Craig didn’t pause for a minute. Ursov had vowed not to let Craig out of his sight, but neither of them had time for political games. He couldn’t waste a second to get rid of Ursov, so he just ignored the squat, muscular man.
Reaching the rover, Craig spotted the scarlet stains splashed on the driver’s side door. Before he could blink, he noticed the crumpled, bloody form inside. He stopped short as he recognized the face of Mike Waterloo, his expression slack with death.
Everything Sally had said was true. She had shot Waterloo, and she would not hesitate in carrying out her threat against her hostage. Paige was doomed — and so were they all. He longed to go rescue her, but first, he had to somehow stop the nuclear weapon from going off. He glanced at his watch. Piece of cake. Right.
“How do you expect to disarm the warhead, Agent Kreident?” Ursov said, panting, his face flushed. “Are you an expert in such matters?”
“Maybe it’s got an OFF switch,” he muttered, shaking his head. He’d had trouble enough with the plastique at the Hoover Dam — and now this. “I knew I should have learned how to do this stuff.”
His priorities had been clear, as Sally had known, but the procedure was not. Craig had no idea what to do… but if he did nothing, the warhead would go off. And if he did the wrong thing, the warhead would go off. He just had to hope that somehow, by accident, he would be able to guess the correct method.
The wind picked up, hurling cold raindrops, and the thunder rumbled overhead. Craig peered into the back of the land rover and spotted the nuclear device. He had seen similar warheads in the DAF, and he knew this was not a mockup, not a prop — but a functional nuclear weapon. He understood where it had come from, and he knew that the militia intended to use it.
The LED lights on the warhead’s access panel glowed. Numbers on the timer continued to click down steadily one at a time. The bomb was armed, ready to detonate.
Thirteen minutes.
Ursov moved up beside him, puffing, his face flushed with determination. Perhaps he intended to chew up the warhead to dismantle it. He stared through the land rover’s window, scowling. “Come, Agent Kreident — we must begin.”
Craig grabbed the door handle, ready to jump into the back compartment and get to work… whatever it was.
But he found the door locked. He couldn’t even get inside.
CHAPTER 46
As Sally Montry drove at a reckless speed across the rugged and muddy terrain, fleeing the nuclear demons she herself had set in motion, Paige huddled in the passenger seat. After all she had seen and learned, the death of her Uncle Mike, the insidious plan of the militia and their paranoid fears of a secret UN base deep inside Groom Lake, the ticking timer on the nuclear device, she sat quiet, seemingly cowed, subdued.…
Watching for her chance.
Wondering how much time remained on the warhead’s countdown clock, and how they would escape the deadly rain of fallout even if they somehow managed to survive the blast itself.
The murderous secretary jammed the land rover into four-wheel drive and tromped down on the accelerator, kicking up chips of alluvial gravel from the boulder-strewn hardpan, splashing brown water from a puddle. The vehicle slewed from side to side, but the speedometer jiggled close to fifty miles an hour. Twelve and a half miles, Paige thought. That’s how far they’d make it in fifteen minutes. She didn’t know if that distance would put them out of harm’s way — how far away were those weathered press bleachers from the detonation zones on Frenchman Flat?
A mile from the fenced-in Dreamland facility, cracks appeared in the ground, wide arroyos carved into the desert where forerunners of a flash flood coursed, eating away the soft dirt. The driving became much rougher.
Slowing as little as she dared, Sally paralleled one of the gullies, frequently glancing into her rear-view mirror, searching for helicopter pursuit or her imagined United Nations security forces that were supposedly headquartered inside the hangar building.
The land rover roared recklessly across the desert, leaving a plain trail. Sally must be counting on the nuclear firestorm to obliterate any tracks. Stern-faced, her eyes flicking from side to side, Sally Montry cruised onward. Paige held onto the vehicle’s door to steady herself.
Craig and the others had remained behind at the second land rover, struggling to deactivate the warhead — but she didn’t think Craig had any possible way of knowing how to shut down a warhead. Mike Waterloo had asserted that no one could disarm the warhead in time. And Sally had shot him dead.
The bomb would go off, and everyone around it was doomed.
The land rover’s left front tire struck a boulder. Sally compensated by jerking the wheel, and the vehicle smashed into a depression, bouncing them savagely.
Paige picked that moment to lash out, reaching over to grab the steering wheel with both hands, jerking it to the right — hard. The rover lurched toward the steep gully churning with runoff water from the rainstorm. If they went over the edge, the tires would jam — the vehicle might even tip on its side, and they would be stranded, mired in the mud. Sally would never get away in time.
She would probably shoot Paige in her helpless rage, but it would do her no good. The murderous woman would still be trapped.
Sally howled and fought, wrestling for control. “Stop it, you bitch!” Freeing her right arm from the steering wheel, she jabbed brutally into Paige’s side with her elbow. Paige gasped with a sudden explosion of pain and released her hold.
“If we get stuck, we’ll both be fried in the explosion!” Sally yelled, jerking the vehicle back under control as she dropped her speed, veering away from the steep arroyo.
“That’s the whole idea,” Paige growled as she lunged for the steering wheel again.
But Sally clenched her right fist and swung hard backhandedly, striking Paige squarely on the bridge of her nose. The militia woman knew exactly where to hit, as if she had been trained in hand-to-hand combat. The blow caused a silvery explosion of pain behind Paige’s eyes. Fresh, warm blood spurted from her nose.
Paige gasped, seeing the scarlet stain spill onto her shirt. She held her head against the pounding pain, wondering if the other woman had broken her nose. “Damn you,” Paige said, her voice clogged and gurgling from the flowing blood.
“You don’t have a clue what could happen, do you?” Sally snapped. “I should have shot you.” She tromped on the accelerator. Loose rocks spewed from under the rear tires, and the land rover leaped forward again, frantic to increase the distance. “Nothing’s going to stop me now.”
Paige looked up, blinking the red haze from her eyes.
Suddenly something glittered overhead, a silent flash of motion that seemed nothing more than a blur across the sky, lower than the dark clouds. Then the noise came — a muffled passage, a whoosh that sounded as if a high-speed invisible truck had just roared past them.
The land rover rattled and jerked from the shockwave.
Through the biting pain in her head, Paige had a fleeting thought that the warhead had exploded after all and the distant shock front had just rocked them — but she knew that couldn’t be true. From this distance the flash would have blinded them both, and the blast front would have squashed the land rover like a recycled can.
“What the hell was that?” Sally grabbed the steering wheel, craning her neck to stare up through the windshield, then looking out the side to see what had just soared by, what had attacked them.