Lethal Code

CHAPTER 22

Lana and Ruhi raced to the edge of the flat roof, which was bordered by a two-foot wall. Beyond it loomed a six-foot gap to the roof of the next building — and a five-story drop to the alley below.

“Can you make that?” she asked Ruhi, aiming her Browning back at the spot where they’d climbed up on the roof — exactly where she expected those killers to show up any second.

“I think so. What about you?” Like her, he sounded breathless.

She just nodded. It felt like all she could do, so shaken by witnessing the death squad slaughter of the men who had rescued her in Riyadh and protected her ever since.

They knew we were there. How? Who set us up?

No time for questions without immediate answers. “Go!” she urged Ruhi.

She sighted down the black barrel of her pistol at that spot on the roof, saw the gun shaking, and told herself to get a grip — in every sense.

Ruhi stood on the short wall. The tile felt firm beneath his feet, the distance doable. All this registered in an instant.

A standing long jump, he told himself. Six feet. You can do it. “Use your arms,” he remembered a gym teacher telling him. Sixth Grade Olympics. An intracity event. In the 1,500-meter run, Ruhi had won a silver.

No medal for the long jump.

He crouched and sprang out over the gap, thrusting his arms forward, driving himself as hard as he could.

He felt the bite of gravity in less than a second.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lana saw Ruhi’s legs go airborne, but most of her attention was back on where they’d hauled themselves up onto the roof. She was trying so hard to see into the sun that she was shocked when a door to what looked like a rooftop shed flew open forty feet away and a man in a turban peered out. She saw his rifle and knew she had but one chance to kill him. It lasted less than a blink — scarcely long enough for her to get off two shots. The second round tore into his head, killing him.

She turned. Ruhi hadn’t made it.

Oh, God.

But then she spotted him pulling himself up onto the roof on the other side of the chasm. He’d managed to grab the edge. He stood, shouting, “Come on.”

“Catch,” she called softly, throwing him the gun. He’d need it — if she didn’t make it across.

But as soon as she tossed the Browning, she needed it.

A clamor arose in the shed. She looked back and saw a mujahideen stumble over his comrade’s body.

She climbed onto the top of the short wall from which Ruhi had launched himself seconds ago. Riddled with adrenaline, she crouched to leap as a bullet buzzed the very spot where her head had been an instant before. She jumped.

A second shot followed, missed, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference: She wasn’t going to clear the gap. Felt it as soon as her feet left terra firma — or what passed for it up on the roof.

She pumped her legs, as if they might prolong her flight and defy death, reaching for Ruhi’s outstretched hand.

He seized her wrist as she fell, her weight almost pulling him down, too.

He dug his knees into the wall, dropped the gun by his side, and gripped her with his other hand. In a mighty move, he dragged her up, eyes widening as he glanced across the narrow divide.

Lana picked up the Browning, turned, and aimed, keeping her profile low. The dim outlines of three men were racing toward the edge of the other roof.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

She hit one of them.

“Get down!”

Using the roof wall for cover, they crawled toward the street side of the building, hoping none of the mujahideen would risk the leap. Shouts rose from across the divide. Then nothing.

“See that?” Ruhi said, pointing to what appeared to be another shed roof about forty feet away.

She nodded. “Let’s try it.”

What other chance did they have? A whole series of buildings lined the street. How many more jumps could they possibly survive? The distances might be even greater.

But a sprint to the shed door would leave them in the open.

“You first,” she said. “I’ll give you cover. Then I’ll go. Dodge and dart.”

She pushed him — she hadn’t pushed anyone since childhood.

Almost immediately, two gunshots rang out. They missed Ruhi. She rose from behind the short wall and fired, missing her targets. But she forced the gunmen to duck.

Ruhi threw his shoulder into the door. It didn’t open. He worked the handle frantically, an easy target. She opened fire again, emptying her weapon, but the bullets kept the shooter down. Then Ruhi kicked it in a fury and disappeared into the darkness.

“Go, go, go!” Lana told herself, the only push she would get from anyone. One last look behind, and she was off. She saw the turban, spotted the other man raising a rifle, and dived through the doorway bruised but otherwise unharmed.

