Fallout

26

The special agents pressed their backs against the wall outside Merewether’s apartment. They’d been waiting in shifts in their cars for days. No one had tried to enter the apartment since Merewether’s disappearance. No cleaning service, no friends, no family—no one. Not even the manager. No lights had come on, the phone didn’t ring once—they had it tapped—and no one showed any interest in Merewether at all. It had made for a dull stakeout.

Then, just at dusk, Merewether had driven up in his antique Volkswagen Bug with the rusted bumper and parked on the street. The FBI agents had thought they were hallucinating. They expected someone to come at some point, but not Merewether himself. Not in his car, not so obviously.

Merewether had gotten out of his car and gone to the elevator. The FBI agent stationed outside had immediately radioed the others, then hurried to the elevator and to Merewether’s floor.

They waited outside his door, their guns drawn. The lead agent knew very well what his instructions were. If Merewether returned, they were to wait to see if he called anyone or tried to make any contact with anyone that might lead them to the Pakistani who’d set up the entire thing—who had himself conveniently disappeared.

The lead agent stood next to Merewether’s door. He could hear the television: CNN. Typical Washington, he thought. In D.C. everybody does their work, then runs home to see how much of it was legitimate, determined by how much of it makes it onto CNN. In D.C. if you’re not on television, you don’t exist.

The agent checked his watch and looked at the other three agents. They were to wait thirty minutes or until Merewether left. Whichever came first. Then they were to arrest him on a list of federal offenses as long as his excuses were sure to be. The lead agent carried the arrest warrant in his suit pocket. He waited a minute and checked his watch again. He knew Merewether wasn’t leaving. He must have something else in mind, some specific purpose that would make him come back to this apartment, after being gone long enough to have seen his name in the papers. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to escape. His apartment was on the seventh floor of a high-rise with no way out except through the door next to the agents.

CNN droned on in the background as another seventh-floor resident came out of the elevator and passed the FBI agents in front of Merewether’s apartment. He looked at them and their drawn guns and hurried by, quickly turned the corner, and glanced back, horrified and intrigued.

Twenty-seven minutes. The agent had waited long enough. He reached across the door with the back of his right hand and rapped sharply. “FBI, open up. We have a warrant for your arrest!” The agents breathed more deeply, ready for whatever Merewether had in mind.

“FBI! Open up!” he repeated with an insistent, no-nonsense tone.

Still nothing.

“Open up! FBI!” he demanded. No response. He looked at the other agents. They were all in agreement. He nodded. They all knew what the plan was and what each one’s role was. The lead agent tried the doorknob. It was locked. He examined the construction of the door. The usual hollow-core apartment door with cheap hardware. One kick, he thought. He went to the other side of the hallway, across from the door, took one quick step, and kicked with all the force of his leg right next to the doorknob.

The door flew open. Merewether had closed the dead bolt behind him, and it tore through the frame and the wallboard as it was forced open. “FBI!” the agent yelled as he moved rapidly into the apartment with his gun ready, looking for any danger. The other three agents flowed into the apartment behind him and fanned out to cover the entire hallway from the living room to the kitchen. The apartment lights were on in all the rooms they could see. The television was on, too, but no one was watching it.

The lead started working his way through the apartment from the living room. He turned off the television to allow them to listen more easily. The silence was eerie. They could hear their hearts pounding. The lead pointed to the kitchen, where one of the other agents looked, then entered. Nothing unusual at all.

The lead agent headed toward the bedroom. The door was closed. He considered his options. He tried the knob, but the bedroom door was locked. It was a thin door with no internal strength. He stepped back, kicked the door open in one motion, and moved away from the opening in case Merewether was waiting for them with a weapon. There was no sound at all. The lead agent glanced around the door and saw a small white television on a dresser playing to an empty room. He turned it off. There was nothing out of order. They searched the room carefully, checking the closets and the bathroom, but there was no sign of Merewether.

“There any more rooms?” the lead agent asked, confused.

“Nope,” his second replied.

“Where the hell is he?”

They all looked around the three-room apartment—the kitchen, living room, and bedroom. No Merewether. They quickly checked the bathroom. It was empty. They stared at each other.

