Watchlist (40 page)

“We never should have let this go on,” Middleton snapped to Chernayev as they were jostled suddenly when the crowd reacted to another powerful line spoken by the president.

“What choice did we have?” Chernayev challenged him. “Who would have listened to us? We will find this Umer. We will stop this.”

“We’d better,” said Middleton.

Umer made his way to the front of the crowd, sliding along slowly, not about to do anything that would bring notice to him. He need not get this close to trigger the blast but he had promised his men he would join them in their glorious mission and be the first to greet them when they reached heaven. It hadn’t been a difficult sacrifice to make; after today, nothing he ever did could equal the service he was performing. He needed to share in that glory, be celebrated as a hero, even if that be limited to the tiny circles that knew his role.

His men shared his ambition and courage, each and every one of them knowing they had been born for this day. Each had gone into this with eyes wide open prepared to give themselves to the service of the Almighty. Umer felt strangely calm, aware in a God-like moment that he was the master of a fate controlled by the tiny detonator in his pocket. Flip the switch, press the button and the world would change forever in a nanosecond.

Umer prayed he’d be able to view the aftermath from his spot in heaven.

“
Let us not let ourselves be held prisoner to the vestiges of the past. Let us embrace the future without fear of the complications that come with boldness and the bright expanse a new direction imparts. The time for fear and tentativeness is gone . . . ”

“You’ll never get away with this,” Tesla told Archer weakly.

From the private booth in the VIP area, Archer seemed to feel quite confident that he could get away with whatever he wanted to.

“My father would have wanted Middleton to die here,” he said. “But I prefer having him watch me kill his daughter. Better to have him live in misery.”

“He’ll hunt you to the end of the earth.”

Archer’s lips flirted with a smile, clearly unfamiliar with the gesture. “If he survives, which is unlikely. And if he does, let him come after me. Let his personal hatred consume his failed mission. And not long after today that earth will be a considerably different place.”

Tesla thought briefly. “Is it true you killed your father?”

Archer stiffened, didn’t respond.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Some would call that the ultimate betrayal.”

“Age betrayed him,” Archer shot at her. “Weakness betrayed him. He had played the game too long.”

“Is that what this is to you?”

“As it was to my father. But he no longer cared enough about winning.”

“You just answered my question,” Tesla said. “This was your plan all along. It was your plan and he refused to go along with it. He changed his mind, so you killed him.”

Archer didn’t bother denying it. “We had come to see the world a different way.”

Security badge dangling from his throat, Middleton was nearing the front of the vast mass of humanity when he glimpsed a man standing off to the side. On first glance, he wouldn’t have paid him any heed at all, except for the fact that his eyes were held closed, as if he were asleep. Or praying. Second glance brought a flash of recognition from the picture Chernayev had shown him:

Umer!

Middleton had barely formed that thought when one of the reporters squeezed into the press rows plowed his way into the aisle, his face a sheen of dripping sweat. Middleton watched him tear the camera strap from his neck and toss it aside, as security personnel moved toward him.

Middleton swung back toward Umer. His eyes had snapped open and his hand was digging into his pocket.

In that moment it all became clear. The fifty soldiers, thermobaric explosives, the discarded camera . . .

Archer’s men were disguised as
journalists
, the explosives laden into their Nikons, Canons and video cameras.

The equipment would have been remodeled to include a lead shielding rendering the explosives mostly invisible to detection devices. Add to that the fact that thermobarics were so new that their signature may not have been identified and coded yet.

Middleton made his way toward Umer, wishing now he and Chernayev hadn’t separated.

“I’ve got him,” he said softly into a tiny handheld microphone the Russian had provided him. “Front crowd, southeast facing.”

Middleton saw Umer cupping his hands around a tiny oblong detonator and raising them into a position of prayer. He closed his eyes again. He started to go for the Beretta Chernayev had supplied but didn’t dare risk firing. Even a kill shot to the brain could result in a spasm more than sufficient to activate the detonator. Middleton would have to win this battle in close.

A commotion in the press corps drew Archer’s gaze away from his two captives. Harold Middleton was fighting his way down the aisle.

“No,” Archer rasped. And then his voice dissolved into the throaty scream of a spoiled child.
“No!”

With that he lashed a blinding whipsaw of a blow to Tesla’s throat that would have crushed her windpipe had she not turned at the last instant. The blow impacted instead against the side, still mashing cartilage and dropping her momentarily breathless to her knees.

Gasping, Tesla saw Archer jerk Charley forward and drag her downward toward the crowd.

