Day Of Wrath (55 page)

Helen cautiously pushed open one pair of double doors with the barrel of her shotgun. Nothing. No reaction.

She kicked open the door and slid through into a hallway closed off by another set of double doors—these leading outside into the compound.

Blood trails on the linoleum showed that some of the wounded had fled this way. A guard room stood empty to her right.

Naturally, she thought coldly. The guards were all inside—and dead or dying. Except for the men she was after now.

Helen moved on down the hall, pushed through the second set of doors, and came out onto the sidewalk fronting the half-filled parking lot.

Submachine gun fire rattled in the distance drawing closer.

A single, echoing shotgun blast answered.

“Delta Three, this is Two. How’re you doing?” she asked.

“They’re pulling back through the gate, Helen,” Farrell replied, breathing heavily. “I can’t stop them.”

Helen spotted the retreating patrol. Two were half dragging a third man, while a fourth provided covering fire. They would be in among the parked cars and vans in just a few seconds.

Too bad for them.

She knelt, laid her shotgun aside, and rifled through her rucksack.

Her fingers closed on the cylindrical plastic surface of a pipe bomb.

Her lighter came out of one of her assault vest’s breast pockets.

The retreating guards were sixty meters away. Fifty-five. Fifty.

Helen lit the fuse, stood up, and hurled the pipe bomb toward the enemy patrol. It spun end over end through the air, fell a little short, bounced once, and rolled under a minivan just meters away from them.

Perfect.

She snatched up her shotgun and rucksack in one hand, yanked open the closest door, and threw herself prone into the hallway.

WHAMMM
.

The pipe bomb detonated directly under the van’s gasoline tank. A fireball tipped with nails and torn pieces of metal and plastic roared outward-consuming everyone and everything in its path.

“Jesus,” Farrell said simply over the radio.

Helen looked back over her shoulder at the inferno raging outside the building. That ought to get a few official pulses finally pumping, she thought calmly.

She stiffened as Peter’s voice came over the circuit. “I’m at the top of the stairs to the basement. I may need some help with this.”

Helen sprinted toward the inner set of double doors, slinging the rucksack over her shoulder. She started reloading the shotgun as she ran. “Give me thirty seconds, Peter!”

Strike Control Center The sound of gunfire faded away on the floor above. At last, Ibrahim thought.

He signaled one of the technicians. “Find out what’s happening!”

The technician, an older man, swallowed hard. He hustled out the door leading to the planning cell. And then stopped dead.

“Sir!”

Ibrahim hurried over. “What is it, ma?”

The gray-haired computer specialist lifted a shaking hand, pointing toward the stairs leading up.

Ibrahim froze. Talal lay dead on the steps. His mangled face was covered in blood.

Impossible. Absolutely impossible.

The sudden realization that he was on the verge of losing everything flooded through Ibrahim’s stunned mind. He grabbed the shaking computer technician, pulled him through the door, and brutally shoved him toward one of the control consoles.

“Activate that console! Now!”

Then he whirled toward the other man—the younger one with a shaved head and a gold loop through his eyebrow. “Seal that door! Shoot anyone who comes through it! understand?”

The young man nodded convulsively, his face ash-gray.

May Allah protect me, Ibrahim thought bitterly. All would not be lost.

He could yet inflict a massive death blow to his great enemy.

He moved to the secure phone linking him to Godfrey Field.

“This is Control One. Get me Deckert! Now!”

Peter Thorn led the way down the stairs, with Helen coming right behind him.

He turned the corner. The Arab he’d clubbed lay crumpled at the foot of the steps. A few more feet brought him out into a large room crowded with empty desks.

He stopped in sudden confusion. Was this it? Had they been wrong about the whole setup? Where the hell was Ibrahim’s control center?

“Peter,” Helen hissed—pointing her shotgun at a gray, unmarked door in the far corner.

Thorn nodded.

He moved closer. Helen drifted off to the side so that they approached the door from different angles.

Thorn put his back against the wall, leaned over, and gently tested the handle. It was locked. Well, well, what a surprise, he thought grimly.

At a hand signal, Helen moved into position—ready to cover him.

