Fallout

CHAPTER 47

Sweat rolled off Craig’s forehead as he struggled with the land rover’s locked door. Locked! What a stupid reason for a delay.

In the back cargo compartment, the red LED blinked down seconds on the makeshift timer. A countdown to Armageddon.

He smeared his arm across the back window, wiping away the rain. The warhead itself was a dark, hazy shape half hidden by tinted windows and a sheet of scuffed plastic thrown over the device. Mike Waterloo’s limp body lay sprawled in the front seat, stuffed into an awkward position. Blood pooled from wounds in his chest, and his head lolled to one side.

And all the doors were locked.

Behind them, Terrell’s Air Force helicopter shot into the air, leaving them. The rotor’s noise rolled away as the helicopter thundered straight upward like an elevator being yanked to the top floor, buffeted from side to side in the high winds.

Craig looked up in despair at being abandoned so utterly. Ursov shook his fist. But then he realized with relief that the lieutenant colonel must have directed the helicopter to hover overhead and mark the spot for the approaching NEST and EOD crews as they flew in from the southern part of Nellis. Just in case they could get there in time.

Through the tinted glass, though, he could see that the countdown showed less than ten minutes — not nearly enough time for a team to get here, set up, and accomplish anything. Craig thought that the smarter move might have been just to evacuate everyone out to a safe distance and let the warhead blow.

Now he didn’t even have that option.

“Before we can disarm bomb,” Ursov said, “we must get inside this truck.”

Craig stepped back and kicked at the vehicle’s door handle, hoping to smash the locking mechanism with his shoe. Nothing. The side window didn’t yield to his kicks either. He needed a crowbar to smash the safety glass. A rock. Anything hard enough to penetrate.

Ursov yanked off his uniform jacket, revealing a white shirt now smeared with dust and dampened with perspiration — and with good reason. The rain poured down, soaking them both.

The general barely glanced at Waterloo’s body, but turned back to peer again at the nuclear device through the tinted glass. He looked up at Craig, an intense look of worry on his face. “You must get inside. Now. Time is running out. If this warhead explodes, the fallout will be a thousand times worse than Chernobyl. People will be dying for decades.”

“This damned locked door is a simple, but effective delaying tactic.” Craig kicked at the window again. The heel of his black wingtip merely bounced off the tinted glass.

The military helicopter hovered above them, a thousand feet up, serving as a beacon for the NEST team. But Craig saw no sign of anyone coming to help. Not that it would make much difference. Nine minutes.

Craig pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster and leveled his weapon at the driver’s side window. “Step back.”

Raising his forearm to shield his eyes, Craig fired at an angle into the window, which splashed into a spray of cobwebbed cracks. He fired again, and this time the remains of the safety glass shattered. Craig turned to the side and lashed again with his foot, this time kicking in the sheet of glass shards held together with fiber strands.

Panting, Craig said, “Now that we’re inside, I don’t have the first idea how to disarm that thing. All yours, General.”

Ursov crossed his arms over his white shirt. “I have helped to disassemble this model of weapon.” He peered inside the land rover. “Perhaps I can figure out something to do.”

“You’d better hurry, comrade.” Craig reached in and unlocked the doors. “Quick! Open the back!”

Ursov jogged around to the rear of the vehicle. He fumbled with the latch and yanked the back hatch open.

“What can I do to help?” said Craig, feeling terror claw up his throat. Stay calm, he thought. The last thing he needed to do was to spook Ursov.

“Nothing — yet,” said Ursov, bending over the warhead. He ripped the plastic sheet away and let it drift across the rocky ground. The wind caught it and whipped the plastic away like a lost kite. “Give me room to work.”

Craig backed off, feeling awkward and desperate for something to do. “I’ll, uh, see if they left any clues on how to stop this thing.”

Craig stuffed his pistol back in its shoulder holster, then hauled Mike Waterloo’s body out of the front seat. No time for ceremony, no time for sadness or anger. He dumped the DAF Manager on the muddy ground, then frantically began to search the vehicle. He sprawled across the front seat and banged on the glovebox. It fell open, and he rummaged through it.

In back Ursov stood over the warhead, studying the device as if he had all the time in the world. But a sheen of sweat sparkled across the blustery Russian’s forehead — and that frightened Craig most of all.

From the cluttered glovebox he pulled out AAA maps, a National Park Service map, and a folder of vehicle maintenance records. Nothing about the warhead. Craig tossed the material away. He patted under the front seat, finding only an old wrench and a long screwdriver. He couldn’t feel anything else, no How to Disarm Atomic Bombs in Your Spare Time manuals.

The warhead would go off any minute, and he and Ursov didn’t have a chance of getting far enough away. Even Paige would be killed along with any other personnel too close to Groom Lake.