Taking advantage of Umer’s resolute focus, Middleton slammed into him from the side, hand thrust forward to jerk back all the fingers he could find. Umer whelped in pain, enraged eyes finding Middleton as if aroused suddenly from a beautiful dream. The commotion spilled those crowded closest to the front into a domino-like fall, leading Secret Service personnel to storm the stage and enclose the president in a protective, moving bubble.

Chaos.

The word locked in Middleton’s mind as it raged around him. He slammed an elbow into Umer’s face, crushing his nose and mashing his front teeth. He heard something clack to the concrete and knew it could only be the detonator, as Umer dropped to feel for it. Middleton joined him amid the thrashing feet moving in all directions at once. If one of them pressed down on the detonator’s button . . .

On stage he glimpsed the Secret Service just now starting to rush the president to safety, still any number of long, long seconds before he was out of range of the kind of blast 50 separate thermobaric explosions would wreak. Middleton felt a knee smack his skull, a foot jab his ribs, courtesy of the fleeing throngs. He continued to grope about the ground for the lost detonator, afraid to spare the hand it would take to draw his gun on Umer. He grabbed sight of him pawing about the ground through the sea of churning legs and desperate fleeing frames.

Middleton glimpsed the detonator, its black casing now cracked, stretched a hand toward it only to have his fingers stepped on as another foot kicked the device from him. It bounced once and skittered straight toward Umer who lashed a hand toward it.

The fingers on his right hand throbbing and useless, Middleton drew his pistol with his left and fired in a single motion. The bullet took Umer in the cheek, blowing off a hefty portion of his face. He collapsed atop the detonator, shielding it from the onrushing feet long enough for Middleton to close desperately on all fours and jerk it from beneath his body.

Rising to his feet proved an arduous, almost impossible task as he clung to the detonator with both hands to protect it. His eyes fell on an impossible sight, conjured certainly by the sharp blows to his head: a vision of his daughter Charley.

But then the haze cleared, revealing Archer, holding a gun to Charley’s head.

“Give it to me!” Archer bellowed, looking surprisingly young and desperate. “Give it to me or she dies!”

16

JAMES PHELAN

A
rcher’s hand exploded and painted Charley’s face with gore. A high-caliber rifle round took out his pistol.

He dragged Charley back with him to the ground and dropped out of Middleton’s sight. The crowd was surging around them, thousands of people in a stampede to get out of the amphitheatre.

Middleton hunched and bent his knees to lower his center of gravity, being jostled as he went against the tide, making it over to where they’d fallen—nothing. Blood on the ground, Archer’s pistol in pieces, no trail.

Middleton had made a career out of helping others. He’d never asked for anything in return. Right now, as the spooked crowd streamed around him, he wished otherwise.

Connie Carson and Wiki Chang sat in the cargo area of an MV-22B Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, U.S. marines around them, game faces on, M4 assault rifles ready. They took off vertically as a helicopter would, the flying style converting to that of an aircraft as the two massive engines charged forward for horizontal flight and they were hammering hard and fast to the north.

Squashed between a marine three times his size and Carson, Chang hugged his backpack so tight it seemed he wanted to crawl in there to escape the incredible noise inside the cabin, as two other Ospreys flew in close formation.

He’d held on but no more—Chang threw up into the bag he’d been given by the crew chief. Carson patted him on the back.

“You’re . . . smiling?”

“Been a while since I’ve done an infil with marines,” she said, cheerleader exterior masking a former door-kicker with the U.S. military. She was not so much taking to the situation like a duck to water, but rather felt a happiness like a pig rolling in filth. She scratched at the fiberglass cast on her arm. “It’s not really like a computer game, is it?”

His teeth felt like they were rattling out of their sockets. As the marine seated next to him slapped a box of rounds into his M249 SAW and cranked a round into the chamber, Chang shook his head.

Chernayev called his name over the radio.

Middleton scanned around, stood tall and tried to look over heads and was almost knocked over—there, behind the press pool, the assembly still corralled in their cordoned-off area below and out of the sightline of the president, while POTUS was being evacced and the civilians exfilled en masse. Not even all the number of security personnel present were able to control this crowd moving as one.

“Over there!”

Middleton followed Chernayev’s outstretched arm and pointed finger—

Archer dragging Charley back toward the raised VIP area, the sound of a helicopter behind him.

“Two minutes!” the marine CO yelled. “Masks!”

All the marines donned gas masks.

Carson looked to Chang, his face a mixture of apprehension and pure fear. Just twenty minutes ago, they’d been stopped at the major road checkpoint ten kilometers south of the dam, and she had managed to talk the Indian military sentries into letting her speak to the U.S. marine colonel, a man who now stood looking forward through the shoulders of the pilots.

“Wiki, are we in range yet?” Carson asked.

Chang shook his head and turned a new shade of sick, swallowed some vomit that rose up his throat. She put an arm around his shoulders. Saving not only their president, but also this region from a potential nuclear war . . . Yeah, that would do it to you.

