Death Wave (50 page)

Shit!

“Green Amber, this is Amber Three,” Dean said, switching on his tactical radio.

“Three, One,” Rodriguez’s voice said in his earpiece. “Go.”

“You see the two gonzos with the suitcase, coming down the hill to the drill site?”

“Negative. Not from this position.”

Shit and
more
shit. The two bad guys had already moved around the bend in the descending path and were out of the line of sight of the two Marines on the hill above.

Maybe the damned timing wasn’t so hot after all. Ahead was the cave where they had Lia. To his right, the bad guys were bringing down one of the nukes.

Lia or the nuke?

“Amber One, did you get the word on Mountain Storm?”

“Three, that is affirmative. We are preparing to light up the target.”

Okay … so Rodriguez and Dulaney were going to be busy for the next ten minutes. The options sucked. If he took out the two with the suitcase nuke, he would start a firefight, the bad guys would sound the alarm, and any nuclear weapons already armed and in place elsewhere on the island might be set off—and a firefight would pin him down here, unable to reach Lia.

If he went after Lia, the bad guys would arm that weapon and put it down the hole, ready to fire. It was not exactly a comfortable prospect.

“Art Room,” he said.

“Go ahead, Charlie.”

“I have one of the suitcase nukes in sight. Looks like they’re getting ready to put it down the borehole. If I engage, they may disappear with it, and they sure as hell will pass the word to every other Tango on La Palma. I’m going to go in after Lia.”

“We concur, Charlie. Good luck.”

“Ilya?”

“I’m here, Charlie.”

“Target is the two Tango sentries outside of the cave entrance. I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on my left. Do you copy?”

“I copy.”

“Do you see another sentry at about two seven zero up on the crater rim?”

“The goldbrick with the cigarette. I see him.”

“He’s your number two target.”

“Roger that.”

Slowly, Dean eased his M4 out from under the tech-Ghillie and braced it in the prone firing position, left elbow supporting the muzzle, right hand closing about the grip. He checked to make sure the selector switch was on single-shot, then peered through the sight, adjusting the picture until the red dot was over the sentry’s chest. The range was less than a hundred yards now, but he wasn’t going to try for a fancy head shot and risk a miss. He would go for center of mass.

“First target.”

“Sighted in.”

Both of the guards had turned now and were watching the activity at the drill head. With luck,
everyone
in the crater would be watching them hauling up the drill pipe and planting the bomb, and they wouldn’t notice the two sentries outside the cave getting capped.

“Okay, Ilya,” Dean said. He held the target picture steady, took in a breath, released it partway. “On my mark … and
three
… and
two
… and
one
… and
shoot
!”

His rifle kicked against his shoulder, the sound of the gunshot muffled by the suppressor to a harsh cough. Both of the sentries jerked together, collapsing into one another and then tumbling off of the boulder.

Dean pulled the tech-Ghillie straps off his wrists and ankles, got to his feet, and started toward the cave at a fast trot. He was in full view of the people near the derrick now, but all of them were focused on the activity around the borehole.

“Target two sees you,” Akulinin said. “Taking the shot …”

Dean glanced up at the crater rim to the west in time to see the lone sentry silhouetted against the sky, saw him raising his rifle … then toppling backward and falling out of sight.

“Good shot,” Dean told Akulinin under his breath. He ran faster, staying in deep shadow and moving from boulder to boulder to minimize his exposure, but no longer staying out of sight. Speed, now, was more important than stealth.

“I’ve got the others covered, Charlie.
Get Lia out of there!
”

Reaching the boulder in front of the cave entrance, Dean stopped, checked to make sure no one was looking in his direction, then dragged the two bodies and their weapons around behind another boulder resting close to the side of the cliff. That might buy a few more minutes, depending on how frequently the bad guys checked up on their sentries.

Then, still in shadow, he started for the lava tube entrance.

25

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

I’m waiting, Cathy. If you prefer, the guard will put a bullet through your right knee. It will then hurt a
great
deal more when we put you on the table and forcibly undress you.”

Lia evaluated her chances. If she dove for al-Dahabi and tried to grapple with him, she
might
catch the two gunmen by surprise. If she could get close enough to the interrogator, they might not be able to shoot for fear of hitting him.

But then what? She was bigger than al-Dahabi, and younger … but she’d spent the past twenty-some hours tied to a chair, and both the adrenaline surge of the past few minutes and the beating had left her shaking and weak. Even if she did take him down, she would be no match, then, for the two armed Tangos on the other side of the chamber.

Besides, she now noticed that al-Dahabi also had a gun, a holstered pistol on his right hip. Jumping him would be suicide.

She decided to keep stalling. If she could keep him talking …

The danger lay in the possibility that he would become impatient and move on to the next level of force in this psychological game.

“No!” she cried. “Why should I make it easy for you, you bastard? You’re just going to torture me anyway!”

“I
will
need to ascertain that you are telling me the truth. The process can be relatively brief, a matter of an hour or so as I ask you questions, then apply, shall we say, a certain measured amount of pain as I test your truthfulness. But if you force me to rip the truth from you, the process
will
be long and agonizing no matter what you tell me.”

“You’re still going to kill me!”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. But … cooperate, and I might see if I can intercede with Major Feng. He’s not a monster, after all. I think he likes you. He might let you live.”

