was a big steel padlock securing the door to the truck frame. Tommy used the ram on the lock, basically just took out the bottom third of the door. Joey was back.
“Call this thing in?”
“They think I’m crazy, but, yeah, I did.”
“They sending back up anyway?”
“Beats me.”
Patrolman Darius nodded and stuck his flashlight inside the opening. He leaned forward and peered into the dark body of the trailer.
“What’s in there? Baby robot Jobsters?”
“I dunno, but it ain’t seafood. Something big. Black and shiny. Two of them. Heavy plastic sheeting covering them up, whatever the hell it is.”
“Rip it off. The plastic. You want my knife? Here.”
“Thanks…hard to get my arm far enough inside to—”
The horrific explosion killed the two young police officers instantly, vaporizing them. It blew down every tree within a radius of a hundred yards and created a black hole in the frozen ground fifteen feet across. The blast completely destroyed the truck from Louisiana and its contents, as well as the Crown Victoria cruiser parked in front of it on the shoulder. Automobile alarms a quarter of a mile away were activated. Windows rattled at Walter Reed Hospital.
No one seeing the black hole gouged in the earth could quite believe it. A lot of neighborhood kids came out to see it. It looked like a flaming meteor had hit. Debris was scattered in the snow as far as you could see.
It was January 17.
The Day of Reckoning was near.
74
THE BLACK JUNGLE
D eep below ground. In La Selva Negra’s heavily fortified underground communications bunker, Muhammad Top and Dr. Khan were silent eyewitnesses to history. Neither said a word. It was cold in the Tomb, but it was the safest place in the jungle. The walls were steel reinforced concrete, six feet thick. Hardened steel blast doors could be found on both the dormitory level and the one above it, where the electronic heart of Top’s world buzzed day and night. A massive antenna tower, disguised down to the rough bark and air roots as a tree, rose directly above the compound. It was, Top thought, a brilliant work of sculptural art.
The two men, bathed in soft blue light, stared with greedy eyes. They embraced the vision displayed on the monitors: a humbled America, blown apart at the heart. There, on multiple flat-screens mounted on a curving, twenty-foot wall, were images of violence, hatred, and destruction. A hot wind was blowing through America. Few realized yet that it was coming up from the south.
The bunker building had been designed by Khan. Men manning the five rows of ten monitor stations were facing northeast toward Mecca. Before dawn, each man in the room had washed himself according to ritual, then knelt and bent his head to the floor, praying for martydom. An attack could come at any time. They were ready.
It was succeeding. Top knew, because the hand of Allah was with him, lifting him toward the sun. Top had seen the future. All was going according to Destiny. His destiny. His alone.
Various monitors depicted units of the American National Guard units now manning the borderlines of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Too little, too late, in the eyes of Top and Khan, this vain effort to suppress the violent eruptions along those fragile 2,000 miles.
It was only a feint, at any rate. Khan had predicted a full-blown war with Mexico over the border. For all they knew, it still might happen. Two nations, one border. Always an opportunity. For two years, Khan had held secret meetings with the Mexicans. These had been arranged with the help of a certain German Ambassador, a man named Zimmermann, now dead. Zimmermann, accompanied by certain high-ranking members of the government in Mexico City had traveled to Sao Paolo and brokered a deal with Khan.
The Mexicans’ motives were clear. It wasn’t the spread of Islam that ignited them. Or drew them into Khan’s coterie. With the exception of the German, it wasn’t even money. It was the chance to avenge the abuse and perfidy suffered at the hands of their northern neighbor. And to reclaim precious northern territories seized by the Yankees in the bitter U.S.-Mexican War of 1848.
The movement of the few remaining American reserves to hotspots along the southern border meant major cities, including Washington, DC, were woefully exposed to the impending attack. When the time came for the second wave of his planned attacks, there would be plenty of fireworks in Chicago, New York, Boston. But the Big Bang, as Top gleefully dubbed his first strike, was reserved for the sacred capital.
The only real misfortune thus far was the loss of the Muammar Massaouri family, three of the faithful, devoted sleeper comrades, who seemed to have been sacrificed at the farm in Virginia. The Massaouris had missed a scheduled sat com call with the UCB. This was to be an internet data burst, subsequent to the successful launch of the unmanned vehicle. The message never came. All attempts to contact them had failed. It was assumed Dr. Massaouri and his family had been killed.
To their everlasting glory, the Massaouris had successfully launched the unmanned underwater weapon. Even now, Bedouin was en route to the target thirty miles north of Morning Glory Farm. The video images streaming from the submarine’s nose camera were murky and dark but of no crucial importance.
The sophisticated UUV, an unmanned underwater vehicle developed over the years by Dr. Khan for littoral area incursions, was transporting the 150-kiloton nuclear weapon. After undergoing months of successful sea trials here on the Igapo River, Bedouin had been preprogrammed with GPS waypoints for navigating the Potomac en route to her destination in Washington. Every hour, a needle-thin antenna broke the surface for a data burst to the com sat traveling far overhead.
So far, God willing, the little torpedo-shaped craft was performing perfectly.
She weighed just less than two tons. She was powered by a large bank of lithium batteries, quiet and undetectable. In the busy river, the noise of Bedouin’s propulsion system would also be unnoticeable. The underwater robot’s forward-looking radar allowed it to make constant course corrections to avoid obstacles or other craft in its path. At its current speed, twenty-two knots, it would reach the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC, well ahead of schedule. The thick lead shield inside the hull would prevent its detection by any nuclear-sensitive probes along the way.
Once inside the basin, Bedouin would remain there, inert and immobile, buried in the mud a few thousand yards from the White House until the appointed hour.
The Appointed Hour. It was drawing nigh. Top sighed, and gazed at the over-sized digital clock above the monitor bank. It continued to roll down inexorably to the zero hour, now a thousand minutes away. He was thinking in minutes now. Even seconds. And every one counted.
“Where is Hawke?” he shouted to one of the technicians manning the perimeter defense system. “Get the map up on the screen.”
“The blinking orange dot is Hawke’s vessel,” Dr. Khan pointed out.
“I don’t want a fucking dot, I want a live picture.”
Khan looked at him, but held his tongue. They had come a long way together. It was no time to let the man’s intemperate behavior distract him from his destiny. Any blasphemy could be tolerated now. In a few hours, it would be his finger on the button.
A technician said, “We have no drone on him at this moment, sir.”
“Why not?”
“The enemy shot it down, sir. A missile.”
Silence, save the electronic hum of the equipment, settled over the room.
“He has missiles on this fucking speedboat? Why was I not informed?” Top asked, trying to keep his voice low and controlled.
The short technician with the bushy beard was visibly trembling now. “It only just happened, sir. A few