The Secret Service had the president behind a tall wall of bulletproof glass that deployed whenever the commander-in-chief was giving a public speech. The protective detail, all with service firearms drawn, were scanning the crowd, some looking up at the sound of Marine One, the big Sikorsky VH-3D Sea King coming in fast toward the landing zone.

Middleton ran hard, carving a path through anyone in his way. Weren’t for the flare in his knees he could have been back 35 years, a wide receiver at West Point. A gap in the crowd, another gunshot behind him, he didn’t flinch, eyes searching, sucking in air.

There. Dead ahead.

Near where the base of the dam met the stairs up to the raised VIP platform, Archer turned to face him. Arm tight around Charley’s waist, bloody stump of a hand to the front of her, his other hand out of sight behind her back. Could be a gun, could be a knife.

Middleton looked to his daughter. All thoughts of the running crowd left his mind. The bombs too. It was like he was in the eye of the storm, even the sound of the helicopter was silenced in this moment. People ran screaming all around them as he stood still and faced her. Charley’s eyes pleaded with him. This wasn’t her fight. His work had again put her into jeopardy. No way.

A guy, one of Chernayev’s BlueWatch operators, had his pistol drawn and was coming at him—his head snapped back and he fell to the ground. Secret Service or marine sharpshooter. Middleton almost wished he’d ditched the Beretta but he’d instinctively tucked it into the back of his belt as he’d stood. Hopefully it wouldn’t be clocked and seen as a threat.

“The controller, Middleton, or she dies.”

Charley screamed as Archer pushed something into her back.

They were ten yards away. Middleton closed the gap to five. Stopped. Held the controller loose in his right hand, visible to Archer.

“You want this?”

“This ends here, you know it.”

“Maybe for me and you,” Middleton replied. “It’s not going to end for her.”

“Maybe not—for her.” Archer gave a flick of his head over his shoulder. “What about your other bitch?”

Middleton followed where Archer motioned. At the top of the stairs that led up to the VIP area, Tesla gasping for breath, a stream of bright red ran out of the corner of her mouth, her face sunken and tired. She’d been trampled by the crowd.

“Let them both go, Archer,” Middleton said, turning back. “Only deal you’re gonna get. You think you can draw down on me and not get taken out by a sniper, go for it.”

Sixty marines in full battle dress ran flat out in double-file, carving a path through the middle of the mass exodus.

Chang had a hand on the back of Carson’s belt, as instructed, and he didn’t argue or question when she peeled off from the stream of marines and ran up the stairs to the VIP area to their left.

“The only way this ends, Archer. You let my daughter and my colleague go. You give them time to leave.”

Archer almost smiled. Charley winced as he shifted his grip and his warm blood pumped across her neck.

“The detonator, on the ground, and I let them run for thirty seconds,” Archer said. “There’s a clear path behind me, into the dam’s maintenance area. They’ll be spared from the blast.”

Middleton knew he had no choice but to go along, even though Charley’s eyes said no.

“Twenty-five seconds.”

He scanned right—Marine One was coming in to land. He thought of Lespasse and Wetherby, two fallen comrades. He thought of Charley’s mother. He thought of all those who left too early, who were taken by greedy men. This was what he’d formed the Volunteers to prevent.

“Twenty. Leave it longer and they won’t make it.”

Middleton looked around again—spotted a familiar face: Chernayev was coming behind him.

“OK,” Middleton said. He held his hand out and put the remote detonator on the ground, a few paces from Archer. He let Charley go, shoving her toward Tesla, who was doing her best to hurry down the stairs.

“Run!” Middleton yelled at them. “Run!”

Tesla grabbed Charley by the arm. With all her remaining strength, she dragged her away, pulled her in a run toward the safety of the dam’s reinforced concrete.

The crowd had broken through the barrier and the line of security at the landing area of Marine One. Still several thousand people were jostling for a chance to escape the amphitheatre, hundreds of them taking this new route.

Secret Service were forced to keep the president behind the bullet-proof glass screen, some two hundred yards off their now-busy evac site. Marine One stayed on station, hovering directly above its LZ. They all donned gas masks, even the president and his bodyguards.

Archer squatted to the ground, revealed he had a small pistol, picked up the remote in the same hand, nursing his mangled hand across his chest the whole time. Looked at the little plastic box. Smiled. Content. Flipped the cover off the switch. He thought of that place his father had told him about, a little town of pedigree goat herders in Kashmir where Pashmina came from. Alexander’s caravan was said to have passed through there almost two and a half thousand years ago and the people there still have evidence of that today, with sandy hair and ruddy cheeks and blue eyes. Since a young boy he’d longed to see it—maybe death would bring him there. Suffering has its joyous side, despair has its gentleness and death has a meaning. Every death.