“Maybe he jumped,” one of them said suddenly.

The lead agent hurried to the balcony off the living room and wrestled with the sliding glass door. He had difficulty pushing the door open. It felt as if the slide rail were made of gravel. He tried to look down to the ground through the white steel railing, but they were too high for him to see the ground immediately.

He noticed in his peripheral vision that a light coming from his left was blocked, then not blocked. He realized that two legs hung in front of him, dangling, lifeless. “Help me get him down!” he yelled as he grabbed Merewether’s legs and pushed up. One of the other agents tried to get at the balcony of the apartment above to release the belt that was knotted to the railing. The end was slipped through the buckle, allowing it to cinch tight when pressure was brought to bear, which it certainly was when Merewether stepped off the railing of his own balcony.

The lead yelled, “Get up there and get the belt off!”

“I can’t reach the other end!” the second agent protested as he considered climbing up on the railing to reach the balcony above.

“Then get up there and get onto the balcony!”

The second agent ran out of Merewether’s apartment and up the stairs to the next floor.

The lead agent and the others tried to keep Merewether from hanging from the belt. They tried not to look at his blue, swollen face.

“Is he still alive?” one asked.

“I don’t know. He sure doesn’t seem to be breathing. Get an ambulance here!” the lead replied.

Finally they heard the other agent above them and two voices they didn’t recognize. “I just need to get onto your balcony,” he was explaining as he pushed by them.

“Hey! What could you possibly need out there? We haven’t been out there all day!”

He ignored them and leaned down to examine the knotted belt. “Shit, this is tight! Can you get any more pressure off?”

“No,” the lead replied.

“I’m just going to cut it,” the second said, pulling a buck knife out of its belt holder and slicing through the leather.

Merewether tumbled into the arms of the three agents waiting below.

They laid him on the concrete slab that constituted the balcony and felt for a pulse. Nothing. “We’re too late.”

The other agents grimaced. They knew that those who had decided to stake out Merewether’s apartment around the clock were much less interested in securing a conviction against him than in being able to question him about the Pakistanis. Now they wouldn’t get the chance.

“We did it right, boss. Thirty minutes—”

“Shut up.” He looked at the body. It was still warm. There was still some color in his hands. They were only a few minutes late. While they were out in the hall, Merewether was ending his life. “We’d better call Li.”

“I’ll call her,” another agent said.

“No, I’ll call her.”

“It wasn’t our fault.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not political with her; it’s getting to the bottom of things.” He finished dialing and waited for the cell phone to connect.

Luke and Vlad walked through San Francisco International Airport trying not to look conspicuous. Every television continued to broadcast the unending news on CNN and every other news station about the attack at San Onofre. The immediacy of it had subsided slightly, only because the nuclear cloud had not yet decided where to go and was hovering over the Pacific. It was apparently caught in the middle of contradicting weather patterns, which resulted in its staying put, a not altogether unpleasant development, although a marine layer was starting to form and threatened to engulf the California coast in a low-hanging, radioactive fog.

The televisions showed nonstop video of the crumpled San Onofre building, with accusatory reports about nuclear waste. Interstate 5, the main artery that ran along the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles, was closed for the indefinite future.

Luke and Vlad stood in line at the gate. The passengers in front of them spoke of little else. The entire world was transfixed by the attack and by following the drifting, dissipating radioactive cloud. Luke tried to count the number of times he heard the words “Chernobyl” or “Three Mile Island” or “malicious,” or some other unflattering adjective applied to the Pakistanis. Luke watched the television out of the corner of his eye, especially when Pakistani officials were answering questions about how their pilots might have pulled this off without governmental assistance. They claimed to be baffled and angry.

His and Vlad’s innocuous bags had been checked, even though they contained flight gear, flare guns, and other things that were never supposed to be checked. They’d been assured that their bags would not be inspected or confiscated. All they carried with them were two small Air India flight bags that contained shaving kits and paperback books that looked to them to be particularly boring and ridiculous.

They stopped at the desk to check in with the airline attendant. Luke started to sweat as he stepped to the counter and handed her his false passport.

