Cold Shot (35 page)

The SEBIN would kill her if they caught her now.

Kyra ignored the pain in her legs and her lungs, and she ran.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

“What’s the word, Kathy?” the SecDef asked. The encryption on the secure line created a slight hiss in between his words.

“My people were at the site but the MOP didn’t get them. They’re on the move. I need
Vicksburg
on standby to execute that personnel recovery mission.”

“Yeah, we saw one of them recon the blast site. If she can confirm whether we got the nuke, she’ll be my new best friend. I’ve cut the orders to
Vicksburg
. Captain Riley has a helo on standby. All he needs is the extraction site.”

“My people have a nice spot all picked out, but we don’t have a way to contact our officers and give them the coordinates. If we make contact, we’ll direct them to the location, but if not, your people might have to make this up as they go.”

The former CAVIM Explosives Factory

“Get me out of here,” Ahmadi ordered. His voice was shaking.

“Are you hurt?” Elham asked.

“Nothing serious, I think.”

The troop transports rumbled in through the dust clouds, kicking up some dust of their own, and slid to a stop in the loose dirt. Soldiers began to disembark, jumping from the back, and discipline died as they saw the crater for the first time. Curses and prayers to God Almighty went up until Elham cut them off. “Get over here,” he ordered, ignoring the fact that he had no authority over the locals. “We have casualties.”

The soldiers slung their weapons and pushed the car back onto its tires, drawing groans from the occupants. Elham opened the doors and a medic moved in to check the men over. “Is the weapon intact?” Ahmadi asked weakly.

“I don’t know,” Elham said. “I haven’t checked it. The truck that was carrying it is destroyed, but the transport crate is durable. There is a chance.”

“Good. Inspect it, then have it loaded in another one of these trucks as soon as possible. We have to move it before the Americans try again,” Ahmadi ordered, then began coughing hard. “I heard shooting?”

“The American spy, the woman, came down from the hills to see their work. She reached the back of the weapon transport by the time I was able to get out of the car,” Elham told him. “I tried to stop her, but the sniper was in the hills again and gave her cover. She fled on foot, that way.” He pointed north.

“How long since she ran?” Carreño asked. His sense of time was sketchy.

“Four or five minutes. Not long,” Elham said.

Carreño pulled himself out of the car and turned to the gawking soldiers, still staring at the burning crater. “Find them!”

USS
Vicksburg

11°22' North 67°49' West

75 miles north of the Venezuelan coast

“Permission to come on the bridge,” Marisa announced.

Riley frowned at the voice, turned, and recognized the speaker. “Granted,” he said. The station chief stepped through the hatch and approached the captain, who was standing over the Electronic Chart Display. He offered her a piece of paper as she came near. Marisa took it and skimmed it over.

“Orders straight from the SecDef. You just got your helo, Miss Mills,” Riley said. “We’re at Ready Thirty right now. Pilots will be briefed on the mission in ten minutes if you want to be there.”

“I want to go,” Marisa told him.

“I figured you would. So did your director. The orders allow it, so get suited up. Just stay out of the crew’s way.”

It was only her dignity that kept Marisa from running off the bridge.

The former CAVIM Explosives Factory

Elham had seen other men frightened like Ahmadi was now. The Americans called it the “thousand-yard stare,” the blank face of a man who had faced death for the first time and realized that he was no one special, that he could die today as easily as anyone else. Men like him were accustomed to the soft life with all the amenities they could want. Such men gave no thought to their own mortality. Now the Americans had come within meters of killing him and Ahmadi’s mind was refusing to process the event.

Elham had no sympathy for the man at all.
The law of the harvest,
he thought.
You have always made men like me reap what you have sown. Now the Americans are making you reap your own works.

“Señor!”
he heard one of the SEBIN soldiers yell. Elham turned and saw the uniformed officer run up to Carreño. “As you ordered, we are setting up roadblocks on all the nearby highways, ten-kilometer radius. They will be in place in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” Carreño repeated with disgust.

“How long since the woman fled?” Ahmadi asked. The fear in his voice had vanished now, replaced by fury.