Hovering above the crowd, the side door of Marine One opened, an agent leaned out, fired three CS rounds directly below onto the LZ. The 40mm grenades from the M32 launcher took less than half a second to hit the ground fifty yards below. The tear gas had an immediate effect.

“No!” Chernayev shouted through a screen of running people.

Archer pressed the detonator.

Middleton closed his eyes. He thought of Charley.

Nothing happened.

Middleton opened his eyes. Archer looked at the remote, incredulous. He tucked the pistol into his belt, pressed the button again. Nothing. Again.

Again.

“Nice try, Archer,” Carson said.

She came down the stairs with Chang, who held up the POLENA handset that was wired to his backpack.

“He jammed the signal,” Middleton said. He’d seen Connie Carson and Chang in the brush nearby, signaling to him that it was all right to give up the remote control. Saving him from the very difficult decision: his daughter or the president.

Chang nodded, looked worn-out and relieved, like he might faint with the passing of the adrenalin. For all his advanced computer and science degrees and language skills that had aided the Volunteers from the comfort of his desk in D.C., never was a sight so welcome in the field as this slightly built Taiwanese-American before him.

“First, I thought they might be using a garage-door opener, but then I realized that the Secret Service must be wise to that sort of thing, from all the IEDs and stuff in Iraq,” he said, holding up his handset. He was taking comfort in tech-speak. “So I barrage jammed all frequencies as soon as the marines dropped us off.”

Middleton smiled, looked to Archer, who was now standing up, pistol still tucked in his belt, radio detonator in his useful hand. His eyes were darting around, then he seemed to relax.

“Nice work, Wiki.”

“No problem, boss,” Chang replied. He looked over at the commotion of Marine One hovering to land, the bubble of security protecting the president. “Holy crap,” he said, “it really is the president . . .

“And for the record,” Chang added, “there was no heavy water. The copper bracelet referred to the organization.”

“Yeah,” Middleton said. “I figured that one out too.”

He saw Chernayev approaching, a couple of his security guys with him. Looked like this was working out as a victory after all.

“Hacked into Bicchu, that search engine?” Chang said. “And you’ll never guess who it’s owned by—Hey!”

Middleton turned. He saw Wiki Chang on the ground, rubbing his jaw.

Chernayev had taken the backpack jammer from him. Walked over to Archer, flicking switches on the handset as he went.

“Owned by one of my corporations,” Chernayev said. He dumped the jammer by Archer’s feet and took the detonator from him. As a dozen heavily armed BlueWatch security men pushed onto the grounds, he glanced down at the younger man. “This should work now.
Almost
time...”

“And I’ll see your hands please, Colonel Middleton.”

POTUS was being ushered to his helicopter. A hundred and fifty yard dash. The marines were at the LZ now, a wall of 100 percent pure American muscle to keep the crowd away from the raised landing area. The gun-ships were close in too, their immense sound adding to the message to those below: this is
not
the way out. The press corps kept their cameras trained on the LZ, waiting for the money-shot of a gasmask-wearing president to headline the news services.

Middleton’s world was spinning.

Chernayev.

He’d set this up. He built this dam to attract a U.S. official. He set it all up . . .

He lied about the communiqué from the State Department—and, of course, never sent the email to Charley. And the reference to Tampa on Balan’s computer—it wasn’t one of Devras Sikari’s companies, but Chernayev’s. Sikari was probably worried about what it meant and was going to send Balan or someone there to check it out.

And Chernayev was responsible for the death of his dear friend and colleague, Lespasse.

“Originally, I was going to choke Pakistan into being more submissive to what I could provide them,” he said, his eyes drifting from Middleton to the scene of the president’s detail moving through thick CS smoke. “I’m afraid I’m not that patient.”

“We knew some of your Volunteers would make it here,” Archer said. “In fact, we were always going to have you here, Harold, dead or alive.”

“Oh?” Middleton felt Connie brush close against him. He made sure he kept his hands out front, in view of Chernayev, who had a silenced pistol pointed at them, concealed under his jacket.

“It was clear you’d come to me.” Chernayev said. He motioned for Archer to see that the president was almost in the kill zone. The tear gas was dispersing, blowing to the south, chasing at the heels of the evacuating crowd.

“Even dead, which you’ll be soon enough, you serve a purpose. Today’s events will reshape not only this area, it will be a final nail in the coffin for your little group. Pakistan, as the world knows it, will end. Afghanistan too, Kashmir, some of India. Maps drawn up by old colonial masters will be redrawn again. This is the beginning of the end—for your Volunteers too, buying us the time we need to build up.”