She looked up at him with shining eyes full of joy and wonder.
“You did it, Peter. You did it.”
“No,” he said, pulling her closer. “We did it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
END GAME
Fifteen minutes after the fireball faded out of the night sky, Helen Gray still knelt at Peter’s side — holding him tight as his hand lovingly stroked her hair.
She turned her head as a tall, dapper man came into the control center, pushing through the several Fairfax County sheriff’s officers who were now studying the tightly packed array of computer hardware in stunned amazement. Ibrahim al Saud was gone — hauled away under arrest with the other wounded terrorists shortly after the police entered the bulletriddled headquarters building. So far, her FBI credentials had kept them from being arrested themselves.
Despite the early hour, the newcomer’s gray suit was perfectly pressed and his black loafers perfectly shined. She’d known him.
FBI Special Agent Paul Sandquist stopped in front of her, took in the scene silently for a minute, and then shook his head in amazement.
“Jesus Christ, Helen. How the hell do you manage to stick your neck out so far every single time? You know I have orders from the Director himself to arrest you and Colonel Thorn on sight?”
Helen nodded. “Yep.” She calmly let go of Peter, stood up, and held out her wrists. “Okay, Paul. You want to handcuff us and take us to your fearless leader?”
Sandquist smiled wryly. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to need the handcuffs, Special Agent Gray.”
Helen felt Peter Thorn’s warm hand slip into hers and smiled back.
“No, somehow I didn’t think we would either. But let’s get going. Colonel Thorn and I have a few things to discuss with Director Leiter.”
FBI Hostage Rescue Team section leader Felipe Degarza stepped outside the Caraco hangar and immediately took the full brunt of the late morning sun.
Sweat trickled out from under his assault helmet. Black coveralls, black boots, and heavy Kevlar body armor didn’t make the most comfortable outfit under the circumstances, he decided. But it was a hell of a lot safer when bullets went flying around. Better hot and sweaty than cold and dead.
Or so his old boss, Special Agent Helen Gray, had always said. For Degarza that made it gospel.
“Director Leiter is on the line, Felipe,” Special Agent Tim Brett said.
Degarza handed the H&K MP5 submachine gun he’d been cradling to his second-in-command and took the secure cell phone Brett offered him.
“This is Degarza. The airfield is secure.”
“Thank God,” Leiter said. “Any trouble?”
The HRT section leader shook his head, — watching a line of dazed prisoners streaming out of the hangar under the watchful eyes of his own troopers and the local SWAT team. “None, sir.
We caught them with their pants down. Apparently they weren’t slated to get their first plane off until well after sunrise. Their leaden-some German guy — was still trying to get through to Chantilly when we blew the door open.”
“And the bombs?” Leiter asked. “The bombs are still there?”
“Oh, yeah,” Degarza replied. He turned back toward the hangar.
“Besides one Caraco corporate jet, I’ve got four twin engine aircraft here — and all four of them are carrying devices that look a hell of a lot like the pictures of those TN1000s you faxed us.”
“Don’t touch those weapons,” Leiter ordered. “Leave that to the experts. There’s an Army EOD team on its way to your location now. The commander’s name is Lieutenant-Colonel Greg Lyle. He’s their best man. You let him check them over first, clear?”
“Absolutely, sir,” Degarza said, unfazed by Leiter’s apparent lack of trust in his common sense. Only an idiot would want to screw around with weapons packing a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand ton punch — especially when nobody knew whether or not these terrorists had booby-trapped them.
Which left him with one burning question. “Is there any word yet from the other dispersal fields, sir?”
“So far, so good,” Leiter replied. “We’ve hit them all now.
Took a couple of minor casualties in a firefight at Page and at Shafter-Minter, but nothing serious. A few of the bastards apparently got spooked early and ran when they couldn’t make contact with Ibrahim — but we know where they’re headed. They won’t get far. And we’ve recovered nineteen bombs. According to Special Agent Gray and Colonel Thorn, that’s all they had left.”
All they had left, Degarza thought in disbelief. He sure hoped Leiter knew just how lucky the Bureau had been — and how much it owed to Helen Gray.
Vienna, Virginia Colonel Peter Thorn gingerly poked his head into Farrell’s booklined office. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything, Sam.”
Farrell looked up from the yellow legal pad he’d been furiously scribbling on. He tossed the pad onto his desk and stood up to shake Thorn’s hand. “Not at all, Pete! But I’m surprised Louisa didn’t let me know you were here.”
Thorn grinned sheepishly. “I don’t think she saw me come in. I waited till I saw her go out into your garden and slipped in the back way.”
Farrell wagged a finger at him. “No more cloak-and dagger stuff in my house, Colonel. I’m retired for good this time.”
“Yes, sir.”
The general waved him toward a chair and sat down himself.
“I don’t see why you’re acting so skittish around my wife, Pete,” Farrell continued, smiling. “You know you’re one of her favorites.”’ Thorn shook his head. “That’s hard to believe — since we both know I dragged you into the middle of one hell of a mess — not to mention the ten thousand bucks of your money we spent. And Louisa’s been around the Army long enough to know how long it’ll take the green eyeshade boys to cough up any reimbursement— if ever!”
Farrell shrugged. “Who knows? I may just write that ten thousand off as research on a book I might write someday. And maybe I’ll even bill the FBI for the time I spent answering their questions.”
Thorn grinned. Sam, Helen, and he had been held in FBI “protective” custody for nearly two days while the Bureau, the Pentagon, and the CIA all ran them through extensive and exhausting debriefing sessions. At first, it was clear that the government would really have preferred to keep the whole crewed-up affair hushed up. But there was no way the administration could clamp a lid on a major firefight out in suburban Virginia and half a dozen heavy-duty HRT and SWAT raids around the country. Not to mention a nuclear explosion right over Chesapeake Bay.
Thorn frowned. He looked out the window at Farrell’s big, green, peaceful backyard.
They’d been lucky. Very lucky. Because it was an airburst, the blast hadn’t created a lot of fallout. Plus, the prevailing winds had pretty rapidly pushed what radiation there was well out into the Atlantic.
Still, the police and National Guard units had been forced to temporarily evacuate several thousand people from the Virginia portion of the Delmarva peninsula — mostly as a precaution. Fortunately, the Defense and Energy Departments decontamination teams surveying the area were reporting only very minor levels of background radiation.
Anyway, what started out as a trickle of news leaks had rapidly turned into a flood.
The first stories had focused on the horrifying news that someone had somehow smuggled a large number of
