Fallout (2 page)

Luke checked the clock. He transmitted, “
Knock it off, knock it off
.”

All the airplanes in the fight rolled wings-level, slowed to a reasonable speed, and headed for Fallon Naval Air Station fifty miles away. They joined up in sections of two or flights of four, depending on who was around and who had enough fuel to wait for others.

Luke turned his F/A-18 toward Fallon, and one of the student F/A-18s quickly joined on his right. Luke glanced over and recognized the airplane and helmet of Mink, Lieutenant Rob Stoller. Good student. Aggressive, eager, and capable. In spite of the fact that Mink had gotten killed in the graduation strike, Luke thought he’d done a good job in the school. Luke nodded to him.

Stoller transmitted to him on the secondary radio, “
Stick, you up
?”

“Yeah, Mink.”

“How about a photo op?”

“What would you like?”
Luke asked as he checked his heading and fuel.

“I want me and your airplane, with those purple mountains in the background,”
Mink said, pointing to their right with his head.
“I’ve got a wide-angle lens.”

Luke looked past Mink to the mountains and nodded. He tapped his forehead and pointed to Stoller, indicating he had the lead. Mink nodded, tapped his forehead, then his chest, taking the lead.

Luke pulled back on his throttle and crossed under Stoller’s plane. He came up on the right side and flew a close wing formation on him. Stoller dug his expensive camera out of the map case in his cockpit. He held up the camera and pointed it at his face covered with a mirrored visor and oxygen mask, and tried to get just the right angle to ensure that Luke’s airplane and the mountains would be in the background. “
Almost got it
,” Stoller said, but he was right-handed and he was trying to take the picture with his left hand to get the perfect angle, to achieve the kind of picture you might see in
Aviation Week & Space Technology
. He couldn’t even get his finger on the right button and hold the camera.

He took his hand off the stick and held it with his legs as he adjusted the camera and removed his gloves. He set the camera on autofocus and finally was ready to take the picture. He had taken his eye off the horizon and had inadvertently commenced a slow left roll.

Luke watched with annoyance as Stoller continued to roll to his left. He had rolled nearly forty-five degrees before Luke alerted him. “
Watch your roll
,” he transmitted.

Stoller looked ahead and suddenly saw he was rolling over to his left. He quickly grabbed the stick and threw it to the right to level out. But his movement wasn’t as smooth as it should have been. His right wing swung down rapidly.

“Level out!”
Luke warned as he saw the wing coming and tried to bank quickly to his right to avoid it. By rolling right he threw his left wing up to meet Stoller’s dropping right wing. Their wings collided, with Stoller’s right wing hitting hard on the missile rail on the outside of Luke’s left wing. Stoller’s right wing crumpled and folded in half, causing his airplane to roll sharply right, into the dead wing.

“Shit!” Luke yelled inside his Hornet as he pushed the nose of his airplane down hard and right and tried to get out of the way. As soon as he was clear of Stoller’s falling airplane, he pulled up to get on top of him and began a gentle left turn to stay near him. Luke looked over at his left wing with terror in his heart. “
Mink! You got it
?”

Mink’s voice was strained and high. “
Negative. I’m missing half a wing! I can’t stop the rolls
!”

Luke could tell that he wasn’t going to recover. Luke was at ten thousand feet above the desert, and Mink was passing through seven thousand feet. “
Eject! Eject
!” Luke yelled.

Mink heard him and tried to read his altimeter. Then he realized it didn’t really matter how high he was. He had no chance of recovering control of an F/A-18 with half a wing bent up. He reached between his legs and pulled the ejection handle.

Luke watched as the canopy came off the falling Hornet and silently drifted away from the jet. The rocket motor on the seat fired, and Mink came hurtling out of the cockpit into the dry desert air. The Hornet spiraled downward and slammed into the desert floor.

The ramshackle building stood at the end of a nearly impassable dirt road outside of Peshawar. Most of the men crowded into the room were accustomed to much more desperate conditions. Riaz Khan had known both a life of deprivation and a life of privilege. He lived in both worlds in Pakistan. The people he worked with were mostly privileged, but those he identified with—those he planned to die with—had never owned anything of value and didn’t care whether they ever did.

