Fuse of Armageddon (38 page)

Patterson tried to concentrate on his task. All the American hostages had to be loaded onto the choppers along with the Freedom Crusaders.

He then saw a child on crutches, led by a middle-aged woman with straight hair and an angry, determined look. The child, a girl, was boarding the chopper.

Why?

Walking with them, guiding the little girl moving forward on her crutches, was the man Patterson had been watching on television since his childhood, the founder of Freedom Christian University, and the most prominent proponent of Zionism among all fundamentalists.

Jonathan Silver.

The man leaned down as they approached the chopper, treating the crippled girl with tenderness.

Silently, knowing the strictness of orders, Patterson helped the two of them climb aboard the chopper.

Jonathan Silver.

It hit Patterson.

If Brad Silver was here, then of course his father knew about the presence of the Freedom Crusaders. All of the previous planning had been so meticulous; it was impossible that this wasn’t part of it too. For that matter, it could easily be Jonathan Silver behind all of this. He had the resources and had used his university to recruit the Freedom Crusaders.

Jonathan Silver had set up his own kidnapping and all of this?

Patterson thought of the red heifer. It could be here for only one reason. Silver had preached about its importance numerous times. But to get the red heifer where it belonged would be impossible, right?

If the old man had been able to arrange this much so far, maybe it wasn’t impossible after all.

Patterson climbed aboard the helicopter. He knew the approximate range of a Black Hawk—about three hundred miles. A radius that big gave a wide range of destinations. He’d discover it when they landed, so at this point, he had no choice but to trust Saxon. No choice, because Sarah had been kidnapped back home and was being used as leverage against him.

He shut his flashlight off and settled into the chopper, strapping himself in place.

The roar of the engines increased, and the chopper wobbled a little as it rose. Then it steadied and the compound dropped away. Seconds later, the lights of the Gaza Strip dominated the skyline.

The chopper tilted into a turn, then increased height and speed.

Patterson closed his eyes. Yes, at this point, there was nothing to do except wait.

36

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 17:38 GMT


The IDF agents had taken Quinn to a room inside an apparently abandoned building across the street from the orphanage. A lightbulb dangled from a wire in the center of the room. The glare from it showed a few battered chairs. Quinn saw two things distinctive about the room. Both alarmed him. The first was a car battery. It had wires and clips running from both terminals. Crude but effective, and perfect when interrogators had to jury-rig something on short notice. The second was a trapdoor in the center of the dirt floor. The small piles of dirt on each side, a darker color than the rest, indicated that the door had been hidden until recently.

Quinn could guess what was below that door. His own death.

But he didn’t see how he could prevent it. Just after pushing him into the room, the agents had cuffed his hands behind his back with plastic restraints.

“This Hamer’s idea?” Quinn asked. It was a weak move to stall, but what else did he have? If they took him below with the car battery, it would get a lot more unpleasant.

“Shut up and sit down.”

To Quinn’s surprise, neither agent opened the trapdoor.

With the second agent holding the pistol on Quinn, agent one pushed a chair toward Quinn and motioned for him to sit. Quinn didn’t need a second invitation. Anything not to be taken below the trapdoor.

“We’re going to have a discussion about the call you made to Hamer,” agent one said. “It can be an easy and painless discussion. Or not.” He used another set of plastic cuffs to secure Quinn’s ankles to the chair legs.

“Hamer,” Quinn repeated. “He sent you here?”

Agent one stood over Quinn. “We have all the time we need. All the justification. After that last call, you’re a proven threat to national security. An escaped murder suspect. And frankly, there’s no one to miss you even if you were a political liability. To the world, you died in that van just like the American cop.”

Agent two moved to the corner and lifted the car battery. He set it beside Quinn.

“You threatened Hamer,” agent one said. “Not a good idea. Where did you store it?”

