Cold Shot (33 page)

The MOP had its own GPS guidance system. Free of the plane, the bomb took stock of its location, calculated the optimal path to its target, and began shifting its tail fins, adjusting its trajectory as the high Venezuelan winds tried to push it away from its destination. It would have taken a hurricane to move it. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator weighed over fifteen tons.

CAVIM Explosives Factory

The last of the SEBIN soldiers clambered aboard the cargo trucks and closed the tailgate. Satisfied, Carreño walked to the waiting town car and climbed in, seating himself in the front passenger seat. Ahmadi and Elham were waiting inside.

“Everything is secure,” he told the others. Carreño picked up the Motorola radio sitting on the dash. “Move the convoy out,” he ordered. “Stop for nothing. I want to be in Caracas before dark.”

“Sí, señor,”
the lead driver replied. Carreño saw dark smoke spew from the trucks’ exhaust stacks and the first of the five-ton transports began to roll forward.

•    •    •

“There they go,” Kyra said. “I hope somebody up there is watching.” She waved at the sky, then saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up. “Jon?”

He saw her staring up and scanned the sky until he saw it.

GBU?
It had to be. A Tomahawk cruise missile wouldn’t be arcing down in a vertical line and the object was moving too slowly to be any kind of ballistic missile. That meant a bomber had deployed it within the last minute. Jon stared beyond the falling weapon but couldn’t discern the plane that had loosed it.
Too high to make it out,
he thought. B-2 and B-52s both could reach fifty thousand feet, ten miles up, but he’d heard B-52s flying at altitude and now he’d heard nothing—a B-2, then.

The only question was what kind of ordnance the U.S. Air Force had just chosen to put on target. He’d seen smart bombs used in Iraq when his unit had called in air strikes on the occasional building filled with stubborn insurgents determined not to come outside. This one seemed larger than any Jon was familiar with, given the size and distance, and B-2s could carry anything in the U.S. arsenal, including nuclear weapons. He doubted it was one of those . . . hoped, really. They were done if it was nuclear.

It would hit in fifteen seconds or so by his estimate, and it was going to hit close. He wasn’t surprised. There was only one target worth hitting. He stared at the weapon as it hurtled downward, seeming to come straight toward them.

Five seconds later, he finally figured out the weapon type. “Get down!” he yelled. Jon turned and heaved himself toward Kyra.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

Drescher zoomed the picture out. The image of Jon and Kyra on the hilltop was overlaid in a separate box on the lower right. The entire convoy had moved out of the picture now.

Cooke stared at the monitor, hands over her face, her eyes fixed on the separate feed of Jon and Kyra. She saw one of the thermal figures lunge toward the other.
I’m sorry, Jon, I’m sorry, I’m—

The image of the CAVIM building went completely white.

CAVIM Explosives Factory

The trip to the ground took a little over fifty seconds. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator ripped into the chemical factory’s roof at terminal velocity.

As big as a large van, the MOP was designed to penetrate two hundred feet into hardened concrete bunkers. The CAVIM plant didn’t offer nearly so much resistance and the bomb smashed through every floor in less than a tenth of a second, crushing more than one technician on its way to the subbasement. The falling weapon cratered through the building’s foundation, then burrowed into the earth and traveled almost two hundred feet farther through the dirt and rock before its onboard computer decided it had gone far enough.

The MOP’s payload detonated, fifty-three hundred pounds of high explosive igniting in a fraction of a second. The shock wave went supersonic, compressing everything in its path to the density of steel, and traveling back up through the solid earth around it.

The entire building came off the ground as the earth rose up underneath it, rippling outward in a circle like an earthquake driving upward and out from a fault line. The shock wave broke through and the building pancaked from bottom up, smashing it all to gravel, the walls disintegrating into particles small enough to vaporize in the fireball that followed an instant later. Smaller outbuildings around the plant disappeared, crushed between the writhing earth, the solid wall of air hardened by the shock wave, and the fireball that trailed behind. A mushroom cloud erupted out of the earth where the MOP had burrowed, sucking air and dirt into the sky higher than the foothills.

