Day of Wrath

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN SHOCK WAVE

Helen Gray blotted away some dried blood and dirt with a cotton ball soaked in iodine, finished taping down the gauze pad, and then stepped back to admire her handiwork. “How’s it feel?”

“Ouch,” Thorn said. He raised his bruised right arm, winced, and then gingerly touched the bandaged side of his head. “I’ll live, I guess, but I have a feeling I’m not going to win any beauty contests this year.”

“You’ve got that right, mister,” Helen said — working very hard to keep the same light, cheerful tone.

She was still grappling with the emotional trauma of their bloody early morning gun battle. Losing Heinrich Wolf, their only solid witness to the Caraco-run smuggling operation, was bad. Killing Mcdowell was worse. She was also uncomfortably aware that she’d carried out something very close to an execution on Mcdowell. Once she’d fired that first shot, she’d never even considered trying to take him alive.

But the biggest nightmare of all had been the sudden, blinding fear that Peter Thorn might be dead — torn forever out of her life. They’d faced death twice before in the past couple of weeks, but always together — never apart and alone.

After Helen had made that frantic phone call to Farrell, she’d held herself together just long enough to search Wolf’s and Mcdowell’s bodies for any possible evidence. Then, with tears staining her cheeks, she’d stumbled back through the pitchblack woods to where they’d left the two cars. And there she’d found Peter sitting by the side of the road with his injured head in his hands — blood-spattered, dazed, and furiously angry at himself, but alive.

Mcdowell had hit him over the head with a rock — clearly intending to kill him. Only the fact that he’d reacted fast enough to ward off some of the impact with his arm had saved his life.

That and the fact that the traitorous FBI agent must have rushed off to chase down Wolf without making sure he was dead.

Still tearful, though with relief now and not sorrow, she’d managed to bundle Peter into the back seat of Wolf’s Chrysler, pat down the body of the driver for any more evidence, and then head back to pick up Farrell outside Caraco’s Chantilly complex.

Pressed for time, she’d been forced to leave Mcdowell’s bulletriddled Ford parked out in the open on the shoulder.

Helen had hated to do that. The abandoned car would act as a beacon to the next passing patrol can-signaling that something very wrong had happened along that isolated stretch of road. More to the point, their fingerprints were all over the car, and even a cursory check of the government-issue plates would reveal it had been signed out to FBI Deputy Assistant Director Lawrence Mcdowell — now missing.

Not good, she thought grimly. Not good at all.

Helen checked her watch. It was after eleven in the morning.

By now, there might very easily be an APB out for the three of them.

And the charges against them could range from kidnapping to murder.

Somehow, in the space of just a few days, she and Peter had managed to push the punishments they were facing from likely administrative reprimands to possible imprisonment, and now maybe even the death penalty.

She shook her head in dismay. It was best to focus on the immediate future. For the moment they were free and still in a position to try something — anything — to stop whatever Heinrich Wolf and his employer, Ibrahim, had planned.

The hours since their abortive attempt to capture Wolf had passed in a dizzying blur. After a quick cleanup in the rest room of a large, busy gas station, she, Peter, and Farrell had found an out-of-the way residential street and abandoned the Chrysler.

With luck, it might be days before the neighbors compared notes and discovered it didn’t belong to a visitor or anyone local.

Next, they’d phoned a cab and checked into this plain, clean, and relatively inexpensive motel. Close to the Beltway, the motor lodge mostly catered to truckers, traveling salesmen, and economy-minded vacationers touring the nation’s capital. It offered privacy, easy access to the local road and highway network, and effective anonymity to anyone paying cash.

After a short rest, Farrell had left a couple of hours ago on a hurried shopping expedition.

Someone knocked on the door — softly but urgently.

Helen waved Peter down and checked the peephole. It was Sam Farrell.

He bustled in, set a large plastic bag down on the nearest bed, and displayed a set of rental car keys. “Okay! We’re mobile again.”

Helen read the tag. “A white Oldsmobile Ciera?” She tried hard to match his determinedly cheerful mood. “Not a brandnew, 007-type BMW? Hardly our style, Sam …”

Farrell grinned. “I know, I know — dull, boring. But there’s a zillion of ‘em out on the road. We’ll blend right in with everyone else in the metro area.

“I also got this.” He pulled a bulging manila envelope out of the shopping bag, opened the flap, and dumped several thick stacks of twenty-dollar bills onto the bed. “There’s somewhere around five thousand dollars there. I cleaned out one of my savings accounts.”

“Jesus, Sam,” Peter said, looking down at the money. “Your wife will kill you when she finds out about this.”

“Not with an IOU from you in hand,” Farrell reminded him.

“Louisa trusts you, Pete. It’s her one big blind spot. Anyway, we need the money right now.”

