“You go on,” he told her. “Now I’m really done. Leave me be.”
“No, Richard, that is not going to happen. You are a soul in trouble, in many different ways. But you’re also a fellow soldier, in distress. I’m not going to leave you. If we’re captured, it’s going to be together.”
“Jen, listen to me. You can go much faster alone. You’ll be better off without me,” he argued, in a bizarre version of chivalry. “I’ll just take the last of my drugs and wait. Maybe I’ll just heave myself off the cliff. With enough drugs in my system, it won’t be all that bad an end. In fact, I feel like I’m floating off a cliff right now.”
“I’m not leaving you, as much as I would like to,” Jennifer muttered.
The two of them viewed that day in completely different ways. From Richard’s point of view, the day consisted of standing, sitting, or lying down, ingesting more medication and experiencing sheer panic when he thought he might be running out. In his clear moments, it consisted of the immense guilt he was feeling about letting his country down, and leaving Jennifer to deal with the situation alone. For Jennifer the day was a pattern of prodding Richard along, getting him back on his feet, or pulling him bodily off the ground, and ducking for cover from low flying planes or helicopters.
It was just after 5PM, and growing darker, when they heard the dogs.
49
At the PWS testing facility, Yousseff had ordered the two teenagers, Javeed and Massoud, to pick up their pace. He didn’t care about their religious sensibilities or what they were there to do. All he cared about was having the unwrapping and packing process finished, so that he could get out of the way.
“It must be evenly packaged,” said Kumar. “There can be no spaces or holes. The slightest deviation will affect the cutting power.”
They had been at it for another half hour, taking the red cellophane wrapping off each brick, and squeezing the putty-like substance into the interior of the Ark, when a rustle in the rear of the cube truck caught Yousseff’s attention.
“What the devil—” he started to say. Before he could finish, a woman, in shorts and a T-shirt, and black from head to toe, appeared in the rear of the truck, jumped down, did a U-turn, and ran, at a very quick rate of speed, down the gravel road that led from the facility. It was Corporal Catherine Gray, making her bolt for freedom.
Yousseff was so shocked that it took him a moment to recover. Then he started barking instructions. “Ba’al, take my truck. Get her back now. If she gets away she’ll ruin the plan. Go now!” Yousseff tossed Ba’al the keys. “There is a small Beretta in the central console. Get her back, or kill her.”
He looked around at the rest of the crew, standing with mouths agape. “The rest of you keep working. We can’t deviate from the plan. Ba’al will get her back.”
“How on earth did she get in there?” asked Kumar.
“Good question. Izzy, would you mind telling me why a woman was hiding in the back of your van?” asked Yousseff, his tone edgy.
“Must’ve been at Devil’s Anvil,” responded Izzy. “She was covered in what looked like coal dust, which means she was probably wriggling through one passage or another at that mine. When we were loading the truck, she must have stolen her way onboard. Ba’al and Dennis brought the explosives through Devil’s Anvil in four loads while I stayed with the truck. Each load took about an hour, from beginning to end. I guess she got onboard, underneath the tarps, probably between loads three and four. We were almost done, and they probably weren’t paying attention like they should’ve been.”
“Why didn’t you check the load, and the tarps, before you left?” asked Yousseff, angrily.
“We should have, Youss. We didn’t. Didn’t expect this. We were in the middle of nowhere — who knew that there’d be some woman wandering around? Anyway, we’re almost 30 miles from civilization, and far from cell phone range. She can’t get far. Ba’al has a truck and a gun. I mean, how far can you run?” asked Izzy, not familiar with Catherine’s athletic history.
“Keep working, and fast, all of you,” ordered Yousseff. “If she gets to a telephone before the sub is in the water, this mission, after incredible risk and cost, is doomed.”
Izzy had known Yousseff for almost 40 years. There had been many, many tricky situations, where they were foiled by the river police, or attacked by pirates, or dealt with a crew mutiny, or even had a problem on the Vancouver or Manzanillo docks. He had never seen Yousseff angry or losing his composure. Yousseff was able to talk himself out of almost anything. He seemed to delight in using his prescient intelligence to wiggle out of distressing circumstances. But when Yousseff saw the woman jump out of the truck, he was as close to furious as Izzy had ever seen him. Izzy wondered again exactly what they were involved in.
As Yousseff and his Pashtun crew continued unwrapping brick after brick of Semtex, Ba’al drove south, looking for the strangely clad American woman. There she was. Five minutes had passed and she was already more than half a mile down the road.
He hit the accelerator. The truck shot forward, and in moments he was directly behind her.
“Stop now, or I’ll shoot,” he barked.
He saw her slow, looking as though she was going to stop. He got out of the truck and started walking toward her. He was 30 feet from her when, rather than stopping, she sprinted away at what Ba’al considered to be an astounding speed. Little did he know that the woman ahead of him was a Canadian, with an extraordinary level of physical fitness; a woman who could run the 100-meter in under 12 seconds, and who could and did run half a dozen marathons a year, invariably in less than three hours. After being cooped up for almost 24 hours, the sensation of physical movement was giving her feet wings, and increasing her speed even more.
“Damned bitch,” cursed Ba’al. He fired a shot in her general direction, and then hurried back to the truck to continue the chase. “Should’ve driven right over her.”
Catherine’s thoughts were racing. She was not panicked, and was feeling exhilarated in the open air after spending so long in the back of a cube truck with more than four tons of Semtex, no light, and some coolers containing a few cans of pop and beer. But she knew that she couldn’t outrun the truck. The driver’s next tactic would be to simply run her down, but she was already 100 feet farther down the road when Ba’al clambered back into the truck. She darted off the traveled portion of the roadway and threw herself into a shallow ditch, praying that the driver would not see her.
She smiled as the Ford crew-cab went roaring by. Yes, he’d be back, but for now she had some time to think.
The early morning sky was still inky black. There was no moon, and the sky was overcast. Without the background glow of city lighting, visibility was almost nonexistent. In pulling herself out of the ditch into the dead black night, Catherine was struck by a flash of inspiration. Yes, she knew how she could even up the odds.
She saw the truck turn around and start back when it was more than a mile away. Ba’al had obviously concluded that his quarry had successfully eluded him, and was slowly coming back, looking at the ditches and woods on both sides of the road. His bright lights illuminated the entire road, extending outward for several feet into the brush. Catherine held the large chunk of rock that she had found in the ditch at the ready, unsure of exactly how this was going to play out.
“Come on, big boy,” she said as the lights from the Ford slowly approached. “Come to mama.”
Ba’al was driving very slowly, taking time to survey both sides of the graveled roadway. One hundred feet. Sixty. Forty. Twenty. Ten…