Vlad was completely unperturbed behind him, in spite of the fact that his passport read “Billy Walters” and listed an address in El Paso, Texas. Luke glanced at Vlad and whispered, “Do you even know where El Paso, Texas, is?”

“Sure,” Vlad answered.

Luke tried to look bored and preoccupied. Nearly everyone getting onto the airplane appeared to be of Indian descent. There were very few American passports in the group. “Good morning, sir,” the attendant said, taking his passport. She checked it against his appearance, then against the ticket. “We have you assigned to seat 27A,” she said in her Indian accent.

“Fine,” Luke said, avoiding her gaze.

She handed him his passport and ticket and took Vlad’s papers. “Good morning,” she said.

“Morning,” he replied, trying his hardest to hide his thick Russian accent. He nodded and smiled as she clicked the computer keys.

“There you go, Mr. Walters,” she said, giving him his documents. “You’re in 27B.”

They walked down the ramp into the Indian 747.

They took their seats and put their heads back, gladly accepting a little rest before they would once again be required to fight for their lives.

Cindy Frohm spoke into her phone as she waited for Morrissey’s encrypted digital cell phone to connect, “Come on, pick up, pick up!”

“Morrissey.”

“Bill!”

“Who’s this?”

“Cindy.”

“I can’t really talk. What do you need?”

“We just got something I think you should see.”

“From whom?”

“Go secure.”

“Okay. Stand by.” He came back on line. “Okay.”

“It’s from the NSA.”

“What is it?”

“Transcript of a telephone conversation in Russian.”

“Whose?’

“Between Russia and Tonopah, Nevada. It was the Russian guy at the school out there. The guy who just set up this whole India thing.”

“And?”

“And somebody in Russia is involved. He was accusing this Vladimir guy of trying to murder him and of sending a Colonel to try to take him out. They’re checking this guy’s voice. They think they can ID him. He’s with the Russian Mafia.”

“What was he saying?”

“It sounds very tense, I’m told. All we have is the transcript. They’re checking all the tapes for phone calls between Russia and Nevada over the last few weeks. It will take some time.”

“They’ve already left for India! What are we supposed to do with this?”

“The NSA seems to think Vladimir is working with the other side. It may be under duress, but he may be against us.”

“So the whole thing is a trap? Shit!” Morrissey said, trying to think of what to do next. “Get whoever knows about these calls to pull it all together and meet me in my office. I’m on my way.”

Luke’s face had now been on CNN hundreds of times as the one who was in charge of the now famous school where the attack had been launched on the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Everyone in the world was aware of what had happened, and where it had happened from, and who owned and ran the school from which the catastrophe had begun. Yet no one seemed to glance their way as they walked off the 747 into the terminal in New Delhi. They didn’t know who was to meet them or what they were to do next. They’d simply been told someone would be waiting.

Luke and Vlad followed the signs to baggage claim. As they were walking down the long hallway, two men began walking next to them. “Follow us, please.”

“What about the bags we checked?”

“We’ve already retrieved them.”

“Where are we going?” Luke asked as they walked down a flight of stairs and out of the terminal into the muggy morning air.

The first man pointed to a waiting Falcon Jet, a two-engine business jet. The engines on the Falcon were screaming with anticipation as Luke and Vlad were ushered inside and the door closed behind them.

“Are you both from the squadron?” Luke asked.

“We’re on the General’s staff.”

“Thanks for meeting us. Where are we going now?”

“To the air base.”

“Straight there?”

“Yes, sir, nonstop.”

Luke was impressed. “Any developments?”

The first Indian officer, who was doing all the talking, sat down across from Luke. A small table was between them. The man said loudly, “Several of their F-16s have been towed inside the hangar. We think they are being loaded.”

“How much time do we have?”

“We don’t know. Do you think they’ll go during the night or day?”

“You think they’ll really do this?”

“We have seen what they did to you.”

“Anything else?”

“We’re trying to move some air defenses to the area without anyone noticing, but it is extremely difficult. We don’t have that many mobile systems, and we don’t want them to be obvious in their movement. Have you thought about how to defend the nuclear plant?”

