“That the bus has a range no greater than two hundred and sixty miles on a full tank, and that it had made three runs around the Washington area since the cyberattack, so it probably had between two-thirds and three-quarters of a tank when they started out, but a lot less now. So I’m guessing that we knew even before they did that they were going to have to stop. But the governor of New Jersey is already screaming, as you can imagine, that he wants that bus out of his state.”
Holmes rested his chin on fists. He could not stop thinking that wherever that bomb went off, whether it was plastique or a backpack nuke, those kids would be at ground zero.
Hamza pointed to the police car in front of them as it pulled off the interstate.
“See, those police are cowards. Nobody wants to challenge us because we are such powerful martyrs.”
Hamza’s words appeared to cheer his compatriots. All four of them shouted in victory and shook their fists when the vehicle behind them also exited. The man wearing the backpack bomb was especially vocal.
“We will go wherever we want, and take millions with us,” Hamza announced.
Millions? What is he talking about?
Emma’s mom had a word for creeps like him who thought they were so important that they could kill or control “millions” of people. She wished she could remember it now. Then she did: “megalomaniacs.”
“Do you know what we have?” Hamza asked her, flashing his knife before her face, and then turning his eyes to the rest of the kids on the bus. “Has anyone been able to guess?”
No one volunteered an answer.
“A nuclear bomb! Yes, that’s what it is. Stand up,” he shouted to the man with the backpack.
He stood, beaming.
Hamza nodded at him. Then his gaze swept over all the children. “You will die with great martyrs. But that won’t save your souls.” He shook his head, but Emma saw no sadness in his eyes. “You are all damned anyway.”
Emma watched him flick his knife inches from her eyes. In those seconds, the brutal magnitude of the bomb didn’t register as clearly as the sharp threat of the blade that had already cut her throat and left bloodstains on her collar. She watched him slip it back into a leather sheath that hung from his belt, inches from his gun.
Then she glanced at Tanesa and saw her caregiver’s eyes staring at the knife, too. Tanesa nodded at Emma ever so slightly.
She knew exactly what Tanesa was saying. And if she could do it, she would. But just to be sure, she looked at Pastor William Sr., still gagged. He did not move his head, not even a little, but his eyes opened wide on her and looked up and down three times.
Yes, yes, yes.
He wasn’t trying to stop her. This was no time for caution.
CHAPTER 19
Deputy director Holmes found himself flying in the copilot’s seat of a hurriedly revamped Boeing B-29 Superfortress that the agency had borrowed from a Smithsonian facility at Dulles. And not just any World War II — era B-29, either, but the Enola Gay, which had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ironically enough, the NSA, the cybernetic heart of the intelligence services, needed a pre — computer age aircraft to fly Holmes safely over the latest disaster triggered by the escalating attacks of the invisible enemy. The White House had also plundered the Smithsonian, taking a Stinson L-5 Sentinel for the president’s use.
Holmes was headed into the heart of Dixie for an overflight that he already dreaded. Computer programs that controlled nine dams on the Tennessee River, all run by the Tennessee Valley Authority, had long been zealously guarded against terrorist bombs. But months ago — long before their first cyberattack — the unseen enemy had infiltrated the TVA’s extensive computer network with “bomblets” that thirty-six hours ago had stopped turbines from moving and closed off spillways and sluice gates. The buildup behind the dams had created crushing pressure until the great walls burst, one after another, like a series of deadly dominoes.
From Knoxville, Tennessee, all the way down to Paducah, Kentucky — more than 650 miles — walls of water had ripped through millions of tons of concrete and earth. The dream of providing electric power for much of the South in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s day became another means of sending furious torrents of terror through the heartland of the country in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
And there it is.
The damage filled his window. Sickening, like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, but far worse, because in river-valley towns the force of cascading water — not steadily rising seas — had torn houses and schools and hospitals from their firm foundations and sent the bodies of thousands of men, women, and children tumbling downriver in a viciously engineered maelstrom. Few survived the tsunami-force waters. Limp bodies were strewn like seaweed wherever he looked.
Souls.
Holmes, never much of a believer, once more heard the word repeating in his thoughts as he looked down at the devastation.
Hours after the dams had broken, another message arrived on the screens of the NSA. Nothing else worked on those computers, but someone, somewhere, had somehow executed a series of keystrokes that produced the same video of a burning American flag that had appeared on tens of thousands of Aramco’s screens. This time the flames were accompanied by the deep, unaccented voice of a man saying, “You are destined for a new kind of D-Day. We call it Death Day, when your country is obliterated, when your flag will look like this.” The burning Stars and Stripes turned to cinders with an audible whoosh, followed by the sound of a powerful bomb exploding. The voice had continued:
“You should keep your eyes on Appalachia. We are not done with your most-exploited citizens yet. So do not count your dead, because more will die. There is nothing you can do to stop us. You must see that by now. But you may wish to watch what we can do with the worst of your poisonous policies.”
“Rhetoric,” Teresa McGivern had spit as she turned to him in his office hours ago. She, along with other top members of his team, advised him to disregard the additional warning about Appalachia, telling him bluntly, if coldly, “It’s coal-mining country. Hitting that area would be the domestic equivalent of bombing Afghanistan, turning rubble into more rubble.”
But Holmes had insisted on seeing the region before flying back. Maybe he’d spot something. Maybe he could actually take action to prevent yet another catastrophe.
Given the threat to the region — and the invitation for it to be observed — Holmes did agree to have two World War II P-51 Mustangs join the Enola Gay for this leg of the journey. More than seventy years ago, the Mustangs had driven the Luftwaffe from the skies and been hailed as the greatest dogfighters of the European Theater. But when Holmes spotted them off the wings of the Superfortress, he experienced a powerful sense of displacement, a feeling that he’d stepped into a time capsule that had swept him back to an earlier era, even as he was observing the wretched results of the most advanced warfare in human history.
And here I am in a museum piece.
His eyes lowered to coal country. By any reasonable measure, there was not much to see, mostly a region ravaged by the brute claws of the coal industry. Holmes considered himself a forthright defender of his nation, but he couldn’t abide the greed of a young generation of corporate titans. Below him was reason number one: mountaintop removal. Everywhere he looked he saw moonscapes looming, the once picturesque region so damaged that it was inconceivable conditions could be worsened by a hacker sitting at a distant computer. The despoilment was so extensive that it could be seen from space. He wondered if the enemy just wanted a Washington official to eyeball the destruction.