Countdown to Mecca (42 page)

*   *   *

So, hours later, he stood on the tarmac of the private airport with one of Ashlock's sleeper agents dressed in overalls. “Is the fact that the average American is completely blind to the battle that was being waged another sign of their decadence?” the agent asked.

“Were they so drunk on their evil diversions, their sex and their drugs, their movies and music, that they did not understand that the world was at war with them?” Pyotr replied. He laughed. “So many of them bought the ridiculous claims about Islam being a religion of peace—what is a religion of peace? How could such a religion exist? War is a necessary part of human existence; a religion that does not get involved in it would surely be wiped out and cease to exist.”

*   *   *

The two climbed back into the cab of the truck after having secured their payload—the one the pilots had been so kind to help them unload—in the back. As they started forward on the access road, Pyotr began to consider why he was feeling so contemplative this evening. It was as if the imam was talking to him from inside his brain.

These grave questions of righteousness and fate—these were things the imam spoke of, not things that Pyotr contemplated. He was a man of action, one whose lust for blood—he could admit that now, in his final hours—had been used by the one true God for greater purposes. He was not a man who thought idly, but practically. He was not a teacher, and certainly not a prophet. He was a doer.

Perhaps at the end, everyone became a prophet. Perhaps that was the final preparation for Paradise.

He stopped ruminating and leaned forward as the new plane came into sight from around a corner. It was a thing of beauty: a single-engined Cessna Super Cargomaster EX. Some forty-one-and-a-half feet long, powered by a single Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140 turboprop, the aircraft could carry a maximum payload of 3,665 pounds and cruise at roughly a 185 knots; it had a maximum altitude of 25,000 feet, and most importantly for this mission, could take off in roughly two thousand feet, depending on its weight.

“Is it ready?” he asked the truck's driver.

“Prepared. A dream to fly. Brand-new.”

Pyotr hopped out of the truck as it rolled to a stop. He inspected the aircraft while the others took the weapon from the truck.

“There is one difficulty. The runway is too short,” said Ashlock's agent as Pyotr entered the cockpit. “It is only fifteen hundred feet, not the two thousand we were expecting.”

“How was this mistake made?”

The agent shook his head grimly. “The macadam was broken up for some sort of project and then not repaired. We cannot take the plane over it. We have to lighten the load to get in the air. The fuel is the only variable. So we will have to alter the course to make a direct line to the target.”

“No,” said Pyotr. “That is not acceptable. The flight plan has been well established. It is imperative.”

“Flying over the ocean and making the approach—”

“The Americans can be very suspicious of last-minute deviations. The route has been established to avoid any questions,” said Pyotr. “We will lighten the load.”

“Commander, the fuel has already been lightened. That is my point.”

“And use one pilot if necessary.”

The agent tightened his lips. It was to have been the two of them in the plane, and he already guessed that Pyotr would not give up his place. “We will recompute it and see.” Pyotr allowed it. He knew what the result would be. He, alone would fly the plane into history, as he had always supposed. He wanted to do this himself. It was his final act, and he didn't want to share the glory with anyone else.

The imam would not have approved, but that was no longer a concern. Pyotr no longer had any concerns, except for staying exactly on his course. It would be a glorious feeling, to be alone in a plane, flying toward Destiny.
The Muslim Charles Lindbergh,
he thought, with a smirk. It was an intoxicating feeling to think about all the people who would die the next time he crossed the altitude threshold to set the bomb off.

He would push down and there would lightning, tremendous lightning. The hand of God would smite a million people in one blow. Millions of others would die over the next several weeks. The hundreds of thousands of those initially infected would linger for weeks, suffering from internal bleeding and diarrhea. Without sufficient quarantine they would spread the disease and cause the health care system to collapse … dragging the rest of the state and municipal infrastructures with it as people failed to report for work. Los Angeles would die quickly; the rest of America would follow with shocking alacrity.

Pyotr's only regret was that he would not see each and every death. But perhaps that boon would be given to him in Paradise.