Elham checked his watch. “Almost forty minutes.”

The hills north of the former CAVIM Explosives Factory

Kyra dragged herself over the last ridge. Her legs had forced her to slow down almost ten minutes before and were finally starting to give out. She had heard no dogs, no soldiers behind her. Helicopters had overflown the forest at a low altitude, each one sending a new shot of adrenaline through her system, but there was no way they could see through the dense canopy overhead. But she couldn’t push herself much farther and even the adrenaline wasn’t enough to keep her going now.

She jumped down the leeward side of the ridge, letting gravity pull her through the dirt and loose leaves on the forest floor. The truck was at the bottom. She came to rest by the front bumper and let herself lie on her back for a minute, sucking air into her lungs.

The foliage she and Jon had put up to cover the vehicle had been removed and Kyra felt panic rise in her throat, thinking the SEBIN had found the truck. Then she saw Jon standing by the driver’s-side door. She couldn’t speak, her lungs still heaving too hard and fast.

“Good to see you too,” he said, tossing her own words back at her. Jon reached down and helped Kyra to her feet. She leaned on him until she was able to crawl into the truck. Jon took his place in the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and the rear tires spewed dirt.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

Cooke kept her eyes on the imagery feed and watched Kyra reach the truck and Jon help her in. They weren’t even close to safe, but they were no longer on foot and hope began to rise in her heart.

“Cell network still down?” she asked.

“Yes,” Drescher said. “I don’t think Avila is going to do us any favors. The Pentagon is watching this too. They’ll have to guide the helo in once our people stop moving.”

The hills north of the former CAVIM Explosives Factory

The roads through the hills were all unpaved, barely depressions in the underbrush. Jon kept the truck going as fast as he dared, but the trails were narrow and uneven.

“Think we can make it to Highway Three?” Kyra asked. “Head north and we could put some road between us and Morón.”

“I’d bet money the SEBIN are throwing up roadblocks everywhere,” he said.

“Jon, I left my smartphone with the warhead,” Kyra told him.

He reeled at that bit of news. “So they can track it . . . smart.”

“So where do we go now?”

“Someplace high,” Jon said. “These PRC handhelds only have a four-mile range, and without the antenna, the LST-5 is only good for line of sight. So we need to find someplace high up where we can get power and splice an antenna.”

“Where?”

“Good question,” he said.

Avenida Falcón, southeast of the former

CAVIM Explosives Factory

Sargento
Javier Oliveira leaned against the jeep and shifted his rifle so he could scratch his face. The humidity was making his neck itch and the asphalt under his boots and his green uniform were both soaking up the sunlight, making it impossible for him and the other five men in his unit to stay cool. He wouldn’t have had patience for this duty even if it had been cool with an Atlantic breeze running past. The ocean was only a few kilometers to the north. A week ago the women had been coming out in numbers, but the riots had forced the beaches to close, leaving Oliveira and his unit to swelter in the barracks on base when they weren’t out on the streets, trying to keep the rioters and looters from running free. The ones protesting Presidente Avila were bad enough. The ones supporting the
presidente
were worse, thinking themselves agents of the law and free to do Oliveira’s job for him and pummel anyone they thought was an enemy of the state.

Then the Americans had bombed that explosives factory to dust. Oliveira had seen the mushroom cloud from the base and for a few moments had thought the United States had used a nuclear weapon against his country. He’d crossed himself and started to say his final prayers, but he realized after a few seconds that there had been no flash of light and no electromagnetic pulse. Whatever bomb they’d dropped had been enormous, but it wasn’t nuclear and Oliveira knew he would live.

Then the orders had come to establish roadblocks and detain any Caucasians who approached. Rumors had been spreading among the other troops for days that there were CIA spies hiding in the hills. Oliveira hadn’t believed it until the bombing.