Khan was desperate. His entire plan had turned on getting the material through the border. And now the man who had helped him come up with the most dramatic scheme to embarrass all three of his enemies at once, was about to abandon him. He was the one who had brought them inside information from India. He could stop everything just by withholding his approval. “You
cannot
cancel your part—”

“You have left me no choice,” Shirish said in a quiet, authoritative voice. “I told you that we had a small window of time. You said you could get the material through the border. You have failed.”

“No,” Khan replied, trying not to explode. “No, I didn’t. Mahmood did.”

Shirish turned and regarded Mahmood behind him. He looked around the room, which was full of Pakistanis except for himself and the tall Russian. “It doesn’t matter to me. These are your people. You can divide blame as you see fit.” He shook his head in complete frustration, the kind that grew from knowing that someone else would hold him accountable somehow, and it was completely out of his hands. “What you do is now up to you. I can no longer help you.”

“Yes!” Khan roared. “It will still happen! We will get to the United States. We will not fail!”

Shirish smiled ruefully. “You said you had an
inside track
! That you could get your men into TOPGUN. You couldn’t even do that. Then this border incident! You have brought the attention of the entire world down on our heads! My country does not want that kind of attention. Our help must be withdrawn—”

“Mahmood!” Khan yelled. He balled his hands into fists and glared at Mahmood, a man much smaller than himself, with the soft hands of a politician, the man who had embarrassed him in front of the world and, more particularly, in front of Shirish, the Indian intelligence agent whom Khan had convinced to help them. Khan’s face was barely perceptible in the shadows as he hissed at Mahmood, “You promised you would get us into the TOPGUN school. You had your man in place in Washington, you said. And you promised the material would make it through the border. You promised the guards would be no problem. I was almost killed just trying to salvage your plan. Now our friend here,” he said, pointing to Shirish, “is about to abandon us because of our incompetence. And who could blame him? We have shown him nothing,” he said in exasperation. “We may not be able to do any of it, because of you!” he went on, pointing at Mahmood’s chest—Mahmood, who was trying to say something but whose mind was failing him.

“We have here,” Khan said, gesturing toward the Russian, “the one who was going to turn the plutonium into a weapon that would have put us in front of the world.” Everyone in the room knew who the humorless Russian was. He was the one who had come out of nowhere to help them. The men thought it proved that Riaz Khan could get anyone to do anything for the cause, even a Russian nuclear scientist. “All he needed was the materials. And you
failed
us!”

Mahmood was petrified. He knew Riaz Khan’s reputation. “How could I know that the
one
border guard in all of Pakistan’s mountains who was not drunk would decide to stop this truck? How could we know?”

“Always an excuse!” Riaz paced. He looked at the Russian. “Is it possible to get more? Can it be done?”

The tall Russian looked grim and shook his head slowly as he considered. “The material from the border is gone? There is no way to get it?”

Khan replied, “I told you. The truck blew up. The border guards shot at the tires and hit the gas tank. The whole truck went up.”

The Russian suddenly went pale, understanding the implications for the first time. He knew that the attempt to get the plutonium across the border had failed, but no one had told him there had been a shoot-out and a conflagration in the process. He dreaded the answer to his next question. “Were the containers with the plutonium broken?”

Khan thought about it for the first time. “How would I know? We never got close enough to the truck to see the containers. For all I know they weren’t even on the truck.”

The Russian rubbed his forehead. “Has anyone tested you for exposure?”

“Exposure? Exposure to what?”

“To radiation,” the Russian whispered. He quickly went to the corner of the room and took a small electronic device out of a box. He turned it on, crossed to Khan, and put a microphonelike device up to Khan’s chest.

“What are you doing?” Khan asked, frustrated with such odd behavior.

“Checking for exposure.”

Khan watched as the needle jumped. The Russian frowned.

“What is it?”

The Russian looked grim. “Who else was there?”

Khan pointed to two others who were nearby. The Russian checked them.