That was certainly true, Helen knew. Neither she nor Peter dared use their own credit or ATM cards, and their earlier travels had pretty well depleted their own cash reserves. And, unless the police or the FBI nailed them in the next few hours, they were sure to need money and lots of it.

She tapped the still-bulging shopping bag. “So, what’s left, Sam?”

“This,” Farrell said. He handed her a massive hardcover German-English/English-German dictionary.

“Perfect.”

Helen led Peter and Farrell over to the small circular table where she’d sorted out the possessions she’d collected from the three dead men — Wolf, his driver, Brandt, and Mcdowell. She’d swept Mcdowell’s into a separate bag for later disposal. What struck her about the other two men was the complete lack of commonplace personal items.

Their wallets contained only some cash and one credit card apiece — both tied to a Caraco corporate account. There were no dry cleaning receipts, no shopping lists, no photos of their wives or kids.

Both Wolf and Brandt were “clean”—covert operations jargon meaning neither had carried anything that might contradict their cover identities.

Which left just two interesting items. Brandt had apparently been more than just a simple driver and bodyguard for his boss.

He’d been carrying a fat, leather-bound appointment book. And Helen had found Heinrich Wolf’s blood-soaked briefcase under his still-warm body.

Naturally, all the notations in both the appointment book and in the papers inside the briefcase were in German. Hence the hardcover monstrosity Sam Farrell had just handed her.

Farrell took one look at the small table and shook his head.

“Two’s company, three’s a crowd-especially when you’ve only got one dictionary. You two take the first whack at this stuff. I’ll take a gander at the TV and see if there’s anything on about a shoot-out near Middleburg.”

“Nothing on the local news yet?” Peter asked.

Farrell shrugged. “Not a peep. And that makes me kinda nervous.”’

Helen nodded silently. The Loudoun County sheriffs must have found Mcdowell’s abandoned car by now — which probably meant the Bureau’s higher-ups were stonewalling all inquiries from local law enforcement while they tried to sort out just what the hell was going on.

She laid the German-English dictionary in the middle of the table, sat down, and slid the appointment book across to Peter.

Then she flipped open Wolf’s briefcase. Aside from a few business cards, there were only two folded pieces of paper that struck her as significant.

The first was a list headed “Flugzeug Piloten Ankunftszeiten.”

Which meant “Pilots-Arrival Times,” according to her best guess and some rapid flipping through the dictionary. Today’s date, “18 Juni,” appeared at the very top in crisp, neat Germanic handwriting. It was followed by a series of four airline names, flight numbers, and times — with the phrase “nach Dulles” circled to one side.

Several minutes on the phone with various airlines while Peter snagged the dictionary for his own rough translations elicited the information that Wolf had pilots arriving at Dulles on flights originating from Charleston, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and Seattle.

Helen didn’t like even the vague picture she saw emerging.

Caraco’s operation involved aircraft in some fashion — and more than one plane, too. Had the pilots now arriving in the D.C. area been used to ferry Ibrahim’s smuggled cargo into those four cities?

Oh, hell. Her blood ran cold. They’d been assuming they were chasing after one stolen nuclear weapon. What if there were more?

There was a second note on the same sheet, “Drei zusaetzlichen Wache von Deutschland nach JFK Flughafen.” Three cities — Los Angeles, Charleston, and Washington, D.C. — were listed below with an arrow pointing to each. More flipping to and fro in the dictionary supplied the information that Wolf had ordered three additional guards deployed from Germany through JFK International in New York to unnamed locations in each of those three cities.

And the word “additional” implied that he already had forces stationed at those locations. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

The second sheet didn’t have a heading — just a set of what looked like five underlined place names with other words beneath them. She studied the first set:

Berkeley Adler Fuchs Katze Baeren Hase Eagle, Fox, Cat, Bear, and Hare. All were clearly code names of some kind, Helen decided. But code names for what? For people?

For places? Stages in Wolf’s operation? “Katze” had been crossed out and the German word for cow, “Kuh,” had been written in beside it — with a further notation, “Wetter,” or weather.

There were more animal code words beneath each of the other four underlined locations five more under two, three under a third, and two under the last. A total of twenty then. With one more code word crossed out and another substituted — this one with the German words “Eine Obung,” or “an exercise,” as an explanatory note.

Helen frowned. Without more than this, it was going to be impossible to decipher much about Ibrahim’s real intentions. She showed the second sheet to Peter and Farrell. “Can either of you guys make heads or tails out of this stuff?”

The two men studied it for a few seconds.

Peter read the apparent place names out loud. “Berkeley. Godfrey. Page. Nampa. And Shafter-Minter.” He raised an eyebrow.

“Sounds like a bunch of small towns. Or suburbs, maybe.”

