Resurrection Day (32 page)

Seven miles from the White House, Mohamed Rashid pulled up in the rear lot of the disused warehouse, a five-minute drive from the Wentworth apartment block. He climbed out of the Explorer along with Karla and Gorev, quickly unlocked the warehouse doors, and they all moved inside. The white Ryder van was still parked there, and Rashid opened the back to reveal the pair of powerful Japanese motorcycles, a black Yamaha and a dark blue Honda, propped up against the sides. The rage hadn't left the Arab's face, and he slammed his fist on the van door. 'How? How did they find us?'

'We'll worry about that later.' Gorev started to move, but then clutched his side and faltered, and Karla rushed to him. 'What's wrong?'

'Grenade shrapnel. My own fault. I wasn't quick enough to get out of the way of the blast.'

'Let me see.'

Gorev unzipped his parka and Karla saw that his left side sported a nasty gash, like a stab wound. His shirt was stained with crimson, and he looked in pain, beads of sweat on his face. Karla paled. 'You'll need a doctor, Nikolai. You've lost blood.'

'It's not as bad as it looks. A flesh wound. The bleeding's stopped, but give me something to patch it.'

'You better let me drive.'

'As long as you can manage.'

Karla took a scarf from her tote bag, and Gorev pressed it against his side. Rashid climbed into the rear of the van, ignoring Gorev's state, and said angrily, 'Move, both of you. We don't have time for this.' A helicopter clattered somewhere in the far distance, galvanising them all. They worked frantically, maneuvering the wooden planks into place and rolling down the machines, before Karla handed out the helmets and leather motorcycle gear. When they'd finished dressing, Rashid pulled on his helmet, tucked his Skorpion machine-pistol into his backpack, and hung the bag round his neck. 'Get away from here as fast you can.' Sweat drenched his face as he climbed on to the Yamaha, ready to make his escape. 'We'll use separate routes, and take special care you're not followed. We'll meet at the cottage. That's if we can make it before the police set up roadblocks.'

'And if we run into trouble?'

Rashid fixed Gorev with a cold stare, spat out his words. 'We're only small players in all of this. Nothing changes, no matter what happens to us. But I'll tell you this. The Americans will pay the price for their stupidity. I'll turn this city into a wasteland before I'm caught. You mark my words.' He started the Yamaha, his mouth twisted in contempt. 'As for you, Gorev, you made a serious error. You should have finished the Russian when you had the chance. Don't ever make a mistake like that again.' He snapped his visor shut, opened the throttle and drove the Yamaha over to the doorway. He inched his way out, glanced right and left, then gave the all-clear signal before he drove off. Karla was tense as she mounted the Honda. 'Will you be all right?' Gorev pulled on his helmet and climbed onto the pillion seat with difficulty, pain creasing his face. 'I've come through worse.'

'Rashid means it, doesn't he? He'll trigger the device if he's at risk of being caught.'

'I think you can count on it.' Gorev was grim. He snapped shut his visor. Karla did the same, then hit the start switch and the Honda purred into life.

Washington, DC 1.15 p.m.

'What about the next circle?' the President asked. 'I presume that represents the next wave of casualties?'

In the basement of the White House, Sergei Maslov had sensed a wave of animosity wash towards him from everyone in the room as they digested his words. He could understand why. He was, after all, a chemist who had worked on the nerve gas that could kill them all — their families, their friends, their fellow citizens.

'That is correct,' he replied. He turned to the map again, ran his finger around the orange circle, which encompassed the intersection of 12th Street and Jefferson to the west, the farther reaches of Capitol Street to the south, Lincoln Park to the east, and almost touched New York Avenue to the north. 'In this zone, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, most victims will certainly inhale the gas, but in less extreme quantities — anything from the micro droplet necessary to kill them down to thousandths of a micron perhaps, enough to cause grave injury. By that I mean loss of muscle control, impaired lung and nerve function, acute breathing difficulties. Many survivors in this zone would suffer long-term serious illness. Victims with bad hearts, asthma or bronchitis would almost certainly perish. We are still talking about a hundred per cent casualty rate — or close to it — but the percentage of casualties who would die immediately diminishes to between fifty and seventy-five.'

