Al-Hazmi felt the blade of his own knife pierce the roof of his skull, could not believe that his own weapon had been used against him, and — just before the long blade plunged through his brain and finished everything — he marveled at the sacrifice his opponent had made, understanding that the pain the man must have experienced as he used his own damaged arm as a weapon must have been enormous.
And then al-Hazmi was dead, the irony of his own priceless, beloved janbiya having been used against him the last thought he ever had.
Cole rolled the dead body off the top of him, breathing hard with relief, pain making his vision swim.
The act of forcing the embedded dagger into hard bone had been excruciating, the impact pushing the janbiya back out of his forearm the other way for two painful inches.
Lying on his back, Cole regarded the knife in his arm with a mixture of hatred and gratitude, then rolled over onto his side and was sick.
He shook his head, realizing he had no time for self-pity, no time to look after himself; the suicide bombers were gone, and he needed to find a way of tracking them.
He pulled himself slowly to his feet and dragged himself to the bank of computer monitors to see what al-Hazmi had been watching.
And when he saw what it was, at last he smiled; the pain might just have been worth it after all.
Shaking off the pain, he pulled up the telephone handset that lay on the desk and placed a call to the White House.
He could only hope that there was still enough time.
6
Navarone woke up, eyes blinking rapidly.
He could feel the rain as it fell on him, felt that he was lying in a puddle, covered in water, freezing cold.
He looked around and saw flame everywhere, licking at the trees of the forest.
The forest.
He had made it to the forest before the bombs hit. He knew the camp would have been reduced to nothing, the soldiers along with it.
He rolled onto his side, looking for Xie, hands scrambling desperately in the puddle for purchase as he raised himself to a painful standing position, ears ringing and head pounding.
The flames from the camp illuminated the forest against the dark of the storm, and he saw bodies nearby. Some of them were children who hadn’t made it, their tiny bodies pummeled by the bombs’ shockwaves; others were North Korean soldiers who must have been racing after Navarone and Xie and not quite made it.
But where was Xie? It didn’t help that he was wearing a North Korean uniform.
Navarone’s memory of the blast, and of how he’d come to end up in the puddle, was incoherent; he had no real idea of what had happened between the time he’d sensed the approach of the bomb, and when he’d woken up.
He staggered from body to body, trying desperately to find Xie, careful to avoid looking for too long at the poor children who dotted the area, limbs askew and torsos broken.
He wasn’t concerned anymore about being found by the North Koreans from Camp 14 — they were all dead, he was sure of it. But he knew that the blast would bring reinforcements to the area, and he wanted to be long gone by then.
He wondered how long he’d been out of it, how far away his men were, if they’d made it to the emergency RV and the Black Hawks which would take them back to China.
‘Jake!’
Navarone heard the shout coming from the trees behind him and his head shot round, his muddled brain taking far longer than normal to identify Tony Devine, his old swim buddy Duke Kleiner stood right beside him. Kleiner was one of the men who had been setting explosives on the far side of the valley, and Navarone was relieved to see that he’d made it.
The men raced to him, embracing him, helping him to stand. ‘Holy fuck!’ Kleiner exclaimed. ‘We thought you’d be dead for sure! The size of that explosion, must have been a fucking nuke!’
Navarone shook his head, weary. ‘Bunker buster,’ he whispered, even his own voice hurting his ears. ‘The children. ?’ he asked.
Devine nodded. ‘We figured you must have gone back in there, you crazy son of a bitch,’ he said with half a smile. ‘Yeah, we got a whole load of kids now on the back end of the prisoners, they’ve hooked up with the others and they’re hightailing it into the mountains. Let’s just hope the reinforcements don’t get ‘em, although I guess there’s nothing we can do about that now.’
Navarone nodded his head in thought, then grabbed his friends by their combat vests, his eyes wild. ‘Xie!’ he said. ‘He was with me, we need to find him.’
Devine and Kleiner nodded and moved off immediately, searching through the rain-soaked forest for their Chinese colleague.
Not more than a minute had passed when Navarone heard Kleiner’s booming voice. ‘Over here!’ he shouted. ‘I got him!’
Navarone raced over, his face expectant. ‘Is he. ?’
But he saw Kleiner’s grim expression and knew the answer, even before his friend shook his big head. ‘I’m sorry Jake,’ he said sadly. ‘He’s gone.’
Navarone knelt by the body — bloody from the gunshot wounds, the bones broken from the shock of the blast — and wiped away the tears that started to form.
‘We’ve got to move, Jake,’ Devine told him. ‘Choppers are en route, and we’ve got no fucking idea when the Koreans are going to get here.’
Navarone nodded in understanding, then hefted the weight of the dead man back onto his shoulders.
‘Hey, let me get him,’ Kleiner said, ‘you need to rest, you look like shit.’
Navarone knew his friend was right, but shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I asked Xie to stay with me, and I’m gonna take him out of here. Understood?’
Navarone watched as both men nodded — he knew that they really did understand — and then marched past them with Xie on his back, leading them into the forest and to safety.
7
Jeb Richards had decided in the end to go to the NSC crisis meeting; he couldn’t face running away.
He just had to hope that his role would never be discovered. He would give everyone the full low-down on Abd al-Aziz Quraishi if that was what they wanted, but he would stop short of admitting to any involvement in the current situation. That would simply be suicidal, and Richards had no wish to die.
He had gambled, and it had backfired — simple.
But now there was the very serious threat that millions of Americans might wind up dead. These crisis talks were designed to provide a framework for emergency response if it came to that, and he was sorry to see that containing the situation was going to be far more problematic than even the worst-case scenarios from the NSC’s war games files.
A quarantine area had already been set up inside the White House, the president’s bunker transformed into an emergency laboratory in case anything happened nearby. If the government was affected, then the country was even more likely to descend into chaos and panic, with the horrific results that would follow.
He knew that the nation’s best scientific minds were working on the information which had been transmitted from North Korea regarding the weapon, people working around the clock on some way of defeating it, or providing an antidote; but so far, there had been no breakthrough.
Discussions raged on around the table about the best methods of handling the upcoming pandemic, but silence crept across the room as the secure telephone in front of General Olsen rang.
He grabbed it immediately. ‘Yes?’ A pause, then he looked at President Abrams. ‘It’s Commander Treyborne ma’am,’ he said. ‘He needs to speak with you urgently.’