He flipped open the appointment book Brandt had carried and showed them one page after another. “I think that bastard Wolf may have visited all of those places over the past couple of weeks. He’s been flitting across the whole country on a Caraco corporate jet. See?” His finger stabbed each name as he read it out. “On June 11 he was in South Carolina. The next day, the twelfth, he was out in California — at this Shafter-Minter place.”

Helen glanced ahead at the listing for June 13. Her eyes widened.

“Look where he went next … Galveston.”

Peter nodded. “Yeah. No wonder the FBI didn’t find anything in that warehouse. The son of a bitch was a step ahead of us all the way.”

“True. But we’re still left in the goddamned dark about exactly what’s going on here,” Farrell pointed out. He shook his head.

“Let me check out these towns or whatever they are at the local library. I’ll see if I can dig anything up about them that would appeal to a nasty piece of work like Wolf.”

“How are you planning to do that, Sam?” Helen asked. “Guide books?

Atlases? It’ll take you hours.” Still jotting the place names onto a piece of scrap paper, Farrell grinned back at her. “Helen, someday you and Pete are gonna have to spend less time learning how to kill people and more time dragging yourselves into the modern age.” He waggled a finger.

“All I need to do is find the nearest computer connected to the Internet, input this stuff, do a little word search, filter out the meaningless garbage, and bingo, I’ve got my data.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Prince Ibrahim al Saud saw his chief of security, Talal, appear at the door to his study. At a glance, the former Saudi paratroop captain stopped motionless and stood silently, waiting for permission to speak.

With a superficial calm he no longer felt inwardly, Ibrahim finished his prayers, carefully rolled up the prayer mat, and rose to his feet.

It was ordinarily his custom to lead the five daily prayers of all the faithful in his household, but the press of events had forced him into these less fulfilling private observances.

It was a pity, but he felt confident God would understand his need.

He crooked a finger at Talal.

The man stepped closer and stiffened to attention. “Highness.”

Ibrahim crossed to his desk and sat down. “Yes, Captain.”

“There is still no sign of Herr Reichardt, Highness. Or of the American, Mcdowell.”

Ibrahim frowned. When Reichardt hadn’t shown up on time for their scheduled meeting, he’d immediately dispatched Talal and a section of his security force to backtrack along the route the German would have taken. To his dismay, they’d found only an empty, abandoned car pockmarked with bullet holes — a car with U.S. government-issued license plates. A car that had been assigned to Reichardt’s mole inside the FBI–Lawrence Mcdowell.

Minutes later, his men had discovered the corpse of Johann Brandt just inside the forest. But both Reichardt and Mcdowell were gone. The German’s corporate car had also vanished without a trace.

Determined not to draw any further official attention to his activities, Ibrahim had ordered Talal to bring both Brandt’s body and the missing FBI man’s Ford back to the estate — where they could be disposed of without awkward questions from the authorities.

It didn’t require much imagination to piece together what must have happened. Somehow the two Americans, Thorn and that woman Gray, had turned the tables on Reichardt. Somehow the predator had become the prey.

Ibrahim scowled. He had cautioned the German before against overconfidence. Evidently, his warnings had fallen on deaf ears.

What troubled him most was the possibility that Thorn and Gray might have taken Reichardt alive. That would greatly complicate his plans.

He didn’t believe the ex-Stasi officer would break under questioning, but he could not be absolutely sure. For an instant, Ibrahim became disoriented — his mind casting up images of American agents appearing in force outside his gates, destroying the grand scheme he had worked so hard and spent so much to prepare.

Be still, he told himself. What will be, will be. So far the Americans show no signs that they are aware of their imminent peril.

If Reichardt were alive and in Thorn and Gray’s hands, he had not yet betrayed his master.

Of course, there were also the documents the other man would have carried on his person. The German was often circumspect, prone to wrapping even the most basic information in a concealing layer of code, but even vague references might provide the two Americans with more details about the Operation. And they already knew far too much.

Talal’s quiet, deferential voice broke in on his thoughts.

“Should I report the Chrysler stolen, Highness? Perhaps the American police could do some of this work for us?”

“No.” Ibrahim shook his head forcefully. “We would need to explain the circumstances of the car’s disappearance. For now we shall let sleeping dogs lie.”

He sighed. “In any case, I am quite sure that Colonel Thorn is no longer anywhere near Herr Reichardt’s vehicle. He could not have survived this long by behaving stupidly.”

Ibrahim stood up suddenly. The hours were flying by. Whether Reichardt were alive or dead, the German’s abrupt disappearance so close to the end had thrown sand into the Operation’s once smoothly turning gears. There were decisions to be made — and now only he could make them.

“Captain Talal,” he snapped.

“Highness!”