So the phone call he had made after the initial shock of the van’s explosion had worked. Maybe too well. Quinn had realized the timing was no accident. The explosion had come moments after Hamer had called to tell him to begin driving, ensuring that Quinn was in the van. If Hamer had tried to have Quinn killed, he knew he’d have to make his next moves very carefully. So Quinn had called Hamer back on his cell phone to feed the general a story that would throw him off guard.

“Hamer,”
he’d said,
“That was stupid. I’m alive. Kate’s dead. My computer was in the van, but once I get on the Internet, all I need to do is reach my server. Then the e-mail draft I had as backup with all the information on this goes straight to the media.”

“It’s helpful to both sides if it’s clear exactly what you’re looking for,” Quinn said now.
Stall. Stall. Stall.
“Assumptions in a situation like this can have bad consequences.”

“Only for you.” Agent two pulled aside Quinn’s robe and attached one clip to his left nipple. He held the second clip ready for the right nipple.

“All right then,” agent one said. “You told Hamer that you’d put together a draft of an e-mail and stored it on your server. We want the location of that server and access to it.”

“Be more specific,” Quinn said.

Agent one nodded at agent two. When the second clip touched Quinn’s nipple, the electricity jolted through him and arched his back in an unnatural spasm that felt as if it had broken his spine.

“Is that specific enough?” agent one said.

“Hang on,” Quinn gasped.
Stall. Stall. Stall.
“I was lying to Hamer. There’s nothing about this negotiation process that can blow back on IDF. Nothing in an e-mail draft. I told him that so he wouldn’t try anything else to kill me.”

“Wish I could believe you,” agent one said. “Server and password.”

Quinn saw the clip coming again. He closed his eyes as if that would diminish the shock. It didn’t. This time it lasted longer. It left Quinn panting, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Server and password,” the agent said. “We’ve got plenty of juice left otherwise.”

Somewhere over Gaza • 17:43 GMT


Shooting stars,
Jonathan Silver thought, realizing in the same instant that the streaks of light were going in the wrong direction to be meteorite debris streaking past the front of the helicopter.

Cause and effect is so ingrained in human thinking that he strained for an answer as the next flash shot upward.

Fireworks.

But the chopper swerved with the violence of a bus careening over an embankment. A military phrase shot through Silver’s mind, staying at the front of his awareness, even as screams rose in the chopper:
evasive action.
Then he knew without conscious articulation of the words in his mind.

Ground fire.

Someone was shooting at the helicopter!

Another flash sliced through the black of the night sky. More hideous dipping and swerving, like giant hands tossing the chopper back and forth.

Two more flashes.

The sound and the explosion registered at the same time, and the helicopter seemed to lurch in midair.

Dear Lord,
Silver prayed,
preserve our souls.

He expected next to feel the horrifying drop of the chopper spinning out of control, tumbling like a duck punched with lead shot. But the helicopter leveled.

Another flash of ground fire.

Then darkness again. Silver blinked to get his vision back.

The helicopter remained level.

But Jonathan Silver noticed a new glow outside. Not the lights of the countryside below but an eerie glow.

Fire.

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 17:44 GMT


A knock at the door interrupted the interrogation. Both agents flinched.

Agent one shouted at the door, telling the person on the other side to leave.

More knocking. Followed by the voice of a boy speaking Arabic, offering to sell oranges.

Agent one slipped his pistol beneath his sports coat and opened the door. There was the boy. And a woman beside him in traditional Muslim clothing.

The boy stepped inside, jabbering. The woman was holding oranges too, offering them with outstretched hands.

The agent stepped forward, grabbed the boy, and threw him back out on the street. He made a threatening move toward the woman. But she held something else among the oranges. A pistol.

She dropped the oranges as she raised the pistol and aimed directly at the man’s forehead. He froze.

Agent two began to lift his weapon but not fast enough. Quinn pushed with his feet, driving into the man’s chest with his body and the chair that was attached to his ankles. The clips raked loose from Quinn’s nipples. They fell together, with the second agent trying to roll clear.