“You’re good,” Ruhi said.

“I’m trained, but I’m also out of ammo.”

They found themselves inside a flimsy shed that she doubted could stop a .22. She saw the top of a wooden ladder poking up from a dark opening in the floor and started down without a word. Ruhi followed.

They lowered themselves into an attic. Spiderwebs wrapped around her face as she stumbled over old wooden boxes. She spied light streaming through a crack in a door and made her way forward, Ruhi only steps behind.

Her nerves felt like they were frying. The pair burst out of the attic onto the top floor of an apartment building, spotted the stairwell, and started down, clearing three, four steps at a time.

They encountered no one, only the odor of piss and sickness. Moments later, they burst out of the stairwell onto the ground floor — and were taken down by at least four men.

Bones in her gun hand felt snapped by a vicious blow. The Browning skittered across the floor. She heard its clatter stop abruptly, and then they were bagged in the most literal sense: dark burlap sacks dragged down over their heads, jammed into the back of a windowless van, hands and feet Flex-Cuffed with frightening efficiency.

“Let me see his face,” she heard a man say. Then: “Cousin, it is good to see you again.”

“I will kill you, Ahmed, I swear,” she heard Ruhi reply from the darkness that still surrounded her.

“It is not I who should fear the reaper,” Ahmed said in a soothing — tormenting — voice.

Holmes didn’t know how bad it had gotten in Yemen. He knew only how grim conditions had become in the States. Pure misery.

In the jury-rigged manner that was the only means available, he sat in his office reading bulletins typed out on old Royals, using the last of their ribbons. They detailed what might be the final hours of the failing republic.

Phoenix, with a runaway reactor core, had descended into bedlam, in the original meaning of that word. The Valley of the Sun more closely approximated an eighteenth-century insane asylum than a series of contemporary communities linked by highways, freeways, cloverleafs, and surface streets, all of which were littered with evidence of panic: dead bodies, smashed cars, weeping survivors, and the invisible death rays of radiation that were seeping into every corner of the city.

Radiation plumes were ravaging much of the Pacific Northwest as well, rising from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation about a hundred miles east of Portland, Oregon. Driven by winds, the invisible poison, like the invisible enemy, was sweeping over the land.

Chicago had not been annihilated by Veepox yet, but the chimera virus was arguably crueler than a melting reactor core. Even the uninfected inhabitants were behaving like the countless extras in Night of the Living Dead. The military still had the city, suburbs, and lakefront surrounded, but soldiers and National Guard troops were frequently forced to fire on throngs of citizens too desperate to care about death. Or perhaps they preferred mass execution by machine-gun fire to the microbes that would make slow madness of their lives.

Swift death was also coming to those caught in raging wildfires set off by pipeline explosions in the first cyberattack. Those fires now scorched millions of acres, turning the West into a Hades of previously unknown proportions.

And the South, still reeling from the collapsing TVA dams, faced a Category 5 hurricane as the tropical storm season moved into overdrive. Hurricane Becca, extending more than six hundred miles, was expected to pile into the east coast of Florida in the next twelve hours, and then churn northward — with no way to warn tens of millions of residents in the direct path of the storm. Holmes knew of the danger only because of emergency ham radio communications.

Was Becca a coincidence? Holmes’s rational side said yes, of course, but he could not help but wonder if the invisible enemy had cooked up the Category 5 somehow. Who would have imagined, for instance, the devastating extent of a cyberattack? Well, Holmes reminded himself, he had, in fact, conjured up just such a grim scenario, along with colleagues in government and the administration. But they were called prophets of doom and roundly ignored.

His own people at NSA, who had been laboring so hard to try to make cyberdefense a priority, were now tasked with trying to retake control of the country’s own nuclear arsenal. The only good news on that front was that three of the Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines had been able to reprogram software to regain control of their nuclear firing mechanisms. Unfortunately, the advance had no direct application to the land-based missiles aimed at American cities, though the Navy’s success did mean that revenge would be in the offing — if the enemy could ever be identified.

Holmes had his suspicions about the culprit, but without proof he kept that speculation to a tight inner circle. All he allowed beyond his closest colleagues was that the enemy “wasn’t as obvious as people might think.”

