Countdown to Mecca (44 page)

“Better to minimize the damage out here then let him get to L.A.!” Jack countered.

“Can you keep him from taking off?” Doc asked the pilot.

The pilot looked doubtful and challenged at the same time. “It would take incredible timing and maneuvering to buzz him, keep him grounded,” he said even as he was starting to prepare for it.

“How much time might that buy us?” Jack asked the copilot, whose face had gone white.

“A couple minutes, maybe ten, tops. We have to come in at such a speed and angle that he can see us as he's taxiing and realizes that he has no room for takeoff. But he might just play chicken with us, certain that we'll veer at the last second.”

“Don't play chicken,” Sol said. “Just disrupt the airflow on his trajectory, try to rattle him.”

The pilot was smiling like a wolf. “Great idea. We just have to cut across his runway as he's taxiing. This baby's speed will screw up the air currents enough to keep him grounded.”

“How long can we do that?” Jack asked.

The pilot pursed his lips. “Till we run out of gas or he gets pissed enough to try and bully past us.”

“Go for it,” Jack said, then turned back to Dover. “Get an ETA for the Air Force.”

Dover nodded then went back to the phone. Jack turned just in time to hear a call come in on the jet's communication equipment.

“Gulfstream G650, this is Colonel James Wright. I am seventy-five nautical miles north of your location. A no-fly zone has been established around Los Angeles. I have orders to engage and shoot down any aircraft that violates it. And I will follow those orders, sir.”

“Yes,” sputtered Jack. “The Cessna—you have to get it.”

“You are ordered to change course immediately,” said the Air Force pilot, not even bothering to acknowledge Jack's response. “Go north.”

“Where are you?” Jack asked. “How long to get here?”

“Zero ten—respond to my orders immediately or you will be shot down.”

“Ten minutes isn't going to cut it,” Doc said. “You better hit the afterburner. We'll keep him here until you arrive.”

“Negative … negative…!” Wright started, but the copilot cut the audio with Doc's one short motion of his thumb across his throat.

“He's taking off!” the pilot yelled suddenly. “Christ, he must have heard the AF pilot. He's taking off no matter what we do!”

“Stand off! Stand off!” warned the air force pilot. His voice was so strident, the copilot had felt impelled to turn the volume up again.

“Colonel, you
must
shoot the Cessna down!” insisted Jack.

“For the last time, I am warning you—turn north or you will be shot down!”

“Dammit, the Cessna is your target!” yelled Dover from the back. “Get your orders straight!”

“Crash into him,” Jack said to the pilot with deadly certainty. “It's all we can do.”

“Jack!” came Sol's booming voice. “Don't do anything stupid! Leave that to me!”

Jack's eyes snapped open and saw what Doc was pointing at through the windshield. Everyone saw as an armored SUV none of them had ever seen before came crashing through the abandoned airfield's gate and barreled directly at, and then into, the side of the Cessna.

 

57

The result of the collision was all they could have hoped for.

The Cessna skidded to the side, a wheel collapsed, and the entire aircraft spun in three-and-a-half dusty, ground-spitting circles until it came to rest against the far fence. The armored SUV's face was crumpled, but it had been designed for the impact. All twelve airbags had deployed, but the vehicle's occupants were well prepared. Six flak-jacketed men emerged, carrying Uzis and Glock 9mm automatics.

Even from this distance, Jack could see that they were being led by Boaz. Jack spoke his name in surprise.

“As soon as Sammy figured out the target, I immediately sent Boaz to the area,” Sol's voice filtered into the cockpit. “I assigned him to prepare a team and a vehicle. I've been feeding him the information the same time it came into the safe house. They've been racing to that hillside airport from their L.A. base camp from the moment Sammy found the address.”

Good driving,
Jack thought, then watched, dumbstruck, as Boaz and his flak-jacketed men ran toward the Cessna, its dust and dirt cloud just settling around it as if from a particularly disastrous magic trick. He felt a rush of hope as he saw the Cessna's door open and Pyotr stagger out. The hope sank when he saw that the terrorist was holding a wired, yellow-tubed, black based, red button thumb switch.