He gritted his teeth and spit. They wouldn’t come by this station. There were no cars on the highway now, no doubt the result of the other roadblocks in both directions cutting off any traffic that would otherwise pass through. This intersection was the connection where the Avenida Falcón met the single paved road that ran into the now-destroyed factory complex and any Americans surely wouldn’t be coming down
that
street. Oliveira wasn’t the smartest of soldiers but he understood maps and math. These hills were hundreds of miles square. The chances that they would pass by here—

Oliveira cocked his head as he heard the vehicle for the first time. It was a large engine, running fast, like someone had the accelerator mashed to the floor, and it was getting louder. He looked down the road and saw nothing, then checked behind him. Avenida Falcón was empty, the entrance road to the destroyed factory was empty. The other men scanned the roads and checked their rifles as they muttered to themselves.
Then where—?

The truck screamed out of the woods, coming off some small trail through the trees that they hadn’t been able to see from their station. Its tires hit the asphalt a hundred meters away and the driver cranked the wheel hard, turning south, and immediately accelerated in a straight line away from the roadblock. Two of the other men raised their rifles and fired a few rounds, but hit nothing.

Oliveira ran for the cab of his jeep and turned on the radio.

•    •    •

“Six men, two jeeps.” Kyra turned her head back and looked at Jon. “The turnoff to Highway One is a half mile down on the left.”

Jon shook his head. “There’ll be more of those jeeps on the big roads.” He looked left into the town. Black smoke was rising in columns from three points in the town. The riots had reached Morón.

“If we stop, we might not be able to get moving again,” Kyra warned. “Someone spots us when we’re on foot and we’re done.”

“Maybe,” Jon conceded. “But we won’t last long out here on the roads. We can outrun some jeeps but we can’t outrun their radios. They’ll coordinate on us and drive us until we run out of gas or road.” He turned left onto the first side street into Morón.

The former CAVIM Explosives Factory

The forklift had finally arrived but couldn’t reach the warhead crate inside the wrecked cargo truck where it had settled. Elham had stood by watching as five soldiers managed to drag it out, with Carreño cursing their incompetence from start to finish. When it was finally in the open, the forklift driver got the metal tines underneath and the soldiers had strapped it on. Loading it onto one of the new trucks was going slowly.

“Malditos!”
Carreño muttered under his breath. “We should have been gone twenty minutes ago. The Americans could put another bomb down on us anytime now.”

You should have been in the truck when they hit us the first time,
Elham thought.

A soldier came running up to Carreño, radio in hand. “Señor!”

“What is it?” he demanded.

“The Americans just ran a roadblock southeast of our position here. They were seen turning east into Morón on Highway One.”

“I want that town cordoned off!” Carreño ordered. “Pull men off riot control if you need reinforcement. I don’t care if the entire place burns. Do you understand me?”

“We’ve already alerted all of our units.”

The soldiers locked the tailgate as the men inside finished strapping the warhead’s transport crate to the truck’s bed.
“¡Terminado!”
one of them yelled.
Finished.

“We leave,
now
.” Carreño looked up at the sky, afraid of what might appear overhead.
“¡Vámanos!”
he ordered. The soldiers clambered aboard the jeeps and trucks and the convoy finally started to move.

Morón, Venezuela

Jon sent the Toyota through the streets fast enough to alarm Kyra, but the neighborhood seemed empty, the occupants either out rioting in another part of Morón or hiding in their homes. Jon scanned the buildings, muttering to himself as he rejected one edifice after another. Kyra looked right as they hurtled through another intersection—

—the riot in the next street over filled the gap one block down, a few hundred people at least gathered in one of the town
centros,
with a line of soldiers trying to subdue them all. People were running in two directions, either toward the fight or away from it. Some civilians held signs aloft, uniformed men were swinging nightsticks, a man caught one in the head—

—and then the scene was cut off by the next row of buildings as Jon kept the truck moving. The road passed under a freeway, probably Highway 1, she thought, which cut the small town in half running east–west. A line of jeeps filled with soldiers rumbled by on the overpass.

“I think half the army is coming together here,” Kyra said.

“There,” Jon said finally after another thirty seconds. Kyra followed his finger and saw an apartment building, ten stories of nondescript concrete with terraces protruding at every floor on all sides.