“Instruct the staff to continue packing. Then organize and equip a four-man squad of your best troops as an escort. I’m going to the Chantilly facility. You will accompany me. Understood?”

Talal nodded hurriedly.

Ibrahim would learn from Reichardt’s mistakes. If Thorn and Gray wanted to come after him on the road to Chantilly, so be it. They would be met by overwhelming firepower.

A little more than thirty miles west and slightly north of Washington, Sam Farrell turned south off the highway onto a narrow, two-lane blacktop road. The area around them had once been predominantly rural — a stretch of green hills and fertile farmland.

Now, though, the District was pushing its urban tentacles up Route 7, the old Leesburg Turnpike of Civil War fame. A few scattered farms still held out, but most had fallen prey to new housing developments and gleaming corporate buildings. Light industry lined both sides of the road now — and the scars of new construction in the green fields showed where still more houses and shopping malls would soon rise.

Colonel Peter Thorn leaned forward from the back seat, squinting as the early afternoon sun poured in from the west. His head still ached, despite Helen’s soothing ministrations. “You mind telling me where you’re taking us, Sam? Fun’s fun, but we’ve been on the road for a while now.”

Farrell raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. He smiled crookedly.

“You just can’t stand secrets, can you, Pete?”

“Not really,” Thorn admitted.

Farrell turned their rented Ciera off the blacktop road and into a parking lot about half the size of that of any typical supermarket.

He pointed toward the single asphalt runway just visible behind a pair of buildings. “Welcome to Godfrey Field, aka the Leesburg Municipal Airport.”

“An airport?” Thorn heard Helen ask. He scanned the five long rows of private planes tied down just left of the parking lot.

Most were small — single-engine two-, four-, and six-seaters.

“Yep. They’re all airports,” Farrell said. “From Berkeley, South Carolina, to Nampa, Idaho, to Page, Oklahoma, all the way to Shafter-Minter out in California. It took some work to narrow my search down to exactly what linked those names, but that’s it — that’s the common denominator.”

“And they’re all this size?” Thorn asked, eyeing a line of hangars beyond the airpark — three pairs paralleling the road.

The path between the two nearest buildings, one a two story FAA office, the other a small flight school, was the quickest way out onto the runway. No metal detectors. No boarding areas. No jetways. No security.

“On the nose, Pete,” Farrell said. “All five are pint-size municipal or regional airports — but all of them are reasonably close to larger urban centers: Los Angeles, Charleston, Boise, Oklahoma City, and D.C.”

“My God,” Helen said. She turned toward them. “There were five Su-24 engines in that last shipment from Kandalaksha.”

Thorn saw it at almost the same moment. He felt cold despite the sticky heat rolling in through the car’s open windows. “Then Caraco has five nukes.”

“Five airfields. Five bombs. Five cities,” Farrell concluded grimly.

A bleak expression settled on his face, and, for the first time Thorn could remember, his former commander looked close to his real age.

“But why use aircraft?” Helen asked, clearly desperate to poke holes in their story. “Why not just put a bomb in a truck, drive it into the center of town, and hit the switch? That would be simpler and cheaper.”

Thorn thought he knew why Wolf and his employer, Ibrahim al Saud, would want their nuclear weapons aloft. “They must be going for airbursts,” he guessed — feeling even colder still. “Set a nuke off a few thousand feet up and you maximize its blast and heat. And casualties.”

The silence stretched for more than a minute.

At last Thorn shook his head, and immediately wished that he hadn’t.

Smaller aches exploded into sharp-edged, stabbing pain.

Ignore it, he told himself harshly, you haven’t got time for weakness.

The pain receded to a more manageable level.

He opened the Ciera’s right rear door. “Okay, let’s see if we’re right. I say we take a closer look at those hangars.”

First Farrell and then Helen nodded slowly. Like him, they preferred action to inaction — especially in the face of what might be coming.

The two closest hangars were large and modern. Red signs on the sides indicated they were owned by Raytheon. The next two hangars in line were olden-much older. Constructed of corrugated iron and covered with flaking paint, they hardly looked large enough to hold even a single-engine plane.

The third pair of hangars were as big as those belonging to Raytheon.

But they were so far away across the field that it was hard to see much detail. Neither of the silver-gray structures had a corporate logo boldly emblazoned to identify their owners.

Three sizable twin-engine aircraft, executive passenger planes, were parked on the tarmac in front of the hangars. Several men were visible — either working on the aircraft or lounging in the shade created by their wings. Despite the sweltering afternoon, the big sliding doors on both hangars were shut.

“That’s what we’re looking for,” Farrell said. “Has to be.” Thorn nodded. The other man’s snap assessment made sense.

The two distant hangars were completely surrounded by a fence, with a guard shack by the gate. None of the other facilities at Godfrey had any security around them at all.

