Returning to the end of the runway, Bourne traced a route across the full width of it. In the back of his mind he was furiously working on a plan. They needed to gain access to the underground facility, get to Fadi before his men found the prisoners. If there was any chance that one of them was Lindros…
Once again, he scanned the IKONOS topographic readout, compared it with the visual survey he’d taken on his way in. A facility enriching uranium required water—a lot of it. Which was where that deeply shadowed, rock-strewn ravine came in. He’d noted it from the air, and it had stayed in his mind like a beacon.
What he was considering might work, but he knew Feyd al-Saoud wasn’t going to like it. And if he couldn’t sell his friend on the plan, it wasn’t going to work. It might not work even with the security chief’s cooperation, but he didn’t see any viable alternative.
Reaching the near side of the runway, he once again knelt down, scrutinizing the edge. Then he said to Abdullah, “Can you help me with this?”
Together Bourne and Abdullah heaved up, curling their fingertips around the end. With a titanic effort, they began to peel the surface back.
“What we have here,” Bourne said, “is a strip of landing material.”
Feyd al-Saoud came forward, bending his body from the waist. He was looking at the material, which was perhaps six centimeters thick and the precise color and texture of tarmac. Clearly, it wasn’t tarmac. What it was, exactly, there was no way of telling. Not that it mattered in the least. What was of intense interest to them, what they were all studying with a fierce concentration of joy and triumph, was what lay beneath the peeled-back layer.
A metal hatch, large as the door of a two-car garage, set flush with the ground.
Thirty-four
WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” the lead terrorist shouted. He was clearly agitated, which meant he was on hair-trigger alert.
“We’ve been sent to the—”
“Turn into the light! You’re not one of us! Put your weapons down now!”
At once Lindros raised his hands. Having a semiautomatic rifle leveled at you was a threat that needed to be taken very seriously.
“Don’t shoot!” he said in Arabic. “Don’t shoot!” To Katya, he muttered, “Walk in front of me. Do exactly as I say. And for God’s sake, whatever happens, keep your hands in the air.”
They began to walk toward the front man, who was in a semi-crouch. While keeping him in the periphery of his vision, Lindros watched the cover man farther down the corridor. At this moment, he was the real problem.
“Halt!” the terrorist said when they were several paces from him. “Turn around!”
Katya obeyed. As she was turning, Lindros drew out a bottle of alcohol he’d taken from the infirmary, opened the top, and threw the contents in the terrorist’s face.
“Down!” he shouted.
Lindros leapt over Katya as she dropped to the floor. Lunging for the recoiled terrorist, he grabbed his semiautomatic and pressed the trigger, spraying the corridor with bullets. Several struck the cover man in the arm and leg, spinning him back against a wall. He returned fire, but his aim was wild. With a short, precise burst, Lindros brought him down.
“Come on!”
He slammed the butt of the semiautomatic into the base of the skull of the terrorist, still clawing at his face, then went roughly through his clothes for other weapons. He found a handgun and a thick-bladed knife. With Katya behind him he sprinted down the corridor, snatched up the cover man’s semiautomatic, handed it to Katya.
They made their way to the communications room, which according to Katya was around to the left at the far end of the corridor.
Two men were inside, busy at their equipment. Lindros stepped up behind the one on the right, put his hand under his chin, and, as shocked tension came into the frame, quickly brought his head up and back, slashing his throat. As the second man turned, coming up out of his seat, Lindros threw the knife into his chest. With a small gurgle, he arched backward, his lungs already filling up with blood. Even as he slid, lifeless, onto the floor, Lindros took his seat, began to work the communications system.
“Don’t just stand there whimpering,” he ordered. “Guard the door. Shoot at anything that moves, and keep shooting till it stops!”
Feyd al-Saoud’s earpiece crackled. He put a hand up to it to press it more firmly into his ear canal. In a moment, he nodded. “I understand.” To Bourne, he said, “We must return to the command center. At once.”
