The words were slammed to the ground by a flash of orange, a burst of light so bright it eclipsed the midday sun. And in that instant before the shock wave struck him, Jonathan saw the Humvee rise up on one end, as if standing on tiptoes, and a soldier suspended in midair, and he thought, This is what it is like to see a nuclear weapon explode from two hundred meters away.
Jonathan blinked and opened his eyes. Stunned that he was alive, he rose to an elbow and watched as huge sections of the corrugated iron roof tumbled from the sky amid coils of black smoke and plummeted into the fire and debris.
“Stay down,” shouted Danni, knocking the elbow out from under him. “It’s a hellstorm. The whole place went up.”
Jonathan ignored her. He had seen something else, something besides the fire and the debris and the Humvee traveling end over end. Lifting his head, he stared across the tarmac, squinting to see into the distance.
There, beyond the flames and smoke and mayhem, two jeeps were driving rapidly away from the hangar. A fireball blossomed from the carnage, obscuring his view. When the flames receded and the smoke cleared, the jeeps had disappeared into the airport’s busy ground traffic.
65
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Frank Connor sat on the edge of a desk in the middle of the op center, jaw agape and not giving two shits about it, as he watched Hangar 18 disintegrate before his eyes. The screen blinked repeatedly, then went black, and he knew he’d lost the feed from Islamabad Airport.
“Get me hooked up with the on-scene commander,” he said to his telecom tech.
“Audio is intact, sir. We just lost the picture.”
“Well, get it back.”
The room was packed with Division’s senior staff. Victories were few and far between, and it was doubtful that any person present, Connor included, would ever again witness one of this magnitude. He had followed the operation from inception via a camera attached to the assault commander’s shoulder harness. He had witnessed the breaching of the hangar, the killing of Lord Balfour and Massoud Haq, and the subsequent firefight. And now he was having a very difficult time remaining calm as he waited for the boys from Delta Force to bring him his prize.
“Have you retrieved the package?” he asked the commander.
“No, sir. We can’t get near the place. The way that ammo is still cooking off, it’s a war zone. Right now I’ve got to look after my men. I’ve got two seriously injured and one KIA.”
The news sent a sobering chill through the assembled viewers.
“Keep me posted,” said Connor.
It had been a long day. Upon receiving Balfour’s files, he’d immediately run the batch through a keyword search. The results yielded a mountain of information about Balfour’s various businesses and over a hundred articles about cruise missiles and the American nuclear arsenal, but precious little about the nuts and bolts of his operation to retrieve the warhead from Tirich Mir.
After three hours of sifting through thousands of individual files and letters, Connor chanced upon an e-mail retrieved from Balfour’s trash addressed to Massoud Haq, agreeing upon a time and place for the exchange of the weapon. Again there was no overt mention of a WMD, just a cryptic and oft-repeated reference to a “carpet for sale.” This e-mail, coupled with inquiries to a team of Pakistani nuclear physicists about traveling to Blenheim to examine “an object that required their expertise,” was all Connor had to go on. Disappointingly, there had been no photographs or other concrete evidence of the weapon.
Connor looked to his side, where Peter Erskine stood, arms crossed, a glum expression aging his boyish features. “See, Pete, we did it. We took a risk and it paid off. If we’d sent this info upstairs, that WMD would be in Times Square by now and New York City would be a smoldering ruin.”
“I agree, Frank,” said Erskine. “It looks like your gamble paid off.”
“Gamble my ass. It was a calculated endeavor. It was us or nobody.”
“If you say so.”
“I do, Peter. I say that and more.”
Connor stood, keeping an eye on the screen. He would have enjoyed confronting Erskine about his treasonous activities, here in front of all his colleagues, but Connor hadn’t received sufficient proof. The NSA’s probe of Erskine’s telephone records showed nothing more interesting than a propensity to call his wife at any and all hours of the day, whether at home or at her work at the Justice Department. No unlisted numbers. No overseas calls to unknown individuals or organizations. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had yet to report back one way or the other about Erskine’s financial situation. For all his certainty about Erskine’s divided loyalties, Connor was hamstrung without hard evidence to back up his claims.
There was a commotion at the entry to the ops center. Connor saw his executive assistant, Lorena, speaking to three men he didn’t recognize and one he did: Thomas Sharp, national security adviser and a former deputy director of Division.
Sharp pushed past Lorena and made his way through the gawking crowd to Connor’s side. “You’ve gone too far this time,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “I’ve been on the horn with CENTCOM for the past hour. They were pretty damned curious about why I wasn’t in the loop on this op. You didn’t think they’d give me a call?”
“Frankly, Tom, I didn’t give a shit. If I’d wanted your opinion on the matter, I would have told you myself.”
Sharp rode out the insult like the professional he was. Tall, sleek, and cunning, he was the perfectly evolved bureaucratic animal. “Luckily,” he said coolly, and with a victor’s confidence, “Mr. Erskine felt differently.”
“Mr. Erskine?” Connor shot Erskine an incredulous glance, but Erskine refused to meet his gaze. “Peter called you?”
Sharp stepped closer, moving in for the kill. “You suspected Ashok Balfour Armitraj was trafficking a WMD-one of our own cruise missiles, no less-and you didn’t see fit to inform me, or anyone else, for that matter. Are you out of your mind?”
“It was time-critical intel. I didn’t tell you or the boys at the Pentagon because you would have screwed the pooch.”
“How long have you known about this?”
“Days. A week, tops.”
“Mr. Erskine said it’s been two weeks.”
“Two weeks since we began working the lead. If you want to get out the stopwatch, we only got confirmation that he has the thing a few hours ago.”
“So you have proof that this weapon exists?” asked Sharp.
“The proof is in that hangar.”
“Two weeks. And you sent in a rank amateur who hasn’t even received an official security clearance to do the job?”
“It’s that rank amateur who got us the information about where the exchange was taking place.”
“Who is this man Ransom, anyway?”
“A doctor we’ve used in the past to help us execute our operations.”
“A doctor? Well, I’m glad he’s had some formal training, even if it has nothing to do with covert activities. Where is he now? I’d like to speak with him.”
“I don’t know,” said Connor. “He tried to contact me several hours ago, but the connection was broken.”
Sharp took a step back, hands on his hips, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you’re not just off the reservation, you’ve left the entire planet. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Then don’t.” Connor turned away from Sharp, despising him. “Just shut up and wait with the rest of us.”
Five minutes passed, and Connor spoke to the commander again. “Can you get in there yet?”
“Not a chance. The whole damned hangar collapsed. There’s enough ammo to arm a Marine division in there, and all of it’s cooking off. It’s raining shrapnel out here. No one’s going near the place until it stops.”
“And Sultan Haq?”
“Sir, no one got out of there but my men. If Haq was in there when it went up, he’s in there now.”
Connor looked at Sharp. “The bomb is in there,” he said. “We had a visual confirmation.”