“Get down there,” Doc growled at the pilot.

The pilot reacted wordlessly. They had plenty of room now, and the Gulfstream came to a stop where the Cessna had begun. One of Boaz's men was waiting as the jet door opened.

“He's calling for Jack Hatfield,” the man reported.

Boaz stood with his hands up, fifty feet away from Pyotr. The terrorist was injured—he had one arm wrapped around a plane prop just to remain upright and blood was coating his face—but he held the thumb switch tightly in his other hand.

Boaz exchanged a look at Jack, then concentrated his attention on Pyotr. “Okay, he's here,” Boaz shouted to the terrorist.

“Good,” Pyotr almost laughed. “Come forward Jack Hatfield. It goes without saying that none of you could kill me before I set off the device. Not at this range, not with those weapons.”

Jack didn't require coaxing. Dover almost put her hand out toward him, but resisted. She knew he mustn't weaken—or let Pyotr see that they had a connection. Jack walked slowly forward. When he was about ten feet away, the terrorist told him to stop.

This time Pyotr did laugh.

“You people,” he muttered through is grin. “You are so easily distracted … you never learn. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Eight years later, it was hit again … destroyed. How did you allow that to happen? You had deadly cases of Ebola in 2014. Your president and his ineffective Ebola czar had every opportunity to safeguard the public. Did they? No. There was infighting, finger-pointing. I wonder,” he chuckled, “who will take the fall for this?”

Jack wanted to rush him. Time was running out and zero progress was being made.

“What exactly is ‘this'?” Doc asked. It was as if he'd read Jack's mind and was trying to distract Pytor, give his friend a chance to make his move.

“Surely you know by now,” he said. “A genetically engineered form of Ebola that is inert until exposed to tritium. Then it becomes a respiratory killer, carried far and wide by the wind. It won't die, you see, when outside the body. Not for days. By then it will have spread from west to east, infecting and killing millions … perhaps tens of millions.”

“To what end?” Doc asked.

“To your end!” Pyotr cried. “So the world can descend further into chaos where men like me can lead, prosper, conquer!”

“You'll be dead,” Jack pointed out. He thought about going for Jimmy's gun but he knew he could never be fast or accurate enough.

“If I cannot deliver death to the wretched scum who poisons the world with its lies, then I shall go to Paradise looking into the eyes of the man who stopped me … as he, and all his beloved friends, boil in the hellfire I will rain upon them.”

Jack had no option. He went for the gun—

Then watched as Pyotr's right thumb, the one over the red button, exploded off his hand in a splash of red, followed by his arm being jerked back hard. Pyotr screamed in surprise and overwhelming pain, then spun to land, face-first, against the Cessna's fuselage. Jack raced forward, diving, sliding, and rolling until his hands grabbed unerringly on the fallen thumb switch.

Although splashed with blood, the button was untouched.

When Jack stood, he saw that the others had also charged, and were now standing around Pyotr's fallen body. A wave of relief swept over him. But that wave turned to ice when he heard Pyotr laughing.

He ran over to the site, glancing at Doc. His old friend motioned his head at the terrorist's crumpled body. Jack looked down at Pyotr. The bastard was holding his ruined hand, but he was also chortling insanely.

“Good shot,” he babbled. “Amazing shot. Like none I've ever seen. Who did it? Which one of you did it?”

The men, and one woman, just silently stared at him.

“No matter,” Pyotr half-gagged, half-chuckled. “No matter…” The terrorist's face seemed to freeze in a twisted grin, but then he turned away.

Doc's eyes shifted from Pyotr's quaking body to Jack. “Well I'll be,” he muttered, beginning to walk away. “What's he doing, crying?”

Jack just stared down at the man who almost killed millions. “No,” he realized quietly. “He's not crying.” He suddenly grabbed Doc's arm. “He's
laughing
. Doc, why is he laughing?”

The two men took only a moment to lock eyes before Jack was diving into the crippled Cessna, Doc right behind him.

