bitten the major. Garlic was supposed to be fatal, but there might not have been enough of it in Ghost’s saliva for a lethal dose. Instead it had probably weakened the Upier, but not enough to keep him from breaking out of the cuffs. Then he’d killed the other guards and fed on them. Disgusting as that sounds. What had that done for him? Probably like Popeye eating spinach.
As I looked at the corpses, I understood that there had to be a lot of Red Knights here at the refinery, and they’d just started their workday with an O-positive energy drink.
Ghost trembled beside me. I tore my gaze away from the corpses for a moment and looked at my dog. He was cross-trained for all sorts of things including searching for dead bodies, and he doesn’t weigh moral or social implications. He shouldn’t have been scared by this. Excited by blood and the evidence of slaughter, sure, that’s hardwired into his animal brain. But not mass murder. And yet he was clearly terrified. His eyes were huge and rolling as if he was checking every possible line of escape at once, and drool dripped from the corners of his mouth. At the point where his body touched my leg I could feel his heart hammering away at dangerous speeds.
“Easy, boy,” I said in a voice I hoped was soothing. Ghost glupped back some of the drool and looked up at me, though whether it was for reassurance that the pack leader would protect him or instructions on what to do next was anyone’s guess. I stroked his side and patted his flank. He pressed more firmly against me. “It’s okay, Ghost… it’ll all be okay.”
I was pretty damn sure I was lying to him. To both of us.
Then I tore myself away from the carnage and looked around the cavern. I shined my light and saw something dark on top of one of the crates and at closer inspection saw twenty sets of folded clothes. Not the missing uniforms, but almost certainly the clothes of the men who had taken them. Black pants, black shirts, black balaclavas.
“Oh… shit,” I said aloud. Did that mean there were twenty Upierczi down here? Or were they up in the refinery? Up where my team was.
Shit.
I dropped the balaclava I was holding and directed the light into the cavern. It was so wide that the beam didn’t reach the far side, and from the uneven walls and ceiling, it was apparent that this hadn’t been cut into the earth but was a natural cavern that had been repurposed. The far end looked to be a jagged tunnel, but from where I stood I couldn’t make out any details. I crept quietly toward the stacked crates. Some were open and heaps of straw or packing popcorn were spilled like guts onto the ground. A few were still sealed, and I began circling the stacks looking for a crowbar.
Then I suddenly lost all interest in the crates, the crowbar, the dead bodies, and every other damn thing. I could feel the blood in my veins turn to ice water. My guts clenched as I saw what sat on the far side of the crates.
It was there.
Sixty feet away. It squatted there in the center of the big cavern. Sitting out in the open, all by itself except for thick power cords that coiled like snakes toward the nearest wall.
Huge, powerful, feral. Sophisticated in a brutal and primal way.
Deadly as hell.
My heart started beating as fast as Ghost’s and all the spit in my mouth turned to dust.
“God,” I murmured, but I was looking at the devil.
The bomb.
Chapter One Hundred Ten
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:05 a.m.
I moved toward it. I wanted to run. God, I wanted to run for my life.
I kept moving toward it, drawn to the sheer enormity of what it represented at the same time as I was totally repulsed.
Ghost was right with me, but he seemed happy to be away from the dead, which is weird. Dogs like smelly, rotting stuff. He should have been having a field day cataloging all the scents. He wasn’t.
The device was larger than I thought. Four feet high, six wide, eight long. The data on these models gave a weight range between eight hundred and sixteen hundred pounds. This one looked bigger, maybe a ton. I wasn’t going to slip it into a pocket and run out of here with it, and I wasn’t going to sneak it out on a hand truck.
I was going to have to de-arm it.
I tapped my earbud again in the vain hope that somehow there was a signal. Nothing, and glancing over my shoulder at the heap of corpses I had a pretty good idea why. Whatever was happening, whatever the Red Order and the knights, or the knights themselves, had running-the infiltration, the communications jamming-was happening now.
The only thing that kept me from having a stroke right there was the thought that there were a couple of dozen of our unknown hostiles here at the refinery. Not the time to detonate the device.
Hopefully they were not suicide soldiers.
My inner Cop told me to shut the fuck up and pay attention to the task at hand.
I used my forearm to wipe sweat out of my eyes, then took a long steadying breath, and focused my mind on the PDA strapped to my forearm. I tapped the keys to pull up the de-arm procedures for the nuke. I scanned it to refresh my mind and then scrolled back to the first step.
“Okay,” I said aloud, hoping that my voice sounded competent and calm. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cure cancer. About as likely.
I have a little bit of religion. Not much, just enough to get me to church on Christmas and Easter. I wasn’t much for personal prayer. Not like my friend, Rudy, who was a staunch Catholic. However, as I removed my tool kit on the cowling of the beast, I was praying as hard as I could.
My tools were all made from an ultra-high-density polymer rather than metal. Plastics are nonconductive. The steps sound easy. Remove the screws holding the cover plate in place, disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the timer to the detonator. Sounds easy, but this is where you’re most likely to encounter a booby trap. Trembler devices, fake wires, micromotion detectors, heat sensors. If nothing goes boom at that phase you hit the whole red wire-blue wire thing.
I slowly unscrewed the six screws and checked to make sure that there wasn’t a trip wire rigged to an anti- intrusion trigger. There was no wire visible. Sweat ran down my face and stung my eyes. Ghost smelled my fear and whined nervously. I held my breath as I removed the plate.
Nothing went boom.
I set the plate down and addressed the wires. The leads from the battery were easy to spot. And, yes, they were red and blue. Always have to appreciate the classics.
There was a second plate covering the electronic trigger device. This was the brains of the machine, a computer that operated the neutron trigger and would fire it as soon as the activation code told it to. In devices like this, the code could be radioed in or hand-entered. I glanced up at the rocky walls. No, maybe the device on the oil platform in Louisiana could be activated via radio, but no radio signals at all were getting in here. They must have come and hand-entered it. As soon as I removed the plate I should be able to determine how much time was left before detonation. With any luck it would not already be ticking. Ideally, a two-hundred-year countdown would be nice.
I gingerly removed the screws and lifted off the plate.
And stared at the digital screen display.
“What the fuck?”
The bomb was not ticking away its last few seconds.
All of the little lights were dark. The timer wires were not even attached.
I stood up and backed away from the device.
The bomb wasn’t live. Not yet.