He raised his shotgun, now loaded with solid slugs, and fired twice—smashing the hinges, first the top and then the bottom.

Helen spun out, savagely kicked the door in, and spun back into cover.

From inside the room a pistol cracked twice—sending steeljacketed rounds screaming through the opening.

The stupid bastard’s firing high, Thorn thought. He dropped to one knee and then threw himself flat in the doorway with his shotgun angled up. A figure loomed in his sights—a young man, obviously terrified, but still holding a weapon.

Bad move.

Thorn pulled the trigger.

The slug caught the other man in the stomach and threw him back against some kind of equipment console. Eyes already glazing over in death, he slid to the floor, smearing blood across the console, and toppled sideways.

Helen flowed in through the doorway, yelling, “Hands up! Get your hands up!”

A second man, this one older, hurriedly tossed his pistol to the side and stuck his hands in the air.

Thorn scrambled upright and joined Helen inside.

“Eight. Four. Alpha. Two …” someone said, speaking rapidly, but precisely.

He swung toward the voice and saw a tall, slender, handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes speaking intently into a telephone. Ibrahim. That had to be Prince Ibrahim al Saud—the man responsible for all this carnage. Rage flared inside him.

Thorn aimed the shotgun at the Saudi. “Drop the phone!”

Ibrahim smiled thinly and shook his head. “Delta. Tango.

Five …”

Helen fired. She was less than three meters away, and the pellets from her triple-ought shotgun shell were still tightly grouped when they hit—blowing Ibrahim’s right hand, the hand still holding the telephone, off just below the wrist.

The Saudi prince stood motionless, staring in horror at the blood pumping out of his shattered right arm.

Thorn grabbed the older man they’d taken prisoner and tossed him toward Ibrahim. “Use your belt! Put a tourniquet on him!”

“Oh, my God,” Helen said in horror.

Her shocked voice stopped Thorn in his tracks. He turned toward her.

She pointed at the several computer consoles that filled the room. One of them was live. It showed a digitally generated map of the surrounding region.

And a white dot blinked rapidly as it moved across the screen-heading inexorably toward Washington, D.C. One of the strike planes was airborne and closing on its target—with an armed 150-kiloton nuclear warhead aboard.

JUNE
21

Strike Control Center, Chantilly, Virginia

Colonel Peter Thorn stared at the blinking dot in shock. Godfrey Field was barely thirty nautical miles from Washington, and the aircraft they’d seen based there had a cruising speed of two-hundred-plus knots.

Which meant they had maybe six or seven minutes before the equivalent of one hundred and fifty thousand tons of high explosive detonated right over the nation’s capital.

Several seconds trickled past—each an imagined lifetime of sorrow and regret. His shoulders slumped. “Oh, Christ.” Helen turned toward him. “We have to do something, Peter!”

Do what? What more could they do? Despite all the risks they’d taken, despite everything, they were too late. Ibrahim had managed to get one of his nuclear-armed planes off the ground.

And now the aircraft was following its preset flight plan, drawing ever closer to its programmed target.

He focused on the computer display. A single line below the digital map of the Washington metro area read: F1,
FLIGHT
CONTROL
MENU
.

Thorn grabbed the nearest chair, set his shotgun down, and sat down in front of the computer keyboard. He punched the F1 function key.

A new cursor popped on-screen, replacing the notation about a flight control menu:
AIRCRAFT
ID?: Swell.

Thorn whirled toward the older man they’d taken prisoner with the Saudi prince. The man had just finished rigging his belt around Ibrahim’s maimed right arm as a temporary tourniquet.

“You speak English?”

The balding, gray-haired man looked up from Ibrahim’s slumped, unconscious figure. The wounded man had fainted halfway through the effort to save his life. He hesitated. “Was? Ich verstehen She Night.”

Something in their prisoner’s eyes told Thorn he was lying. He stood up and kicked the chair backward. “Bullshit,” he said softly.

The German flinched.

Thorn stalked up to the other man, grabbed hold of him by the shirt, and yanked him upright. “I said, do you speak English?”

Their prisoner stayed mute, his eyes wide in fear.