“I will take off in an hour,” said Pyotr. “I will fly the original path, and I will succeed. There is no other possibility.”

 

55

San Francisco, California

If the situation hadn't been so dire, the gathering at the airport would look like a reunion.

Jack all but bounded off the private jet as Dover and Carl Forsyth approached him across the tarmac. The sight of Dover's superior confused him, but not as much as the sight of the C-17, which was at rest some three hundred yards away.

“What, they landed already?” he complained.

If Jack looked confused, Doc looked positively perplexed. “But, how…?” he started, then turned to Jack. “Our Gulfstream is a hundred miles per hour faster and has three times the range.” Both he and Jack were frustrated enough that they had to refuel twice during the eight-thousand-mile flight from Riyadh to America as it was.

“Did they screw around with the scheduling to throw us off again?” Jack wondered. He smiled in relief at Dover, but his smile disappeared when he saw her grave expression. “What? Did you get him? Has Peter Andrews been detained?”

“That's a decoy, Jack,” she said, stabbing her head angrily toward the C-17. “We were all over it as soon as it landed. It has Brooks's coffin, but nothing else.”

“Where is the rest?” Doc growled, his eyes narrowing, his memory of that gnawing fear returning.

“We checked every landing and departure for a thousand miles around,” Forsyth stressed to Jack. “Doubts be damned, I had the whole office working on it within minutes.”

“And?”

“And they made an unscheduled stop, Jack,” Dover told him with concern. “Andrews deplaned at a small suburban airport and took a large crate with him.”

“Small?” Doc echoed. “For a C-17?”

“Just large enough,” Forsyth shot back.

Jack stared at her, and then her boss, in disbelief. “We have no time for quibbling! I gave you new information,” he said accusingly. “Sammy found a target in America. And when the attack might take place.” He checked his watch. “Soon!”

“No way an American general would target Hollywood,” Forsyth contended. “No way.”

“Not Brooks,” Jack yelled at him. “This Andrews guy.”

“How do you know for sure?” Forsyth countered.

“Check the e-mail accounts yourself,” Jack told him. “If my brother could get in, so can you.”

“We will,” said the FBI special agent.

“Do it now.”

“We need a warrant,” said Forsyth. “There's a process.”

“Don't you have some sort of emergency exclusion or something?” asked Jack. “While you're fooling around getting a subpoena, Andrews may be on his way to blow Hollywood up!”

“I want to, Jack,” said Forsyth. “That's why I'm here. But I need proof that will stand up in court.”

“The hell with court,” raged Jack. “You're arguing about some law school garbage when people are trying to destroy America.”

Forsyth stared at him. “Your word isn't enough! Maybe there is a threat, and maybe there isn't. You've cobbled together information from sources that may or may not be sources at all. There's simply not enough here for probable cause.”

“You're talking like a lawyer, Carl,” Jack pleaded. “Come on!”

“I am a lawyer, Jack. I got my law degree before I joined the Bureau.”

Frustrated, Jack turned and started to storm back to the plane. Dover reached to stop him, but he kept going. This was insanity. But he had to do something.

“Jack, wait,” said Dover, running after him. “What are you going to do? Where are you going?”

“L.A. If that's what Andrews is targeting.”

“His name isn't Andrews,” came another voice. Jack looked over, and saw, emerging from the FBI SUV, Montgomery Morton.

Jack's jaw fell as he looked from Morton to Dover to Forsyth. So that's why they had all come to meet him.

“He's a Russian mercenary named Pyotr Ansky,” Morton said heavily, coming to stand between Jack and Forsyth. Dover hadn't even gotten to her car outside the Morton residence when she saw the general emerging wearily from his front door. It had been a choice between suicide and coming clean … and his wife was not going to let him try suicide again.

“Ansky was hired by Brooks to obtain the Russian bio-agent that you were tracking. He was very good at his job. Ruthless. The general came to depend on him far more than me. I—I still had a conscience.”

“Did he kill Schoenberg?” Jack asked.

