Arms shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline, palms bloodied from the climb, I was barely able to speed-dial Margaret’s number.
“They won’t do it!” she exclaimed. “They-”
“Here’s what Nielson needs to do. Now!” I gave her my instructions.
Man, I hoped this worked.
Prayed it would.
It’ll work. It has to The snowmobiles stopped just outside the door.
Margaret ended the call so she could speak with Secretary of State Nielson, and I looked at my watch. We had only two, maybe three minutes before final descent.
Someone was turning the door handle.
Still lying on the freezing cement, I took aim with my Glock, tried to hold it steady in my torn, trembling hands as the door burst open and a cluster of flashlight beams blinded me.
“Stand down,” I yelled. “I’m an FBI-”
“Pat, it’s me!” Anton Torres shouted.
“Anton.” Yes, good! I lowered my gun. “You’re just in time.”
“For what?”
“There are people down there who might try to blow up the base.”
I wiped the blood from my hands and surfed to the DoD’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database, punched in my federal ID number, and searched for the live satellite feed of the SLBM’s contrail. “And we need to see if this missile can be stopped.”
While Sean barreled his pickup through the drifts forming on the road, Tessa sat with Amber in the backseat, trying to keep her awake.
“We’ll be there soon,” Sean told them. “Hang in there.”
Tessa closed her eyes and asked for divine intervention.
Even if God was angry at her for what she’d done, even if he couldn’t forgive her for the thrill she’d felt when she took that man’s life last year, maybe he could find enough mercy on this hellish night to give Amber a second chance.
97
I found the satellite image.
One of the SWAT guys handed me his jacket and I slipped it on, sat up. Stared at the screen.
With the satellite’s magnification, the missile’s contrail was clearly visible streaking over the Persian Gulf, and I waited for the SLBM to break apart, crack, fail, fall, die, but it did not.
No, it did not.
Over the next minute or so Torres’s men quickly and expertly set up their anchors and lowered the ropes they’d brought with them to rappel into the base, and while they did, I gave them the rundown on the base schematics, the number of terrorists, the status of casualties and known injuries, the location of the TATP detonator in the control room, but most of my attention was on the phone’s screen, on the contrail, on the missile that was not being blown out of the sky.
Come on.
Time ticked by. The missile streaked toward Jerusalem. I prayed for the bride, for the queen, for the people of God in that holy city. But the missile did not stop its fatal trajectory.
One by one the SWAT guys rappelled into the shaft while Torres and I silently watched the images on the phone.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Come-”
And then, all at once it appeared: a thin red streak, faint and barely visible, cutting across the corner of the screen. It contacted the missile for two seconds, three-maybe four-then veered away again and was gone.
Just that. Nothing more.
No. That’s not enough time!
But yet it was.
Without any dramatic explosion or pyrotechnic display, the SLBM ruptured, its fractured pieces fell toward Earth, and the contrail misted to a vaporous end.
And it was over. It’d worked. Iran had done it, but Hopefully, Israel hasn’t already responded.
Hopefully I felt Torres’s hand on my shoulder. “You did good, bro. I’m gonna go get those people out of there.”
“Chekov is in the control room.” I thought I might have already told him this a minute ago, but everything was sort of a blur. “Be careful with him, Anton. He won’t think twice about killing your whole team or blowing the base if he needs to in order to get away.”
“Right.” He handed me his gloves and wool hat. “Stay warm. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Then Torres lowered himself into the shaft and I was alone in the chilled, empty maintenance building, catching my breath, decompressing, trying to keep from shivering from the rush of adrenaline, the frigid air, my wasted, quivering muscles.
Figuring that cable news would be as up-to-the-minute as the government, I surfed to CNN’s website. Then I pulled on Torres’s hat, wriggled my hands painfully into his gloves.
On my cell’s screen, a reporter announced that, “According to our sources the missile is no longer in flight. We are waiting to confirm that-yes…” He spoke for a few moments about the SLBM’s destruction, then finally mentioned that Israel had not fired retaliatory missiles, that “at this time it appears a cataclysmic crisis in the Middle East has been narrowly averted by the strident efforts of Secretary of State Nielson and an unlikely ally in the Supreme Leader of Iran…”
I was breathing out a deep sigh of relief when I noticed that I had a voicemail from Tessa. The icon flashed highest priority.
A tap at the screen, then I heard her words, frantic, desperate: “Patrick! It’s Amber. She overdosed. She’s unconscious. I need you! We’re going to the hospital!”
What? Overdosed!
The message was from eight minutes ago.
I tried Tessa’s number. No reply.
I dialed Amber’s cell, their landline, Sean’s bait shop-nothing.
Pushing myself to my feet, I hollered down the shaft to Torres, “Tell Lien-hua I’ll be at the hospital. Amber’s in trouble!”
He acknowledged that he’d heard me.
Legs still uncertain from the climb, I clambered out the door toward the snowmobiles that Torres and his team had left outside the building.
Terry heard two explosions, felt the building rumble.
It must have worked. The missile must have hit Jerusalem and now Abdul’s men were here!
He waited, but no Al Qaeda militants came in to save him.
Instead, without warning, his door flew open and two CIA agents charged into the room, one shooting Terry’s gun from his hand, the other kicking him in the face, dazing him.
Then they were both on him, pinning him down.
Riley, who was pale and breathless on the floor nearby, gasped that he needed help. “In a minute, buddy,” one of the agents said. Then he leaned close to Terry, his breath stale and sausagey, his tone smug. “Your two buddies blew ’emselves into paradise right outside the door.” He pressed his knee against the GSW tunneling through Terry’s hand. White light blistered apart inside his head and he clenched his teeth, but he couldn’t keep from crying out in pain. “Didn’t account for American engineering, though. This place is built to withstand a lot more ’an that.”
Trying to fight off the pain, Terry rolled his head to the side and saw a woman whom he didn’t recognize enter the room. She wore a white coat and carried a medical kit and a large syringe.
Terry tried to wrestle free, but his legs were useless and he could barely move his arms or torso beneath the merciless grip of the two agents holding him down.
The woman knelt beside him. “Looks like you’ve been given a transfer order, Mr. Manoji.”
Then, the man who’d ground his knee against Terry’s wounded hand grabbed his head and forced the left side of Terry’s face to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye Terry could see the woman positioning the needle against his neck.
“This comes to you compliments of FBI Director Wellington and CIA Director O’Dell,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’s a transfer to a much better place.”
And as Terry Manoji screamed, the woman in the white coat depressed the plunger of the syringe.
98
Tessa sat beside Amber’s bed.
Her stepaunt was unconscious, on oxygen, a nasogastric tube inserted through her nose. The doctors had worked hard at emptying the drugs from her system, but she hadn’t responded well.