The cargo trucks were five hundred feet away from the point of impact, well inside the blast radius. The artificial earthquake reached the first cargo truck and lifted all five tons of it off the ground, flipping it end over end. The shock wave struck it faster than the speed of sound, stripping away the tires and metal sides, twisting the frame like rubber, and shattering the bones of the soldiers in the cargo bed before their brains could recognize that anything had happened at all. The second truck followed the first, slamming into what remained of its brother. All of the trucks took flight in a fraction of a second, the soldiers inside killed before the heat of the now-dying fireball ever touched them. The entire convoy came to rest hundreds of feet from where the shock wave had touched them, the trucks twisted and crumpled, lying on their sides.

Carreño’s car was another three hundred feet ahead—just far enough to spare its passengers. The shock wave hit the vehicle, shattering the windows and driving the air at a few hundred miles an hour, sucking the oxygen from the occupants’ lungs. The town car flipped over onto its side, end over end, until it came to rest on its right side, all four passengers unconscious and bleeding from their noses and ears.

•    •    •

Kyra saw the shock wave for a fraction of a second, barely enough time for her mind to register the sight before it reached her position. It was a perfect circle of distorted air expanding out as it vaporized everything it touched. It passed over the security shack she had penetrated, then the fence, which disappeared into shards smaller than nails. The new shrapnel flew into the woods and cut into the trees microseconds before the shock wave touched them, shredding the smaller ones into splinters and bending the larger ones over until their trunks finally exploded, sending them tumbling into the hillside.

Behind it, the ground rolled like an ocean wave, a perfect circle of moving earth expanding outward until the flash from the explosion forced Kyra to shut her eyes.

The shock wave was dying now, slowing down and losing force from the moment of its birth. It expanded into the trees, ripping branches loose into the air. Still it pushed out, spending its energy to rise up the slope. Kyra yelled as she felt it hit, like a giant fist punching her over the entire surface of her body, knocking Jon off her and sending him rolling through the high grass. Her cry was lost in the screaming air, the loudest sound she’d ever heard. She could feel her eardrums vibrate inside her head and without a thought her hands covered her ears, trying to save her hearing. The earth rumbled and the solid wave rolled underneath her, throwing her and Jon into the air.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

Cooke stifled a cry of her own as she saw the MOP explode and the screen wash out. She turned away from the monitor, covering her face with her hands. Drescher said nothing, didn’t move.

They’re dead,
she realized.
They must be dead.
It was the only thought she could keep in her head.

“Kathy,” Drescher said after a short eternity. He’d never called her by her first name. She looked up. The Ops Center watch officer was pointing at the monitor.

On the screen, in the separate window in the lower right, Cooke saw two thermal figures, bodies, lying prone on the ground, still.

Then they started to move and Cooke couldn’t restrain a small cry of hope.

CAVIM Explosives Factory

“Jon?” Kyra couldn’t hear her voice over the ringing in her ears. Her balance was shot. The world spun around her and she stumbled forward as she tried to rise, falling onto her hands and knees.

He was in the high grass behind her, twenty feet away, dragging himself to his feet. He made his way to her side, no small feat. He lifted her to her feet again and she fell against him, unable to keep her balance. He caught her, put her arm around his shoulders, and held her upright.

They turned and looked at the valley.

The CAVIM site was gone, erased from the ground, a mushroom cloud reaching into the sky to a height Kyra couldn’t begin to guess. The chemical factory was a crater in the earth, the outbuildings vaporized, the security hub missing, with only a small corner of one charred foundation to mark its previous location. Smaller craters in the ordnance field marked where the shock wave and the fireball had detonated the unexploded ordnance that had littered the ground.

“There,” she said, pointing, almost having to yell so he could hear her over the ringing in his ears. The convoy was scattered out beyond the crater, Carreño’s town car another football field’s length beyond them. The trucks were on their sides or backs, clearly wrecked beyond repair. “You think it survived?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Trucks weren’t vaporized . . . nuclear . . . nuclear transport caskets can take serious punishment.” He was still trying to catch his breath. “If they put it in one of those . . . might be intact.”