Luke nodded. “We need a lot more information than we have right now. And we’ll need to know who’s available to go with us, who has experience.”

“There is a meeting set up with the commanding officer of the Archers. He’s prepared to give you whatever you need.”

“If they’re loading them now, they could be launching within an hour.”

“That’s why I asked you whether you thought they would go at night.”

“I don’t really know whether they have much of a night capability. I sure as hell hope not.”

“What if it were you?”

“I’d go at night. Without a doubt. Especially against your fighters. Sorry…”

“That’s why you’re here. Someone else must agree with you. You think they’ll come in low?”

“I had assumed so.”

“There are many airline routes that fly over Pakistan and India. They might disguise themselves as an airliner, then drop down. It would allow them much greater range and less likelihood of detection.”

“That’s possible, but I doubt it. My guess is he will come right at us.”

The man looked troubled.

Luke looked out the window as the Falcon lifted off quickly from the New Delhi airport, then back at his host. “If we’re in time.”

The business jet shut down its engines just outside the hangar and was towed in. Luke and Vlad started to get up but were told to wait until the jet was completely inside the hangar and the doors were closed behind. Someone was being very cautious.

Luke hurried down the ladder behind the two Indian officers. There were ten people waiting for them. One was clearly the leader of the group. The commanding officer of the MiG-29 squadron, no doubt, Luke thought, spotting the yellow Archers patch on his flight suit. He walked directly toward the distinguished-looking man. He was perhaps forty years old, with dark skin and thinning, carefully combed hair.

They shook hands. “Welcome. My name is Prekash. We have been expecting you.”

“Luke Henry. This is Vladimir Petkov.”

“Yes, I know,” the Colonel said as he smiled at Vlad. “How have you been, Vladimir?”

“Well, Colonel. You?”

“Very well. Thank you.”

“How are the MiGs holding up?”

The Colonel showed some ambivalence. “Not too bad. We have some maintenance problems, but nothing too horrible. Come this way,” Prekash said, pointing toward the back of the hangar.

“Why the closed hangar doors?” Luke asked.

The Colonel glanced at him. “This man who is intent on attacking us, we are told he is very resourceful. He has many friends, even where one wouldn’t expect. We are taking all precautions to ensure he doesn’t know you are coming or that we are expecting him. We want to show nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Towing a Falcon into the hangar and closing the doors isn’t out of the ordinary?”

“Fair enough,” he replied. “But given the circumstances, we didn’t want two foreigners walking off the plane. Better to wonder what’s wrong with our jet.”

“Have you done any planning? Do you have any charts? Any signs they’re getting ready to launch?”

The Colonel indicated a room in the corner of the cavernous hangar. They entered it and closed the door. The room was full of pilots in their flight suits who were obviously waiting for Luke and Vlad. It was a mission-planning room, with charts and flight information on the walls and planning materials on a large table in the middle of the room. “We have everything you need,” the Colonel said. “You have your flight gear?” he asked.

“In the bags.”

“Excellent.” He looked at one of the pilots, who immediately left the room to take care of the flight gear.

Luke and Vlad wanted to examine the charts, to study the defensive situation, and to try to determine how much time they had. The commanding officer of the Indian MiG-29 squadron wanted everyone in the squadron to meet the two pilots. They came forward in what soon became a receiving line to introduce themselves to Luke and Vlad. They all had bright eyes, but Luke detected some resentment. He knew he would be resentful if some foreign pilots were brought in to do his job and defend the United States from attack, implying that those who were supposed to do it were somehow incompetent or, at least, less capable.

Prekash brought the pilots together. “Those who have been asked to be part of the final planning stage are welcome to stay. For the rest of you, please return to your duties.”

Those who were being asked to leave headed for the door, while three other officers stayed behind and made their way to the planning table.

Luke glanced around. “We’re right here,” Prekash said, pointing to the airfield on the chart. “It is my understanding that you believe he’ll be attacking here, the nuclear power plant.”

“We’re just guessing,” Luke said, looking at Vlad. “But it’s what he did to us, with no warning whatsoever. It’s kind of the poor man’s nuclear war—if you can’t use nuclear warheads to spread radiation, if you don’t have your own radiation to drop on someone, use theirs. Hit the nuclear power plants or, as he did to us, their high-level nuclear waste. And if he is truly intent on starting a war between India and Pakistan, wouldn’t that be the sure way of doing it?”

