Lethal Code

CHAPTER 24

Ruhi entered the thickening shadows of the community center, wary of the first few steps that drew him into the darkness. He expected a knifing — violence teeming with vendetta — so he was not surprised when hands reached from the engulfing blackness and seized him so hard that he thought his bones were being crushed.

“Quiet, Mancur,” murmured a man as he pressed a heavy hand over Ruhi’s mouth. “We are on your side. If you yell, we die.”

“It’s true, Ruhi,” he heard Candace whisper, offering so many reassurances in so few words that his joy and gratitude might have lifted monuments.

Ruhi nodded. The man’s hand dropped away. Ruhi stared at Candace.

“You’re here — how?” he murmured.

“Later. No time now,” she replied.

Candace guided Ruhi against an interior wall. Her touch felt magically restoring, all the more so for the bloodshed that he spied as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The slain bodies of nine mujahideen sprawled across the floor told the story of a successful ambush, while the armed men he now saw crouching on both sides of the doorway — Mabahith, he guessed — spoke of the imminence of another surprise attack.

He sensed increasing tension in the shadows as Ahmed neared the entrance. His cousin held Lana’s arm with one hand, her computer in the other. Fighters moved alongside them. The armed escorts didn’t appear on guard, and why should they have been? The community center belonged to them; their brothers-in-arms should have been waiting inside, hidden from the prying eyes of Predator drones.

Without warning, the Saudi agents crouching in the shadows opened fire on the jihadists, a disciplined and muffled fusillade that lasted no more than two or three seconds. Their targets never had a chance to fire their weapons.

Only Ahmed and Lana were spared. Ruhi’s cousin huddled close to the ground, still gripping his prisoner’s arm. That Ahmed survived seemed like the greatest crime of all to Ruhi.

Why?

Because he held Lana and her computer. They were his shield. That was the only fathomable reason. Ruhi vowed to kill Ahmed quickly, now that all of his cousin’s protectors were dead.

Ruhi launched himself straight at Ahmed, who simply raised his hand and looked Ruhi in the eye. “I am on your side. I always have been. Time is absolutely essential now. We’re down to less than an hour to stop them.”

Incredibly, Ahmed’s words were not challenged by anyone, not even Candace. In fact, a man named Omar put his arm on Ahmed’s shoulder and said, “It is true.”

“What about the murder of the SEALs?” Ruhi demanded. “And the Mabahith?”

“That was the price we had to pay to get her here,” Ahmed replied calmly, glancing at Lana, who had pulled away from him and was the only other person who looked horrified by what she was hearing.

More than horrified, Lana could scarcely make sense of Ahmed’s words: that he’d casually traded off the lives of all those good men to bring her to the nerve center of the cyberattack. It seemed the cruelest equation of all. But as she stood there, sickened by the brutal logic of Ahmed’s plotting, she also recognized the implacable understanding of war at the heart of his plan.

“Did you get them all?” Ahmed asked a man who stood foremost in the doorway.

“Nobody got away,” he answered.

“Then let’s get her down there quickly.” Ahmed turned back to Lana.

“What about the noise?” she asked him, looking behind her.

“They can’t hear. They’re in a cavern deep underground, and then steel doors have to open when you’re lowered down. Only one person gets in there at a time. That’s part of their security. You’ll be handcuffed, just like they would have done. We’ll try to come in through a ventilation shaft on the far side of the cavern.”

“What do they want from me?” she asked. “And what am I supposed to do? It’s not like they’re going to let me hack their computers.”

“They don’t want anything from you today,” said Omar, speaking rapidly. “They just want you under their control until they launch those missiles. Once they heard you were in Riyadh, they knew you’d been sent to try to stop them. So when Ruhi’s computer ended up in our hands, someone in my agency sabotaged it.” Omar stated that as if it happened every other day. “That’s how they forced your rendezvous with him.”

“So I’m basically dead once they get those missiles launched.”

“No. Just the opposite,” Ahmed replied. “From what I understand, they have plans that go beyond destroying the States. I’ve never been down there, but I know they really want you. So until we can get through that ventilation shaft, listen to what they have to say, but whatever you do, don’t make them want to kill you. We’re going to need you.”

“If we can take control down there,” Omar explained, “we want you to get on their computers and shut them down for good, if that’s at all possible.”