But they weren’t going to be able to get any closer — at least not from here. The field was quiet, sleeping in the hazy June sunshine, and they were the only people in sight. There was no easy way to walk across the open space separating them from the hangars without being conspicuous.

Helen came to the same conclusion at the same moment. “No point in spooking them now.” She pointed to a gravel-covered cutoff that ran past the twin hangars. “Let’s see what’s visible from that road.”

The speed limit on the cutoff was forty-five miles per hour, but Farrell cruised by as slowly as he dared. A driveway led to the gate and guard shack, and a small white sign on the fence next to the gate read “Caraco Washington Region Air Maintenance. No Trespassing.”

“I bet,” Thorn muttered, after a quick glance at the guard shack and fence. The shack’s windows were dark — tinted heavily enough to hide anyone inside from prying eyes. But coiled razor wire topped the chainlink fence and there were video cameras sited to sweep the entire perimeter.

A turnoff just past the airport led them back to the parking lot. This time they stayed in the car while mulling over what they’d observed.

Helen broke the renewed silence first. “Are you sure those planes out there are big enough to carry a nuclear bomb?”

Thorn nodded, remembering the O.S.I.A briefing he’d received before flying out to take part in the crash investigation. Christ, that seemed like a lifetime ago. “Kandalaksha’s special weapons magazine stored TN1000s, and those things weigh in at about two thousand pounds.”

He looked toward the parked twin-engine turboprops shimmering in the heat. “Any of those aircraft could haul a TN1000 to altitude without even straining.”

“And we know Caraco has the pilots,” Farrell pointed out.

“There’re at least four coming from those sites in other states, plus at least one from this field.”

Thorn thought about that. “Jesus, Sam. You think they could find five competent pilots who’d be willing to commit suicide like that? Anybody can drive a truck bomb, but how many wackos can pilot a plane?”

“The Japanese didn’t have much trouble rounding up a few thousand kamikazes,” Farrell pointed out.

“But that was during a global war and from a total ‘death before dishonor’ warrior culture,” Thorn said. “I don’t see that here.

Ibrahim’s a Saudi, but that bastard Wolf was German. And everybody we’ve tangled with outside of Pechenga has been German, or at least European.”

“Maybe they’re planning on setting the autopilot, bundling on a chute, and hopping out before the blast,” Helen suggested.

“Doesn’t seem likely. If that was me, I’d want to bail out a long, long way from the detonation point.” Thorn combed his mind for data.

He wasn’t a pilot, but he’d had friends who were, and his Delta Force training covered a host of different technologies.

“Even on autopilot, you’re gonna get some drift and even a quarter mile would really throw your attack off.”

“Not these days,” Farrell cut in. He looked somber. “Link GPS into your autopilot, and you could put a bomb within a few meters of where you want it.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said slowly, running through the logic. Farrell was right. With signals from the GPS satellites as a navigation aid, none of the planes would wander off course. And GPS receivers were now widely available to the general public. He stiffened as the full implications of the available technology became clear. “Christ, you don’t even need a pilot! Plug a computer into the autopilot, program in the required waypoints and altitude changes, and you’ve got an aircraft that can take off on its own — and then make its way straight to the target.”

Helen’s eyes opened wide. “You’re talking about a poor man’s cruise missile, Peter.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Farrell considered that. “Jury-rigged cruise missiles? Maybe.”

Then he shook his head. “Still a lot of things that could go wrong with that. You get some unexpectedly hairy weather, an engine problem, or maybe an air traffic control call that goes unanswered and you’re going to start losing planes. And neither Ibrahim nor Wolf struck me as careless. If they are setting up to pop off five nukes somewhere in the U.S they’ll want some assurance that all five will detonate — on target.”

“But they can work around that,” Thorn said softly. “Install a communications link and maybe even TV camera in every plane. That way a pilot sitting safe on the ground can run the thing by remote control if need be. Hell, he could even answer air traffic control challenges.”

Farrell chewed that over and then nodded. “That’d be the way to do it all right. Pinpoint accuracy and no human element.” His eyes narrowed as he looked out across the runway toward the Caraco hangars and the three turboprops parked outside.

“Which do you think is the bomb-carrier here, Pete? Aircraft number one, number two, or number three?”

“Would you assign one pilot to every remotecontrolled plane?” Helen asked suddenly, rummaging through Wolf’s bloodstained briefcase.

Thorn thought about that for a moment and then shook his head.

“Nope.

There’s really no need to. With the kind of gear they could assemble, one guy should be able to run two or three aircraft without even breathing hard. Plus, with the right radio and microwave links, you could orchestrate the whole strike from one secure, central location.”

“So, why do they need five pilots?” she persisted.

Farrell shrugged. “Who knows? Redundancy, maybe.”