“The most sure way I can imagine,” Prekash said with an undertone of fury.

Vlad was staring at the chart. “But we should consider other targets. If we were so smart, we would have stopped him before he attacked us,” he admitted.

Prekash ran his hand across the chart to flatten it, then looked up at Luke. “You trained this Khan?”

“Mostly in air-to-air,” Luke replied defensively. “We did some air-to-ground, but not much. We helped him plan a mission to attack a target from low level about three hundred miles away.”

“And here we are,” Prekash said. “How do you think he’ll come?”

“As low as he can get.”

“It does not give us much time to react. If we detect him coming at all.”

“Show me where we are in relationship to the target,” Vlad said.

One of the other officers pointed to the nuclear power plant. “It is right here. The Air Force base is”—he looked—“here.” He took a ruler and showed them the most direct line of flight. “It is a pretty straight shot.”

“It looks flat,” Luke said.

“For the most part,” Prekash said. “There is no real good place to hide, which makes an intercept easier. And that is assuming they don’t stage out of one of their forward air bases. A real possibility.”

Luke studied the chart. “Where are those?”

“Here, and here, and here,” Prekash showed.

“A lot of angles to worry about.”

“Precisely.”

“How’s your radar? Any chance of an early-warning hit on them coming across the border?”

Prekash thought for a moment and stared at the identified air bases and how close they were to the Indian border. “I’d say a one-in-two or one-in-three chance of picking them up. Depending on where they cross the border and how high.”

“We told them to attack a target from several directions at once to ensure that some go through.” He looked at the chart where Prekash was staring. “I’m sure they know where the radar coverage is the weakest.”

“There are some valleys.”

“Could you do it without detection?”

“Not with a large flight.”

Vlad shook his head. “It won’t be a large flight. I’d expect four airplanes at the most. A surgical strike with laser-guided bombs. It’s what we recommended.”

Prekash and the other Indian pilots studied Vlad and Luke. They still weren’t sure what to make of them. They had been ordered to cooperate but didn’t feel comfortable yielding. “You make it sound like we will never stop him. What do you suggest?”

“We need to have a complete understanding of your radar system, your early-warning system, and any airborne radar platforms you have available. We also need to devise a plan to get them airborne covering the right places without alerting anyone to increased activity.”

“We have some old early-warning airplanes, but they are not very reliable.”

Luke stood up straight. “You need to get everything that can detect a low-flying airplane airborne. Even if it looks like provocation, you can argue that it can’t be provocation to turn on your own radars. We’ll have to have fighters airborne from now until we think the threat is over. And since Vlad and I are to be the first to engage, we need to be in a five-minute alert at the airfield along the most likely threat vector.”

“I think you’ll see that we have no airfield on the threat vectors. We are as close as there is, and we’re a hundred miles away from their most likely route.”

Luke and Vlad frowned. Luke spoke first. “That won’t do it. With the 29’s limited range, we won’t be able to get them from here.”

“What do you suggest?” Prekash asked, slightly peeved.

“I don’t know,” Luke said.

A Major spoke. “We might be able to pre-position you at one of our unimproved wartime locations.”

“Would it put us on the threat vector?” Vlad asked.

He looked at the chart again. “Yes, it would.”

Prekash began to say something, then stopped. He had seen somebody come into the room from behind Luke and Vlad. Luke felt the gaze of the intruder on the back of his head and turned to look. The man was impeccably dressed. He wore expensive casual clothes. He nodded at Prekash, who quickly gave a very subtle and slight bow and left the room with his other officers. Luke and Vlad were suddenly alone with him.

The man came over to Luke and extended his hand. “I am Sunil.”

Luke was puzzled. “Luke Henry, and this is—”

“Yes, I know. Hello, Vlad.”

“Sunil,” Vlad said, surprised.

“Who exactly are you?” Luke asked, perplexed by Prekash’s leaving in the middle of their conversation.

“As I said, my name is Sunil.”