Pulling himself back out of the front seat, he turned to Waterloo’s corpse lying in the dirt. Sally had shot him three times, well placed and effective. The DAF Manager’s gaunt features were pale from death, his body sprawled at an angle.

Craig quickly patted down the man’s body. He found only a wallet and a heavy handgun. Then he pulled out a thin RF card from Waterloo’s bloody shirt pocket, thicker than a credit card; it reminded Craig of the security access cards he had seen near the DAF. It might have something to do with the warhead, some code for the interlocks.

Protecting it from the rain, Craig jogged around to the back of the land rover. “General, I found an RF card.”

Ursov’s torso was half inside the back, bent over the warhead. He had opened the casing, but the red LEDs continued to blink, counting down the seconds. Six minutes.

The Russian used his finger to follow wires from the timer to a shoebox-sized package sitting on top of the warhead. He looked up, his eyes red with concentration. “Let me see it.”

Craig handed him the card; Ursov flipped it over, scowling. “Do you know the security code for this?”

Craig shook his head. “No.”

“It is useless without the code.” Ursov tossed the card away and hunched back over the unit. “But it would have helped us a great deal.”

Craig stared at the LED readout, still ticking down. “What kind of code would it be?”

“Numbers,” said Ursov, his head buried in the workings of the warhead. “A long sequence of numbers. Mr. Waterloo could have set it to be anything he liked. But if you don’t have the code, Agent Kreident, then leave me alone so I can work.”

“The numerical sequence could be anything.” Craig tried to think, watching the Russian work on the warhead’s control systems. A matrix of buttons next to the LED took up most of the side of the shoebox, next to the RF card reader. “Can we guess?”

Ursov continued to stare intently, his teeth on edge, as he traced the wires. He didn’t look up. “There are too many permutations to try at random. That would be a waste of time. Now stop bothering me.”

But it wouldn’t be random. What would Mike Waterloo use — a combination of his dead wife’s birthday and Paige’s birthday as well? But even if that were true, Craig didn’t have a clue what those dates were. What could be important —

Craig snapped his head up. “Wait, try a date, today’s date. October 24.” The date the Eagle’s Claw had written on the plastic explosives back at the transformer towers at the Hoover Dam.

Ursov inserted the card into the unit and punched in the numbers.

Nothing. A loud crack of thunder rolled across the sky.

“Maybe the month and day are reversed — sometimes people do that,” said Craig. Why wasn’t this working?

Ursov withdrew the card, then re-inserted it. He tried another sequence. He repeated the procedure — still nothing. “Useless! We are wasting time!” Scowling, he tossed the card to the side, then turned back to the PALs inside the warhead casing.

Craig drew in deep breaths. He felt totally helpless.

The weapon itself looked sleek, highly polished. Seams were barely visible around the steel-colored, conical nose section and toward the flared back. Although not more than two feet in girth at its widest point, the commandeered device took up a good part of the back of the land rover. The nuke looked like an old artillery shell, except smoother and shinier. And much more deadly.

Craig glanced at the countdown clock. They were down to a little over four minutes. Yet Ursov took his time, methodically tracing the wires that led to the rectangular package sitting on top of the warhead.

He heard approaching vehicles, more aircraft, helicopters — but the thought sickened him instead of filled him with elation. They should be evacuating at full speed — but he had no way of getting in touch with them.

Craig leaned over and tried to see what the Russian officer was doing. Here he stood two inches from ground zero with a Russian Strategic Rocket Forces officer — a man who had been trained all his career on how to blow up the entire western hemisphere. Now, Craig’s life was in the hands of this ex-communist.

But what could he do — run? The military helicopter overhead couldn’t even get far enough away now. They would all be dead in a flash. If the weapon went off, the crater itself would be thousands of yards in diameter, and the fireball would incinerate everything within miles. The wind would carry radioactive dust and debris across a thousand miles.

Ursov straightened, then whirled toward Craig, snapping in a hoarse voice. “I need a metal bar.”

“A what?”

“Something sharp. A crowbar. Quickly. We do not have much time.”

“What are you going to do, hit it?”

Ursov looked Craig coldly in the eye. “Agent Kreident, we will both die within three minutes unless you stop asking questions and just assist me.” He bent into the back of the land rover and started ripping loose a side panel.

Craig swung open the rover’s rear door. He bent to search, scrambling under the back seat. Nothing but a watercooler and thermos jugs, not even a tire jack. It was probably buried somewhere under the heavy warhead.

He thrust his hand under the front seat, patting around. Where were those tools? There, something long, cold, and hard. He yanked out a foot-long screwdriver smudged with oil and grime.

“I’ve got something.”

“Quickly!”

Craig tossed the screwdriver over the back seat. Ursov caught it and immediately began to pry open the shoebox on top of the warhead. Beads of sweat drooled down the general’s ruddy face. His close-cropped gray hair was plastered to the side of his head.

