The incoming group reached the end of the path, where it joined the common area around the steps.
Kaseke checked his watch. Less than a minute now.
A hundred yards from where he’d planted the mine, he could not see that his plan was unraveling, and it would only be later, after he was captured, that the police would explain how he’d failed.
For the past five hours, as the Claymore sat first in the rain and then in the early morning sun, the candle wax Kaseke had used to cement the rat-poison pellets to the ball bearings and their resin base began to crack. This alone wouldn’t have interfered with the mine’s function, but what Kaseke didn’t know was that this particular Claymore mine and eight others were more than two decades old and had spent the last eight years improperly stored either in a wooden box in a damp cave or buried in the sun-baked soil of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province.
As the candle wax cracked inside the casing, the resin, far past its effective lifespan and as brittle as a fortune cookie, also cracked, but only a few millimeters. It was enough, however, to loosen the sockets in which fourteen of the ball bearings rested. With overlapping metallic tinks that no one on the church steps would hear over the babble of voices, the fourteen ball bearings broke free and dropped against the shell’s lower casing. If not for ten hours of rain that had fallen since the previous afternoon, this, too, wouldn’t have hindered the mine’s detonation, but the legs holding it upright in the soil, now softened to a mudlike consistency, succumbed to the weight of the fallen ball bearings. At 8:49:36, twenty-four seconds before detonation, Kaseke’s carefully aimed Claymore tipped forward and came to a rest at a forty-five-degree angle, half its face pointing at the dirt, the other half pointing at the concrete.
When she would awake later that day in the hospital, Katie Alvey’s first thoughts would be, My husband’s dead and I think my children are alive, followed by the realization that dumb luck probably played a big part in both those outcomes.
As Kaseke’s mine was tipping forward, the Alvey family mounted the front steps along with dozens of other late arrivals and started upward. Hank walked closest to the hedges bordering the steps, with Josh and Amanda to his left, then Katie and Jeremy, who was holding his mom’s hand.
Witnesses would later describe the explosion as a whoosh followed by the hailstorm from hell. Katie neither saw nor heard these things but had for some reason turned her head to look at Hank when the Claymore went off. Of the seven hundred bearings inside the mine, four hundred or so struck the dirt, cratering the bed and taking a yard-wide chunk out of the concrete. The remainder of the bearings either skittered along the concrete, punching through feet and calves, shattering bones and ripping away whole chunks of flesh, or bounced off the concrete and tore across the steps at various angles and trajectories. Those unlucky enough to be struck by these were either killed instantly or suffered horrific limb injuries. Hank Alvey, his body protecting his oldest boy and his daughter, caught a ball bearing beneath the left jaw, effectively cleaving his head into three portions. Katie saw this but had no time to react, no time to grab any of the children or to shield Jeremy with her body. As it turned out, none of it had been necessary.
Katie stood blinking, her ears ringing and her brain failing to immediately register the carnage around her. On either side of her, Josh, Jeremy, and Amanda were similarly stunned, but that passed quickly, and then the tears started to flow. The steps were awash in blood and littered with arms and legs and unidentifiable chunks of ... who? She recognized no one. Dozens of people lay strewn across the concrete. Some weren’t moving, while others writhed in pain or tried to crawl away or toward loved ones, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.
Then Katie’s ears cleared and she heard the screaming. And sirens.
86
AFTER MAKING SURE all the drapes were closed, they turned on lights around the house, then Jack called Pasternak and had him pull the van into the garage. The doctor walked through the kitchen door and stopped short. “Is that him?”
Jack said, “No, this is Tariq, the Emir’s bodyguard.”
In fact, it had taken ten minutes of talking to simply get Tariq to admit his own name. Beyond that, he’d said nothing. Chavez and Domingo were tossing the rest of the house, but so far it had all the individuality of a builder’s model home. There were no personal touches.