Lana remembered Travis’s words: Hack. Them. To. Death.

Omar looked at his watch. “We’ve got to move.”

All but two of the men rushed deeper into the community center. The pair stayed behind to lead Lana across the floor. They stopped by the edge of a wide hole that she couldn’t see. They warned her not to move. One of them slipped a rock-climbing harness around her. She wondered if it had been scavenged from Westerners scaling peaks in Pakistan or elsewhere in the Himalayas. It was not the kind of gear you’d normally find on a floodplain in the Yemeni desert.

Then the man with the climbing gear clipped a carabiner to the harness and another one to a rope that had hung hidden in the darkness only feet away. He drew her hands around the length, Flex-Cuffing her wrists together.

She didn’t understand the need. It’s not like she was going to let go when they suspended her over the deep emptiness that she sensed below. But then she understood that a real prisoner, knowing she was about to be delivered to torturers and murderers, might undo the harness and hurl herself into the hole. Men steeped in a culture of suicide bombings would be sharply attuned to the self-destructive potential of others.

The pair eased her off the edge. For several seconds she swung over what seemed like a bottomless abyss. She heard the creak of a pulley above her. As the pendulum-like swinging slowed, she felt herself beginning to descend.

Twenty, thirty seconds passed. She counted them out carefully: One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand…

When she looked up, only the dimmest outlines of the two men appeared, and she heard nothing but the protest of the pulley. If it suddenly snapped from its bearings, she had no idea how far she would fall.

Fifty seconds passed, then a full minute. Always descending.

Without conscious thought, she began to count anew. One-one-thousand. Perhaps numbers, with their illusion of precision, were the only way she could endure so many unknowns, which included the viability of her life as well as her daughter’s.

The next second her feet touched a metal surface that she could not see, contact that triggered the opening of panels directly beneath her. They parted to what appeared, after so much blackness, to be a blaze of light rising from a cavern at least two acres in size, with rows and rows of computer equipment and what looked like ten thousand miles of wires and cables. She figured every last diode had to be powered by the sun, because nothing less than a powerful array of solar panels could ever generate the juice for such a remote operation.

And there were scores of people. Men in dress shirts, others in ragged jihadist garb. And not just men. Women, too, some wearing slacks, most chadors. An odd mix. They worked at computer stations at least three stories below her. Rows of them. Most paid strict attention to their screens, ignoring her. Or perhaps they’d been ordered to pay no heed to whatever the ceiling revealed.

She scanned the entire space, looking for the ventilation shaft or a means of escape. She saw only the floor, and curved walls and ceiling. It was an arena-size hole in the ground.

Then she saw the man she guessed she would be answering to. He wore no turban, unlike the men waiting for her on the floor below. Nor did he deign to turn to look at her. Large computer screens engulfed him on three sides, and plush chairs and a settee distinguished his large work area from any other.

She looked back at the men waiting right under her, wondering in the final seconds of her descent whether she had been taken captive by Shiites, Sunnis, or Wahhabis, certain only that fundamentalists had her in their grip. Silently, she cursed them all, the fanatics that plagued Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism — every conceivable faith. Why couldn’t they all just pray or chant in peace and leave the less crazed elements of humanity alone?

With that thought she was delivered to their hands. To free her, they cut away the cuffs, then stripped off the harness so efficiently it was as if they had spent their lives bagging peaks instead of people. Another guard kept a gun inches from her head.

Only then did the man at the large computer console turn to Lana, shocking her. He was unmistakably Korean, with bristly black hair, a rectangular face, and almond eyes.

As soon as she saw him, she thought he was probably from the North, and if that were true — and North Koreans were among the real fanatics of cyberterrorism — then she was undoubtedly looking at a veteran of Unit 121, the infamous North Korean cyberwarfare unit. Three thousand strong at last count, which was more than three times the number of cybercounterterror agents in the entire United States.

And we wonder why we’re dropping like flies.

Guards on each side of her, including the one with the gun at her head, guided Lana toward him. The Korean smiled, gesturing to a chair that would force her to face him. Even as she approached — scanning the man’s computers, trying to familiarize herself with them — she could not make immediate sense of this strange alliance. What could jihadists possibly have in common with godless North Koreans? What perverted confluence of desire and ambition could they conceivably share?