The general bent over the device and spoke quietly, almost reverently. “I have learned during these disarmament inspections that you Americans have installed numerous Permissive Action Links so that your warheads cannot be accidentally detonated. Unfortunately, when Mr. Waterloo armed this weapon, he circumvented those protective devices.” He grunted as he popped off a cover, then started working with the screwdriver again.

“Therefore, all I must do is to engage the PAL without setting off the explosive lenses surrounding the bomb core —” He slipped and the blade of the screwdriver jammed deep inside the Permissive Action Link. He cursed, flailing his hand and blowing on his skinned knuckles.

Craig felt a chill run through him as he hurried around the vehicle. He desperately wanted to ask what had happened, but he knew he couldn’t afford to jar General Ursov out of his concentration.

The helicopter’s throbbing rotors broke the desert silence above; Craig heard faint warbling sirens in the distance, coming closer — but the NEST or EOD teams would get here too late. The countdown clock’s LED showed only a minute and a half remaining. They would all die together.

Ursov muttered to himself. He swiped sweat from his face with his forearm. Rain blew inside the back compartment. “The timer will not disengage!”

Craig heard a sudden pop, then a crackle, as if something had shorted in the warhead. Seconds later Ursov rattled the screwdriver around and pounded on the casing. Craig looked on, his eyes wide. His breath quickened.

Blinking in the sunlight, he shaded his eyes to peer hopelessly up at the hovering helicopter. In the instantaneous nuclear flash, the crew wouldn’t feel a thing, wouldn’t know what had hit them.

“Stand back,” Ursov snapped, not looking at him.

Craig staggered to the front of the vehicle, as if that might protect him. What else could he do?

“I said, stand back!” Clenching his hand and hammering with long swipes of the screwdriver, General Ursov chipped away at the breach in the warhead, pounding and twisting in the small hole he had opened in the shoe-box.

The Russian looked like a madman, his eyes red, his face full of sweat. He battered at the interior, and tiny beads of a solid material came pattering out. Again and again he struck the delicate systems, digging deep inside.

Suddenly, a burst of metallic shavings and charcoal-gray dust spewed from the hole like a tiny smoke bomb. Craig threw himself backward. Ursov dropped the screwdriver and staggered back out of the cargo compartment. He reeled in the glaring sunlight. The numbers of the LED counted down — less than a minute.

The Russian general stumbled away from the land rover. “Get away!” he cried hoarsely. He waved a hand spattered with gray dust. “Quickly! It is going to explode!”

Going to explode? Craig felt frozen with fear. Does he expect me to run away from a nuclear fireball?

But unreasoning instinct kicked in. Feeling as if he were moving in slow motion, Craig sprinted away from the rover, ducking deeper into the washout gully, ignoring the ankle-deep streams of brown water and searching for some kind of shelter. While Ursov ran at an angle from him, Craig bolted for an outcropping of rock, pumping his shoes in the uncertain mud. He tripped over a rock, but he scrambled back to his feet and picked up speed running full bore.

Above him the helicopter tilted its wings and buzzed away, uselessly trying to flee the impending holocaust.

Craig scrambled over a smooth table of rock. Sliding down in a spider-walk, he lunged out to get behind the outcropping. His pants ripped, and he winced as he banged his knee, cutting open a gash. He tumbled into a small depression behind the rocks, drenched with water and painted with mud.

No matter how far he had run, he remained well within the fireball zone. Perhaps it would be better just to stay here.

He thought fleetingly of Trish, but the recent memories of Paige overwhelmed him. Had the vicious Sally Montry managed to drive her hostage beyond the lethal radius of the weapon? Craig sucked in a burning breath as he realized all the opportunities he had missed with her.

He couldn’t hear General Ursov, and he wasn’t about to peek around the natural shelter to find the man, to thank him for trying. But it wouldn’t matter anyway since everything around would be instantly incinerated —

He heard the pop of an explosion. A laughably small echo and thump.

Startled, Craig waited for something else to happen, but there was nothing. Only the sound of the response team sirens growing louder, and the distant echoes of thunder.

Craig crawled around the rock, wincing as he nursed his battered leg. Some distance away, General Ursov raised his arm, waving for assistance.

Smoke curled up from the land rover, which had rolled onto its side, as if a giant had smacked it aside. The tailgate was bent up and torn away. The small explosion hadn’t completely destroyed the vehicle, but it had been enough to blow away the back end.

Some of the high explosives had detonated, but Ursov had somehow prevented the nuclear core from undergoing a chain reaction. The small explosion had damaged the vehicle, but nothing more. The atomic bomb had been contained.

Dizzily, Craig slumped back against the rock as he heard the sirens grow louder, and the sound of approaching helicopters. Within minutes the place would be swarming with help.

But he still had to make sure Paige was all right.