The woman didn’t hesitate. She kicked the man in front of her directly in the groin. He doubled over, and she spun him around and grabbed him by the hair. Using him as a screen, she looked over the man’s shoulder at the second agent, who was just rising to his knees, still holding his pistol.

“Drop it,” she said to the second agent.

Without a clear shot, the man hesitated. The woman snapped off a shot, hitting him in the foot. He looked down in disbelief, then dropped his weapon.

She released the hair of the man she held and shoved him forward. “Both of you, on your bellies. Hands on your heads.”

Both agents assumed the posture, the first groaning, the second moving gingerly with his injured foot.

“Who are these guys?” the woman said to Quinn. “IDF?” She pulled the veil away from her face, breathing hard.

“Kate,” Quinn said, still on his side, still cuffed to the chair. “Glad you could come to the party. Yes, they’re IDF.”

“You were right about the explosion then,” Kate said.

“Is that why you took so much time? Thought I’d called this wrong?”

“Had to check my makeup. In Vegas, it’s about appearance. Nobody on
CSI
looks bad making a bust. It’s something real-life cops live up to there.”

“In Vegas, is it also about working hard to sound cool?”

“Better than sounding scared,” she said. “Which I am. IDF blows our van, then sends killers in to make sure the job’s done right. I don’t like our chances.”

“Me neither.”

“What next?” Kate asked. Her pistol didn’t waver from the two prone men. “Aside from cutting you loose from the chair.”

“Hope they have a couple more sets of cuffs,” Quinn answered. “We take their car keys, identification, and money. Beyond that, I don’t have much of a plan. Except maybe find some aspirin.”

“Aspirin?”

“Another Vegas thing.” He pointed at the car battery and the clips. “While you were checking your makeup, I was the entertainment that kept them here.”

37

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 17:49 GMT


Quinn couldn’t walk away from the trapdoor in the floor. That’s where the agents should have taken him for interrogation. They hadn’t chosen this old building at random; there would be too much risk in it. They knew the building, knew the room, had confidence in it as a safe house. That meant they knew where the trapdoor led. So why not take him down there?

Neither man had answered Quinn’s questions about it. Nor about the location of their vehicle. Both had refused to speak at all. They were still on their bellies on the floor, stripped down to their underwear. Kate had found a knife and used it to cut Quinn loose. Quinn hadn’t found more plastic restraints, so they’d used laces from the agents’ shoes to bind their wrists behind their backs.

The pain from the clips and electrical jolts was fading, and Quinn was still going on an adrenaline rush. “I’ve got to look,” he told Kate, pointing at the door in the floor. He explained why, uncaring that the agents could overhear their conversation.

“I’d rather be looking for their car,” she said. The keys were dangling in her hand. By the stamp of the ignition key, they knew it was a Mercedes, which would help. The only choice they saw was to search the nearby streets, clicking on the remote access to set off the flashing lights and the car horn.

“Give me ten minutes,” he said. “I’ll go alone. We can’t both go down there.”

“You don’t have a flashlight.”

But he had a cell phone. And a pistol.

Somewhere over Israel • 17:51 GMT


The helicopter appeared to have stabilized, but the lights below were growing closer as the chopper seemed to sag downward each minute. Safady was not worried. He had expected this. And he knew the pilot had expected it too.

Because the Freedom Crusaders wore face scarves as if they were Palestinian terrorists, the pilot had no clue to their real identity. Safady knew the pilot believed these were IDF commandos in disguise—the soldiers who had been hiding in a tunnel below the orphanage. And because the pilot did not know how badly the IDF operation had been betrayed, Safady needed to act as if this were a legitimate emergency.

Safady scrambled forward, holding a pistol. He pressed the barrel into the base of the pilot’s neck. “Keep the radio open.”

He didn’t need to shout to be heard above the chopper engines. Safady was wearing a headset and had insisted on being part of all communications between the helicopters and the land-based operations.