The only target Holmes could see clearly right now, besides the NSA building in which he sat, was the blue choir bus in that New Jersey truck stop. It was still lit up by Kalisa Harris’s fuel truck. German satellites provided video to him through a link in Greenland. It was ad hoc and hardly as reliable as the networks to which he had long been accustomed; but Holmes was grateful, nonetheless, for the chance to monitor the slowly building insanity a couple of hundred miles north of him.

He hoped Harris and everyone else there would see a way to save those kids. But he also knew that so much more than their lives was at stake if that backpack bomb blew up.

As he looked away from the screen, McGivern hurried in to tell him that Agent Anders had been rescued.

“That’s great news. Was it the encryptors?” he asked. Desk jockeys in Riyadh who’d been pressed into service, the ultimate nerds were directed step-by-step by the CIA station chief. Everybody else who could be mobilized in the kingdom and Yemen had been tracking the takeover of the embassy or searching for the cyberattackers.

“Yes, they managed to pull it off,” McGivern said.

“Those three will be dining out on that for the rest of their lives.”

“Let’s hope so. But there’s more. After the rescue the Saudis intercepted them in the desert, and, well, I don’t have a final word on this yet, but I guess our geeks were seriously outgunned and turned her over. Without further incident,” she added.

Holmes’s joy fled like a fugitive.

“But she’s back with Omar at least.” The senior Saudi intelligence official.

Holmes nodded, relieved. He knew Omar. Trustworthy. And Anders was a lot better off with him than she’d been with those thugs out there in the desert. Besides, Omar was doing exactly what Holmes would have done: going for the debrief as soon as he could.

“At least she can keep her head down now,” Holmes said to McGivern. “She’s been through enough.”

Emma had fallen asleep. Even abject fear couldn’t keep her awake forever. Other kids had nodded off, too, including Tanesa, slouched against the window. Emma had been dreaming of a day on the Maryland shore with her mother when she was a little kid, maybe five or six. She was chasing a big colorful beach ball on the sand. Every time she tried to grab it, the ball slipped away. Finally, it rolled into the water and floated away, leaving her with the deepest sorrow she had ever known.

She awoke sad, but only for a moment. Then she was scared. She checked Ibrahim the bomber first. The trigger was lying on his lap, his hand nowhere near it. His eyes looked glazed, but open. The Red Bull can lay empty by his feet.

Emma thought she’d been asleep for hours — the dream seemed to go on and on — but it might have just been minutes; the lady truck driver was pulling the nozzle from the bus, from the sounds of it. And Hamza kept poking his head out to watch her.

The other two jihadists were at their posts, fore and aft. They looked exhausted too. The one up behind the driver slipped down into a seat periodically, a motion that appeared to jar him awake. He had an assault rifle and a pistol. They all had pistols. She wished that she had a pistol. The guy a few rows behind her, near Ibrahim, had the same weapons. Only Hamza also had a knife. The cuts on Emma’s neck and chin proved his eagerness to use it.

A huge explosion made her scream and jump. She thought the bus had been blown up. Looking around, panicking wildly, she saw windows on both ends were ripped apart by gunfire. The rounds kept coming. She saw the head of the jihadist up by the driver cut up in a blink, leaving little that was recognizable when he crumpled onto the aisle floor. Blood gushed from what was left of his brain stem.

She glimpsed all that gore in an instant. Then she looked back at the shot-out window behind her and saw the jihadist a row away from Ibrahim slumped over the seat in front of him with a head wound of his own. Though less devastating at a glance, it had left him just as dead.

Ibrahim was shocked out of his open-eyed slumber. Kids were screaming. The bomber looked at them. He appeared confused, as if he didn’t know what was happening. Hamza bellowed, “Blow it up! Blow it up, Ibrahim!”

That was the only reason Emma knew Hamza had survived the initial assault.

Ibrahim reached for the trigger on his lap — but never took it in hand. Quicker than a heartbeat, bullets slammed into his head from the left and right, as if timed by snipers to the hundredth of a second.

Hamza howled, crouched, and started barreling down the aisle. Emma saw his eyes fix on the backpack bomb.

Stop him.