“It appears we just missed the man himself,” Jack said. “Go have a seat in the living room, Doc. We’ll call you.” He joined Clark at the table across from Tariq. They’d bound his hands and ankles with duct tape, then taped his feet to the kitchen-table leg.
“What happened to your hands?” Clark asked.
Tariq took them off the table and put them in his lap. “A fire.”
“I assumed that. How specifically?”
“You invade my home, drag me from my bed. You are not the police. Who are you; what do you want?”
“You know why we’re here,” Jack said. “When did he leave?”
“Who? I live here alone.”
“Shasif Hadi tells us a different story,” Clark said.
At the mention of Hadi’s name, Tariq’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, then went back to normal.
“Aren’t you interested in how we found Hadi?” Jack asked. “We picked him up in Rio de Janeiro. After the attack on the Paulinia refinery, he was ordered by the Emir to break contact with Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed. The Emir had told him the others had betrayed him.”
“That’s not—” Tariq stopped in mid-sentence.
Clark said, “Not true? You’re right. The truth is we broke your crypto. All those onetime pads embedded in the website banners ... We broke it, then uploaded a message to Hadi’s storage site of the day, and sent him on the run—right into our laps.” Clark looked at Jack. “It took, what, ten minutes for him to break?”
“Not even. Here’s another piece of news, Tariq: The cargo ship Losan—we put a stop to that, too. The Salim kids are dead, and the Newport News Fire Department is offloading the propane tanks as we speak.”
This time, Tariq couldn’t help himself. “You’re lying!”
“About what part?” Clark asked. “Hadi or Losan?”
“Both.”
“So you admit who you are and that you know the Emir.”
Tariq clasped his hands on the table before him and stared straight ahead.
From the hallway, Ding called, “John, you’re gonna want to see this.”
Clark and Jack found Ding and Dominic in the master bedroom. Sitting atop a chest of drawers was a laptop. Ding said, “We found it in the nightstand.” He hit the return key.
After a few moments, the Emir’s face appeared on the screen. The backdrop was the living room couch and wall. “My name is Saif Rahman Yasin. I am also known as the Emir, and I am the commander of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. I speak to you today as a devout Muslim and a humble servant and soldier of Allah. By now the world has already witnessed the vengeance of Allah visited upon the infidel nation of America. ...”
Clark tapped the return button, stopping the video. “That’s the sonofabitch’s last testament.”
Jack asked, “What’s the date on this?”
“Yesterday,” Dominic answered.
“Christ.”
They followed Clark down the hall and back to the dining nook. Clark sat down at the table while everyone else hung back.
“Tariq.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me where Saif is and what he’s doing. Before you answer, you need to understand the ground rule: You get one chance to answer, and then—”
Tariq stared ahead. “You’re going to kill me? Go ahead; I do not fear death. I’ll be welcomed into paradise as a—”
“We’re not going to kill you, Tariq, but before another hour passes, you’re going to wish you were.”
Tariq turned and looked at Clark. “I’m not afraid.”
Clark regarded him solemnly for a few moments, an
d then, without taking his eyes off Tariq, said over his shoulder to Ding, “Go fill up the bathtub.”
Clark had never quite understood the debate over whether or not waterboarding was torture. Anyone who’d either been through it or seen it firsthand knew that it was torture. It got results, the validity of which could be ascertained only by a particularly astute interrogator or subsequent intelligence gathering. Clark was blessed with the former attribute but lacked the time and resources for the latter.
Eight minutes, a saturated towel, and exactly thirty-two ounces of water was all it took. Satisfied, Clark rose from his crouched position over the barely conscious and sputtering Tariq and turned to Ding, who stood, arms folded, as he leaned against the bathroom wall.
“Pull the plug,” Clark ordered. “Get him cleaned up and locked down.”
“You buy it, John?”
“Yeah.” Clark checked his watch. “Either way, we’re outta time.”
87
CLARK STRODE back into the kitchen. “Jack, grab the phone book. We need the closest airfield. Commercial helicopter tours will be our best bet.”