“I welcome our esteemed guest, Lana Elkins,” the man said with a brightening of his otherwise dark eyes. He spoke with no discernible accent — Western-educated, she guessed. “I can see that you are shocked to meet me. I, on the other hand, am only pleased to finally have your alluring company.”

Don’t flirt with me, she thought, staring him down.

“And I trust that you will remain comfortable in the coming days.”

“Days? You mean even after my country is destroyed?”

“Please, do not think of it as destruction. Think of it as salvation. A new world is coming, and the U.S. has brought so much destruction and terror, not just to Asia but to the whole world, that Earth will be a much better place without its predatory ways. You will see that this is true.”

Where are they? Ruhi, Ahmed, the man named Omar, and Agent Anders, whom she hadn’t even had a chance to meet. And all the others. There were armed guards down here, too. She tried to count them casually. At least fifteen, maybe twenty.

“And North Korea is going to usher in the grand millennium?” She wanted to see if he would deny his nationality. It could help to know. She’d hacked North Korean codes numerous times and monitored them as a matter of course.

“Not North Korea.” He shook his head, as if he pitied her inability to grasp his real plans. “I have no sympathy for my brother’s kingdom.”

Kang-dee Rang, she realized, the brother of the Supreme Leader of North Korea. Only three years ago, Kang-dee, though older, had been passed over by his father for the leadership of that bizarre country, leading to a scathing sibling rivalry after the aging dictator’s death.

Giving us this catastrophe.

“The ‘Supreme Leader,’”—Kang-dee’s voice dripped with sarcasm—“is already defeated. We shut down his pathetic rule a few hours ago. But the kingdom’s infrastructure is so poor it might take days for the rest of the world to recognize that even its elementary level of functioning has stopped. Our kingdom is here, and soon it will be everywhere.”

Lana wanted to hurl herself at him, but restrained herself, for the tang of real terror hung in the air, and she had no choice but to play a waiting game. Still, she could not keep from shaking her head, appalled to understand the brute mechanics behind his presence and all that it explained and portended: After being snubbed, Kang-dee had decided to grab a much greater prize than the ruined state of North Korea. He had gone after the entire planet.

“I don’t think Yemen is going to love hosting you and the plans you’re hatching down here,” Lana challenged, mostly to keep him talking but also to garner any bit of information that might prove helpful if she ever got her hands on his console.

“Yemen, at the end of the day, as you Americans like to say, is an arm of Iran, even more than Iraq has turned out to be. And the Iranians and I have provided for each other in vital ways. Through their control of Yemen’s highly effective Political Security Organization, my Shiite friends have strong influence in the Ministry of the Interior, which has accorded me great assistance and freedom in building my army. Look at them.” He gestured at the rows of cyberwarriors. “I took only my country’s and Iran’s most elite fighters. They have promised me their allegiance, and I have promised them the world.”

“And what did you promise Tehran?” Though Lana had no doubt about the answer to her question. She questioned only whether he felt cocky enough down there to respond honestly. He did not keep her in suspense:

“We have promised them nothing. We have given them all they need to build their nuclear weapons. It is ironic, isn’t it? Your country and Israel attacked the Iranians with the computer virus Stuxnet to destroy their centrifuges, which were so vital to their nuclear ambitions. But that made them ever so willing to work with us. I saw the opportunity and took it. I will forever be grateful to the short-term thinking of the United States.”

He glanced at his watch. “The last of the nuclear silos is opening. In less than fifteen minutes the U.S. will be destroyed. There is already much wailing in the streets. Show her.”

One of the three large screens came alive. It was only feet from where the would-be emperor sat. What Lana noticed on the video, even more than the prayer vigils and people weeping on their knees or screaming imprecations at the sky, was the trash scattered everywhere. That was the one constant as the big screen changed with video from city after city, disaster after disaster. Each clip showed a country defeated militarily, economically, and socially — but the endless mounds of uncollected, uncontained garbage spoke most revealingly of the deepening desperation of her homeland.

The last clip showed the opening of a nuclear missile silo somewhere in the American desert. She heard a humming sound from the screen, like an idling dentist’s drill.