“I’m afraid you have been exposed to radioactive material.”

“So what?” Khan said dismissively.

“So you have radiation sickness.”

“I feel fine.”

“Based on the levels I just saw, you will almost certainly be dead within a year.”

“What?” Khan exclaimed. “What did you say?”

“You have been damaged by the plutonium. I told you not to get too—”

“We didn’t do anything! I never got closer than fifty meters to the truck!”

“That is close enough, given the right circumstances. I’m afraid there is nothing you can do about it.”

Khan looked around the room, at the others who had heard everything. “Then we move up our timetable.” He paused as he absorbed the idea of dying in twelve months. He asked the Russian, “Is there any more material we can get through your contacts?”

“Our best chance would be Berdsk, but even that would be difficult. Oziorsk and Miass also”—he shrugged—“but better than those that would be Almaly and Olar. They are in Kazakhstan, right on the border with Kyrgyzstan. But after the border incident . . .” He frowned. “I don’t know, I think we must wait at
least
six months—”

“See!” Riaz screamed, outraged. “See!” he fired at Mahmood. “It cannot be done now! We can
not
wait six months. Six months!” He laughed. “Six
more
months, because of your incompetence! All the borders of Asia are being watched with ten times the attention they were before! Nothing will get through!”

“We must be patient, Riaz, if the—”

“No! You heard it! We have no time to be patient. We have
been
patient. It is time to
act
.”

Mahmood lowered his voice in desperation. “I will
not
have you ruin this. There is too much at stake.”

“You said it would all be in place by now, Mahmood. I believed you! Everything else
is
in place. I have taken irrevocable steps, and we must act now or we will never be able to. Do you not understand that? Are you so stupid?” Khan asked. He turned to one of the men next to him holding an AK-47 as if he had held it every day for years. “How many men can you send over the border?”

Mahmood interrupted. “No, Riaz! We must do things in order—”

“Shut up!” Riaz yelled in his native Pashto, the language of the northern frontier provinces, a language no one like Mahmood would ever understand.

The armed man said to Khan in Pashto, “He has done nothing for us.”

Khan agreed. “He had his chance. He brought us nothing except the international attention that we did not need. And now he has killed us.” He looked at Mahmood like a serpent. Khan’s huge, muscular neck was red with anger. “We do not need him. I know who his contact is in Washington. We can bring other pressure to bear.” He and the armed man exchanged a knowing glance.

Riaz turned suddenly to Mahmood and grabbed him by the throat with both meaty hands. He lifted him up off the floor and held him, choking the smaller man. “No more waiting! No more promises!” Riaz screamed in Urdu.

Mahmood’s eyes bugged out in surprise and terror as he tried to free himself. He began flailing his arms, trying to grab the ferocious hands that held him. His feet kicked vainly for something solid to give him leverage. His red face began to turn pale. The other men watched casually as Riaz lifted the man higher so everyone could see the life drain from his face. Mahmood’s feeble struggling lessened as his arms fell slack against his side. His hands twitched and his eyes rolled back into his head. Still Riaz held him high, as high as he could hold him. Finally Mahmood was still.

Riaz tossed him aside like a sack of meat. Mahmood’s head cracked against the stone floor as he landed in a heap in the corner of the room.

Riaz looked at the man he had begun addressing earlier. “How many men can you take across the border into Kashmir?”

“Two thousand,” the man replied softly, unmoved by Mahmood’s death.

Khan considered. “One week from tonight begin the infiltration. Gradually. They must not be detected. Remember. You are not to attack. That will come later. You are there only to be ready, and to recruit others. It will be some months’ time before the attack, but it will come.”

The man nodded. “We will be ready.”

Riaz pointed at Mahmood lying in the corner. “His failure has made it impossible to do what we had planned. Now we must do something different.” He looked at his subordinates. “Don’t worry about the details. You just do your job, and I promise I will do mine. I will get there, and I will do it.” He looked at the Russian, who was unable to speak from watching a man he knew murdered in front of his eyes. “I need to talk to your friends in Russia.”