It was time for more active measures, Thorn decided coldly.

He scooped his shotgun back and casually, almost negligently, aimed it toward the other man’s head. “I’m going to ask you that question one more time. If you lie to me …”

He chambered a round.

The German bit his lip, trembling even harder now. “But you cannot do this! You cannot torture me. It is against American law!”

Thorn leaned closer. He pressed the shotgun right against the other man’s temple. “That plane is carrying a nuclear weapon.

What makes you think I care about the law right now?” His finger tightened on the trigger.

“Mein Gott.” The German swallowed hard. “I … I will help you. Do not shoot me … bitte. please!”

Helen patted him down, fished a wallet out of his pocket, and showed Thorn a tourist visa issued to one Klaus Engel.

He grabbed the German and dragged him back to the live console.

The blinking aircraft indicator was now roughly halfway between the towns of Leesburg and Herndon, Virginia—which meant they probably had somewhat less than five minutes remaining.

He pointed to the question asking for the aircraft identification.

“What’s the ID number for that plane ?”

Engel shook his head frantically. “I do not know, I swear it! I merely built and programmed the machine. I was not part of the planning cell!”

Thorn lifted the shotgun again.

“They are not numbers. They are code names,” the other man said, stumbling over the words in his haste to get them out. “But I do not know these names!”

Code names? Thorn glanced at Helen. “Do you still have that list we took off Wolf?”

“Yes.” She fished it out of one of her pockets and handed it over.

He scanned down the list until he found the five animal code names listed under Godfrey: Lion, Tiger, Leopard, Jaguar, and Cheetah, all in German. He looked up at Helen. “What do you think?”

“Try Lion,” she said flatly. “It’s the first on the list and the king of the beasts.”

Thorn nodded. That Was logical. Except for Ibrahim and a few others, most of those involved in this conspiracy were German.

Putting their primary target at the top of a list and attaching the name of the top of the animal kingdom to it would appeal to them.

He sat down at the keyboard and typed in L,O,W,E.

A new line appeared on the display: ID INCORRECT;
AIRCRAFT
ID?: Damn it.

Helen leaned over his shoulder. “Peter, there’s no umlaut symbol on this keyboard!”

Of course. Thorn tried again, typing in L, O, E, W, E, this time.

New data appeared below the digitized map on the computer display—showing information on airspeed, altitude, the plane’s attitude, heading, and degree of bank, throttle settings, and fuel remaining. At the same time, the video monitor just to the left of the computer screen flickered to life—showing a black-and white image of lighted suburban streets passing slowly astern.

Thorn scanned the numbers quickly, trying to make sense of them. From what he could tell, the strike aircraft was currently flying southeast at two hundred thirty knots—at an altitude of two thousand feet.

Two sets of coordinates—latitude and longitude—stayed constant.

A third decreased constantly. As he watched, it flickered from 25.4 to 25.3. He turned toward Engel and stabbed a finger at the screen. “Are these what I think they are?”

The German computer tech nodded nervously. “That is the detonation point. And the range to the target.”

Something about those coordinates looked familiar to Thorn.

Then it clicked. This aircraft was headed straight for the Pentagon which would put most of Washington inside the bomb’s blast and shock radius. He glared hard at Engel. “All right, how do I give this plane a new set of coordinates?”

“You cannot.”

This time Helen ground her weapon into the technician’s cheek. “Try again!”

“Please. It is true.” Sweat rolled down the German’s face. “You cannot change the aim point once the aircraft is aloft. Herr Reichardt insisted on that as a security precaution!”

Reichardt? Who the hell was he? Thorn filed the name away for future reference. He focused on the task at hand. “Are you telling me that goddamned plane is totally locked on autopilot?”

“No, no!” Engel insisted. “You can control the aircraft manually.”’ “How?”

The technician plucked a joystick off the top of the console and held it up. “Using this. and the keyboard.”

“Set it up. Now!” Thorn growled. Ibrahim’s bomb-laden plane would be over the Pentagon in roughly four minutes.

Engel leaned over his shoulder, hastily plugged the joystick into a port near the display, and began entering commands on the keyboard.