“You should be grateful,” Kang-dee said to her. “You are alive, and you will remain alive. The world belongs to the likes of us.”

She looked around. The mujahideen appeared grim. She wondered whether that was because those jihadists wanted to kill the only Western woman in their midst. Or had they recognized that they were also expendable to Kang-dee, that real victory might accrue only to this creature with his sickly smile and those who plied cyberwar on his behalf? His minions would never include her, she vowed silently, solemnly. No matter what happens.

He glanced at the screen with the missile silo and resumed his work as if she were not present. With the absence of talk, she again heard the hum of the silo opening.

At any other time, Kang-dee would have been considered delusional, and rightly so. But she knew this was not any other time. This was a new age with the most lethal means of warfare ever devised, one that could bend even nuclear arsenals, fighter jets, and long-range bombers to its own designs. And she had the grinding misfortune of finding herself perched on the very precipice of its wholesale slaughter.

Holmes hadn’t slept in thirty hours, and for days before that had only catnapped, yet he remained intensely alert and fully engaged as the minutes ticked away, his thoughts always circling back to words that played in his mind like a song you can’t shake:

Ruhi Mancur, lost somewhere in Yemen.

Lana Elkins, lost somewhere in Yemen.

Fourteen SEALs, lost forever in Yemen.

And now, in a curious twist, the last of the mighty weapon silos of his own country was opening on a screen only a few feet from him. He thought about how he and his fellows in the intelligence service — and a number of women as well, back in the day — had faced down the Russians, the growing threat from “Red” China, then terrorists of all stripes with their plastic explosives and box cutter conspiracies; but the computer, which arose largely from the most creative minds of his country, had turned war upside down and, in a purely demonic sense, democratized it to the point where an invisible enemy could bring Holmes’s powerful nation to its knees. Just as the terrorists had claimed in one of their communications to the American people.

He had strong suspicions about the attackers, of course, and would have chiseled those thoughts into stone if he thought they would have survived the imminent nuclear blasts.

Teresa McGivern looked at him. “What do you think? Do we have any hope?”

“The only hope is that we haven’t heard from them.”

Emma screamed for help. Hamza was still trying to pull himself across the driver’s seat to grab the backpack nuclear bomb. Despite her intense shoulder pain, she clung to his back, with her hands now wrapped around his throat, trying to choke him. Then she remembered Tanesa tearing at his eyes and scratched as hard as she could. But he squeezed them shut and kept inching away, so she jammed her legs against the big tire, once more trying to drag him out of the truck.

In seconds, she heard boots on pavement. Looking back, she spied soldiers about fifty yards away racing toward her. But here, in the midst of violent struggle, she watched Hamza snag a strap on the backpack nuclear bomb and start to pull it toward him.

She drove her knees into the truck wheel so hard that she might have bent steel. With a shriek, she dragged him out. But the backpack bomb came with him.

Hamza fell on her — with the bomb. She searched frantically for the trigger and saw that it had fallen aside like a loose belt. They both lunged for it. Hamza grabbed the tubular conduit that contained the wiring. But before he could pull the actual trigger to himself and set off the explosion, she threw herself on the device, then curled her body around it — like the soldier in the old war movie who saved his buddies by hurling himself onto a hand grenade.

She felt Hamza claw her arms as he tried to tear them loose. And then the son of a bitch bit her shoulder, right where he’d stabbed her with the nail file. She screamed, wanting nothing more than to unpeel her body to try to stop the pain, but she knew she could not do that, no matter what. Hold on, she pleaded with herself, but the agony was so intense that she didn’t know if she could stand another second.

And then she felt Hamza torn away from her by the soldiers. She looked up and saw his eyes on her, her own blood dripping from his mouth.

One of the soldiers yelled, “Don’t move, Emma. Not a muscle.”

Her shoulder throbbed. Blood ran down her arm. But more than anything else, she felt the trigger lodged in her hand.

“Emma, if you can hear me, just wiggle a foot,” the soldier said in a calmer voice.

She did.

“That’s good. Stay super still. We need to disarm the bomb. Can you stay still for us?”

Crying, she wiggled her foot once more.

Ahmed handed Ruhi a semiautomatic pistol. Not a Glock, like he’d trained with on the Farm, but when Ruhi racked the slide the motion felt familiar. Ahmed now had Lana’s computer strapped across his chest, bandolier style.

