JET V - Legacy (26 page)

Pausing motionless, he listened for footsteps, but after thirty seconds the grounds were quiet. Confident now that nobody was going to follow the first attacker in, he knelt and squinted at the unconscious figure’s face – a young Asian man, probably local. Judging by the blood streaming from his hairline he wasn’t going to be doing much pursuing in the near future. Matt rose, and after expertly searching him, finding only a slim wad of local currency and a cheap cell phone, he hefted his bag and slipped the pistol into the waist of his shorts, hiding its bulk with his mini-duffle.

He slipped through the doorway and glanced around, his darkness-accustomed eyes roving over the surroundings, and when he saw nothing, he made for the far end of the courtyard and the exit that led out onto the street. Matt had gotten across the expanse and was pulling the iron gate closed behind him when he sensed someone approaching from his right. He spun and then relaxed when he saw that it was only a local girl, walking from the main street. She smiled at him as she neared, and he almost missed the tell-tale glint of steel from the stiletto as she lunged, trying to eviscerate him with the razor-sharp blade. He stepped back and turned sideways, presenting as small a target as he could, and the knife slashed through his shirt as he brought his hand down against her wrist, simultaneously whipping the pistol from his shorts and slamming it against her temple.

She stumbled and dropped the knife, but then surprised him by winging a kick at his head, even as blood trickled down her face from the gash he’d put in her skull with the weapon. The kick got him in the neck as he instinctively pulled away, and everything began to fade – she’d managed to get him near enough to the carotid that he was momentarily stunned. He shook off the daze as she dipped her left hand and retrieved the knife; she was about to make another run at skewering him when he rabbit-punched her in the face, breaking her nose. Her eyes welled with tears and fury, and then he spun and delivered a brutal kick to her chest, knocking her backwards. She lost her balance, stumbled, and went down hard, and he heard the crack of her head splitting as the back of her skull struck the sidewalk.

She convulsed several times, jerking like a beached fish, and Matt didn’t stick around for the inevitable. The pair had been working as a team, and he had no way of knowing whether there were more, or if these two were the night shift after the safecracker had run off. The girl had been good – almost too good, he thought, as he moved down the sidewalk. Better than an amateur, with an adept command of Thai martial arts and unexpected tenacity.

Whoever had sent them after him had paid top dollar, but they’d underestimated his abilities, as well as his field instincts. If the man survived his beating, he’d be out of the game for a long time, so he no longer presented a threat. The girl was history – he’d seen those kinds of convulsions before, and he knew what they meant.

Matt slowed as he neared the corner and checked his watch – five-thirty, so maybe another forty minutes to go before dawn. The inevitable police would take their time at that hour, but it would still be wise to put some distance between himself and Phuket. There was a good chance that the motel clerk might give them a decent description, and even if every other person in town seemed to be a middle-aged Caucasian man on vacation, he didn’t want to press his luck any further than he already had.

He glanced around the building’s edge and, seeing nobody on the larger street, hesitated for a moment and then opened his bag to retrieve another shirt – this one a light-green short-sleeved dress shirt he’d acquired in Bangkok. He pulled it on and stuffed his current one into the sack; then, with that flimsiest of disguises, made for the bars, where he was hopeful he could get a cab to the airport and from there another headed north. He knew the country well enough to know that trying to board a plane in Phuket was a bad idea, but if he could make it to the mainland – a town with an airport, like Krabi – he could get out of the area and go to ground someplace more remote.

Which, at this point, as he rubbed his neck, sore from where the woman’s shoe had gotten him, sounded like a good strategy, given how badly his attempt at a beach holiday had gone.

As he approached the nightclubs, the disco music still pumping from the tireless speakers, he smiled. Last time he’d decided a beach in Thailand was a good destination they’d burned down his house and killed everyone around him. This time had also rendered a poor result, although not as dramatic.

Maybe, he thought, next time he’d stick to the jungle.