'What about the survivors?' Charles Rivermount, assistant to the President on economic policy, pointed to the orange circle, inside which perhaps a million people would be trapped during the rush hour. 'Many of them will still die. You must realise that the aftermath of this attack would be like nothing in your country's experience. Chaos, and the massive numbers of injured, would overwhelm your emergency services, make it impossible for them to function properly. Ambulance crews would be prevented from moving into the area without wearing biochemical suits and breathing apparatus, making it difficult in itself to treat surviving victims lying in the streets. And the aid they could offer would be negligible.'

Listening to Maslov, Paul Burton was awestruck. In his mind's eye he saw not the red, orange and green circles but the living streets of Washington. Streets full of restaurants and cafes, galleries and shops. The guts of the city he had grown up in, studied in. The parks where he had played as a child and with his own sons. The city he loved because of its grandiose design, its cultural diversity, its elegance. Massachusetts Avenue, with its stately mansions. Capitol Hill, the icon of the nation. The bustling thoroughfares of Chinatown, with their smells of oriental spices. The Eastern market on 7th Street, where his mother used to take him as a kid to the Saturday farmer's mart to buy her fresh vegetables and fruit. Nor did he take in the sheer volume of anonymous victims Maslov was speaking of. Instead he saw faces: cabdrivers, store-owners, waiters, cops, politicians, municipal and government workers. Close relatives, families and friends that he and his wife had known all their lives; Nathan's playmates and the infants in Ben's preschool. He saw the black neighbourhoods, the tenements in south Georgetown, the white-collar apartment blocks on Connecticut Avenue, the mansions of the rich out in Adams Morgan, and he knew that not a single home would be untouched by this tragedy.

'You're saying that it's pointless deploying our emergency medical response teams?'

Maslov nodded. 'In my opinion, they would be totally ineffective. There is no antidote for A232X. Many survivors will ultimately die, even if they get to a hospital.'

One of the army chemical experts spoke up. 'The chaos the professor spoke about is also going to be worsened by mass hysteria, sir.'

'Explain,' said the President.

'There's a medical phenomenon known as hysteria-induced epidemic, a psychogenic illness, that comes into play. You have one person visibly sick and the people who see that person ill come down with the symptoms. The classic example is the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult. Twelve victims died and a thousand were injured, but almost five thousand people nocked to hospital complaining of symptoms. In the District, we'd be talking about a tidal wave of people swamping the few emergency medical services that might still exist.'

The bespectacled young Russian professor nodded his agreement, then turned to the third circle, in green. 'There is some hope, however, for those caught within the green zone.' The circumference around which he drew his finger touched the banks of the Anacostia river to the south, George Washington University to the east, Le Droit Park to the north, all the way out to Capitol Heights to the east. 'Here, casualties would be down to between fifteen and thirty per cent. But survivors would have to be moved out of the area quickly — in itself a major problem — to reduce the risk of inhaling gas particles.'

'How long would the gas remain in the air?'

'The A232X footprint — which is, in effect, the length of time trace particles linger in the atmosphere, on water or on man-made surfaces such as buildings or roads — is up to four months.'

Bob Rapp, the President's special adviser, standing at the back of the room, raised his voice. 'You're telling us America's capital will be uninhabitable for four months? How in hell is that possible?'

'Actually, it may even be longer, perhaps even six months,' Maslov suggested. 'Remember, you will have mounds of corpses on the streets — hundreds of thousands of unburied dead. The after-attack clean-up and the burials will take time. It would be safer not to commence any large-scale decontamination programme until the risk of exposure is reduced to near minimum. And there is also another risk to consider — typhoid or cholera outbreaks. People involved in the clean-up may be reluctant to enter the affected zones, for fear of putting their own lives in danger.'

