He knew that letting himself care was the worst thing he could possibly do. But Kumar found himself starting to like these wounded children. Did he really have to do this, leading the boys to their deaths? Eventually, though, he shook his head and gave himself a stern lecture. It wasn’t his place to worry about things like that. Yousseff was right — there was nothing he could do to help these boys. They had already chosen their path. It broke Kumar’s heart to see it. But Massoud and Javeed had their own demons, and the Emir and Yousseff had their master plan. Even if he tried to change things, Kumar knew that he had no chance against men like that.
Jimmy, Ba’al, and Izzy had reached the Meziadin Junction and were headed south toward Kitwanga, in northwestern BC. They were still driving the old five-ton cube van. The Semtex was buried beneath several layers of tarps in the back. Four old tires lay on top of the tarps, and fishing and camping gear was scattered on top of that. “Fishing in the Charlottes” was the official cover story. There were coolers with ice and gutted fish in the back to cover their tracks, should they need to use the story. They even had fishing licenses. Took the company truck.
Ba’al had taken the first leg of what would be an 18-hour trip, driving from the northwest pole of the province to the southeast corner. After two hours of talking without pausing for breath, Jimmy had fallen asleep in the back of the van, exhausted from his long and stressful journey in the sub. Ba’al and Izzy were talking quietly, hoping to make the time go faster.
“You know what’s amazing about this place, Izzy?” asked Ba’al.
“Tell me, oh wise one,” moaned Izzy. “Is it something other than the women?”
“No. But compare this to the trip from Peshawar to Jalalabad. There are no guns in BC, or very few anyway. We don’t fear for our safety here. We can live here for 50 years without anyone taking any shots at us. You have the same beauty as northern Pakistan, but no guns. No violence. If one person gets shot it makes provincial headlines. If a policeman gets shot it makes national headlines. Compare that to back home, with land mines, bandits, the Soviets, the Taliban, and the endless warring between tribal bosses. The crooked cops… ”
Izzy had to laugh at that. “Marak is totally honest. You just need to know who he actually works for.”
“I know,” Ba’al answered. “Here, though, Marak blows away three guys on the Vancouver docks and it’s still a story, almost 30 years later.”
They reached the Highway 16 junction at Kitwanga, and turned east. The highway, called the “Yellowhead” by the locals, extended to the Alberta border, although Izzy and Ba’al wouldn’t be following it that far. The scenery was once again spectacular, the road winding on an easterly course through the Hazelton Mountain range. Ba’al kept his speed just a few miles above the speed limit, going with the flow of traffic. “Don’t stand out,” Yousseff had told them sternly. “Not in any way.”
“Do you ever get lonely for home, Ba’al?” Izzy asked at length.
“Yes, of course I do. These mountains are beautiful to be sure, but nothing like the Hindu Kush. The river here is nice,” he said, motioning to the white water of the Skeena. “But you can’t drift down it, like the lazy Indus. And the weather is too damn cold. Inland here, 30 below zero in the wintertime. It’s madness. Yeah, lots of the time I pine for home. So does my wife. But a few weeks in Jalalabad is enough. I miss home, but when I am there, I want to be somewhere else.”
“Me too,” said Izzy. “Vancouver is fine for me most of the time. And we do live like kings. I don’t think I’d want to move back home, given a choice.”
It was 7AM when they reached the mountain town of Smithers, their first stop. They did everything they could to keep it short. “Pretend that the police are right on your heels,” Yousseff had said. “They are clever. They are looking for the Semtex. They will be unrelenting.” They filled up on gas, then went through a fast food drive-through. At the Smithers airport, Jimmy gave Izzy and Ba’al bear hugs. None of them knew when, or even if, they would see each other again. It was something they were trying not to think about too much.
“Gentlemen, which areas face the highest probability of attack?” The President was in the Situation Room, now almost as famous as the Oval Office. He looked around the room at the people who’d been called to meet with him. Thirteen men were debating the problem. All men. Maybe that was the problem, he thought. No women. He wondered if a woman would have a different perspective. Maybe the answer.
As usual, Admiral Jackson was in the thick of it. “The NSA is picking up a lot of chatter from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Most of it from the Internet. Most of it highly encrypted. The bastards don’t know we can read it. There are ongoing references to a nuclear or dirty bomb threat to one of the coastal cities. It all started with Goldberg’s message. The stolen Semtex seems to be related, but no one can figure out how. I suspect a combination of the Semtex and a nuke. A radiological dirty bomb. They may bring the Semtex in one way, and the radioactive material via another route, and then combine them at the last moment.”
“How bad would it be?” asked the President.
“Bad,” replied the Secretary of Defense. “It could poison an inner city harbor and the surrounding buildings for hundreds of years. Depends on what they use. It could do what nothing else has done so far. If it came down in the business district of New York it would make Wall Street and every building for a dozen blocks around it uninhabitable.”
“So which cities do we need to protect, Admiral?” asked the President. “Where are we looking?”
“You can go up and down both coasts guessing,” Jackson answered, shaking his head. “I think the West Coast is more likely than the East, given that the Haramosh Star is due in Vancouver. Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, or maybe Los Angeles. If the stuff is coming north from Mexico, I’d say Phoenix, Tucson, Vegas, and maybe even San Diego would be the prime targets. Las Vegas would be an attractive candidate for any Islamic radical. Maybe some of the southern Texas cities, like El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, or even Dallas Fort Worth. Hard to say at this point. If they bring it through British Columbia somehow, maybe one of the cities in Idaho or Montana. Definitely hard to say.”
“God dammit, we spend billions and billions of dollars on Intelligence and you guys can’t tell us more precisely than saying this thing is probably going to land somewhere on the West Coast or in the Southwest?” demanded the Secretary of Defense.
“We can, in time. Right now we’re half a step behind this thing, and we’re having trouble getting ahead of it. We need to take protective measures. We need to go to Threat Level Orange for those areas. We need more eyes and ears than we have. And we need to alert the public about it as well. The Intelligence Community would welcome another hundred million pairs of eyes, quite frankly,” responded the Admiral, somewhat defensively.
“Do you have any idea what it will cost to go from Yellow to Orange?” the President demanded.
“I have a fair idea,” responded Jackson. “But I don’t think you have much leeway here, sir. If this thing went sideways on us, and an inner harbor was polluted for a century, or a nuke went off in the middle of an NFL game, the cost would be infinitely greater.”
The discussion raged for over an hour. The executive director of the NSA was called, as was Dan Alexander at TTIC, and the director of the FBI. Information was drawn, sampled, and analyzed, costs were debated, and solutions considered. At the end of the meeting word went out, by telephone, e-mail, television, instant messaging, and whatever else was on hand. The West Coast and the Southwest states were officially going to Threat Level Orange.