The three men covered the several hundred meters to the vehicle in very little time. Inside, they found the communications officer gesticulating wildly. When he saw them, he ripped off his headphone and pressed a cup to his left ear, so he could hear them and what was coming out of the earphones simultaneously.
“We’re receiving a signal from inside the facility,” he said in rapid Arabic. “The man says his name is Martin Lindros. He says that—”
Lunging, Bourne ripped the headphones out of his hand, slipped them on.
“Martin?” he said into the mike. “Martin, it’s Bourne.”
“Jason… are alive?”
“Very much so.”
“Fadi thinks… dead.”
“Just what I want him to think.”
“… are you now?”
“Right here, above you.”
… God. I’m here with a woman named Katya.”
“Katya Veintrop?”
There came a short bark that might have been a laugh, during which Fadi, monitoring the conversation via the auxiliary comm system, signed to Abbud ibn Aziz. Fadi resumed listening, his heart like a trip-hammer. Bourne was alive! Alive and here! O, sweet revenge. What could be better?
“I should have known.”
“Martin, what’s… situation?”
“… hostiles down. We’re well armed. So far, so good.”
Abbud ibn Aziz, Fadi saw, was already ordering the men to the comm room.
“Martin, listen… coming in after you.”
“We have to find a safer place right now.”
“… kay, but… hold on until I get in.”
“Will do.”
“Martin, headquarters isn’t… without you. Maddy keeps asking… haven’t forgotten her, have you?”
“Maddy? How could I forget her.”
“Right. Hang on. Out.”
Fadi touched the wireless transceiver in his right ear that connected him with his team leaders. “Now we know the fate of the Sovereign,” he said to Abbud ibn Aziz. “Bourne’s presence here explains the communication I’ve had from our people in Riyadh. Two jets were scrambled over northern Iran when a plane answering the Sovereign’s signature failed to give the flyover code. The two fighters haven’t been heard from since.”
Fadi strode into the corridor. “All of which means that Bourne somehow commandeered the flight. We must assume that Bourne has killed both Muta ibn Aziz and the pilot.”
He embraced his companion. “Courage, my friend. Your brother died a martyr—in the way we all wish to die. He is a hero.”
Abbud ibn Aziz nodded soberly. “I will miss him.” He kissed Fadi on both cheeks. “The contingency plan has been activated,” he said. “When the plane failed to check in, I myself loaded the nuclear device into the helicopter. The second jet is standing by in Mazar-i-Sharif. I have sent the signal to your brother. Now that you cannot fly directly from here, it’s imperative that you get under way immediately. The deadline comes in precisely twelve hours, when Karim al-Jamil ignites the C-Four charges.”
“What you say is true enough. But I cannot ignore the fact that Bourne is alive. He’s here now.”
“Leave. I’ll take care of Bourne. You have a far more important agenda—”
A blind rage boiled through Fadi. “Do you imagine that I can allow the cold-blooded murder of my sister to go unavenged? Bourne must die by my hands—my hands, do you understand?”
“Of course, yes.”
Abbud ibn Aziz felt a violent
fizzing in his brain, a sense that his worst fears were being confirmed: There was a disconnect in Fadi between Dujja’s mission and the private revenge of him and his brother. That he, Abbud ibn Aziz, was at the heart of this twisted course of events had played havoc with his mind for some time. For this he blamed Muta ibn Aziz, whose voice he still heard, admonishing him for the lie he had built around Sarah ibn Ashef’s death.
He had no sense of the disconnect inside himself. His lack of reaction to the likelihood of his brother’s death was due to the crisis of the moment. It was his responsibility, he kept telling himself like a mantra, to focus Fadi on the endgame, the nuclear card that Dujja—and only Dujja, of all terrorist organizations—was able to play. The amount of time, energy, money, and connections they had all spent on this one, single outcome was incalculable. To have it put in jeopardy now by Fadi’s obsessive need for personal revenge was intolerable.
A sudden hail of semiautomatic gunfire from the interior of the facility brought them to an abrupt halt.