'It seems to me,' a red-faced Mitch Gaines suggested, 'that if this device goes off, Washington will be turned into a total graveyard. Ruined, completely destroyed.'

'Your description is accurate,' Maslov agreed. 'And as I pointed out to your colleagues during our earlier discussions, there are other effects that you must consider, and which are as grave as the immense human casualties. This is a powerful weapon we're dealing with. It has the ability not just to destroy lives but to destroy a city in every conceivable way, most especially one like this.'

'What do you mean?' Katherine Ashmore, the Counsel to the President asked.

An army colonel from the Chemical Biological Rapid Response Team, standing against the back wall, responded.

'Ma'am, I think what the professor's trying to say is that by choosing Washington, these terrorists have picked the perfect target. Almost every government department has its headquarters in or near DC. Education, Health, Revenue, Treasury, the Federal Reserve which controls all banking operations in the United States. Then you've got the emergency and crisis management agencies, the military, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the White House. Large numbers of employees and officials in all those departments, agencies and offices are going to be killed or seriously injured in an attack. That's going to affect our ability to function as a nation, apart from the massive problem of having to abandon the city for up to six months. But killing people isn't always the sole objective of even the most aggressive terrorists. Chaos and disruption are just as important. That's what this attack will ultimately achieve. If this country were a machine, Washington would be the main cog. If the cog were destroyed, the nation's infrastructure would grind to a halt. You'd have chaos and martial law, the economy damaged and society destabilised. Effectively, the United States government will have come to a virtual standstill.'

Maslov nodded agreement again. Silence engulfed the room. The deputies were still trying to take in the breathtaking tragedy the Russian scientist had painted; now they had to imagine another nightmare: bedlam reigning in every American city through lack of proper governance, law and order.

The President spoke. 'Professor Maslov, leaving aside those considerations for now, as frightening as they are, what's the bottom line here? How many deaths, how many casualties, maximum?' Maslov riffled through his sheets — computer print-outs, models produced by complex programs that were virtually indisputable, spewed out by the American computers from the data he had supplied. Everything that would happen to Washington was on those pages.

The effect on the city's medical services (less than five per cent operational), public utilities (totally defunct), police department (eight per cent effective), what percentage of pedestrians walking along Washington Avenue at rush hour would be killed (one hundred per cent), how many private dwellings and business premises would be uninhabitable in the aftermath owing to particle contamination (in excess of two hundred thousand) ...

On it went: the numbers of infants, children, adolescents and adult dead in each affected area within the three circles, the numbers of injured who would die within hours or days from lack of medical aid. A breakdown of the numbers of police, military, government officials, engineers, doctors, nurses and municipal workers who would survive or perish in each of the three zones. A prophecy so chilling, so unthinkable, that Maslov, staring down at the cold black figures and adding them up, suddenly wished he were back in his grim Moscow apartment eating his breakfast, and not having to forecast the nightmare that lay ahead of the people in the room.

'For the conditions I have outlined, my estimate is that the total number of dead and injured in Washington, DC, would be just under a half million people.'

PART FIVE

12 November

'You have no option but to surrender, Mr President ... '

Washington, DC 12 November 9.45 a.m.

Nikki turned her Toyota into the parking lot of Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport. She had dropped Daniel off at preschool and had arrived in plenty of time for her interview with Tony Gazara, Reagan's air traffic control manager. Leaving her car, she walked to the ATE building and introduced herself to the receptionist, who made a call, and a minute later a tall, middle-aged man appeared, introduced himself as Tony Gazara, and led her up to his office on the top floor, with a panoramic view overlooking the aprons and runways. 'Take a seat, Miss Dean. Can I get you some coffee?'

'No, I'm fine, thank you. I've got another interview scheduled before noon, so I'd like to get straight to it, if you don't mind?'

'Sure. You know anything about ATE, Miss Dean?'