“Three triggers!” Doc realized. “One for altitude, one for the thumb switch, and one for—”

“Time!” Jack shouted. “It's a time bomb now!” He scrambled up to the device anchored down to the Cessna's floor, and saw that there was a digital clock on its side, counting down. It was at four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.…

“Professor!” he wailed. “Get me the professor!”

Doc was clambering in beside him, holding out his smartphone. On the view screen was the interior of Sol's car. The professor's face was filling the image as if he were examining a particularly interesting insect.

“Show me, show me!” he demanded, and Jack slowly waved the smartphone's front screen all around the bomb's surface as if it were an X-ray machine. “Good, good,” the professor said. Jack exhaled. That meant Peters knew what they were dealing with. “Okay, Doc, unscrew the main panel. Be quick about it.”

When Doc was done, the clock was at 3:57.

“All right,” said Peters. “Try disconnecting the wire from the battery to the detonator.” Doc pointed at the mentioned parts. Jack grabbed the blue and red wires.

“Wires?” he echoed, already pulling.

“No, no, no, no!” Peters yelled. Jack froze. “Not wires, plural, wire, singular!”

“There are two,” Jack moaned.

“Then it's booby-trapped,” Peters stressed. “You'll have to remove the trigger instead.”

Doc was on one end of the bomb, while Jack was at the other end.

“What's the difference between the trigger and the bloody detonator?” Jack yelled.

“The detonator triggers the bomb,” Peters replied. “The trigger opens the lead container filled with tritium.”

“Okay … what should we look for?” Jack asked calmly. “What does the trigger look like?”

The clock read 1:42.

“It looks like … a trigger,” Peters said helplessly. “Like a thermostat with a lead container attached. It will be wired to whatever contains the inert toxin, probably a test tube with a hinged cap, something that will open after the tritium is released.”

Jack's eyes searched frantically through the mass of hardware. He saw solid blocks, microprocessors, more wires underneath, a test tube like Peters had described, and then—

“I
see
it,” Jack replied, but there was exasperation in his voice. “It's under every damn thing else, including the booby trap.”

“Then never mind the trigger!” Peters shouted back. “Too late now. There's only one thing we can do. Remove the con—”

That was when the smartphone lost its connection.

 

58

Jack actually screamed in frustration. The cell reception at Peters's cabin was always spotty, but this was ridiculous! “Get him back!” Jack bellowed. “Everybody, try to get him back!”

Everyone tried. Dover even started running for the jet, hoping the computer connection was still intact. But both she and Jack knew it was an act of desperation. She'd never get there in time.

The clock read 1:13.

“What did he mean?” Jack asked everyone. “Remove the con? Remove the coil? Remove the convex lens?!” He looked helplessly on as the clock continued to count down. It was at 0:48 now. He started to scramble across the device, looking for anything removable that didn't have two wires.

“Convection?” he babbled. “Contraction? Convent—?”

Doc shot up straight at the mention of the last word. He had been scouring the other side of the device all along.

“Convent!” he repeated. “Conventional!”

He reached down, pinched his fingertips around a thumbnail-sized mass of what appeared to be putty, and ripped it from the device, sending several very small, fine silver wires flying. He hurled the putty away, out through the broken passenger side window, where it landed on the grass. He dropped to his knees, spent.

“Conventional explosive,” he said to Jack, both tiredly and triumphantly “‘Remove the conventional explosive.' If the device wasn't going to be set off by altitude, or a button, then he needed something like a timed blasting cap to pop the tritium container and the Ebola test tube simultaneously. Oh, and all those wires—the little plastique would've set off larger explosives to send the bad stuff this way and that into the atmosphere.”

“A nickel-sized explosive,” Jack said weakly. “That was what you threw?”

“That was what I threw,” Doc replied. “Military IHE—Insensitive High Explosive.” Which meant without the timer and detonator it wouldn't go off no matter how far or how hard Doc had thrown it. As they watched, two of Boaz's men were already collecting it.

Jack looked at the countdown clock. It read 0:03.

When Doc and Jack finally stumbled out of the wrecked Cessna, Dover and Jack grabbed each other, while Doc noticed that Pyotr was missing. The old soldier anchored his eyes on Boaz.