“Have to find out.” Kyra pushed away from Jon and stumbled forward, her balance returning more slowly than she wanted. She searched through the grass and found the HK, still in working order. The Barrett was the heavier rifle and had traveled less distance in the same direction.

“Radio’s intact,” she heard Jon call out behind her. She turned his way. The LST-5 had just missed landing on a large rock after being thrown into the air, and Kyra realized for the first time how lucky she and Jon were not to have come down to earth that way. Either of them could have, maybe should have broken backs or bones.

She reached into her pocket and checked her smartphone. It was still in one piece, courtesy of the MIL-SPEC case holding it. Breathing was coming easier now. “We finish this. We make sure it’s dead, then we get out of here.”

Jon pointed at the mushroom cloud. “They can see that all the way to Puerto Cabello.” Another pause, another deep breath. “The SEBIN will be coming. If you see anyone down there, run for the truck.”

“I’ll try. But if we get separated, take the truck and head for some town that’s not on fire. Try to find a way to reach Mari or HQ.”

“I’ll be watching,” he said.

Kyra began to make her way down the hillside, still unsteady on her feet.

Jon exhaled, then reached down and picked up the Barrett. It was heavy in his hands.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

“What are they doing?” Cooke asked. One of the thermal figures on the screen—Kyra, she guessed, judging by the smaller size—was walking away from the other. Jon laid himself prone on the ground.

“Going down to check out the blast site?” Drescher guessed. He panned the satellite image away from the blast crater until he found the wrecked convoy trucks. “The nuke might’ve survived.”

Don’t get killed. Don’t get caught. Bring home the intel.
The words ran through her mind, a cruel reminder that she had put the two officers in harm’s way. Now Kyra was trying to bring home the intel and Jon wasn’t trying to stop her.
He must think the nuke survived too,
Cooke told herself.

“Get me the SecDef,” she ordered. It took Drescher five minutes to comply with the order.

“I’m a little busy, Kathy,” the SecDef replied.

“We think the nuke might have survived,” she told him. “I assume you’re watching the live feed?”

“We are.”

“One of our officers is approaching the crash site from the northwest. I know both members of the team personally. She wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t both think there was a chance the warhead is intact,” she advised.

“If that’s true, we might have to bomb the site again,” the SecDef told her. “
Truman
can hit the site within the hour.”

“The SEBIN will probably have people on-site within a few minutes. If you do that, there will be casualties.”

“There were already casualties,” the SecDef replied. “I don’t think that’ll stop the president. But I’ll see if we can get some boots on the ground instead . . . secure the perimeter and maybe retrieve any nuclear material. Not likely, so don’t get your hopes up.”

“I want those personnel retrieval assets ASAP.”

“Has Rostow approved?”

“No. But if my people find out whether the bomb is dead, that’ll tell you whether you have to hit the site again.”

“Works for me,” the SecDef conceded. “Okay, it’s a go. I’ll get permission later. But your people have to pull back to some other checkpoint. I’ll order
Vicksburg
to launch as soon as that happens.”

“I’ll let you know,” Cooke said. She hung up the phone.
They’re coming, Jon.

CAVIM Explosives Factory

Her balance was better, the ringing in her ears quieter now, and Kyra began to jog down the hill, then run as she felt more steady on her feet. She reached the bottom and sprinted as hard as she could to the edge of the site where the fence had once stood. There was no building to provide cover, but she supposed the same was true for any survivors, and she saw none. She moved forward, walking into the compound, the HK raised to her shoulder.

Charred earth crunched under her boots and she saw little fires everywhere, the surviving debris burning where it fell. The smoke was settling, creating a fog that limited her vision to a few dozen feet. She made her way past the broken foundation of the security hub and walked east, stepping over the blackened gravel that lay in clumps on the ground. A quarter mile to the north, she reached the edge of the crater where the chemical factory had stood. The bowl in the earth was at least thirty feet deep to the bottom and she couldn’t judge the distance across . . . well over a hundred feet at least. She prayed that the fireball had eaten whatever chemicals had been stored inside the building, or that any surviving nuclear material was now a thousand feet above her head and getting blown out to sea.