So far that had proved the safest choice.

And right now, safety sounded pretty good.

Chapter 32

Doha, Qatar

The dingy walls of the safe house seemed to seep despair as dawn’s rays brought the tense group no closer to finding the bomb than they had been two hours earlier. Jet paced the rough tile floor, her usual calm marred by an anxiety that was palpable as the minutes ticked by with no further contact from headquarters.

When the phone rang, Jet lunged for it on the dining room table, now the epicenter of their ad hoc situation room, and stabbed the call activation button.

“I have news. A radiation sensor was triggered at the port at about the same time a guard was shot. So the bomb is hot – we have no idea how much radiation it’s leaking, but it is, which means that we may have a shot at locating it using our satellite. We have the ability to locate minute amounts of radiation if we know what we’re looking for. In this case, Ben, the technician, confirmed that the business end was uranium, so we’re calibrating the satellite to look for any traces in Doha. It’ll be in position in twenty minutes, and we should get several good hours before it’s orbited out of range again.”

“How long until you have something?” Jet demanded, her words laced with impatience.

“If there’s anything to be had, I would think within the hour. But this isn’t an exact science. This is all very new stuff, and it’s not a hundred percent. Usually we would be looking for something larger. I just wanted you to know that we’re on it,” the director said.

“What about the local authorities? Aren’t they freaking out with the Arab League meeting happening today and a radiation sensor sounding the alarm?”

“Apparently not, although it’s hard to tell for sure. The attack on the guard is being treated as a robbery issue. We only found out about the radiation sensor just now, and nobody’s made the connection. Remember that there are innocent things that could set one off – poorly shielded medical containers with radioactive sources being by far the most common. Qatar doesn’t have the same concerns that a port like New York does, so the sensors aren’t nearly as sophisticated. According to the report, the government will have a hazmat team going into the container area today, but it’s a big place with hundreds of possible suspects.”

Jet snuck a look at the men and then walked down the hall to the bathroom.

“You haven’t told them, have you? The Qatar government?” she whispered.

The director sighed, weighing how best to answer her direct question. “It was decided at a higher pay grade than mine that a group of our most prominent citizens scheming to nuke the Arab leadership into oblivion could be misconstrued.
Would
be misconstrued. So no, nothing’s been said. We’re depending on you and your team to stop this in time. If not, it’s a Russian device, and will ultimately be traced back to the Russians. We have plausible deniability.”

“But you don’t need deniability. You’re doing everything in your power to stop it.”

“That’s not how politics works, my dear. Nothing is straight lines.” The director sounded exasperated, unaccustomed to having to explain himself to anyone, much less female subordinates. “There are more considerations than I’m able to discuss, but the decision was made at the highest level.”

“It’s a stupid, dangerous decision,” Jet snapped, furious at the old men running the government for risking countless lives, as well as the stability of the region. “Surely having a nuke explode is worse than a PR problem.”

“I don’t disagree, but it’s out of my hands. At this point you’re our only hope. If the worst happens…” The director paused, and then cleared his throat. “I don’t expect you to be happy with the decision, but it was made, and there’s no going back now. I’ll call you as soon as we have something on the leak.”

Jet stared at the dead encrypted phone, shaking her head. The enormity of the situation was like a monstrous weight over her head – her government had betrayed her trust with this idiocy, and now the world would pay. She wondered how many innocents would be immolated by the blast – people who had never harbored any hate in their hearts, who were guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Children like her Hannah, just starting out in life…

The ramifications infuriated her, but there was nothing to do. She wasn’t responsible for the crisis, but she would certainly be part of the solution – if any was to be had.

Jet choked back the rage she felt, the broiling in the pit of her stomach eating at it like acid, and took several calming breaths before going back to the men and filling them in on the new radiation detector development.

~ ~ ~

“It’s cracked. You can see where the lead shielding has a hairline fissure in it,” Joseph reported, leaning back from where the bomb sat on the dining room table.

