trapped. Crawford must’ve hit some kind of tripwire that activated a timed detonator.’ He looked to Jason for corroboration.
Jason nodded.
‘But you said there was a nuke in there,’ the second marine who’d been guarding the cave entrance challenged. ‘How are we supposed to believe—’
‘Hey, wise guy, I think you should shut up and grab hold of something,’ Meat advised sternly, counting down the final seconds in his head.
The testy marine wisely clammed up and clasped the handle hanging over his head, tight enough to turn his knuckles white.
The others also hunkered down. Tension and anticipation filled the air.
Nobody spoke.
Five seconds later, a brilliant white light flashed through the rear window, accompanied by an earsplitting explosion on par with a thunderclap. There was a deceptive delay that preceded the shockwave. When it hit, the MRAP groaned and bucked, jostling everyone inside. Arms and legs flailed and bodies rolled. The hull filled with screams and expletives.
A barrage of heavy debris pounded the roof, clanging the vehicle’s thick armour plating like a gong. The white light dissipated and a second wave of pelting debris came raining down over the truck’s exterior.
Then came an eerie calm.
The intensity of the blast had Jason feeling confident that even if some of the rats had managed to escape before the nuke detonated, either the searing heat wave would have vaporized them, or the crunching pressure wave would have pulverized them.
‘Told you it was a nuke,’ Meat said to the sceptical marine.
EPILOGUE
LONDON, ENGLAND
TWO MONTHS LATER
‘I feel like I’m hanging from a noose,’ Meat grumbled as he tugged at the starched white collar that strangled his eighteen-and-a-quarter-inch neck. The rented black tuxedo paired a size 46 long jacket with a pair of 34 x 34 pants. But it all felt too restrictive, particularly at the shoulders and crotch. The shiny black patent leather 14 EE shoes were no great shakes, either; he hated the way they clicked along the marble tiles of the museum’s Great Court. ‘God, I hate playing dress-up.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jason said, fixing his own bowtie and taking extra-long strides to keep up with Meat. ‘Dressing up is all we’ve been doing for the past five years,’ he reminded him. ‘Except this time we get to shower and shave, even smell nice. Nothing wrong with looking classy once in a while.’
Jason gazed up to admire the deep cerulean sky coming through Norman Foster’s glass and steel canopy - a segmented dome of triangular glass panels which covered the hectare Great Court that was the heart of the British Museum. At the court’s centre, he scanned the mingling VIPs who sipped champagne in front of the circular Reading Room. Still no sign of Flaherty.
‘Doesn’t look like Tommy’s here yet,’ he said, claiming a spot beneath a life-size statue of a Roman youth riding a horse, in search of conquest. Giving the statue only a cursory glance, he couldn’t help but draw a parallel to Randall Stokes’s lofty ambitions to chart a new course for human history.
A tuxedoed waiter carrying a tray of long-stemmed glasses brimming with bubbly immediately came to them. ‘Champagne, gentlemen?’
‘Cheers,’ Jason said to the waiter as he took a flute by its stem.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ Meat said, grabbing his own glass by its narrow bulb as if were a chopper control grip.
A lithe brunette wearing a skimpy cocktail dress and high heels strode by, gazed at Meat appraisingly, then flashed him an approving smile. Meat smiled back, and miraculously the tuxedo felt comfortable. He reconsidered his position, saying, ‘I suppose classy isn’t so bad.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘I’m just not used to getting all dressed up like some rich socialite.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Jason said. He slid his hand under his lapel and pulled out a white envelope.
Meat looked at it suspiciously. ‘If that’s another goddamn subpoena—’
‘Calm down …’ Jason said.
There’d been plenty of court requests over the past weeks since they’d returned home from their mission. The Department of Defense had begun what would surely prove to be a lengthy inquiry into the events that had transpired in Iraq. Accompanied by an army of counsellors from Global Security Corporation’s Legal Affairs division, Jason and Meat had endured exhaustive questioning at a Congressional hearing. They’d quickly been absolved of any formal charges, thanks largely to the tell-all video captured on the disc Jason had recovered from the camcorder in Crawford’s tent. The footage corroborated everything Jason and Meat had described in their testimony. It showed Crawford’s crude interrogation of Al-Zahrani, Jason’s unheeded demand to Crawford to call for backup, Al-Zahrani’s rapid decline in health as proof that the Genesis Plague was a very real threat, plus a chilling offscreen altercation between Crawford and Dr Jeremy Levin just before a gunshot rang out to silence the medic. The video’s grand finale, however, was when Crawford and Staff Sergeant Richards (dressed in nomad garb) appeared onscreen to hoist Al-Zahrani off the bed while Crawford barked orders to secrete the terrorist out the back door for a clandestine escape. Scathing testimony provided by the surviving troops of the 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Division Expeditionary Force, also emphasized Crawford’s schizophrenic behaviour, as well as the lifesaving air attack staged by the GSC mercenary unit.
The day after he’d been taken into custody, Randall Stokes had suffered a miserable and poetic demise, choking to death on his own blood in a quarantine ward at Nellis Air Force Base. Shortly thereafter, NSA cryptographers succeeded in cracking the sophisticated encryption on Stokes’s computer hard drive, and retrieved all the operational details for Operation Genesis, including schematics for the breeding facilities installed beneath the Zagros Mountains and gene sequencing data for the Genesis Plague. There were even simulation models that forecast the spread of the disease - an expected 90 per cent kill rate of the Middle Eastern male population in just the first three months of the contagion’s initial introduction.
Auditors had forensically reconstructed the money trail for the project’s financing to reveal a complex web of twenty-seven phantom accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, all funnelled into a numbered account held by Our Savior in Christ Cathedral. The majority of funding had been misappropriated from defence money earmarked for biochemical research at Fort Detrick shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. The balance of funding came from charitable donations to Stokes’s evangelical mission made by a veritable ‘who’s who’ of wealthy donors. Every contractor and benefactor associated with Operation Genesis was being vetted for complicity in the plot.
Just last week, both Jason and Meat had been recommended for the highest commendations for their heroic actions in averting what might have been the most egregious act of bioterrorism ever documented. But the kudos didn’t end there. There were other rewards too.
‘Calm down, it’s not a subpoena,’ Jason said in a taming voice. He held the envelope out and waited for Meat to accept it. But Meat just stared at it.
‘What is it?’
‘Just open it. Come on … it won’t bite. Trust me, you won’t regret it.’
Meat reluctantly snatched it away from Jason. After confirming that his name and address appeared in the small window on front of the envelope, he began tearing at the seal.
‘After that fire at the safe house burned out,’ Jason explained, ‘six skeletons were recovered from the ashes. Five were unidentifiable. But one of the skeletons had a very unique dental implant, as well as a titanium pin implanted surgically in the left ankle to correct for an old soccer injury.’
‘All right,’ Meat said, not grasping the connection. He peeked into the envelope and saw the backside of what looked like a cheque.
‘Turns out the FBI matched the dental work with records already in its database,’ Jason explained. ‘The serial number on the titanium pin came up too.’
Meat froze before fishing out the contents from the envelope. He looked at Jason in disbelief. ‘Al-