The voice in her head was harrowing. Tanesa was already hurling herself past Emma and launching herself up the aisle at Hamza. He pushed her viciously to the side, with his eyes still fixed on Ibrahim. Tanesa whipped back around and jumped onto his back, reaching around to scratch his face. Hamza raised his pistol to try to shoot Tanesa over his shoulder.

Emma, sick with fear, legs like jelly, grabbed his wrist, falling in front of him in the process, but he never let go of that gun.

Hamza, with Tanesa still on his back, toppled onto Emma, the barrel grinding into her gut.

Hamza had not been spared in the initial barrage. He had simply gotten lucky at a horrible price: With the first shot, Kalisa Harris bolted for the front of the bus, 45 drawn from her calf holster. As she rose up onto the steps, she intercepted a round aimed at Hamza. She couldn’t have known who fired the bullet that cost her life — or whose worthless existence it had spared.

Lana felt the van’s leisurely motion. No sign of panic driving. In a voice that reflected that ease, she heard Ahmed speak in Arabic. A moment later the burlap sack was pulled off her head. A dome light burned in the back of the windowless van.

She could have picked out Ahmed easily. His physical resemblance to Ruhi was unmistakable.

“Hello, Lana Elkins. It is so good to have your company.”

“You set us up. You ambushed us.” And killed a lot of good men. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing that from her lips.

“People die every day,” Ahmed replied airily. “Your country kills them; mine does, too.” He waved his hand as if her concerns were a trifle. “Now, we are taking you where we all want to go.”

That smile again.

“Where’s that?”

“Oh, you know where. So do you, cousin. Maybe not the exact address, but you know what you’ll be doing when you get there, don’t you? Making sure the attack on your country is not stopped in the final hours.” That comment was directed at Lana. “We know you are the brains of the operation. America is almost history now. But this attack has other targets and far greater goals. So you will cooperate. You will join forces with us. And if you don’t?” He shook his head. “That would be sad. But even if you think you can accept a painful death for yourself, rather than give us every last secret of your encryption and hacking experience, I doubt very much that you’ll be able to watch your daughter dismembered on streaming video. Our martyr has a special knife that he’s already used on her, I am told.”

Lana, though bound, tried to lunge at him. A man seized her.

“He hasn’t done anything serious to her,” Ahmed went on, “not yet. She even has her fingers and nose still. Just a cut on her neck and chin. But he’s a young man, our butcher, and a real animal. So get ready to share your expertise with us. You were always the one we wanted. My cousin?” Ahmed shrugged. “He has served his purpose, but blood runs thick, doesn’t it, Ruhi?”

Ahmed pointed a gun at his cousin’s face. Lana thought he was going to shoot him right then. But he didn’t.

Now, we are taking you where we all want to go.

When Ahmed had said that, did he mean it ironically? she wondered.

What difference does it make?

But then she realized that it could make all the difference in the world.

Chapter 23

the throbbing in Lana’s hand awakened her fully. She’d been napping in the back of the van through most of the drive. But pain now overcame weariness. She tested herself, flexing her fingers. She could make a fist. It was her only weapon as the driver wheeled into a dingy garage whose lone window bore spidery cracks. A fist. She shook her head at the pathos. What good could it do in the company of such heavily armed enemies?

A skinny bald man rolled down the garage door.

The jihadists jumped out of the vehicle and dragged Lana and Ruhi from the back. Two men forced a keffiyeh on Ruhi, while another unbound Lana’s wrists, which befuddled her. Not for long. Ahmed thrust a dark hijab into her hands and ordered her to put it on. She found it odd, after their murderous actions, that several men turned away when she slipped it over her clothes. But not Ahmed. He kept a gun on her the whole time. Once she was fully veiled, her hands were quickly bound again.

Immediately, they loaded her and Ruhi into another van, similar to the one the SEALs had used to rescue her from the embassy in Riyadh.

She was seated, as she had been then, with armed men on both sides of her. But the jihadists pressed their weapons against her — knives lodged so tightly to her ribs that she feared a sneeze, cough, or sudden turn would leave her bleeding.

