Dead or Alive (94 page)

T
hey collected the two AKs and then, with Chavez at the wheel, climbed into the Cushman and started down the tunnel. “How stable is this thing they’ve got?” Jack asked Clark.

“Pretty stable. The slug has to be rammed into the pit with a lot of force. Takes a good-sized charge, and it has to be set. Why?”

“Working on an idea.”

Fifty feet ahead, the string of halogen ceiling lights converged into a circle. “First ramp,” Jack said.

“Easy, Dom,” Clark ordered.

They pulled to within twenty feet, then stopped, got up, and walked up to the ramp’s entrance. Lit from above by yet more halogen lights, the ramp angled down at twenty-five degrees.

“Should be able to hear their Cushman,” Jack whispered.

They went silent and listened. Nothing.

They climbed back into the Cushman and kept going. The tunnel curved to the right. Dominic stopped short, and Jack got out and peeked around the bend. He came back. “Clear.”

They kept going. They reached the second ramp and stopped to listen but heard nothing. Same with the third and fourth. As they approached the fifth, they heard a voice echo up the ramp. They got up and walked forward and looked down.

In the distance they could see the yellow speck of a Cushman appear under a halogen light, then move into shadow, then into light again.

“Three-quarters of the way down,” Jack said.

“If you’ve got an idea, now’s the time,” Clark said.

“Depends on how sure you are about that thing’s stability.”

“Ninety percent.”

Jack nodded. “Ding, need your help.”

They climbed into the Cushman, did a Y-turn, and headed back down the tunnel. They returned thirty seconds later. From the rear of the Cushman, Jack and Ding each lifted out an acetylene cylinder. “Torpedo,” Jack said.

“Are they full?”

“Mostly empty.”

“Timing’s going to be a bitch.”

“I’ll leave that up to you. You’re the boss.”

“Go ahead.”

Jack and Chavez carried the cylinders to the ramp’s entrance, laid them flat, then gave them a shove. At once they began to spin, gonging off the walls on their way down. Jack and Chavez ran back to the Cushman and got in. Dominic pulled up to the ramp and stopped.

Clark waited for a ten-count, then said, “Go.”

 

 

 

A
lmost immediately it became apparent that the Cushman’s breaks were inadequate. After fifty yards, the speedometer needle quivered past thirty mph. The overhead lights zipped by. Dominic braked, slowing them slightly, but smoke began gushing from the drums. Two hundred yards below them, the cylinders were spinning and tumbling like a pair of footballs. The Emir’s Cushman was almost at the bottom.

“Gonna be close,” Chavez said.

Clark said, “Slow us down, Dom.”

Dominic tapped the brakes with no result. He stomped on the pedal. Nothing happened. “Keep your hands inside,” he yelled, then veered right. The Cushman’s front quarter panel scraped the tunnel wall, sending up a shower of sparks. They slowed slightly. He eased away from the wall, then back again.

A hundred yards down the ramp, the cylinders caught up with the Emir’s Cushman. One cylinder took a bad bounce and tumbled past, but the second one crashed into the rear bumper. The Cushman skidded, turning broadside, then tipped onto its side and skidded onto the landing.

“Get us stopped,” Clark ordered.

Dominic spun the wheel hard over, putting the whole left side into the wall. The Cushman slowly ground to a stop. They got out and started down the ramp. On the landing, the Emir’s Cushman lay upside down. A few feet away, a body lay sprawled on the concrete. They paused at the entrance to the landing. To their left, the tunnel continued on another fifty feet before turning sharply left. There was no one in the tunnel. Chavez walked over to the body and knelt down. “Not him,” he said.

 

 

 

T
hey jogged down the tunnel. Around the corner, they found themselves in a thirty-foot-wide alley. Overhead, vaulted girders spanned the ceiling. They could see the circular entrances to the storage drifts, spaced at twenty-foot intervals along each side of the alley.

“I count twelve per side,” Dominic said.

“Split up,” Clark ordered. “Me and Jack will take the right, you two the left.”

Clark and Jack sprinted across the alley to the opposite wall. Jack mouthed,
I’ll take the last six.
Clark nodded. Jack took off in a sprint, glancing into each drift as he went. On the other side of the alley, Dominic was doing the same.

Jack dashed past the fifth drift, saw nothing, then continued past the seventh and eighth. He skidded to a stop, backed up, and looked again. He saw a flicker of light two hundred yards down the drift. He could just make out two figures crouched beside what looked like an industrial bait box. Jack looked around. Clark was working his way forward but too far away. Same with Dominic and Chavez.

“Hell with it.”

He sprinted into the drift.

 

 

 

H
e’d covered half the distance to the figures when one of their heads snapped up. A muzzle flashed orange. Jack kept running. Raised his gun, snapped off two shots. From the alley, Clark yelled, “Over here!”

The man stepped forward, firing from the hip. Jack hunched over and pressed against the wall, trying to make himself small. He adjusted his aim, laid the sites on the man’s center mass, squeezed off two rounds. The man spun and went down. The other figure ignored his fallen comrade and kept working, his hands moving in the box. He looked up, saw Jack, kept working. Thirty feet away. Jack raised his gun and kept firing until the slide locked open, the magazine now empty. Twenty feet. A head peeked around the box, disappeared again. Jack covered the last ten feet in two strides, then dropped his shoulder and slammed into the box. He heard something pop in his shoulder, felt the pain rush up his neck. The box skidded backward. Jack’s feet went out from under him, and he slammed face-first into the concrete. Blood gushing from his shattered nose, he pushed himself to his knees. His eyesight sparkled. He looked around. The first man’s body lay sprawled against the curved wall, his AK a few feet away. Jack crawled over to it, snagged the sling with his right hand, and dragged it toward him. He got to his feet and stumbled around the box.

