Bennett rolled into the small conference room where he and McCoy had spoken with the president and NSC just a few hours before. Inside, he pressed his back against the wall, then pivoted hard and thrust both arms — both guns — out the doorway. He fired two shots each into the firestorm, then pulled back. The figure scrambled left and let loose another burst of gunfire, Bennett waited, pivoted again, fired again, but the rounds hit a television console that exploded on impact. He pulled back again as more gunfire erupted into the conference room.
Bennett waited again, then popped his head back out the doorway to see where this guy was hiding. The roar of the fire was deafening. Bennett pulled back again. He was shaking uncontrollably. The smoke was so acrid, so pungent he could barely suck in enough air to fill his lungs. The heat was so intense his raw, exposed skin was beginning to blister and boil. In a few minutes, the entire control room would be completely engulfed by fire, and there was no way out. He couldn't leave this room without being blown away, and even if he could, he had nowhere to go.
He didn't dare shut his eyes, though they were burning with pain, but he tried to picture Erin McCoy. He had no idea where she was. He had no idea if she were dead or wounded. But he tried desperately to imagine what she'd be doing right now if she were still alive in this inferno. She'd be fighting and she'd be praying, that much he knew. With her last breaths, she'd be firing back, defending this place and these people with her life. And she'd be asking God to protect them all from this hell, and the one to follow.
He knew it. He knew it because she'd done it before. When he'd been shot by the Iraqi at Dr. Mordechai's house in Jerusalem, he'd been slipping in and out of consciousness, but he'd heard her praying. She was literally begging God to save his life and his soul. She talked to God like she knew Him, like He could hear her, like she expected to see the supernatural. It was completely out of the realm of his understanding and experience. Yet it gave him the strangest sense of peace he couldn't explain away.
But that was her God, not his. It was she who had no fear of evil, not him.
He could feel the evil in this room, and it terrified him. Something was stalking him. Something was hunting him. With the fires raging all around him, the temperature had been shooting past a hundred degrees, but Bennett's entire body felt chilled, as though an unseen presence, cold and dark, was moving through the room. It encircled him, surrounded him. It was poised to crush the life out of him. His body was trembling. He wanted to scream, but no sound would come. He wanted to run, but his legs would not move. He wanted to cry out to God to help him, to save him — but it was too late.
Bennett heard the burst of gunfire. He saw the grenade slam against the back wall of the conference and drop into the water on the floor. Then the room erupted. All of the oxygen was sucked out of the room. Flames tore into his eyes and consumed his flesh and in an instant, it was over.
TWENTY-THREE
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.
The senior controller snapped to attention.
He hadn't been drifting off. But after nine hours on patrol on an E-3
AWACS some 33,000 feet above the barren deserts of Iraq in the middle of
the night, he wasn't exactly in top form. His eyes were heavy, his breathing slow. He was on his umpteenth cup of bad coffee and starving for something decent to eat.
But all that suddenly changed. He had an unknown contact — it had to be hostile — and he snapped back to life. The controller held the headphones tight against his ears and scanned his instruments. He called over to his commander. He had a vehicle of some kind — no, two — wait, make that three, and they were moving west-northwest. "Can't be up to any good, can they?" "Not likely, sir."
It was a convoy all right, racing for cover at eighty, maybe ninety miles an hour.
"Breaking for the Syrian border, are they? I guess we'd better stop them." He punched a few buttons and opened up a secure channel with a pair of Apache helicopter gunships on patrol to the north.
"Mongoose One Five, Mongoose One Six, this is Sky Ranch, do you copy, over?"
"Sky Ranch, this is Mongoose One Five, copy you five by five." "Ditto that, Sky Ranch. This is Mongoose One Six. Tell me you've got some action, sir. Ain't nobody out there but the Eighty-second, the Third
ID and a whole lot of sand."
"If you hustle a little, this just may be your lucky night."
"Every night is lucky with you, sir."
The E-3 commander filled in the Apache pilots on what little he knew so far.
"Nobody gets across that border. That understood, boys? Nobody."
"You got it, sir. Mongoose One Five, inbound hot."
"Mongoose One Six, I'm right on his tail."
The Apaches broke out of their patrol pattern and raced south. Their rules of engagement didn't allow them to cross into Syrian airspace. That meant they didn't have much time. At most, they had three or four minutes to intercept whoever was in such a hurry to get out of the frying pan and into the fire. Who knew? This could be fun.
The large red-and-white bus pulled away from Dizengoff Center.
It was a miserable night to be out, still pouring rain. The storm hadn't let up a bit. The driver made a few stops along the way, then began making his way north toward the Tel Aviv University campus. It was the last run of the night, which made it the last run of his career. He'd been with the Israeli transit authority for exactly twenty-five years and one month and he was retiring to spend more time with his wife, his four grown children, and his six grandchildren. His two daughters still lived in Israel. One just got married. His two sons and their families lived in the United States — one in Los Angeles, the other in Seattle.
They were good kids, and smart. For that he and his wife were blessed. They'd worried themselves sick with how to pay for each of them to go to college. It wasn't easy to raise a family on a bus driver's wages, even if his wife worked part-time as a dental hygienist. But they needn't have worried at all. In the end, each of their kids had won full scholarships to MIT, Caltech, Cornell, and Princeton. They met good Jewish kids along the way, got married, and started having children of their own. Now, finally, it was time to enjoy them — all of them — and as soon as they were finished taking some vacation time of their own down in Eilat, they'd start their "world grandkids tour."
The bus was noisy and chaotic. It was packed with foreign students, mostly Americans from TAU's Overseas Student Program, all of whom had just stumbled out of a row of bars just now closing. Everyone was on break for a few weeks, celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas. How could they all be so drunk during the holidays? Didn't any of these kids have a religious bone in their body? Of course, thought the driver, his didn't either. Nor did he, for that matter. At least he wouldn't have to drive on New Year's Eve. Maybe he'd get drunk himself. One more stop and they'd be at the TAU campus, He could let all these kids off and he'd be free at last.
He pulled over to the curb and opened the door. A young woman got on, the only person dumb enough to be out in the rain this late at night, the driver noted. She couldn't have been more than twenty or twenty-one, maybe younger, and she wore the green fatigues of the Israeli Defense Forces, and a thick, padded army jacket. She was carrying an armful of packages and struggled up the steps. But she paid her fare quickly, nervously looked from side to side, presumably for a seat. There weren't many, the driver told her in Hebrew, maybe one or two in the back.