Ruhi was forced against a boarded window. A bony-cheeked man jammed a pistol under his chin. Ruhi’s life, she realized, was cheaper now because of her presence. They didn’t need him. She thought they must know that, and couldn’t comprehend why he was still alive. Ahmed had certainly shown a complete absence of compassion, so it wasn’t a blood link keeping Ruhi among the living. Maybe it was nothing more than an oversight, or Ahmed’s desire to lord as much power as possible over his expatriate cousin.

Death would come to both of them soon enough, as well as to Emma. To the whole of her country. But she focused — how could she not? — on the unbidden tragedy of her only child. I’m sorry, dear heart, she said to Emma in the silence of her thoughts. I’m so sorry. She had no hope of ever being heard, but in the only way she could, she sought Emma’s forgiveness for dragging her into this horror. Your pain is all on me.

The turban-headed driver navigated desert roads without pause, but just as Lana nodded off again, she was jarred awake by a small crater.

“IEDs,” Ahmed said with evident pleasure from the front passenger seat. He turned to bestow his smile on her. Even as she noticed how much it resembled Ruhi’s, she felt her stomach sour. She would have ripped out his eyeballs, if she could have. “Just a carful of NGOs,” he explained. Nongovernmental organizations. “Good-bye, kafirs.”

The jihadist on her left must have spoken English, because he laughed at the insult and nodded enthusiastically at Ahmed.

“Do you want to say where you’re taking us?” Lana asked Ahmed.

He nodded, but not at her, to the English speaker. She turned to the man, puzzled. He punched her hard enough that her lips and nose exploded with pain. It felt like he’d bashed her face with a lead weight.

“Never speak to any of us,” Ahmed said calmly, “unless you are spoken to. I did not ask you a question.”

She swallowed blood, rage, and tears that wanted to run from the sudden crack of bone on bone — the involuntary response that comes from any blow that catches the tender spot between the upper lip and nose. It’s the way a woman can reduce even the strongest man to tears. The way she wanted to begin an attack not on her assailant, but on Ahmed — and then work her way to all points south.

They passed ancient cliff dwellings, shadowed by the harsh light. She guessed the rudimentary homes had been carved out of the mountains thousands of years ago, yet might well be occupied now. Her suspicion was confirmed with the flash of a child’s face, a little boy. Already poisoned by hate and intolerance? She could not muster enough hope to think otherwise.

The canyon widened, and they drove around an outcropping as wide and tall as a building. She glimpsed a floodplain miles ahead and a small town, and the pale green glimmer of fields in the distance.

Ahmed tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed for him to keep going straight. “Hurry.”

A mujahideen stood guard in the doorway of a broad, flat-roofed building with mud-colored walls, the brightly striped red, white, and black Yemeni flag flying before it. He squinted in the blanketing glare of the sun. A village woman in a black hijab was plodding toward him. A beggar, no doubt. Make that another beggar. Yemen was a nation of beggars. She’d want food, maybe water; she wouldn’t dare ask for coin. He sighed and looked away from her. Go back to your fields. Great matters are at hand. Leave us to do our work here. Soon you’ll hail from the proudest nation on earth, and you will have mujahideen to thank for that honor.

He glanced back. She was nearing him now. He waved her off.

Submissively, she kept her head down. But she raised her hand above her waist, the wide black arms of her chador drooping. Yes, food, that’s what she wants.

“I have no food for you,” he shouted. He made a gesture for her to go away.

Still, she came toward him. Past the children playing soccer. She placed her hand on the head of a boy who looked eight or nine. He looked up and grinned at her. So she’s borne a son. Fine. I’ll talk to her. Tell her the world changes soon. Be patient. Always the women are impatient.

As his body language softened, she nodded at him. She might have smiled. It was hard to tell with the veil. You see only the eyes, and she mostly kept her gaze toward the ground out of respect. She seemed to have difficulty breathing. So that was it. She’s sick.

“What is it?” From behind, his fellow guards converged quickly at his side. Eight of them. They had been covering the other exits and entrances. They must have heard him yell at the woman.

“A beggar,” he told them. “Sick. Not breathing well.”

She turned to regard the children, no more than thirty feet away, as their soccer ball rolled toward the group. The commander stepped out and kicked it back to the little ones.

They cheered him.

