in chador and veil, Candace belly-crawled toward the turban-headed man who had Lana, whose face looked bloody and stunned.
Another flash grenade exploded, and Candace spied them all heading to a trapdoor in the floor, including Lana and the Korean. The guard in the lead opened it, climbing into it quickly. Then he guided the legs of the second guard, who kept his weapon up, covering their retreat.
Candace had only seconds. She waved her left hand, weaponless, at the man in the turban who was dragging Lana behind him. He looked over, saw the chador, and acknowledged her with a nod, as he might a comrade. But that was a feint. He quickly pointed his weapon at her, but before he could shoot, she fired three times, hitting him in the throat twice. But the third bullet hit Lana in the arm. Candace saw her roll away in grievous pain. The agent, though, never paused.
The second guard at the trapdoor scrambled into what must have been an escape tunnel, then helped the leader down into it. Candace lunged forward as the trapdoor started to close. She reached in, felt an arm, and seized it. It had to be the leader’s; he had been the last one to climb down.
He tried to jerk free of her grasp and almost succeeded. She knew from his frantic movements that she’d never be able to hold on. Then he bit her savagely. Squeezing his wrist as hard as she could, Candace used her free hand to pull out the gas canister. Gasping from pain — his teeth were grinding into the bones in back of her hand — she maneuvered the nozzle toward her trapped hand and let loose a long blast. The bite ended immediately, and she had no trouble dragging the Korean out from under the door into breathable air. The two guards in the tunnel must have fled as far from the gas as they could, for there was no further resistance from down there.
The Korean now lay in a fetal position, gulping air.
Lana, kneeling and bleeding profusely from the bullet wound in her arm, had found a weapon and trained it on the gassed man.
“Who is he?” Candace asked her.
“Kang-dee Rang,” she told her.
“Cease fire,” Omar bellowed, drawing their attention.
Candace looked around. Huddles of the dead and barely breathing appeared with each glance. Other members of the assault team rose carefully from all corners of the cavern, pointing their weapons at everyone at once.
Lana also stood, looking at her arm. A Mabahith medic ran up with a length of tubing and applied a tourniquet. The gunshot wound was so painful she barely noticed the enormous pressure, or the pain from where she’d been punched in the nose and knocked almost unconscious by the man who’d dragged her across the floor.
In her fury, she kicked Kang-dee. “Get him on his feet,” she shouted.
The Korean didn’t move. His knees were still pressed to his face. Not hard to understand why: Even the little bit of gas that had escaped into the cavern continued to irritate Lana’s eyes.
Omar rushed over. “What do you need?” he said to Lana.
“I need to get to his console,” she said, already striding to Kang-dee’s computer.
Ahmed joined her.
“Hook mine up,” she told Ruhi’s cousin.
Ahmed ran a cable from her port in seconds.
She checked his work and settled where Kang-dee had held forth only minutes ago. With a groan, she used her right hand to lift up her wounded left arm to the keyboard. But she quickly saw the problem: She couldn’t even log on because access was biometrically controlled.
“I need his eye,” she said to Omar.
“You want me to take it out?” Omar asked.
“God, no.” Lana cringed much as she had when watching that ploy in bad movies. “He’s got to actually look into the scanner.”
“No problem.”
In a moment, Omar, with the help of three beefy officers, had Kang-dee hunched over his computer.
“Look at it,” Omar demanded.
Kang-dee refused. Omar seized his wrist and studied a chronograph on the Korean’s watch. “Is that right?” he shouted at him. “Less than three minutes?”
Again, Kang-dee offered no reply.
Candace stepped over, jammed the canister nozzle between Kang-dee’s lips, and released a tiny amount of the fiery gas. The shock of the gas forced his eyes wide open involuntarily, swollen as they were. Just long enough to gain Lana access to the console.
The equipment was familiar to her, the most advanced in her field. She knew it the way a baseball player knows the basics of any bat. What worried her were all the curveballs hiding inside.
“Do you need anything?” Ahmed asked her, staring at the blood dripping from her left arm.
“Nothing,” she replied tersely. Then added, “I’m just getting through the simple stuff right now. This will take a minute. How much time do we have?” she asked as her fingers continued to fly.
“If this is right”—Omar had Kang-dee’s wrist again—“less than two minutes.”
Kang-dee’s swollen eyes opened once more. He nodded and smiled, perhaps finding pleasure in a final measure of torment.
Ahmed shoved a pistol into Kang-dee’s mouth. “Shut it down!”
Kang-dee refused.
Omar shook his head at Ahmed. The Saudis wanted Kang-dee alive.
So do we, Lana thought. But less than two minutes?
Even as she envisioned her next moves, she remembered the nurse handing Emma to her, the first glimpse of her only child.
Don’t let me lose her.
Willing away the pain in her crippled arm, she typed furiously, working to penetrate levels of security not unlike the ones that she had so artfully constructed for her own computer.
It took maybe thirty seconds. Without pause, Lana began releasing malware of every order: worms that she hoped were racing through the heart of each program in Kang-dee’s networks, ideally taking the entire system to the verge of collapse. Viruses, too, that she’d tried to adapt to the invisible enemy’s possible weaknesses after her brief flurry of forensics following the first cyberattack.
Included in her assault was a distributed denial of service attack, instantly turning thousands of computers around the world into robots working for her, assailing the system in her sights exponentially more quickly in an effort to overwhelm it.
Next, with a few strokes, she released logic bombs to try to erase all the data and software on the cavern’s systems.
“One minute,” Ahmed said softly.
She winced, unsure what would work — if anything could—so she began unleashing every technological trick in her arsenal without pause.
“Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one.” Ahmed stopped, perhaps knowing she was fully aware that overwhelming peril was impending.
She was so close to the final keystrokes, so close to executing the reason she had made the long, perilous journey here. So close to firing all the bomblets into his elaborate network.
Don’t slow.
Her fingers flew. The only sounds in the entire cavern were the clicks on the keyboard — and the low hum of that nuclear missile silo opening on the screen a few feet away.
Lana had always been a strong typist. Now she was accessing code burned into her brain as it was into the hard drive of so many intelligence agency computers in the U.S.
And then she neared the last keystroke, which could cripple his computers as he had crippled her country — or leave them with no recourse but to witness, from afar, the final destruction of America. She hit it.
Nothing?
She could scarcely believe it.
“Eight, seven…” Ahmed said.
And that’s when Lana noticed a word in the corner of the screen directly in front of her: “Ahn Yeong.” Korean for “good-bye.”