“On it.”
“Dom, you’ll drive. Doctor, are you comfortable staying here with him?” Ding was coming down the hall, dragging Tariq behind him. “We’ll be back for you.”
“Sure.”
Jack called, “Paragon Air Helicopter Tours on Highway Two-fifteen. Three miles from here.”
They were out the door in thirty seconds and on the highway in two minutes. Clark used the sat phone to dial The Campus. Rick Bell answered, and Clark said, “I need you, Gerry, and Sam on conference call right now.”
“Hold on.”
Thirty seconds passed. Hendley came on the line. “What’ve you got, John?”
“I’ve got Jack on the line, too. Our guy is gone, left yesterday. A bodyguard was still at the house. They’ve got a bomb, Gerry, probably something below ten kilotons but big enough for what they’ve got planned.”
“Wait, back up? Is this credible?”
“I believe it is. We have to assume it is.”
“Where’d they get it?”
“No idea. Our guy didn’t have that info.”
“Okay, what else?”
“The Emir’s meeting with six other men about a hundred miles north of here. The bodyguard didn’t have the nuts-and-bolts details, but their target is Yucca Mountain.”
“As in the nuclear waste repository?”
“Yep.”
“It’s not even open yet. There’s nothing there.”
“There’s groundwater,” Jack replied.
“Come again?”
“Think of it as an underground nuclear test. Detonate a nuke under five thousand feet of rock and the shock wave goes straight down. The engineers there have already dug storage tunnels down to a thousand feet. The water table is five hundred feet below that. It’s a geological sieve,” Jack explained. “All the radiation from a nuke goes straight down into the aquifers, then to the rest of the southwest. Maybe all the way to the West Coast. We’re talking about thousands of square miles poisoned for the next ten thousand years.”
There was silence on The Campus end. Then Granger said, “Where the hell did they get this?”
Clark answered. “It’s homemade—probably a simple gun-barrel setup: shoot one chunk of uranium called a ‘slug’ into a second, larger chunk called a ‘pit’ and you’ve got critical mass.”
“And the material? Where’d they get that?”
“Not sure. The bodyguard said one of the Emir’s captains was in Russia up until a couple weeks ago.”
Hendley said, “You’re the man on the ground, John. What do you wanna do?”
“We’re handicapped, Gerry. Anybody we call isn’t going to just send in the cavalry. There’ll be a hundred questions before anybody moves: Who are we, where’d we get the info, what’s our proof. ... You know how it’ll go.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re about two minutes away from an airstrip. We’re gonna see if we can borrow a helo. Depending on what we get, we could be over Yucca in thirty minutes. If we get there first, we’ll hold the fort until you can get somebody to listen.”
“And if you get there second?”
“Not even gonna think about it. I’ll call you when we’re airborne.”
Ninety miles north of Las Vegas, on Death Valley’s Highway 95, the Emir slowed his car and crossed over the median onto the shoulder. The dirt tract was barely perceptible through a berm of cactus scrub, but he picked his way down into a shallow spot and soon found himself in a pair of tire ruts. Through his windshield, a half-mile away, the Skeleton Hills rose from the barren terrain like mountains of the moon.
The tract kept descending, then swung north and began running parallel to a shallow canyon. A quarter-mile away, he saw a car parked. As he drew nearer, he saw it was a Subaru. Musa was standing beside the driver’s door. The Emir slowed beside him, and he climbed in. They embraced. “Good to see you, brother,” Musa said.
“And you, old friend. Are they here?”
“Yes, just up ahead.”
“And the device?”
“Already loaded aboard.”
The Emir followed Musa’s directions another half-mile down the tract to where it curved around a low hill. Frank Weaver’s flatbed was parked, nose facing the road. The GA-4 cask glinted in the sun. Three men were standing around near the driver’s door.
The Emir and Musa got out and walked over. “My team from Russia,” Musa said. “Numair, Fawwaz, and Idris.”