As they turned their attention back to the beggar woman, she slipped a thick canister out from beneath her chador and blasted a weapons-grade blend of pepper and tear gas at them in a swift arc.

After another blast from the canister had them retching and kneeling, she tore off her veil, revealing a form-fitting gas mask and blond hair.

Candace took a step back to protect her eyes, the only exposed part of her face. She looked behind her, willing her companions to hurry. Far beneath this structure lay the nerve center for the cyberterrorists, according to information gathered by Saudi intelligence in the last few hours. The nature of the site seemed confirmed by the route taken by the mujahideen who’d abducted Ruhi Mancur and Lana Elkins, to judge by the Mabahith’s locator chip in Ruhi’s thigh.

Within seconds, Omar and officers of the Mabahith — all in gas masks — converged on the disabled guards as the children ran toward their parents in the distant fields. Candace wasn’t worried about the villagers; Saudi intelligence said they were farmers, not fighters, and many were angry that their hamlet had been overtaken by jihadists.

With chilling efficiency, the Saudis slit the throats of the guards and swiftly dragged the blood-soaked bodies deep inside the building.

Omar, who had secured Candace’s capture from the American computer jockeys in the desert, studied a smartphone and said, “They are close.”

He had been tracking the chip in Ruhi’s leg on their chopper flight here. The Black Hawk helicopter had put down behind a low range of hills a mile from town. Running in the heat had been grueling for Candace in her chador. Now, with the mask stripped away, she forced herself to breathe evenly, despite her urge to gulp air. While the parents of the soccer-playing children did not pose a threat, Ruhi Mancur and Lana Elkins would be arriving shortly with the heavily armed jihadists who had killed the SEALs and Saudi officers in Sana.

As the van drove closer to what appeared to be a community center, Lana guessed they had arrived at their destination.

The end is coming.

She felt flushed with fear, as if it might seep from her pores as easily as sweat.

The driver braked. Dust rose from the wheels and floated away. They had stopped by a flagpole, about fifty feet from the center’s open doorway.

“You will walk from here,” Ahmed announced to Ruhi.

Ruhi’s guard placed the muzzle of his gun back to the soft spot under his jaw, where a thin beard had sprouted since the first cyberattack.

Ahmed snapped at the gunman in Arabic. The man lowered his weapon. Lana did not know what Ahmed had said, but it possessed the cadence of “Not in here. Not yet.”

Maybe the gunman appeared too eager, even for Ahmed’s taste.

“Cousin,” he said to Ruhi, “I want you to go first.”

The side door of the van swung open, and they all climbed out. Lana kept her eye on Ruhi, subtly adjusting the veil to keep him in view. She worried that each second might provide her last glimpse of him alive. In an unspoken way, she felt she was honoring a man who had suddenly found himself immersed in a violent realm that he’d never sought.

“Walk to the door, cousin,” Ahmed said, racking the slide on his semiautomatic pistol.

Lana heard the rush of metal and remembered the way the chamber accepted the small brass cylinder of death.

“You will die for this, Ahmed,” Ruhi replied with surprising equanimity. He shook his head and went on: “Maybe not today or tomorrow, but you will die. They will hunt you down like al-Awlaki, and they will destroy you.”

Ahmed pointed his pistol at Ruhi’s face. “She was struck for speaking out. See what happens to you. Go!”

The jihadists with Lana lined up on both sides of her. There would be no escape.

Up ahead Ruhi walked closer to the entrance with his shoulders pulled back, his head held defiantly high. She adored him for that, for the spit it offered to Ahmed’s eye.

Ahmed lowered his gun, but called to Ruhi, “Keep going, cousin. You’re getting closer to your destination.”

Holmes turned to one of the screens with a German news report. That country’s communications systems were now the most dependable for the few people capable of receiving signals in the U.S.

He’d studied German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and had used it daily in Berlin, where he was stationed until the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lifetime ago. But he didn’t need all that background to translate the word now blazoned across the screen: “Cybergeddon.”

It appeared as the German announcer enunciated it with great care. Satellite video of the U.S. then showed thousands gathered in half a dozen city centers in spontaneous prayer vigils. Rumors of imminent nuclear devastation had spread. The faithful were no doubt praying for deliverance. For forgiveness. For the Lord’s will to be done. But mostly, Holmes thought, they were praying for the most human desire of all: to survive.

