Jack stomped on Barny’s head. He looked back up the slope, but none of the other bikers was in sight. His fingers tore at the backpack that had been strapped so tightly to his chest. They’d lashed the two shoulder straps together across his chest — a simple bind that wasn’t meant to stop him indefinitely, just make it hard enough to undo without them seeing his struggles. He bent down and fished through the pockets of the now-motionless biker until he found a small folding knife. Flipping it open, he cut through the bindings and slipped the backpack off, hurling it from him and dropping flat, using Barny as cover.
But the bomb he’d been wearing didn’t go off. The digital timer hadn’t even started counting down.
Instead of relief, Jack felt a sickening pit open in his stomach. Jumping to his feet, he ran down the slope to the base of the dam and checked the first brick of plastic explosives. The digital timer on its face was counting down, the tenth-of-a-second digit flashing so fast it looked like a flickering 8.
Barny hadn’t triggered the bomb on his back. He’d set off the explosives on the dam. Jack had less than five minutes to stop it.
“You can’t call it off,” Yasin told Michael over a mobile connection. “They will not find out in time. There are too many fail-safes and backups in this operation.”
Yasin could afford to be calm. Michael could not, but he forced himself to sound relaxed anyway out of a sense of professional competitiveness. “None of the backups will work if the event itself is canceled. You can only push me so far.”
“I know,” Yasin agreed. “That is the reality of all blackmail. You know the power I have over you. You, not I, will decide whether it’s worth it or not to follow my orders. But remember, I lose nothing by exposing the ones you try so hard to protect. I will do it willingly. And if you quit, you will lose them, and also the chance to kill a common enemy. The choice is yours.”
Yasin dropped off. Michael was walking along Olympic Boulevard toward a bus stop. He had ditched the car and stripped off his black shirt, and wore only a fitted athletic T-shirt and his dark pants. He and Pembrook had separated.
Michael thought, just for a moment, about bolting. He had an escape plan, of course — a false identity, an open ticket to Venezuela, a small house there. Not really a life, but a place to bivouac. This carefully laid plan was fraying at the seams.
But his faith was too strong. Professional though he was, Michael was also a devout Catholic. A
Jack couldn’t just pull the detonators. The triggers were not elaborate, but Barny had been clever enough to give each one a contact trigger — if the detonators were simply pulled out, a small wire still buried in the plastic explosives would trigger the brick. Pulling out the wire while the detonator was in place would have the same effect.
Disarming the detonator itself proved to be simple enough. Either Barny’s knowledge did not extend to fail- safes and redundancies, or he hadn’t had time to incorporate them. Jack’s explosives training was not extensive, but he’d learned to both arm and disarm basic explosives while in Delta. That knowledge came in handy now as he careful removed the blast cap from each detonator. The process wasn’t complicated, but he had to move slowly to prevent having the two brass connections touch. He finished the first one and saw that the digital counter had run down to 3:57.
And he had six more to go.
Dean stumbled backward among the control rooms west of the dam, still spitting out bits of his own teeth and blood. One of his gang — Doogan, he thought, but his head was reeling, too — was running next to him, but the others were scattered. They’d seen Barny go for the trigger that would blow that Federal motherfucker to little pieces.
Dean was almost to his bike, and his head was clearing, when he realized that he hadn’t heard an explosion of any kind. “Doog,” he said through swollen, bloody lips, “Less get back there.”
Jack wasn’t going to make it. He’d disarmed all but two, and the last timer had read 1:30.
Jack sprinted toward the second to last bomb, took a deep, steadying breath, and disconnected its blast cap. Without a current and a small charge to set it off, the plastic explosive was now just so much molding clay.
Forty-five seconds left. Jack sprinted toward the last bomb, wondering if he might make it… but even as he reached it, he knew the answer, and he kept on running, reaching the far end of the dam and driving himself up that slope until he reached the height of the dam more than four hundred feet above the gulch, and threw himself to the ground.
Behind and below him, hell erupted. A sound that reminded him oddly of a lion’s roar rent the air, and in an instant dirt was raining down on him, and dust filled the sky. The blast was powerful enough to make the solid earth beneath him tremble. With clods of earth still raining down, Jack leaped to his feet and ran back to the edge of the slope. A huge chunk of the dam was gone, as though scooped away by a giant hand. Water spurted through weak points in the wall in a half-dozen places. None of the newly made springs was very large, but erosion would loosen the dam further. Someone else would have to take care of that.
Jack hurried along the top of the dam, running gingerly over the weakened portion, then leaning into a full sprint as he headed back toward the maintenance sheds. His usual speed was not there because he was still carrying a stack of explosive bricks, but he was fast enough to reach the far side just as Dean’s Angels came stumbling down the slope to his left. Jack dropped to one knee, letting them descend and pass, then he ran among the sheds. One of the bikers must have spotted him because he heard a howl from behind, but he didn’t stop. He ran through the sheds and back to the bikes. He paused for only a second, to hang his backpack off the backseat of Dean’s bike. Then ran to his own bike and, as fast as he could, lashed the stack of plastic explosives onto the seat behind him. Then he hopped on the Harley and started it up.
A bullet whined a few feet over his head. He spun the bike around, sending a spray of dirt and gravel behind him. He couldn’t hear any more reports over the sound of his engine, but he thought he heard the hiss of more rounds falling and passing to the left and right. He felt a faint thud in his lower back and knew that a bullet had found its way into the stack of plastic explosives. The bricks had dispersed the bullet’s force, so it hadn’t penetrated his skin.
Jack raced down the access lane and onto the main road, knowing that they would give chase. He hurtled down the road for almost a mile before he found a good blind turn in the road, traveled past it, then turned and stopped in the middle of the road. He took Barny’s cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open and pressed the menu buttons until a list of recent calls appeared. Two numbers appeared, one after the other, over and over again, and Jack knew that they were dry runs for the receivers attached to the detonators.
Just then, Dean and his bikers came roaring around the corner, not a hundred yards away. They saw Jack, and Dean’s eyes lit up brighter than the early morning sun. Jack highlighted one of the two numbers and pressed send.
Nothing happened. Dean was now fifty yards away.
Jack scrolled down to the other number, held up the phone as though it were a talisman, and pressed send again.
It took a microsecond for the signal to flash from the phone to the nearest cell site to the receiver. When that fraction of a second ticked away, Dean and his bikers vanished inside a ball of fire.
“…after last night’s disturbances, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Walesa, “I don’t see how we can possibly continue.”
Walesa was speaking in Polish, and John Paul answered him in kind. “All the more reason, Your Eminence, all the more reason.” In truth, John Paul was somewhat rattled by the violence that had rocked the cathedral all evening, but he refused to let it show.
He was sitting in the front room of his bedchamber, surrounded by his closest advisors. Cardinal Mulrooney