Thorn stared at Helen more closely. Her fingers were curled around one of the pages they’d found in Wolf’s belongings.

“What’s wrong?”

“Could they fit two more planes in those hangars over there?” she asked tightly, still looking down at the paper.

“Sure. No sweat.” Thorn put his hand gently on her shoulder.

“What’re you thinking?”

She looked up and passed the piece of paper she’d been clutching to him. All the color had drained out of her face. “Caraco doesn’t have just one nuke. They don’t have just five. I think they’ve got twenty.”

Twenty? Thorn took the printed page from her and studied it again.

There were five separate animal code names listed under the heading for Godfrey Field. He’d looked at them before, but he hadn’t made the connection. They’d all been focused on the identifiable place names first.

Christ. Five airfields with multiple codes under each one.

Twenty code words in all. Twenty targets. Twenty bombs.

It made an ugly sort of sense. They knew Colonel General Serov had sold Ibrahim and his subordinates twenty used Su24 engines — engines they’d used as a cover for the real cargo. They also knew that Caraco’s chief executive had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to set up a secure pipeline to smuggle them into the U.S. So why would Ibrahim settle for reducing five American cities to smoking rubble if he could just as easily obtain the weapons needed to smash twenty?

“Pete?”

Setting his jaw against the knowledge that they were facing an almost unimaginable catastrophe, Thorn passed the page to Farrell.

“She’s right, Sam. No other scenario makes sense.”

Farrell’s shoulders slumped. Suddenly he looked like an old man — weary and worn out by years of stress and strain. “So any ideas on when Ibrahim’s attack is set to go off?”

Thorn surprised himself by saying, “Yes, I think so.”

The answer was there, right in front of his eyes. His subconscious must have been busy assimilating all the data they’d acquired and been fitting it into a coherent pattern. He opened the leather-bound day-timer they’d taken off the body of the late Johann Brandt. “Take a look at this. Notations for every day for the last couple of months.

Airline trips from Europe to here and back. Snap visits to these airfields using a Caraco corporate jet.

Conferences at Chantilly and Middleburg.”

Both Helen and Farrell nodded. They’d paged through the appointment book, too.

“Then we come to June 19. Here’s the first crucial notation: “Primary departs. 1945 hours. Dulles.””

“So who’s this mysterious “Primary’?”

Farrell asked.

“Ibrahim would be my guess. He’s the boss,” Thorn said. “Our friend, the prince, evidently intends to be well out of the United States by tomorrow evening. Or at least that was the plan before we took out Herr Wolf.”

He could see the light dawning in Helen’s horrified eyes. “Go ahead, Peter,” she said.

Thorn flipped to the next page. “Okay. Then we shift to June 20.

“Corporate jet transfers from Dulles to Godfrey Field at 1800 hours,’ “he translated.

“Why do that?” Farrell asked. “Dulles can’t be more than fifteen miles from here. Hell, that’s less than a two-minute hop by jet!”

“Because these people know Dulles will be inaccessible after the twentieth,” Helen said softly. “Either because it’s inside the planned blast radius. or because the runways will be stacked high with rescue flights after a 150-kiloton bomb takes out D.C.”

“Exactly.” Thorn showed them the next page, the one for June 21.

“This is the last notation in the whole book. ‘1300 hours. Depart from Godfrey.” There’s absolutely nothing written after that — not one damned thing.”

He snapped the day-timer shut. “My guess is that’s the evac plane for the people coordinating the attack.”

Thorn’s headache came back with full force, but he pressed on — ignoring the feeling that red-hot pincers were tearing at his skull. “God help us, this bastard Ibrahim plans to detonate twenty nuclear weapons at targets scattered across this entire country. And he’s going to do it sometime within the next fortyeight to seventy-two hours.”

“Highness?”

Prince Ibrahim al Saud turned away from his contemplation of the latest intelligence reports. “Yes? What is it, Hashemi?”

His chief private secretary looked anxious. He offered a printout.

“This just came over one of the news wires, Highness. I thought you would wish to see it immediately.”

Ibrahim took it, rapidly skimming the important details.

Loudoun County, VA — Murder victims discovered in woods near Middleburg.

County sheriff’s department confirms that a Boy Scout troop on a nature walk reported finding two unidentified corpses — both male, both Caucasian — earlier this afternoon. Crime scene teams have now cordoned off the area. Sources speaking on background claim both men were apparently shot to death at point-blank range. Preliminary descriptions follow … Ibrahim nodded to himself, studying the descriptions. He was sure that one of the dead men was Reichardt. The other must be Mcdowell.

Part of the veil of uncertainty Thorn and Gray had cast across his calculations lifted. The two American operatives undoubtedly had whatever documents the German and his aide had been carrying, but that was all. It would not be enough. Before they had died, Reichardt and Mcdowell had done their work well.