The lie was so transparent she very nearly laughed in his face.

She battled to keep her face frozen, empty of expression. She’d just seen … was that
Charlie
slipping in through the tunnel entrance?

The two guards were watching her with wide, hungry eyes, their backs to the entrance.

“Okay!” she cried. “Please, please just don’t hurt me!” She started fumbling at her belt.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean eased into the widening of the lava tube, all of his senses at a heightened pitch. He saw Lia in the pool of light ahead, facing him, and felt a surge of relief. Her face was bruised and bloody, but she appeared to be standing on her own, at least. To the left was the Palestinian, an old man standing with arms folded beside a steel table. Directly in front of Dean were two guards, their backs to the entrance, watching Lia undress.

If he shot them, a convulsive muscle contraction might close a trigger finger and kill Lia.

“Hey!”
Dean shouted, his voice echoing down the tunnel.
“Allahu akbar!”

The two guards and the old man turned to face him.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia heard Charlie’s shrill yell, an echoing battle cry, and saw the startled guards spin to face him. Immediately, she launched herself at al-Dahabi, who’d also turned to face Dean and was groping at his hip for his holstered sidearm. Dean’s rifle fired, a sharp chuff of sound, and the back of a guard’s head exploded in a scarlet spray.

She struck al-Dahabi from the side just as he started to pull his sidearm clear, slamming him back into the portable table, upending it with a clattering crash, then continuing on until Lia, al-Dahabi, and the table all smashed into the light stand.

The light toppled, flared, and went dark with a loud pop.

There was neither room nor time for subtlety. Lia raised her arm, then slammed her elbow down against the side of al-Dahabi’s head. The man beneath her screamed, dragging his pistol up, twisting beneath her. She elbowed his temple again, then again, but he turned his head and her last blow caught him squarely in the nose with a gush of blood.

She kept hitting him, kicking and kneeing him, slamming his head and face with her elbows and knees as the pistol hit the stone floor and clattered away into the near-darkness.

She felt a hand close on her shoulder and spun, still fighting.

“
Easy
, Lia! It’s me!”

Her breath coming in savage, rapid gasps, she stared up into Dean’s face for a moment, still ready to kill—

“Charlie?”

“It’s okay, Lia. It’s me.”

She let him pull her back from al-Dahabi. Dean knelt and probed the interrogator’s throat with two fingers. “He’s dead. Nice hand-to-hand technique.”

She shuddered. “Thank God you got here!”

“What’s with the striptease?”

She glared at him. “Don’t you dare even joke about that!”

“Sorry.” Dean looked away, checking the darkened chamber. Enough light was filtering in from the entrance to to show shapes and dark shadows. Both guards, Lia saw, were dead, sprawled in growing pools of blood. She hadn’t even heard Dean kill the second one. “Just those three?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay to walk?”

“I think so.”

“Get dressed. We need to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

FIRESTORM FIVE
12 NMI NORTHEAST OF LA PALMA
MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Farley saw two red indicators on his weapons panel wink on. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five,” he called. “Signal acquired.” He tapped an icon on the screen, watched another indicator light up. “I have target lock.” A moment later, a second indicator winked on, his second target, illuminated at a slightly different wavelength. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five, I have
two
target locks.”

“Five, Firestorm Leader. Copy. Arm the force packages.”

“Roger that. Arming the packages.”

Using the touch-screen controls, he told the computer on board his F-22 Raptor to arm the two JDAMs nestled into his internal bays and to open the bay doors. The Raptor was an extraordinarily stealthy aircraft—at certain angles it had the radar cross-section of a steel marble—and carried its munitions internally to maintain that stealth.

On the advanced touch-screen readout, the schematic drawings of both JDAMs switched from gray to green.

“Firestorm, this is Firestorm Five,” he called. “Weapons hot, I repeat, weapons hot. Bays open. Ready to engage.”

It had been a long flight. The six F-22 Raptors of the 43rd Fighter Squadron had lifted off from Tyndall Air Force base on the Florida panhandle nearly four hours earlier. At a supercruise speed of Mach 1.8, the coast of Africa was less than three hours’ flight time from home, but they’d needed two rendezvous along the way with KC-135 Stratotankers for midair refueling.

Each aircraft carried two one-thousand-pound LJDAM-modified Mk 83/BLU-110 gravity bombs in internal bays; LJDAM stood for Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition, the kit that turned an ordinary dumb bomb into a precision smart weapon. Guided in by a laser designator on the ground, a Raptor traveling at Mach 1.5 could precisely plant one of those babies on a moving target from twenty-five nautical miles away and fifty thousand feet up. The weapons could also be precision-guided by onboard GPS units, but the mission planners didn’t have precise GPS targeting data on all of the targets, and so the decision had been made to use laser guidance instead.

Old tech—but it would work just fine, so long as there were no clouds or smoke in the target area.

Six aircraft, twelve LJDAMs; the extra was along as backup in case of weapon malfunction or a problem with one of the aircraft. Firestorm Five’s targets were the southernmost two in a line of ten. The Raptors were strung out now in a long line at forty thousand feet, angling toward the island of La Palma from the northeast at Mach 1.2.