Ruhi was the last to head down the three-foot-high ventilation shaft that his cousin had identified as the only means of access to the cyberattack center. There was no way they could enter from the ceiling, not as an invasion force, and no tactical advantage in doing so.

The shaft angled downward, but not sharply, prompting whispered speculation from Candace that it might also have been intended as an emergency exit. She was directly in front of him in the black chador. If she spied chadors when they entered, she would keep it on.

From that point on the two remained silent, moving behind the combined forces of Saudi intelligence and the Mabahith. They were the officers who could be spared with a full-scale takeover of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh still under way — and a possible insurrection by the Saudi “street.”

Ruhi heard only the brush of clothing and shoes on the metal floor. To make sure he didn’t spill forward as he crawled, he pressed his back against the roof of the shaft, as did the others. It offered a degree of control as they continued their descent.

What worried him most was the absence of a plan beyond Omar’s parting words: “Go in firing at anyone who’s armed or resisting. We have no idea how many people are down there. Just don’t shoot Lana Elkins, and try not to damage their computers. That’s not how we’re going to shut them down.”

Then he’d eyed each of them in the shadows of the community center and added, “No matter how many of us die, we must get Elkins on their network as fast as possible. At that point, our job is done and hers begins.”

When Omar had spoken, Candace squeezed Ruhi’s hand. Not to ease his fear, he thought, but to encourage him. He’d never been in battle. Never served in any branch of the military. He supposed what she’d done was called camaraderie. He’d squeezed her back, nodding. For him a far greater feeling was in play.

Now he spotted light at the end of the shaft and noticed air sweeping over him for the first time. It came alive on the beads of sweat that dotted his forehead.

The man at the front of their column quietly set a small explosive on the ventilation shaft cover. Seconds later, the device blew up, and they surged into a brightly lit room. The men in front of Candace and Ruhi threw flash grenades, blinding those nearby for several seconds. His own ears felt rocked, stunned senseless, but he heard the overpowering rage of gunfire erupt immediately.

Momentum alone swept Ruhi forward. He felt himself shaking and saw that Candace still wore the chador.

As soon as he exited the shaft, he had to crawl over one of the first men to have braved the cavern. He lay on the floor, eyes open on the ceiling but lifeless. Then, as Ruhi crawled along — guns firing all around him — he passed a wounded man groaning loudly.

Candace, still in front of him, was shooting an M4 carbine that she’d been issued by Omar. Ruhi watched her kill three mujahedeen, then two unarmed Asian computer operators who proved foolish enough to rush her. The chador would disguise her no longer in that part of the cavern.

She and the others were fanning out, targeting shooters who had hunkered down around the cavern, as if digging in for a long firefight.

Ruhi knew there was no time for that. He saw Candace brashly force her way past several more Asian men and women who were cowering under their desks. None threatened her. Maybe they had seen what she had done moments ago. But Ruhi watched them closely as he sneaked up on them. And good that he did: One of the men stood and raised a pistol to shoot Candace from behind. Ruhi gunned him down. Then, without having to think he kept his weapon raised, aiming left and right at the group as he had at the life-size targets at the Farm.

None of the others attempted to retrieve the dead man’s gun. Ruhi grabbed it and forced them facedown on the floor. They didn’t resist. He knew he should probably kill them — one had already tried to shoot Candace in the back — but couldn’t.

Around him, the gunfire continued unabated, and more flash grenades turned the nerve center into a thunderous sky. Then Ruhi spied a man in a turban squirming along the floor toward tall screens in the middle of the cavern.

Ruhi crawled no more than five feet before the jihadist spotted him and raised his rifle. Ruhi fired twice, missing him. Fired again. Missed again, though the bullet might have hit someone, because he heard a man scream the very next instant.

Bullets from the jihadist’s rifle flew right by him, so close they sounded like bees buzzing around his head. He threw himself onto his elbows and aimed. As another bullet seemed to part his hair, he fired three more times. The man slumped. With the shadows and screaming, Ruhi had no way of knowing if he’d hit his target or if someone else had shot him.

