She grabbed it again but this time by the grip. No heat. She didn’t know how to check it was loaded and there was no one around to ask — Riley and Jha were fighting their own battle. She picked it up with two trembling hands and pointed it at the man.
The man stopped moving toward her and looked at the gun wobbling at arms’ length in front of her. “Go easy,” he said, taking a gentle step closer. “You could really hurt someone with that thing.”
“That’s what I want to do,” she said. Her voice was wobbling nearly as much as the gun in her hands — and it was heavy. She had no idea how much one of these things weighed until a few seconds ago when she snatched it off the street.
“No, no… you are not a killer,” he said, quickly glancing over his shoulders to keep an eye on the battle raging across the market. “I can see by the way you are holding the gun — by the look in your eyes.” He smiled like a devil, extended his arm and opened his hand. He beckoned for the gun. “Give me it.”
“If you say so,” she said, and fired over and over again. The muzzle flashed and smoke and heat danced before her eyes as the rounds raked across the man’s chest and his white shirt exploded with blood.
Diana continued shooting the weapon until the sound of dry-firing filled her ears, and then she hurled the gun away with a look of disgust on her face. “Deus me ajude!” she whispered, and made the sign of the cross over her chest and face. She had never killed a person until today, and she never wanted to ever again.
As she watched the man’s smoking corpse cooling quietly on the street, she thought she was going to be sick, but then Riley scrambled in beside her under a hail of bullets tracing over his head. “All right, mate?”
“I…” she raised her hand at the dead body and directed the Australian’s attention to it. She was hoping for some kind of consolation, for him to say it was okay and that everything would be all right.
“You plugged the bastard!” he said. “Good job.”
Jha joined them when a savage burst of fire tore though a market stall to their right and blasted the stock to shreds, but it was aimed not at them but at Kuan’s men.
“What the fuck?” Riley said.
“That’s Singh!” Jha said. “One of Madan’s men — I recognize him from Banerjee’s intel briefing earlier.”
“He wants Kuan dead more than we do,” Riley said and reloaded his gun.
Diana hesitated for a moment and then picked up the gun again, tightening her fingers around the gun’s grip. Until today, she had never held a weapon like this before and didn’t want to hold this one either, but she understood the danger she might be in if she was cornered by Kuan’s men and she was unarmed.
“We have to find Kuan!” Jha said, pulling her palm mic up to her mouth. “Attention all units — finding Lee Kuan and the bomb is the priority!”
Then their world was rocked by a short-fuse grenade. It tumbled over the wall into the marketplace and was just too far for Riley or Jha to reach and throw back. With no time to get to safety, instinct drove them to their feet and they sprinted away from it, but the explosion blasted them into the air. Riley tried to shield Diana but she was hit hard, and when she fell back to Earth her head smashed into the side of the pavement.
Riley ran to her, clearing the smoke and dust from his eyes. “Jesus, Diana!”
“How is she?” Jha asked, businesslike.
“I don’t know yet!” he called over his shoulder. “I just hope she’s still alive.”
37
As the launch sequence fired up and his mission control team hurried into action, Rakesh Madan turned to his prisoners with a smug smile of satisfaction. He had won.
“It has all been very carefully calculated,” he said. “Yama II will detonate exactly two hundred miles above North Dakota, Yama III will detonate the same distance above Suchowola in Eastern Poland, and Yama IV will detonate at two hundred miles above Beijing.
“Can you even hear yourself?” Selena said, taking a step back.
Madan ignored her completely. “The first weapon will destroy every single piece of electronic equipment in all of the United States and Canada, the second will destroy everything in every country in Europe and also all the western oblasts in Russia including the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The final bomb will fry everything in China, Japan and the Koreas.”
Decker squeezed his hands into tight fists of rage. “For God’s sake, Madan, don’t do this!”
“It is incredible to think,” he said with pride, “that in a fraction of a second I will wipe out all the technological advances made by man since the dawn of the electric age… but not in India, of course.”
“This is beyond crazy,” Decker said. “You’ll return billions of people to the Dark Ages.”
“This is my plan,” Madan said bluntly. “As the Destroyer of Filth, manifested in this world by my rebirth in Shambhala, I will eradicate the plague of your existence, just as the Holy Scriptures command me.”
Selena leaned into Johar. “I’m guessing the Holy Scriptures are not telling him to do this.”
“No, they most certainly are not,” he said. “I think our Mr Madan is confused.”
“Confused?” Decker said. “He’s crazier than a sprayed fly.”
Selena watched as five kilometres away on the pad, scientists evacuated the gantry and began to descend in an elevator inside the launch tower. She now watched the rocket on the launch pad with terror etched on her face as Madan ordered the final ignition sequence.
This was really happening.
They had failed.
Umbilical hoses connecting various systems to the rocket fell away from the fuselage, the hold-down arms released, and the launch tower slowly retracted away giving the rocket the space it required to launch. “This is insane, Madan! Please, just consider what you’re doing!”
A man sitting at the desk below the viewing gallery spoke into his mic and his words reverberated around the cavernous control room. “T-minus ten seconds.”
“You can’t do this!” Selena cried out.
Five…
“She’s right, Madan!” Decker said.
Four…
Three…
Decker glanced to his right and saw the two security officers who were standing either side of the self-destruct panel. They were now staring at the launch on the screen, mesmerized by the sight of the rocket as it powered up to full throttle.
Two…
One…
The launch tower fell away sharply and the Svarga lifted up into the air ahead of an enormous fireball of ignited propellant.
“And we have lift off, sir,” the man said.
“Godspeed Svarga!” Madan said, a tear forming in his eye.
Madan was also hypnotised by the sight of his mighty Svarga as it tore through the sunset sky on its way into orbit hundreds of miles above India. After that it would be only a few minutes before the three satellites and their lethal cargoes left the Svarga and the lunium-infused Yama bombs were deployed over millions of unsuspecting people.
Decker felt the rage rise inside him. His loved ones were part of this, back in New York and California and Indiana. It was morning there now, and he imagined his family were maybe out in their back yards… the first they would know that anything was wrong was when their power went out.
They’d moan and laugh and think the lines had gone down in a storm, and then maybe a problem at the power station when the blackout lasted longer than usual. Then the fear would start to rise when they realized that along with no TV, internet or telephone, there was no 4G wi-fi either… not even an emergency broadcast on the TV.