In one quick and athletic move, Catherine launched herself out of the ditch, rock in hand, and smashed in the driver’s side headlight. Jumping backward and rotating, she managed to damage the passenger side headlight as well. It made a fizzling noise, and then went out. Before Ba’al could reach for the gun lying on the passenger seat beside him, Catherine was running by the passenger side and sprinting, again at top speed, up the road in the opposite direction.
Ba’al cursed when he realized what had happened. He still had his parking lights, and one signal light, but, for the rest, he might as well have been driving blind. It was still only 4:30AM, and the dawn would not be upon them for another hour and a half.
“Shit,” he cursed emphatically. “Shit, shit shit.”
Ba’al turned the large pickup truck around on the narrow gravel road, mowing down bushes and small trees in his way, and then proceeded up the road at a speed of 15 miles an hour. He drove for a few minutes, looking both ways, before he realized that she had again given him the slip. He cursed more violently, this time in Urdu, and then in several other Pakistani languages, before turning around and heading back toward the test facility. Before he realized what was going on, the same thing happened again. The woman flew past him at a dead run, streaking back up the road in the opposite direction.
Catherine, for her part, was beginning to enjoy this game of cat and mouse. She could hear the Ford coming, and its four-way flashers and orange parking lights were still on and extremely visible. When it was within 100 feet or so, she ran for the ditch, or some other formation of rock or trees, to take cover. She would stay there until the truck turned around, and when it passed by, would get back on the road and sprint for all she was worth, running anywhere between a quarter and a half mile up the road. When she heard the truck turning around again, she would head for cover. He couldn’t spot her without his lights. There was no way he’d catch her, if this kept up.
Four-thirty became five, and by 5:30AM Catherine knew that this particular phase of the battle would soon be over. A thin ribbon of pink was appearing over the eastern horizon, and by six headlights would no longer be required. As Catherine was deliberating her options, and looking for another roadside stream with which to quench her thirst, she felt the “whomp” of a distant explosion. She saw smoke in the northeastern sky, presumably the location of the building from which she had run. A few minutes later she saw a small convoy of trucks go by, heading toward the Ford on the road ahead of her. In the lead was the cube van that had been her home for the past twenty-some hours, followed in turn by two larger trucks. The vehicles were not going slowly, given the nature of the roadway. They were obviously in a hurry to get away. Fifty miles an hour or more, she estimated. After they passed, she climbed back onto the road and started running at an easy and relaxed pace toward what she hoped would be civilization, wary of any approaching traffic.
By five in the morning they had been ready for the final phase. The Semtex had almost all been packed into the Ark. Kumar went to the outbuilding and started the second, larger Genset to supply additional power to the overhead crane. He returned and positioned himself behind the controls of the gantry system. He then used it to “close the lid.” It was an extremely tricky operation, with all the men positioned along the base of the Ark, trying to ensure that there was no slippage. Once this had been accomplished, a series of lever latches were used to clamp the lid to the base.
Next Kumar, with the assistance of Izzy and Yousseff, threaded the two large slings from the gantry underneath the Ark. When the Ark appeared to be appropriately balanced, it was slowly pulled aloft, and maneuvered so that it was directly above the Pequod. The steel in the gantry crane system groaned under the weight of the heavy and fully loaded Ark. For a moment Kumar wondered if he had underestimated the carrying capacity of the system, but the crane held. He gradually lowered it so that the bottom of the Ark was parallel with, and directly above, the Pequod. The Pequod itself had been pushed across a ramp and roller system, and was floating in the water that ran along the front and center portion of the facility. The structure of the Pequod was not robust enough to carry the weight of the Ark and its contents, unless it was in the water, where buoyancy would make the chore feasible. But before the Ark could be so positioned, the passenger cockpit of the vessel would need to be closed, and before that, Massoud and Javeed would need to be inside. It was time.
50
Yousseff motioned to Massoud and Javeed. The moment of denouement was at hand. Yousseff had seen a lot of death over the past forty-some years. His childhood and teenage years had been marred by the war, death, and destruction brought on by Soviet aircraft, through civil wars, and through the reign of murderous warlords in the Northwest Frontier Province. He had seen thousands of people die in battles in and around Kabul and Khandahar. But the certain death of these two boys troubled him more than anything else ever had. Perhaps it was the ugly set of circumstances that had brought these two individuals to this place. Even though they were both set on their suicide mission, Yousseff could see that there was a deeply subdued, but as yet unextinguished, ember of life in their eyes. Or perhaps Yousseff had overestimated himself. While he was a capable and even brutal drug smuggler and businessman, this situation had put him in the business of terrorism. He wondered if those were shoes he could actually fill.
He tried to shake these thoughts. It was too late to turn back now. And this mission would happen, eventually, with or without his involvement.
“It’s time, boys,” he said. “It’s time. You must now focus on the mission that the Emir, peace be upon him, has given you. Allah has brought you to this hour, and this place.” Yousseff was speaking in the Pashtun tribesman’s version of Urdu that the two boys had grown up with. It wasn’t to give the boys comfort, since he didn’t feel it was his place. It was to make sure that they understood every word of their mission. He quickly outlined their directions, making sure that his words were precise and detailed. Any mistake on their part would mean a failure in the mission; because of the gamble he had taken, a failure would destroy what he had been working toward for his entire life. This made his words even sharper than he meant them to be.
The two boys nodded, but did not reply to his brisk tone. Massoud, and then Javeed, stepped into the narrow two-person cockpit of the high-tech vessel. They had never been in it before, but the simulator in Long Beach had duplicated the conditions and the instrumentation in its cockpit precisely. Kumar and his team had equipped the Pequod with an exotic GPS-linked sonar system that reproduced, in three dimensions, the contours of the reservoir floor. The craft also had powerful running lights and TV cameras, linked to a series of displays similar to the HUD’s carried by all modern fighter aircraft. Between the HUD, the forward-contour modeling, and the view available to the occupants of the vessel, navigating the Pequod was pretty much a walk in the park. The simulator had reproduced these conditions perfectly, and the two teenagers were as comfortable here as they would have been walking along an alley in Jalalabad. They settled in, and nodded their readiness to the men around them.
The cockpit of the Pequod slid shut noiselessly. Yousseff motioned to Kumar to begin lowering the Ark onto the roof of the Pequod. A series of hydraulically operated clamps were positioned along its roofline, with a further series of recessed sockets in the steel base of the Ark to match. A perfect fit was required to ensure good connectivity for the power supplied by the Pequod, at the appropriate moment, to the copper firing rods of the Ark.