He felt deeply for them. He believed that he had failed them all. But the most heart-sickening news that he’d received this morning came from a Russian operative in Sana who had passed along news that two SEAL units had been wiped out in an ambush. What an ignominious end for such gallant young men, killed without a country that could even grieve them properly, that might perish as readily in the coming hours.

The array of screens kept Holmes, McGivern, and others abreast of developments throughout the nation. They saw throngs trudging north through New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, trying to escape to Canada.

The Canadians were accepting all comers, but so much of their grid had gone down when the U.S.’s was attacked that they were poorly prepared to save their American friends. Fuel distribution had ceased in the U.S. and throughout much of southern Canada. Only that country’s most northern regions remained wholly viable — remote villages and a handful of smaller cities. Radiation would eventually eat them alive as well, if the worst came to pass.

As for Chicago, the only good Holmes could muster about the Veepox epidemic was that over the past decades the city had lost more than a million residents for lack of jobs and other opportunities. The next Detroit, it had often been called. But where had all those former Chicagoans gone? Somewhere safer? Not likely. Not with the whole country now a target.

But the most repulsive display he saw on those screens was the joyful response of Iranian leaders, and their Shiite brethren now ruling Iraq, over an America brought to its knees — the Great Satan of their theology about to be reduced to rubble. He knew those fanatics had thoroughly penetrated Yemen’s Political Security Organization, leaving it riddled with terrorist sympathizers, some of whom likely had the blood of those SEALs on their hands.

Tehran’s long shadow fell over much of Yemen, and Holmes found himself suspecting more and more that Iran had played a role in the cyberattacks on the U.S. Those zealots wanted nothing but the complete collapse of Western power. Was there a deal they wouldn’t make for that outcome? It had Holmes thinking about where the Iranians might have turned for help.

Holmes had never loathed even the most ruthless Muslim leaders on sight. He had an understanding of the long history of Middle Eastern colonization and its attendant crimes. He could quote Edward Said as readily as Noam Chomsky or Norman Podhoretz. But now he and his countrymen had their backs to the wall, and he could not bear the sanctimony coming from Tehran and Baghdad, much less the murder of those brave young men in Yemen.

There could be no room now for the nuances of reason, for the values of philosophy alone or the redemptive worth of forgiveness. It was far too early for any of that. There was only winning the race to stop the wholesale murder of his people: Americans of every stripe.

His eyes returned to one screen in particular, where a satellite lens was trained on a truck stop in New Jersey.

Hamza straddled Emma in the aisle, looming over her face. His gun barrel felt as if it were drilling into her stomach, his murderous gaze boring just as deeply into her eyes. She was certain he would kill her right now. Instead, he seized her hair with his free hand and pounded her head onto the floor, oblivious in his rage to Tanesa still clawing his face. But Tanesa’s fingernails, though leaving bloody trails across his chin and neck, didn’t register nearly as much as the nail file of a twelve-year-old choir member. The girl pulled it from her purse and stabbed him in the cheek. Only the tortoiseshell handle stuck out.

Emma glimpsed the length of the file in Hamza’s mouth, which dripped blood onto her shirt. His teeth pinkened as they chomped down on the metal, like a pirate with a knife, but this blade had plunged into his mouth through his face.

He turned to the young girl, raised his pistol from Emma’s belly, and shot the child in the neck. Blood pulsed out like a garden hose rapidly kinked and unkinked. The girl grabbed her mortal wound and reeled into the arms of her seatmate.

They all froze: Emma, dazed from the pounding of her head; Tanesa, mouth agape at her friend’s imminent death, the victim’s eyes still open as her life closed down; and Hamza, who still had the nail file sticking out of his cheek.

But he recovered first, yanking it out. He raised the bloody length, and in a rage tried to plunge it into Emma’s chest. She rolled furiously to the side, catching the file in her upper arm, where it stuck like a dagger.

She shrieked with pain as Tanesa tried to rip Hamza’s eyes out. He delivered a powerful elbow into Tanesa’s side. Even in her own agony, Emma heard her friend’s rib crack and saw tears race down Tanesa’s face.