Nikki smiled, flicked open her notepad. 'Absolutely nothing, except every time I fly my life may depend on you people. Tell me about the near-misses. What happened?'

Gazara was immediately defensive. 'Look out of that window, Miss Dean. The thing of it is, we could have up to thirty thousand take-offs and landings a month at Reagan. Incidents like near-misses happen sometimes, like they happen at any busy airport. That's no excuse, of course, and I've got to tell you we had a lot of traffic on both those days. But our guys had everything under control. Sometimes the media blow these things out of proportion.'

'You think so?'

'I know so.'

'You're telling me people's lives weren't at risk?' Gazara reddened slightly. 'As far as I'm concerned, ma'am, we run a tight ship here. We do a damned good job.'

'I'm not disputing that, Tony. The incident last Friday involved two civilian aircraft, is that right?' Gazara nodded. 'Unusually, traffic was stacked that day due to bad weather, and there were pockets of heavy air turbulence in the airport vicinity. One of the planes was holding on stack, waiting to land, when it hit bad turbulence and dropped five hundred feet, breaching the two-thousand-feet separation between aircraft. No big deal really, and the pilots had everything under control at all times. But the regulations say a breach like that has got to be reported, and that's exactly what happened.'

'But what about the incident yesterday?' Nikki looked at her notes. 'The way I understand it, passengers on a Cessna private aircraft reported seeing a military transport aircraft come within a couple of hundred feet of their port side. The Cessna pilot had to take sudden evasive action that scared the hell out of his three passengers. And you're telling me nobody's life was in danger?'

Gazara was still defensive. 'We had a lot of traffic yesterday, most of it late scheduled. Most aircraft have something called TCAS, Miss Dean. That's Traffic Collision Avoidance System to you and me — think of it as a kind of airborne radar. What it means is, the pilot can tell if there's any danger of other aircraft in their vicinity, well before they see them, and an alert warning is announced in the cockpit. As a rule, small aircraft don't have such equipment — it's only mandatory for larger airplanes. But what made matters worse in this situation was that the military aircraft didn't seem to have its TCAS system working.'

'Why?' Gazara shrugged.

'Maybe it was unserviceable, or switched off. But that's a question you'd have to address to the military. Either way, for whatever reason, their pilot wandered out of his flight envelope. Maybe he wasn't paying attention, maybe he didn't correctly hear his ATE instructions — I won't have all the facts until the FAA investigation is complete. But the moment our guys saw the trouble brewing on their screens they alerted the pilots to take action.'

Nikki glanced out the window. The aprons and runways looked busy as hell. Beyond a line of US Air and Delta passenger aircraft, her eyes were drawn to at least seven huge green-painted military transporters sitting far out on the tarmac. 'Do you always get so much military traffic at Reagan, Tony?'

'Not at all. But don't ask me exactly what they're doing here. Some kind of exercise, I've been told. It's been going on like crazy since yesterday. Just came at us out of nowhere.' Nikki spotted another military transporter taxiing in. And right behind it, another was touching down. Beside two of the parked transporters, troops in military fatigues were unloading dozens of sealed wooden boxes. Nikki thought: There's a hell of a lot of military activity out there.

'Those aircraft — what are they?' Gazara followed the line of Nikki's finger, towards the apron where the soldiers were unloading. 'C-17S and C-130S. The military call them the workhorses of the air. They're used mostly to ferry men and equipment.'

'Was that the type involved in the near-miss?'

'Yes, ma'am. A C-130.'

'What kind of equipment are they moving? There sure seems to be a lot of it.'

Gazara shrugged. 'You'll have to ask the military, ma'am.'

Nikki was puzzled. 'Why wouldn't they use Andrews airbase? It's maybe only ten miles away.'

'Usually they do. But the word is, Andrews is busy as hell. They asked to divert their excess here.' Gazara stood, slid open a drawer in his filing cabinet. 'I've got some details of the near-misses right here. Then I'll answer any other questions you might have and let you get on your way.'

Maryland 2.10 p.m.