“What about the circuitry?”

“Everything appears to be functional, but there’s only one true test. It’ll either work, or it won’t.”

“Damn it. This is a disaster. Isn’t there any way we can be a hundred percent sure?” Solomon demanded.

“No. But I
can
be sure that we’re getting irradiated the longer this thing is around with that crack. And I, for one, would like to live to tell about our day of victory,” Joseph said.

“Can you repair it?”

“I don’t see any reason why not. The truth is that it’s more of a safety issue for us than a functionality issue. Whether or not it works is going to come down to whether there are any microscopic cold solder joints – something we can’t fully verify without detonating it. I’ve checked what I can with my instruments, and I’d say it’s still viable, but now that it’s been dropped–”

“Joseph, I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Solomon interrupted, his face pale from blood loss as well as the pain of having his bites cleaned and sutured without anesthetic.

“Enough, already. Let me think for a second. I’ll need to jury rig something with lead. I don’t want to risk the device itself, or I’d just melt the existing shielding to repair it.” Joseph trailed off, thinking about where he could get some lead to make the repair. At six a.m. in Doha, it wasn’t like he could just head to the nearest hardware store and ask them if they had any lead available to repair a bomb.

“Can’t you just scrape some from the rest of it, then melt it down and pour it into the crack? There has to be more lead than necessary in that thing. And it’s not like we need it to shield the uranium for the next fifty years…”

Joseph contemplated Solomon’s suggestion and then leaned back and smiled. “You’re not just a pretty face after all, are you? I would have gotten there, eventually. I’m just tired.”

“I know the feeling. I’d gladly trade you whatever fatigue you have for the dog bites.”

Joseph frowned. “I felt bad about the poor dog. He was just doing his job.”

Solomon nodded and took the seat next to him.

“As are we all, my friend. As are we all…”

Chapter 33

The promised hour turned out to be more like an hour and a half, but when the call came in at seven forty a.m. the news was the most positive that Jet could have hoped for.

“We narrowed it down and have a location. It’s a house in the Abu Hamour district, near the big animal market.” The director’s voice was excited for the first time Jet could remember.

“Can you send everything you have? This is going to be a seat of the pants operation, but I don’t see that we have much choice in the matter. We’re going to have to go in. Am I missing something?” Jet asked, hating that they were going to have to do an incursion in broad daylight with zero surveillance or information on what to expect.

“It’s on its way. But the bottom line is that we have a defined radiation signature coming from the structure, so unless someone is enriching uranium in their bathtub, that’s our target.”

“I’m presuming that we have full discretion on how to handle this?”

“Absolutely. All I care about is that you stop the bomb from going off. I don’t really care how. Once you have it, we’ll take it from there, but how you get it is up to you.”

“Okay, then, we’re going to move out as soon as we’ve got all the recon. Do you have satellite imagery for it?”

“That’s a different bird. It’ll take a few minutes to get it up on line – it’s just now hitting the point in orbit where we’ll get images. The technicians are scrambling to bring it live. Any second now.”

“Damn. Isn’t anything going to go our way on this one?”

“At least the one with the radiation detector was in position this morning. That’s something.”

“I suppose so. Anything else?”

“Good luck. You know the stakes.”

“I haven’t forgotten them.”

This time when the line went dead, it was Jet who terminated the call. She strode into the living room, where everyone was gathered around the monitors, studying the odd-looking thermal imagery that highlighted the radiation as a bright blip on the overlaid map.

“We have a go. You’re looking at the target. I want to move out in five minutes. Isaac, what can you tell us about that neighborhood?”

Isaac shook his head. “It’s a residential area. Middle class mostly, shop owners and managers, construction supervisors and the like. I’ve only been through it a few times, but it’s very much like this one – nothing special.”

“I don’t suppose you have any surprises for us, like some decent assault weapons instead of this Russian junk?” Jet asked, eyeing the well-used AK-47 by the door.