Now he heard more cries and flash grenades. The uproar was deafening. He looked around. Omar and Ahmed’s men were on the move. Ruhi saw clusters of cyberwarriors clinging to one another or hiding abjectly. They might have been stone-cold killers with a keyboard, but few appeared ready for this kind of combat.

Candace spotted a jihadist crawling under desks, dragging Lana toward a Korean man who was protected by two guards. Their leader, she presumed. Candace couldn’t imagine that Lana Elkins’s life would be spared if these cyberwarriors thought they were about to be defeated.

Still in chador and veil, Candace belly-crawled toward the turban-headed man who had Lana, whose face looked bloody and stunned.

Another flash grenade exploded, and Candace spied them all heading to a trapdoor in the floor, including Lana and the Korean. The guard in the lead opened it, climbing into it quickly. Then he guided the legs of the second guard, who kept his weapon up, covering their retreat.

Candace had only seconds. She waved her left hand, weaponless, at the man in the turban who was dragging Lana behind him. He looked over, saw the chador, and acknowledged her with a nod, as he might a comrade. But that was a feint. He quickly pointed his weapon at her, but before he could shoot, she fired three times, hitting him in the throat twice. But the third bullet hit Lana in the arm. Candace saw her roll away in grievous pain. The agent, though, never paused.

The second guard at the trapdoor scrambled into what must have been an escape tunnel, then helped the leader down into it. Candace lunged forward as the trapdoor started to close. She reached in, felt an arm, and seized it. It had to be the leader’s; he had been the last one to climb down.

He tried to jerk free of her grasp and almost succeeded. She knew from his frantic movements that she’d never be able to hold on. Then he bit her savagely. Squeezing his wrist as hard as she could, Candace used her free hand to pull out the gas canister. Gasping from pain — his teeth were grinding into the bones in back of her hand — she maneuvered the nozzle toward her trapped hand and let loose a long blast. The bite ended immediately, and she had no trouble dragging the Korean out from under the door into breathable air. The two guards in the tunnel must have fled as far from the gas as they could, for there was no further resistance from down there.

The Korean now lay in a fetal position, gulping air.

Lana, kneeling and bleeding profusely from the bullet wound in her arm, had found a weapon and trained it on the gassed man.

“Who is he?” Candace asked her.

“Kang-dee Rang,” she told her.

“Cease fire,” Omar bellowed, drawing their attention.

Candace looked around. Huddles of the dead and barely breathing appeared with each glance. Other members of the assault team rose carefully from all corners of the cavern, pointing their weapons at everyone at once.

Lana also stood, looking at her arm. A Mabahith medic ran up with a length of tubing and applied a tourniquet. The gunshot wound was so painful she barely noticed the enormous pressure, or the pain from where she’d been punched in the nose and knocked almost unconscious by the man who’d dragged her across the floor.

In her fury, she kicked Kang-dee. “Get him on his feet,” she shouted.

The Korean didn’t move. His knees were still pressed to his face. Not hard to understand why: Even the little bit of gas that had escaped into the cavern continued to irritate Lana’s eyes.

Omar rushed over. “What do you need?” he said to Lana.

“I need to get to his console,” she said, already striding to Kang-dee’s computer.

Ahmed joined her.

“Hook mine up,” she told Ruhi’s cousin.

Ahmed ran a cable from her port in seconds.

She checked his work and settled where Kang-dee had held forth only minutes ago. With a groan, she used her right hand to lift up her wounded left arm to the keyboard. But she quickly saw the problem: She couldn’t even log on because access was biometrically controlled.

“I need his eye,” she said to Omar.

“You want me to take it out?” Omar asked.

“God, no.” Lana cringed much as she had when watching that ploy in bad movies. “He’s got to actually look into the scanner.”

“No problem.”

In a moment, Omar, with the help of three beefy officers, had Kang-dee hunched over his computer.

“Look at it,” Omar demanded.

Kang-dee refused. Omar seized his wrist and studied a chronograph on the Korean’s watch. “Is that right?” he shouted at him. “Less than three minutes?”

Again, Kang-dee offered no reply.

Candace stepped over, jammed the canister nozzle between Kang-dee’s lips, and released a tiny amount of the fiery gas. The shock of the gas forced his eyes wide open involuntarily, swollen as they were. Just long enough to gain Lana access to the console.