“Lindros!” Fadi listened to the crackle of his in-ear headset. “Six more men down.” He ground his teeth in fury. “See to him and Veintrop’s wife.”
But instead of heading back, Abbud ibn Aziz sprinted toward the entrance ramp. If he couldn’t talk Fadi out of his madness, he needed to take the cause of the madness away. He needed to find Jason Bourne and kill him.
An there they be,” Tyrone said.
He and Soraya watched as a white Chevy cruised by the Ford for the second time. Near the far corner of the block it stopped and double-parked. Two men got out. To Tyrone, they looked nearly identical in face and physique to the Arabs he’d cooked. This pair was younger, however. Both wore Phat Farm clothes.
One hung back, probing between his teeth with a toothpick, while the other ambled over to the Ford. He took a thin, flat strip of metal out of his pocket. Standing very close to the black vehicle, he jammed it down between the driver’s window and the outer metal panel. Two or three quick jabs of the strip unlocked the door. In one fluid motion he opened it and slid behind the wheel.
“Aight,” Tyrone said. “Time to get our grind on.”
Someone’s coming,” Katya said.
Lindros sprinted, took her by the hand, and raced out of the comm room. He could hear shouts from behind.
“Go on,” he urged her. “Wait for me around the corner.”
“What are you doing? Why stop?”
“Jason gave me a coded signal. That means two things. One, that he felt certain our conversation was being monitored. Two, that he has a specific plan in mind. I’ve got to give him a chance to get in here,” he said. “What he needs most now is a diversion.”
She nodded, her eyes wide with fear. When she had disappeared, Lindros turned and saw the first terrorist appear. He suppressed his desire to shoot, instead waiting, still as death. When the group of them were in the corridor, creeping toward the comm room, he opened fire, mowing them down beneath a blistering fusillade.
Then, before more of them could appear, he turned, raced after Katya. The expression of relief when she saw him was palpable.
“Where will we go now?” she asked as they ran toward a flight of rough concrete stairs.
“Away from where they’re searching,” Lindros said.
They had reached the lower level, where all the laboratories and surgeries were laid out in a neat grid. Each lab, he saw, was double-walled, and there were two sets of thick doors between the surgeries and the nuclear workshops.
“We have to find a place to hide.”
Because it was so well hidden, the hatch had no need of a lock.
Bourne stood alone, at the edge of the hatch. Of course, Feyd al-Saoud had protested vehemently, but in the end he came around to Bourne’s point of view. Frankly, Bourne didn’t see that he had any choice. A full frontal assault with his men would be tantamount to suicide. But following Bourne’s plan—well, then there was a chance.
The hatch was perfectly smooth. There were no handles or any other visible means of opening it. For vehicles to enter and exit, then, there must be an electric-powered opener that could be activated remotely from the vehicles themselves. That meant that there must be a receiver located on or near the hatch.
It took him a few short moments to find the junction box housing the receiver. Pulling off its cover, he traced the circuits and hot-wired the one he wanted. Hydraulics were involved. The hatch opened upward smoothly and silently, revealing an oil-stained concrete ramp—the very ramp, he was certain, down which those vehicles caught in the IKONOS satellite eye had disappeared. He swung the semiautomatic off his shoulder, holding it at the ready as he began to descend.
Illumination from reflected daylight soon petered out, leaving him in twilight. There was no good way to go about this, he knew. Assuming Fadi had been monitoring his communications with Martin, somewhere near the end of the ramp a trap was waiting for him.
He heard the gunfire then, and knew that Lindros had been able to create a diversion. He threw himself forward onto the concrete then curled into a ball, rolling the rest of the way down the ramp.
Fetching up against a wall, he lifted the semiautomatic as he scanned the low-lit corridor yawning in front of him. He saw no one, no motion whatsoever. This did not necessarily surprise him, but it did make him warier than ever.
He moved forward, crouched against the wall. Ahead, low-watt electric lightbulbs in niches spaced along both walls provided enough illumination for him to make out the layout of this part of the facility.