The reputations of the American man and woman were hopelessly compromised. It was unlikely their superiors would listen to any of the wild stories they might try to tell.

Beware, a small voice prompted Ibrahim. Beware the sin of pride.

He nodded to himself. It would be best not to take any more chances.

Let Richard Garrett handle this matter of murder. He paid the former Commerce Secretary large sums of money. And Garrett could be fed just enough information to make his protests credible. Let him take the lead in further blackening the names of Thorn and Gray in official Washington.

Ibrahim came out of his reverie to find Hashemi still standing close by, nervously watching him.

“Well? What more do you want?” Ibrahim snapped.

“I have assembled the primary operational staff as you instructed,” Hashemi replied. “They are waiting for you in the conference room, Highness.”

“Very well.” Ibrahim noted the beads of sweat forming on his servant’s forehead. “And what else troubles you?”

“Perhaps I should fly to Riyadh with the rest of the staff as planned, Highness,” Hashemi suggested quickly. “There is much to prepare—”

“Coward,” Ibrahim said, icily cutting off the other man in mid-sentence. “You will remain here — with me. If you fail me, you will remain here permanently — without me. You understand me, Hashemi?”

His secretary nodded hurriedly, bowed, and backed away.

Ibrahim dismissed the matter from his mind. There would be time enough to deal with Hashemi’s disloyalty once the Operation was complete. He strode through a nearby door and into the conference room Reichardt had used for planning meetings.

Talal and two of his personal security guards followed closely at his back.

The men already crowding the room rose to their feet at his entrance.

Ibrahim wasted no time in pleasantries. These men prided themselves on their professionalism. Let them prove their competence now.

“Reichardt and Brandt are dead — apparently at the hands of a pair of rogue American agents. Effective immediately, Captain Talal will take charge of security for this complex. We will go to maximum alert starting now.”

He regarded Reichardt’s chosen cadre carefully — studying the assembled planners, technicians, and security troops behind a bland expression that masked his true thoughts. How far could he really trust these men? he wondered. They were mercenaries motivated almost purely by greed. Oh, he knew that Reichardt’s Germans were all highly skilled and experts in their assigned fields. But he decided that he would still have welcomed the presence of a few Palestinians from the camps fanatical, poorly educated, and rash perhaps, but utterly loyal, and absolutely willing to lay down their lives for the greater glory of God and their oppressed people.

He had opted for competence over faith. Perhaps that had been an error.

Ibrahim made a mental note to assign the troops Talal had brought to key points. If his mercenaries showed signs of wavering under pressure, they could always be kept at their posts by force — should that prove necessary.

He continued. “Herr Reichardt’s demise does not affect any part of the Operation in any way. The countdown continues. I will assume personal command and remain here — until the planes are launched and we initiate our evacuation.”

He paused for a brief moment. Not to allow them to ask questions. Just to give them a moment to absorb his instructions.

“Very well. You have your orders. You know your assignments. Carry on.”

As they filed out, Ibrahim signaled one of the few noneuropeans in the room, a young, stick-thin, Egyptian-born computer specialist. “Dr. Saleh?”

Saleh scurried over. “Highness?”

“I understand you have completed the attack simulation Herr Reichardt commissioned?”

The Egyptian nodded. “Yes, Highness.”

“Show it to me,” Ibrahim ordered. It was time for a final look at his master plan.

The computer expert led the way back into the crowded room used by the planning cell. With Ibrahim hovering behind him, he quickly booted up the computer at his desk. The large monitor glowed to life — revealing a digitized satellite display of the United States. It was as though a camera hovered in space several hundred miles above the surface of the earth.

The Egyptian’s hands paused over the keyboard. “I am ready, Highness.”

Ibrahim nodded. “Begin.”

Saleh’s hands danced over the keyboard, inputting instructions.

A cursor flashed over the eastern seaboard, vanished, and then reappeared as the camera zoomed in. Washington, D.C and its surrounding suburbs filled the screen.

The Egyptian pushed one final key, activating the computer simulation.

“Initiating the attack sequence, Highness.”

A thin white line appeared — heading out from Godfrey Field and moving southeast. The camera zoomed in even tighten-now focused tightly on the areas just north and south of the Potomac River. A blinking crosshairs appeared, centered on the Pentagon. The white line merged with the crosshairs.

“Detonation,” Saleh said calmly.

A fireball appeared on the screen — a roiling cloud of flame that swallowed the Pentagon whole and blossomed out over the Potomac. A shock wave rippled outward, toppling buildings, smashing highway overpasses and bridges, shattering windows — biting deep into Washington, roaring over the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Capitol. More graphic overlays appeared on the altered satellite image. Each showed the expected areas of maximum overpressure, heat, fire, wind, and radiation damage.