The equipment was familiar to her, the most advanced in her field. She knew it the way a baseball player knows the basics of any bat. What worried her were all the curveballs hiding inside.

“Do you need anything?” Ahmed asked her, staring at the blood dripping from her left arm.

“Nothing,” she replied tersely. Then added, “I’m just getting through the simple stuff right now. This will take a minute. How much time do we have?” she asked as her fingers continued to fly.

“If this is right”—Omar had Kang-dee’s wrist again—“less than two minutes.”

Kang-dee’s swollen eyes opened once more. He nodded and smiled, perhaps finding pleasure in a final measure of torment.

Ahmed shoved a pistol into Kang-dee’s mouth. “Shut it down!”

Kang-dee refused.

Omar shook his head at Ahmed. The Saudis wanted Kang-dee alive.

So do we, Lana thought. But less than two minutes?

Even as she envisioned her next moves, she remembered the nurse handing Emma to her, the first glimpse of her only child.

Don’t let me lose her.

Willing away the pain in her crippled arm, she typed furiously, working to penetrate levels of security not unlike the ones that she had so artfully constructed for her own computer.

It took maybe thirty seconds. Without pause, Lana began releasing malware of every order: worms that she hoped were racing through the heart of each program in Kang-dee’s networks, ideally taking the entire system to the verge of collapse. Viruses, too, that she’d tried to adapt to the invisible enemy’s possible weaknesses after her brief flurry of forensics following the first cyberattack.

Included in her assault was a distributed denial of service attack, instantly turning thousands of computers around the world into robots working for her, assailing the system in her sights exponentially more quickly in an effort to overwhelm it.

Next, with a few strokes, she released logic bombs to try to erase all the data and software on the cavern’s systems.

“One minute,” Ahmed said softly.

She winced, unsure what would work — if anything could—so she began unleashing every technological trick in her arsenal without pause.

“Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one.” Ahmed stopped, perhaps knowing she was fully aware that overwhelming peril was impending.

She was so close to the final keystrokes, so close to executing the reason she had made the long, perilous journey here. So close to firing all the bomblets into his elaborate network.

Don’t slow.

Her fingers flew. The only sounds in the entire cavern were the clicks on the keyboard — and the low hum of that nuclear missile silo opening on the screen a few feet away.

Lana had always been a strong typist. Now she was accessing code burned into her brain as it was into the hard drive of so many intelligence agency computers in the U.S.

And then she neared the last keystroke, which could cripple his computers as he had crippled her country — or leave them with no recourse but to witness, from afar, the final destruction of America. She hit it.

Nothing?

She could scarcely believe it.

“Eight, seven…” Ahmed said.

And that’s when Lana noticed a word in the corner of the screen directly in front of her: “Ahn Yeong.” Korean for “good-bye.”

She was desperate. Nothing had stopped the cyberattack. The silo was still opening on the screen a few feet away.

Do it!

She hit “Ahn Yeong.”

The first thing she noticed was the disappearance of the low hum of the missile silo. She looked up; the shield was frozen. Then she looked down. Her screen was blank. All the screens were blank. Only the lights in the cavern still burned.

Still, she wasn’t sure until she looked at Kang-dee. His smile had disappeared, replaced by a look of utter defeat.

Final confirmation came moments later when Omar rushed up, phone in hand:

“You did it,” he said to Lana. “Everything has shut down.”

Teresa McGivern and Holmes watched the ICBM shield stop moving. Seconds later one of her aides rushed in. “Pentagon reports say the attack has ended.”

Holmes bowed his head to his desk, out of fatigue or a renewed sense of faith, even he didn’t know.

Then he turned right back to another screen as two technicians finished disarming the nuclear trigger that Emma Elkins had held for so long to her chest. An Army medic picked her up and carried her away in his arms. The photograph of the young woman, pale and bloody in the dawn, with her arms wrapped around the young man’s dark neck, would become emblematic of the hope and pain that now defined America.

The good news didn’t stop there. By noon, Eastern Standard Time, Holmes received word from the Russian operative in Sana that Lana Elkins and Ruhi Mancur were in a safe house, having survived the assault on the stronghold of the cyberattack.

A SEAL team from Afghanistan was already in flight. They had been deployed to reclaim the bodies of their brothers. Now they would take home the living heroes as well.