Already on his feet, the Emir was stepping toward the box. He saw Jack and stopped. His eyes flicked to the box, then back to Jack’s face.

“Don’t!” Jack barked. “You’re done. It’s over.”

Down the tunnel behind Jack came the pounding of footsteps.

“No, it’s not,” the Emir said, and knelt down before the box.

Jack fired.

L
ATER, when asked BY Hendley and Granger, Jack Ryan Jr. would remain cagey about whether he’d intended to simply wound the Emir or, in the heat of battle, he’d missed his center-mass target. The truth was, Jack wasn’t sure himself. At the critical moment, the flood of adrenaline in his veins and the pounding of his heart had combined to seemingly both stretch and compress time in his brain. Contradictory thoughts fought for control of his fine motor skills: shoot to kill, stop the Emir; shoot to wound, gain an intel gold mine but risk the man getting a chance to push the button.

On seeing Jack standing before him in the darkened drift tunnel, the Emir had hesitated only seconds before returning his attention to the bomb—his eyes wide and feverish, fingers working inside the device’s open panel. It took only a split second more for Jack to realize he wasn’t facing a man who cared whether he lived or died—by gunfire or by nuclear detonation, the Emir had come here to finish his holy task.

Jack’s weapon had bucked in his hand, and the tunnel had flashed with orange, and when the sound faded and the darkness returned, he saw the Emir lying on his back, arms splayed, the flashlight illuminating his face. Jack could see the AK’s 7.62-millimeter bullet had entered the Emir’s right thigh on an angle, traveled upward, and punched out his buttock. Jack took two quick steps forward, weapon raised, ready to fire again, when he heard footsteps pounding up behind him. Then Clark and Chavez and Dominic were there, pulling him away. ...

 

 

 

T
hough they wouldn’t discover the reason until a day later via a Homeland Security intercept, Clark and company had emerged from the main tunnel’s entrance with their now bound-and-gagged quarry not to the sound of helicopter rotors and sirens but rather dead silence. As Clark had suspected, their helicopter’s course north along Highway 95 and their subsequent intrusion of the airspace above the Yucca Mountain hadn’t gone unnoticed on the radar net that blanketed the Nellis Air Force Range and the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. However, the alert that would have normally brought helicopters and security forces from Creech Air Force Base’s 3rd Special Operations Squadron had been short-circuited by the DOE’s test shipment from Callaway Nuclear Power Plant. Somewhere in the inevitable and often unfathomable bureaucratic process, the DOE had neglected to tell the Air Force they’d decided to forgo the helicopter escort for the shipment. As far as Creech was concerned, the stolen EC-130 on which Clark’s team rode was air cover for the shipment.

Whether from fear or a suspicion that his passengers were indeed the good guys, Marty had taken Clark’s “stick around” order to heart and had sat in the idling EC-130 until Clark and the others appeared jogging down the service road. Twenty-five minutes later they were back at Paragon Air, where they discovered Marty had also stayed off the radio.

“Hope I don’t regret this,” he’d said, as everyone climbed out.

“You’ll probably never know it, but you did a good thing, my friend,” Clark told him, then wiped down his Glock and laid it on the passenger-side floorboard. “Give us an hour, then call the police. Show them that gun and give them my description.”

“What?”

“Just do it. It’ll keep you out of jail.”

And besides, I’m not exactly what you’d call “findable,”
Clark thought but didn’t say.

 

 

 

T
wenty minutes after leaving Paragon Air, they were back at the Emir’s house, where they pulled into the garage and closed the door behind them. Chavez and Jack went inside to collect Tariq, while Pasternak and Dominic pulled the Emir from the rear of the vehicle and laid him out on the garage floor, where Pasternak knelt down and gave him a once-over.

“He live?” Clark asked.

Pasternak peeled back the hasty field bandage they’d applied before leaving Yucca, palpated the flesh around the puckered entrance wound, then slid his hands under the Emir’s buttock.

“Through and through,” Pasternak proclaimed. “No arteries, no bones, I don’t think. Blood’s clotting. What kind of round?”

“Jacketed seven-six-two.”

“Good. No fragments. Barring infection, he’ll make it.”

Clark nodded. “Dom, you’re with me.”

The two of them returned inside to give the house a walk-through. Though they’d all worn gloves the entire time they’d been there, sooner or later the FBI would descend on the house, and the FBI was damned good at finding trace evidence where none should exist.

Satisfied, Clark nodded for Dom to return to the vehicle, then dialed The Campus. Within seconds he had Hendley, Rounds, and Granger on conference call. Clark brought them up to speed, then said, “We’ve got two choices, anonymously dump them on the steps of the Hoover Building or finish this ourselves. Either way, the less time we stay here, the better.”

There was silence on the line. This was Hendley’s call.

“Stand by,” the director of The Campus said. He was back two minutes later. “Get back to the Gulfstream. The pilot knows where you’re going.”