The screen froze, showing a sea of searing flame as a firestorm spread through the devastated area.

Ibrahim smiled at the screen, imagining the chaos this one weapon would cause. “And the results, Doctor?” he asked calmly.

The Egyptian tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Assuming an airburst height of three hundred meters and taking into account only deaths and severe injuries from blast, heat, and radiation.”

“And the results?” Ibrahim asked again, this time in a firmer voice.

Saleh dropped back into reality from his abstract mathematical universe. “Two hundred thousand dead, Highness. With perhaps another two or three hundred thousand seriously injured. Including, of course, the vast majority of America’s top political and military leadership.”

Ibrahim nodded. Perfect.

“The detonation point for this bomb is unusually low in order to achieve maximum damage against the Pentagon, Highness,” the computer specialist commented. “We could achieve even more significant civilian casualties with a higher altitude airburst. One more along the lines of the others — two thousand feet, for example.”

“No.” Ibrahim shook his head. His first target in Washington was America’s military nerve center. Its total destruction was his top priority. Dead American civilians came second. They were a welcome dividend, however. This was not just a surgical strike.

He wanted to twist the knife as he struck home.

He leaned closer to the screen. “Continue.”

Saleh obeyed.

The monitor cycled through a succession of images — showing nuclear destruction spreading across another nineteen targets spread out across the length and breadth of the United States.

Langley and Fort Meade were vaporized next — taking with them the headquarters of the CIA and the National Security Agency. Then the heart of Fort Bragg — home of the 82nd Airborne Division, the Delta Force, and the J.S.O.C-vanished in the blink of an eye. A fifth bomb destroyed the key areas of Fort Campbell-headquarters of the 101st Air Assault Division and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. A sixth destroyed the U.S. Central and Special Operations Commands at Mcdill Air Force Base, near Tampa. A seventh and eighth tore the guts out of the Ranger battalions, mechanized troops, and training units stationed at Georgia’s Fort Stewart and Fort Benning.

More bombs detonated — vaporizing the central areas of the U.S. Marine Corps bases at Camps Pendleton and Lejeune.

Other weapons slammed into the Air Force bases in Delaware, Idaho, New Mexico, Missouri, Texas, and Washington state — eliminating whole wings of C-5, C-141, and C-17 transports, KC-10 and KC-135 tankers, B-1B and B-2 strategic bombers, F-15 and F-16 fighters, and F-117 Stealth fighter bombers.

Four more rained down across the vast naval bases at Norfolk and San Diego — the home ports for a large number of America’s aircraft carriers and amphibious warships. Many of the ships would be at sea, but crucial support facilities and the personnel needed to man them would be wiped off the face of the earth.

When the dazzling images receded, Ibrahim turned slowly toward Saleh.

“So what is your final assessment, Doctor?”

The specialist punched in one last key. His monitor displayed a series of numbers. “At a minimum, I would expect total American military casualties to run close to three hundred thousand dead and critically wounded. Equipment and aircraft losses will run from fifty to seventy percent for each unit we have targeted.”

“And the ‘collateral damage’?” Ibrahim asked, consciously using the sterile, inhuman jargon adopted by the West during its wars against Arab and Muslim nations.

The Egyptian brought up a new set of numbers. “Since so many of these bases are in or near major areas of habitation, I expect civilian casualties to be far higher — millions dead, with as many more seriously injured.

“Naturally, many of those injured by blast or fire will die in the following days,” Saleh continued. “The detonation of even two or three weapons of this magnitude would saturate America’s emergency medical services — especially its burn wards. After twenty bombs go off, a great number of those caught by the flames will simply die untreated.”

Ibrahim breathed out, still staring at the numbers displayed on the screen. His thrust at America’s heart would be even more effective than he’d dared to hope — God be praised.

Every Russian-made nuclear weapon he had purchased at such a dear price was an integral part of the grand design. By striking at U.S. intelligence agencies, he would prevent America from seeing any of its many enemies clearly. By emasculating its commando units and other rapid deployment forces, he would remove its ability to react swiftly to those challenging its parasitic interests — in the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf, in Asia, and all over the world. And by destroying its strategic airlift and amphibious forces, he would cripple America’s power to intervene in strength in crises around the globe.

Ibrahim nodded solemnly. It would take the shocked and dazed survivors years to fully rebuild the elite ground forces and sophisticated aircraft and ships his chosen weapons would destroy in a single, devastating millisecond. And by then, it would be far, far too late.

Other powers, including those loyal to Islam, and in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people, would rush to fill the void left as the United States curled inward on its bleeding wounds.

And the whole course of history — of the centuries-old struggle between the House of Islam and its enemies — would be altered forever. Nothing would ever be the same again.