“We gave them the names and pictures and they said they’ll get back to us. Last I heard, they still haven’t told us what’s really in the crates or even confirmed these guys are connected to the missing material. The president’s going to talk to Medvedev directly as soon as possible, but who knows what that’ll do. And the White House is trying to figure out whether they should cancel the State of the Union tonight. So there’s your update.”
Wells laid the back of his hand on Exley’s forehead to test her temperature and found her running a fever. “You ought to lie down, Jenny.”
“I’ll sleep in the infirmary for a couple of hours.”
“Why don’t you go home?”
“Why don’t you come with me?”
He was silent. Her eyes went wet and then her cheeks and eyes hardened, her face becoming a mask, the emotion disappearing inch by inch.
“You know,” she said. “I’ll go home, wait for you. You don’t even have to come. If you can promise me one thing. Promise me when we find these guys, you won’t go after them. You’ll sit tight here with Ellis.”
“It’s my op.”
“They’ll put half the army in the air. They don’t need you. You’re in the way. And it goes off, what then? You going to outrun the fireball?”
“I can’t ask someone else to take a risk I won’t take myself.”
She put her arm around his neck. A peace offering. “You’ve taken enough risks. Some might say you’ve gotten greedy. Let someone else have this one. Come home.”
He didn’t know how to convince her. Probably because she was right. After a minute of silence, she ran her hand down his arm, took his hand.
“This thing you have in you, this thing that won’t let you stop, I have it, too,” she said. “I came back here. I swore I wouldn’t, but I did. The difference between you and me is that I have some other things, too. My kids. I thought I had you. You, you just have this.”
“I have a son. I have you.”
“You haven’t seen Evan in how long? And you don’t have me, John. You don’t.” She stood and kissed him on the lips, a wet openmouthed kiss that brought him back to their very first kiss, barely two years before, on a day when she’d saved his life and nearly died in the process.
The kiss went on and he closed his eyes and pulled her to him. But she put a hand on his face and pushed him away. And without another word, she walked out.
THE CALL CAME three hours later. An FBI team had found the Avis office in Morristown, New Jersey, where “Jad” and “Kamel” rented their car. The agent who’d been working on January 13 wasn’t at the office when they arrived. But when they tracked him to his apartment, he immediately recognized the photographs. Jad had rented a Pontiac G6, dark blue, 11,347 miles, for a month. He’d used an international driver’s license and a Turkish passport and a MasterCard, all in the name of Dawood Askari. How exactly he’d gotten those useful items was a question they’d answer later.
For now they had the name he was using in the United States. And something even more precious. Avis equipped its vehicles with LoJack, the antitheft system, which could be activated remotely to broadcast a stolen car’s location. According to the system, the G6 was parked on a farm outside the town of Addison, New York — three hundred miles from Washington, and slightly closer to Manhattan. The farm belonged to a surgeon named Bashir Is’mail, who worked at a hospital in Corning.
Now two companies of Rangers had been scrambled from Fort Drum, a big army base about 150 miles north of Addison. FBI agents were en route from Buffalo and Albany. The New York State Police had been given the plate number and description of the G6 and asked to set up observation posts — not roadblocks — on the highways and state roads around Corning. And a half-dozen F-16 fighter-bombers were being put in the air from Andrews Air Force Base.
Meanwhile, the job of taking the house had been given to a Delta unit that was officially called the 9th Special Operations Group/Emergency Response and unofficially known as Red Team. Red Team had two squads, one based at Andrews and the other at West Point. It worked alongside the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a group of scientists responsible for finding and defusing nuclear and dirty bombs. The Red Team soldiers carried gamma and alpha ray detectors and radiological protective gear and were authorized to shoot on sight anyone they reasonably suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon. Each Red Team squad had twelve soldiers and two Black Hawks dedicated to its transport and was ready to scramble within thirty minutes, twenty-four hours a day.
“When are they taking off?” Wells said. He’d been sitting in Shafer’s office as Shafer flicked between calls and e-mail and IM to track the plan. But Shafer was focused on his screen and paid no attention to the question. “Ellis.”
“Company C is shipping out in fifteen from Andrews,” Shafer said. “They’re gonna set down in Corning, switch over to SUVs that the state police will have waiting, go in on the ground instead of helicopter so whoever’s at the farm won’t hear them coming. I don’t want to tell you this, but they’ve got a spot for you. They’ve got eleven guys and you’ll make twelve. You want to ride with them?”
“What do you think?”
“What I think and what I wish are two different things.”
“Aren’t they always?”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells stood on a helipad at Langley, shielding his eyes from the winter sun as the Black Hawk swept in. He wore a helmet and his lightweight bulletproof vest and carried an M-4, an automatic rifle with a grenade launcher attached below the barrel.
The helicopter touched down and Wells ran through the frigid wind-storm whipped up by its blades and jumped into the cabin. He strapped himself in and the crew chief hopped out to check on him and then they took off. He didn’t expect to know any of the men, but as he looked around he recognized one, Brett Gaffan, a sergeant he’d met a few months before in Afghanistan. Gaffan and he had spent a long night together, pinned on open ground under fire from Taliban guerrillas.
After the mission, they’d traded e-mail addresses and vowed to stay in touch, but they hadn’t. Wells guessed that his reputation intimidated Gaffan, who wouldn’t want Wells to think he was sucking up, keeping in contact in case Wells could do him a favor. But Wells had no such excuse. He’d simply forgotten. He remembered the men he killed but forgot the ones he saved or fought beside.
The Black Hawk’s cabin was frigid as they flew over the hills of western Maryland and then into Pennsylvania, roughly tracking U.S. 15. They passed a stretch of open fields, two low ridges facing each other, the landscape as familiar to Wells as a dream, and as the helicopter swept by he realized he was seeing Gettysburg. But even before he could imagine Grant and Lee and the armies in blue and gray, the fields were gone. They were running at 170 knots, roughly 200 miles an hour, the effective maximum cruising speed for these modified Hawks.
They rolled north along ground that was heavily wooded and hilly, blurred towns disappearing as fast as they came, heating oil tankers and tractor-trailers chugging on the roads beneath them. At Harrisburg, the State Capitol flashed before them and then was gone. For a while they flew along the Susquehanna, the river flowing wide and sluggish, chunks of ice floating in its dark brown water. In front of them, the hills grew until they were the Appalachians and the patches of snow on the ground thickened until they weren’t patches anymore.
No one in the cabin spoke and no one smiled. Wells understood. The quickest reflexes and all the Kevlar in the world wouldn’t matter if this bomb blew. So Wells closed his eyes and listened to the music in his head, Springsteen asking,
Would he ever see Exley again? Whether or not he survived?
THE HELICOPTER SLOWED and Wells opened his eyes. They came down in an empty parking lot outside an abandoned factory, its bricks cracking and its smokestacks stained. The other three Black Hawks were already