“Sunil who?”

“Just Sunil.”

“So what can we do for you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about what you’ll be doing and against whom you will be doing it,” he said. His accent was slightly less obvious than the others’. It had a more British, clipped sound to it, as if he’d been educated at Oxford.

Luke nodded without comment. He wanted to get on with their planning.

“We have some very good information that your enemy will be launching his attack either tonight or early in the morning.”

“How do you know that?”

“As I said, we have very good information.”

“Okay,” Luke said. “So what are we going to do about it?”

“We will pre-position your two fighters at a forward strip which is actually a highway. The rest of the squadron will be behind you, in front of the nuclear plant as a barrier. It will be up to you to try to stop them, but if you fail, the others—”

“We won’t fail,” Luke replied.

“I understand that you do not intend to fail, but failure has a way of sneaking up on you.”

“I don’t let failure sneak up on me.”

“Yes, well, who intends to?”

“Do you know how many airplanes there will be?”

“I don’t think many.”

“You sure seem calm,” Luke said. “Everyone else around here is on pins and needles. You look like you just got a massage.”

Sunil smiled. His teeth were perfect and bright against his dark face and slicked-back jet black hair. “No massage, I’m just confident.”

“Why?”

“Because I know our adversary.”

“What do you mean, you know him?”

“I’ve been following him and his group for years. He has been planning this event for a long time, including taking his leave of absence from the Air Force so he could reappear as another pilot with new records.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know almost everything there is to know about Mr. Riaz Khan, as you know him.”

Luke winced at the mention of the name.

“The man who came to your school, killed your security guards, bombed your nuclear power plant, and now has come here to do the same to us.”

Luke put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Why?” Luke demanded. “If his target is India, why go after us first? Why put a big, sharp stick in the eye of the one country that might actually help him win a war with India? I mean, we’ve given them a lot of their military gear. I just don’t get it.”

“Your mistake is understandable. You continue to think that he is working on behalf of Pakistan and that they simply refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, he is working on behalf of an elusive group whose goal is to see one Islamic country in South Asia, including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, possibly Iran, possibly Bangladesh, and, of course, Kashmir. Attacking the U.S. undermines Pakistan and will almost certainly topple the current regime, which refuses to go to war over Kashmir and stands in the way of his great Islamic state.”

“You must have known all this when he came to the States,” Luke asked.

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about him?” Luke demanded.

Sunil took an Indian cigarette from the pocket of his sharply pressed wool slacks, lit it, and inhaled deeply. His gold Rolex watch moved with each hand gesture. “What makes you think I didn’t?” he asked.

“You told them what you know about Khan?”

“I told them everything I could tell them without compromising my sources.”

“Before he attacked San Onofre?”

“Of course. I told them everything they needed to know. But frankly, I anticipated no danger. I had no idea he would do something to the United States. I always thought Pakistan and India were his targets.” He sucked on the cigarette and raised his eyebrows. “I assumed he was in Nevada for training. That is all.”

“What did they say?”

He smiled as he exhaled through his nose. “Your intelligence people did not believe me. But finally they believed your courageous agent, who sneaked onto the military base and identified him. She is, of course, now—and will be for a long time—in a Pakistani prison for her efforts.”

“What?” Luke said, horrified.

“It doesn’t matter. You must get on with your mission. It is up to you to stop Khan.”

Luke’s head was spinning. “You’ve been following this guy for years?”

“Frankly, even I did not anticipate the boldness of his moves.”

“You are with Indian intelligence, I take it.”

Sunil breathed in deeply from his cigarette. “Of course.”

“Do we have his target right?”

“I suppose we are about to find out. But I think almost without a doubt that is his target.”

“And it’s tonight?” Vlad interrupted.

“The airplanes are already loaded with bombs. I do not know what time they will take off, but I am virtually certain it will be tonight.”

Luke needed to plan. “Thanks for your help.”

“We are grateful that you came here to help us. You did not have to do that.” He stepped on the butt of his cigarette with his expensive loafers. He looked at Luke and Vlad. “If there’s anything I can do for you—anything at all—let me know. He must be stopped.”

“He will be.”