Hamza dragged Emma to her feet, breathing deeply, as if to get a grip on his fury. The file stuck out of her arm just below her shoulder. She thought to pull it out, as he had from his face, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

He thrust his gun to Tanesa’s head, ordering her to stand, then grabbed the backpack bomb and demanded the two girls move to the front of the bus with him.

Staying low, he forced them onto the front seat and yelled at the bus driver to go.

The older man cranked the ignition, put the bus in gear, but the watered-down diesel fouled the engine immediately.

Hamza told him to get off the bus. He obeyed, moving around the dead woman who had pumped the fuel, whose body lay below the vehicle’s steps. Hamza then shot the driver twice in the back. The man staggered several feet toward the fuel truck’s headlights and fell, showing no further signs of life.

Crouching, keeping his gun on the girls, Hamza pulled keys from the slain woman’s pocket. Emma watched his eyes land on the backpack bomb, which he’d left by the driver’s seat. She thought to throw herself on it, as she’d once seen a soldier hurl himself on a hand grenade in a war movie. But there would be no absorbing the impact of the weapon hiding inside that pack.

Hamza jumped back onto the bus and grabbed the pack, then stared at them and said, “They’re not stopping Hamza the Lion.” He sounded solemn, like he was repeating a vow.

He yelled at Tanesa and Emma to move to the rear and open the emergency exit. Still crouching, he tailed them. The two injured girls struggled mightily to dislodge the lever holding the door in place. With the exit open, Hamza grabbed the bomb trigger.

“We’re going out to the truck. You two stay right with me the whole time. If you run, I’ll set off the bomb. Millions will die. It will be your fault.”

Emma knew whose fault it would be — the person who pulled the trigger. But she also knew she would not run off, and doubted Tanesa would, either. There was no hope for them or anyone else if he set off the bomb.

“You in front of me,” he said to Tanesa. “And you stay behind me,” he ordered Emma. “Stay very close. If they hit me, I’ll pull the trigger.”

Emma thought all three of them would be shot the second they stepped out. But he crouched and kept them bunched up in front and behind him.

An unearthly silence greeted them, so still Emma heard the odd shuffle of their shoes as they moved, a six-legged cluster. Still, she wondered who would be killed first.

In the next instant, two sniper shots rang out. One hit Tanesa in the leg with such force it spun her around and spilled her onto the parking lot. She rolled over, screaming, clutching her thigh. The other shot sailed over Hamza’s shoulder. Emma wondered if he even noticed.

He rushed her toward the truck as another bullet sailed right over their heads. The door was open, the dome light on. He threw his upper body across the driver’s seat, pushing the backpack bomb ahead of him with one hand, and dragging Emma up behind him with the other.

She saw the filleting knife in its sheath as another shot hit the outside of the cab just inches from her head. She slipped the blade from its sheath as Hamza frantically forced the backpack onto the passenger seat.

Emma drove the long thin blade into his lower back, guessing she stabbed a kidney.

Hamza groaned horrifically, and tried to pull himself all the way into the cab. Emma threw herself onto his back, slowing him down. But she also prevented the snipers from having a clear shot at their target.

Then Hamza tried to turn toward her with his gun. She felt the knife handle against her belly and squeezed herself against him. A low howl arose from him.

He gave up trying to shoot her, putting all his effort into trying to pull himself onto the driver’s seat. Maybe he recognized that the surest way to end his agony and complete his diminished mission was to reach the bomb trigger.

She heard his howl turn into a rhythmic gasp that sounded like a prayer in another language. He was but a hand’s length from the trigger, bellowing now, still fierce in trying to claw his way forward.

Emma braced her feet against the truck’s big wheel, using her legs to pull on him as hard as she could. A horrible pain rose from her shoulder, and she saw the nail file brushing against the open door, jabbing it deeper into her flesh. Grinding her teeth, she jerked the file out and — in a spasm of fury — sank it into the middle of his back. It struck bone and lodged deeply in his flesh. She regained her grip with both hands, pulling with all the strength left in her arms and legs — weeping, screaming, holding on to him for all the world.