"Look, peckerhead, I'm sorry if you find this unsettling." Peretz was still holding the Walther. "However, don't get any funny ideas." He laughed. "You know, it's almost poetic. For years now Israel has been the world's biggest secret nuclear power, but nobody ever had the balls to show our stuff. I'm about to become my nation's most daring ex-citizen."
He turned back to the radio. "You still there, asshole?"
There was no reply. The radio voice of Sabri Ramirez didn't come back.
"He's jumped." Peretz looked up and grinned a demented grin. "He's in the air. Perfect. Now he'll get to watch."
He plugged in the device he had been carrying, a UHF transmitter. Then he flicked it to transmit, checked the liquid crystals that told its frequency, and reached for a red switch.
"No!" Vance lunged, trying to seize the Walther as he shoved Peretz against the instruments. The crazy son of a bitch was actually going to do it.
Peretz was strong, with the hidden strength of the terminally mad, and after only a second, Vance realized he didn't have a chance; he was too beat up and exhausted. Bill Bates, too, was suffering from absolute fatigue, but he also leapt forward, grappling with Peretz and trying to seize his automatic.
With Vance as a distraction, Bates managed to turn the pistol upward. Peretz was still gripping it like a vise, however, and at that moment it discharged, on automatic, sending a spray of rounds across the ceiling. Vance tried to duck away, and as he did, Peretz kneed him, shoving him to the floor. Bates, however, still had a grip on his right wrist, holding the pistol out of range. Again it erupted, another hail of automatic fire, but as it did, Bates managed to shove Peretz against the desk, grabbing his right elbow and twisting.
The Walther came around, locked on full automatic, and caught Dore Peretz in the side of his face. As blood splattered across the room, Bates staggered back, while Peretz collapsed onto the desk with a scream, then twisted directly across the transmitter.
He was dead instantly. And as he crumpled to the floor, almost by magic, the background noise from the radio on the Sikorsky stopped, replaced by a sterile hiss.
"Thank God," Bates whispered, breathless, and reached to help Vance up. "Are you okay, Mike?"
"I think so," he mumbled, rising to one trembling knee. "At least we—"
The room shook as a blistering shock wave rolled over the island. Outside, the distant sky above the eastern Mediterranean turned bright as the midday sun. Fifteen thousand feet above the Aegean, a blinding whiteness appeared unlike anything a living Greek had ever seen.
Chapter Twenty
"My God," the President muttered, settling the red phone into its cradle. "They did it. The bastards detonated one of them. NSA says their SIGINT capabilities in the Med just went blank. An electromagnetic pulse."
"I don't believe it," Morton Davies declared. Sitting on the edge of his hard chair, the chief of staff looked as incredulous as he felt. "We're tracking their helicopter with one of the AWACS we brought up from Rijad. The minute they set down, we're going to pick them up, rescue Mannheim and any other hostages, and nail the bastards. They know they can't get away, so why…?"
"He'd threatened to nuke the island," Hansen went on, "but I assumed that had to be a bluff. Why in hell would he want to go ahead and do it? It didn't buy him anything at this stage."
Edward Briggs was on a blue phone at the other end of the Situation Room, receiving an intelligence update from Operations in the Pentagon. As he cradled the receiver, he looked down, not sure how to tell Johan Hansen what he had just learned. Mannheim.
"What's the matter, Ed? I don't like that look. What did—?"
"Mr. President." He seemed barely able to form the words. "Our people just got a better handle on… It wasn't Andikythera."
"What?" Hansen jerked his head around, puzzlement in his deep eyes. "What do you mean? Good Christ, not Souda Bay! Surely they didn't—"
"The detonation. Our AWACS flying out of southern Turkey monitored it at around fifteen thousand feet. As best they can tell. They still—"
"What!"
“They say it looked to be about seventy miles out over the eastern Med, in the direction of Cypress. Which is exactly where they were tracking—"
"You mean…" His voice trailed off.
'That's right," Briggs said finally. "They think it was the helicopter. The one they were flying out. An old Sikorsky S-61 series, we believe. It—"
"What are you saying?" Hansen found himself refusing to believe it. 'That those idiots nuked themselves?" What the hell was the Pentagon talking about?… My God. Isaac was—
"Doesn't exactly figure, does it?" Briggs nodded lamely. “The electromagnetic pulse knocked out all our non-hardened surveillance electronics in the region, but Souda's intel section was hard-wired into our backup SAT-NET and they claim they triangulated it. Everything's sketchy, but that seems to be what happened."
"I can't believe it," Hansen said, running his hands over his face. They were trembling. “The whole situation must have gotten away from him. That's… the only way. It must have been a macabre accident. Christ!"
"A damned ghastly one," Briggs agreed. "But I think you're right."
"It's the only explanation that makes any sense," Hansen went on. "He probably decided to take one of the bombs with him, hoping to try this again, and something went haywire." He suddenly tried a sad smile. "You know, I warned that son of a bitch he didn't know what he was doing, that he'd probably end up blowing himself up. Truthfully, I didn't really think it would actually happen, though." He turned back to Briggs. "The Pakistanis said the weapons they had were about ten or fifteen kilotons. How big is that, Ed, in English?"
"Okay," Briggs said, pausing for effect, "that would be like a medium-sized tactical, I guess." Truthfully he wasn't exactly sure.
"Well," Hansen mused, "I'm still convinced they intended it for Souda Bay. And if they'd succeeded… but as it stands, I guess it was more like a small upper-atmosphere nuclear test. A tactical nuke, you say? The very term is an obscenity. But, you know, NATO had those all over Germany not so long ago, on the sick assumption that the German people couldn't wait to nuke their own cities." After a long moment, during which a thoughtful silence held the room, Hansen continued. "Tell me, Ed. What kind of impact would a weapon like that actually have at that altitude?"
"My guess is the effects will be reasonably contained." He was doing some quick mental calculus. "Okay, if you were directly under it, you'd have been about three miles away, so you'd have taken a shock wave that would have knocked out windows. And maybe produced some flash burns. But we had the region cleared of civilian traffic, so maybe we're okay on that score."
"What about fallout?" Hansen asked.
"Well, at that altitude the radioactive contamination should be mostly trapped in the upper atmosphere and take several days to start settling. By that time, it'll probably be diluted to the point it'll be reasonably minimal. Nothing like Chernobyl. Hell, I don't know the numbers, Mr. President, but then again he was over some fairly open waters. Besides, like I said, we had a quarantine on all civilian air and sea traffic — guess we see now what a good idea that was — so maybe we can be optimistic."
"The bloody fools just committed hara-kiri, and took Isaac with them." He found himself thinking about the warning his aged father had given him that the job of President would age him half a lifetime in four years. He now felt it had happened in two days.
"There's more," Morton Davies said, clicking off a third phone and glancing at the computerized map now being projected on the giant screen at the end of the room. "SatCom's laser-powered rocket did go up. That's all they know for certain, but they think it's going into orbit. Whatever the hell that means."