The Emir nodded to each man in turn. “You’ve all done well. Allah will smile on you all.” The Emir checked his watch. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”
The fit was tight, but they all managed to squeeze into the truck cab. Fawwaz, who bore the closest resemblance to Frank Weaver, drove. Five minutes later, they were back on the highway and heading north.
A sign on the shoulder said, HIGHWAY 373—6 MILES.
Chavez pulled into the parking lot of Paragon Air. Through the fence they could see two helicopters—both Eurocopter EC-130s—sitting on the tarmac. Chavez pulled up to the office, and Clark climbed out with Jack. “Ding, circle around to the maintenance gate. We’ll let you in.”
Clark and Jack walked into the office. A mid-sixties woman with a red beehive hairdo was sitting behind the counter. To the right through a half-glass door was the maintenance area.
“Morning,” Clark said.
“Morning yourself. How can I help you?”
“Wondering if you’ve got a pilot around I could talk to.”
“Maybe something I can help you with. Are you interested in a tour?”
“No, actually, I’ve got a technical question about the EC-130’s rotational bearing manifold. My son here is studying avionics, and it’d be a big help if he could see one up close.”
“Just a second, I’ll see if Marty’s got a minute.”
She picked up the phone, spoke for minute, then said, “He’ll be right up.”
Clark and Jack wandered closer to the door. A man in gray coveralls walked up and opened the door. Clark stuck out his hand. “Hey Marty! Steve Barnes. This is my son, Jimmy. ...” As Clark spoke, he stepped through the door, backing Marty along. “Gotta question about the EC-130.”
Only two other people were visible in the hangar, both at the far end, near a Cessna.
“Sure,” Marty replied. “But we should probably step back inside. ...”
Clark lifted his shirttail and showed Marty the butt of his Glock.
“... Oh, shit, hey ...”
“Relax,” Clark said. “We just want to borrow a helicopter.”
“Huh?”
“And we want you to fly it.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Nope. You’re gonna help us or I’m going to shoot you in the leg and take your helicopter anyway. Go along, take us where we need to go, and you’ll be back here in an hour. Say yes.”
“Yes.”
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“Which bird is prepped?”
“Well, none—”
“Don’t lie to me, Marty. It’s a weekend. Prime time for tours and lessons.”
“Okay. That one.” Marty pointed.
“Go tell your receptionist you’re going for a quick spin. Get hinky and I’ll shoot you in the ass.”
Marty opened the door, poked his head through, and did as he was asked.
Jack whispered to Clark, “What’s a rotational bearing manifold?”
“No idea.”
Marty turned back from the door and Jack asked, “Where’re the controls for the side gate?”
“On the outside wall, opposite end of the hangar.”
Jack started walking that way. Clark smiled at Marty. “Let’s go.”
“What’s this all about?” Marty asked as they headed for the EC-130. “What’re we doing?”
“You’re saving the day, Marty.”
As they neared the helo, Jack, Chavez, and Dominic came around the corner of the hangar and walked up. They got in the back while Clark took the front passenger seat. Marty climbed in, buckled up, and began preflighting.
“Where’re we going?” he asked.
Jack said, “Northwest. When you reach Highway Ninety-five and Three seventy-three, head northeast.” He gave Marty the latitude and longitude.
“That’s restricted airspace, man,” Marty said. “That’s Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site. We can’t—”
“Sure we can.”
They were airborne eight minutes later. Clark called Hendley and said, “We’re up.”
“Rick Bell’s on the line, too. More shoes are dropping. CNN, MSNBC, Fox are all over it. An explosion of some kind at a church in Waterloo, Iowa; they’re talking about fifty or sixty dead, maybe twice that many wounded. Something in Springfield, Missouri, too. A local news station was there, covering a statue unveiling; it looked like goddamned Omaha Beach. Some town in Nebraska ... Brady ... Someone walked into a high school swim meet and rolled grenades beneath the bleachers. Christ almighty.”