Jack took a few steps back, away from Rehan, turned to find something to use as a weapon, but Rehan barreled into him from behind. Both men crashed back into the ground. Jack grunted with the impact, his Kevlar vest saving him from a broken jar that would have sliced him open.
Rehan climbed up to his knees, Jack still facedown below him, and the general grabbed a large brick from the trash around him. He lifted it up into the air, over Ryan’s head, and prepared to crush his skull.
Jack bucked hard, throwing the larger man to the ground next to him.
Ryan reached out, ready to grab
In the air, Jack positioned the spike in front of his Kevlar vest, pressing the head of the iron point against the rigid vest, and he held it there with his hand as he landed on his enemy. He slammed down on him with all his weight.
His body and his vest hammered the rusty spike into General Riaz Rehan’s chest.
Jack rolled off the big man and climbed slowly back to his feet.
Rehan sat up, looked down at the iron barb sticking into him, bewilderment on his face.
Weakly, he put a hand on it. He tried to pull it out of him, but he realized he could not, so his hand fell back to his side.
Ryan, his face covered in dirt and smeared blood from the encounter, said, “Nigel Embling sends his regards.”
“American? You are American?” Rehan asked in English as he sat there.
“Yes.”
Rehan’s look of surprise did not waver. Still, he said, “Whatever you think you just did… you failed. In minutes the caliph will reign in Pakistan… ” Rehan touched his hand to his lips and then looked at it; it was covered with blood. He coughed out a thick wad of blood now while the young American stood over him. “And you will die.”
“I’ll outlive you, asshole,” Jack replied.
Rehan shrugged, then slumped over on his right shoulder; his eyelids remained open but his pupils rolled back in his head.
Ryan heard police sirens that seemed to come from the railway station, a few hundred yards back. He left the general’s body right where it lay and began running across a dozen sets of train tracks and toward the warehouse.
Ryan ran back into the warehouse with his pistol raised, but he holstered it when he saw his cousin and al Darkur looking into a large packing crate. Dom was talking on his phone with one hand, and shining a flashlight with his other.
Ryan got al Darkur’s attention. “Listen. There are about to be fifty cops pulling up in a minute. Can you and your man go out and talk to them, ask them to give us a minute?”
“Of course.” Mohammed and his captain left the warehouse.
Jack shouldered up to Dom. “What’s the word?” As he said this, he saw the red countdown clock on the detonator switch from 7:50 to 7:49.
“I took a picture of the device and sent it to Clark. He’s got experts with him that will take a look and then let me know if we’re about to glow in the dark.”
“Not funny.”
“Who’s joking?”
“Are you okay?” Ryan saw blood on the back of Caruso’s pants.
“I think I got shot in the ass. What about Rehan?”
“Dead.”
Both men nodded. Just then the Canadian Rainbow munitions expert came on the satellite phone and told Caruso how to reset the altimeter trigger, which would stop the manual countdown.
Dom finished with two minutes and four seconds remaining. The clock stopped, and the two men sighed in relief and shook hands.
Ryan helped Caruso down to the floor, Dom lay on his hip to keep his wound from getting any filthier than it already was, and Ryan sat down next to him.
Within another twenty minutes al Darkur’s unit of SSG had arrived along with PAEC engineers to render the weapon safe.
By then Ryan and Caruso were gone.
EPILOGUE
It was five p.m. in Baltimore and President-elect Jack Ryan flipped off the TV in his study. He had been watching the news reports from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and he’d had two conference calls with his aides, members of his cabinet-to-be, during which the matter was discussed at length.
Also discussed in the meeting was the worsening situation between Pakistan and India. Skirmishes had been reported along the border, but some reports suggested the shelling in Lahore and the areas around there were not by Indian forces, but rather PDF units allied with rogue ISI officers.
Ryan would take office in less than a month. Officially this was Ed Kealty’s problem, but Ryan was hearing grumblings from Kealty’s people — most of whom were reaching out to the Ryan camp in hopes of grabbing some sort of employment in the D.C. area — that the lame-duck President had already flipped the lights off in the Oval Office. Figuratively speaking, of course.
His phone rang, and he grabbed it without thinking. “Hello?”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Where are you?”
“In a plane, heading home.”
“Home from where?”
“That’s what I called to talk to you about. I’ve got a story to tell you. I need your help with the crisis in Pakistan.”
Ryan Sr. cocked his head. “How’s that?”
Junior spent the next twenty minutes telling his father about Rehan and the ISI and the theft of the nukes, about the Haqqani network and the Dagestani militants. It was a hell of a story, and the father interrupted the son only to ask him what kind of encryption his phone was using.
Jack Junior explained that he was on The Campus’s own aircraft, and Hendley had seen to it that the equipment was state of the art.
When he was finished, Ryan Sr. asked his son again: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad. Cuts and bruises. Dom took a bullet in the ass, but he’ll be fine.”
“Oh my God.”
“Really, he was joking about it twenty minutes later.”
Jack Sr. rubbed his temples under the arms of his eyeglasses. “Okay.”
“Look, Dad. I know we have to keep The Campus away from you, but I thought you could talk to the players over there in India, persuade them to back off a bit. We do think the man in charge of this entire operation is dead, so it will fizzle out fast if no one does anything stupid.”
“I’m glad you called. I’m going to get on it right now.”
The call ended a few minutes later, but the phone immediately rang again. Ryan Sr. thought it was his son calling back. “Yeah, Jack?”
“Uh, I’m sorry, Mr. President. Bob Holtzman from the