Immediately to his right, the corridor branched into the entrance to the underground parking area. Dimly, he could make out the silhouette of a number of all-terrain vehicles parked in neat rows, military-fashion. Dead ahead was a slightly narrower corridor that seemed to run down the center of the facility.
As he continued to move forward, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. A slight metallic glint, as of a weapon. He veered to his right, diving into the parking lot.
At once a spray of bullets sent chips of the concrete floor into his cheek. The fire was coming from inside the lot. Headlights came on, dazzling him into immobility. At the same time, an engine gave a deep, throaty cough and, with a screech of tires, one of the all-terrain vehicles came hurtling at him.
Thirty-five
BOURNE RAN STRAIGHT at the oncoming vehicle, leapt off his feet, and landed on its hood. Using a combination of the vehicle’s momentum and his own strength, he lowered his shoulder as his entire body was driven into the windshield.
The glass shattered from the force, and Bourne used his leading elbow and forearm to sweep aside the remaining shards. Scrambling through the rent, he found himself in the seat next to a man who, given his close facial similarity to Muta ibn Aziz, could only be his brother, Abbud.
Abbud ibn Aziz had a gun at the ready, but Bourne lunged at the wheel, turning it hard to the right. Centrifugal force slammed his body into the terrorist’s. The gun fired, deafening them both, but the bullet went awry, embedding itself in the doorpost. Abbud ibn Aziz squeezed off two more shots before the vehicle slammed into the concrete wall.
Bourne, who had prepared for the impact by willing his body to go completely slack, was slammed forward, then back against the seat. Beside him, Abbud ibn Aziz smashed into the top of the steering wheel, causing a great bloody gash in his forehead as well as a fracture in the bone over his right eye.
Wresting the gun from his slack fingers, Bourne slapped him hard across the cheek. He knew he had little time, but he was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of Sarah ibn Ashef’s death.
“What happened that night in Odessa, Abbud?”
He deliberately left off the last half of the terrorist’s name, a clear sign of contempt.
Abbud ibn Aziz’s head lolled against the back of the seat. Blood, coming from several places, leaked from him. “What d’you mean?”
“You shot Sarah ibn Ashef to death.”
“You’re
insane.”
“Muta told me. He told me, Abbud. You shot Fadi’s sister, not me. This whole vendetta could have been avoided if only you’d told the truth.”
“The truth?” Abbud spat blood. “In the desert, there is no such thing as the truth. The sands shift constantly, like the truth.”
“Why did you lie?”
He began to cough, blood vomiting out of his mouth.
“Tell me why you lied about Sarah ibn Ashef’s death.”
Abbud ibn Aziz spat again, almost choked on his own blood. When he’d recovered sufficiently, he muttered, “Why should I tell you anything?”
“It’s over for you, Abbud. You’re dying. But you already knew that, didn’t you? Your death from a car accident won’t get you to heaven. But if I kill you, you will have a martyr’s death, filled with glory.”
Abbud looked away, as if in that way he could escape the fate awaiting him. “I lied to Fadi because I had to. The truth would have destroyed him.”
“Time’s running out.” Bourne held a knife to his throat. “I’m the only one who can help you now. In a moment, it will be too late. You will have lost your chance at shahada.”
“What do you, an infidel, know of shahada?”
“I know that without jihad there can be no martyrdom. I know that jihad is the inclusive struggle for truth. Without your confession of the truth, there can be no jihad, there can be no shahada for you.
“Without my help, you won’t be able to stand witness to the truth that is Allah. Therefore, your holy struggle in the cause of Allah—your entire existence—will be meaningless.”
Wholly unbidden, Abbud ibn Aziz felt tears stinging his eyes. His enemy was right. He needed him now. Allah had placed this final terrible choice in front of him: testify to the truth, or be condemned to the eternal fires of damnation. In this way, at this moment, he understood that Muta ibn Aziz had been right. It was the shifting sands of the truth that had buried him. If only he had spoken the truth at once. For now, in order to die righteously, in order to be clean in the eyes of Allah and all that he held holy, he would have to betray Fadi.