“I honestly don't know. But I would guess yes, probably. It has his signature—efficient, no trace. He had sniper training. By then the general was depending upon Ansky exclusively.” Morton looked down to the black tarmac. “I thought he was going to kill me as well.”

“He's told us everything, Jack,” Dover said. “How they were planning to smuggle the bomb into Mecca in a crate of books for needy children, and how they were going to have their fellow conspirator, Andrew ‘Bull's-eye' Taylor, fire a flaming arrow from a helicopter into the crate to detonate the bomb.”

Jack looked aghast at Morton, who avoided his gaze, but then concentrated his fury on Forsyth. “So you have a confession. Not just from him—” Jack pointed at Morton “—but Taylor, too.” He stopped when Forsyth didn't meet his eyes. “You
have
got Taylor, haven't you?”

“He's disappeared, Jack,” Dover said softly. “We've got APBs out for him everywhere.”

“But you've got Morton!” Jack stressed. “Isn't that enough for you to open all the stops for this attack on American soil?”

“Dover has been working with your brother to locate all the foreign conspirators,” Forsyth told him, “and you wouldn't believe the international activity that's going on right now to track them down and arrest them, but that was for Brooks's conspiracy. We've got nothing tangible on a second, real, bomb, or an attack on L.A.”

“I was right about Jerusalem and Mecca,” Jack exclaimed, “and I'm right about this, too!” He turned on Morton. “Do you have any idea why Andrews—I mean, Ansky would want to bomb Hollywood?”

“I don't know,” Morton said miserably. “I'm not sure.”

“But you heard Brooks yourself, Jack,” Dover reminded him. “All that stuff about Hollywood poisoning American minds. It was in your interview with him.”

Jack was dumbstruck. Could Ansky be completing Brooks's desires with the one bomb they had left? “It doesn't matter why,” he said aloud. “We can figure out ‘why' later. Now we just have to stop it!”

“We have proof that there was an attack planned for the Middle East,” Forsyth told him, “but we don't have proof that the attack didn't die with Brooks. My hands are tied, Jack. There's nothing I can do.”

Jack stared at the man for a moment. He had stressed the words “my” and “I” in his last two sentences. He had come all the way down to the airport just to confront him personally.

“Doc!” Jack called. His old friend popped his head out of the private jet. Jack had been so intent on Dover, Forsyth, and Morton that he hadn't noticed the smartphone seemingly glued to Doc's ear, or that the jet was just about to finish refueling. “I need to talk with Sammy and Sol ASAP,” he said, all but trotting to the jet's steps.

“Already established a connection,” Doc said as he stepped back to make way for Jack to reboard. “They're on two separate computer screens. The safe house isn't the only place with good Wi-Fi.”

Jack saw Sol's face on one computer screen and Sammy's face on the other, with Ana and Ric behind him. Jack was about to start barking orders when he realized that someone was standing beside him as well. Someone shorter, warmer, and shapelier. He glanced over to see Dover on board. She was making sure her sidearm was tight in its holster. Jack hadn't noticed Forsyth motion with his head for her to join them.

Jack couldn't help but smile despite the death sentence that was hanging above them. “Sol,” he called. “Have Boaz get Professor Peters.”

“Boaz is on special assignment,” Sol informed him. “I'll get him myself.”

Before Jack could ask about what possible special assignment could take precedence over this, Sol was out the door. Jack immediately shrugged it off. “Sammy?”

“Yeah, bro?”

“Even if someone wants to drop a bomb on Hollywood, they need a registered flight plan or they'd be shot down before they got close. Dover?” He turned toward her. “Tell Sammy where the C-17's unscheduled stop was. Sammy, check flight plans for every airport, open field, and dirt road in a ten-mile radius.”

“On it, brother.”

“Jack?” Doc called from the cockpit door. “Speaking of flight plans, where to?”

“Where do you think?” Jack retorted. “We're going to Hollywood.”

 

56

Jack had no idea Doc had become so tech-savvy.

“It's a whole new world out there, Jack,” Doc grumbled as he made the connections allowing everyone to hear each other. “Stay current or get washed away.”