Day of Wrath

Peter Thorn led the way down the stairs, with Helen coming right behind him.

He turned the corner. The Arab he’d clubbed lay crumpled at the foot of the steps. A few more feet brought him out into a large room crowded with empty desks.

He stopped in sudden confusion. Was this it? Had they been wrong about the whole setup? Where the hell was Ibrahim’s control center?

“Peter,” Helen hissed — pointing her shotgun at a gray, unmarked door in the far corner.

Thorn nodded.

He moved closer. Helen drifted off to the side so that they approached the door from different angles.

Thorn put his back against the wall, leaned over, and gently tested the handle. It was locked. Well, well, what a surprise, he thought grimly.

At a hand signal, Helen moved into position — ready to cover him.

He raised his shotgun, now loaded with solid slugs, and fired twice — smashing the hinges, first the top and then the bottom.

Helen spun out, savagely kicked the door in, and spun back into cover.

From inside the room a pistol cracked twice — sending steeljacketed rounds screaming through the opening.

The stupid bastard’s firing high, Thorn thought. He dropped to one knee and then threw himself flat in the doorway with his shotgun angled up. A figure loomed in his sights — a young man, obviously terrified, but still holding a weapon.

Bad move.

Thorn pulled the trigger.

The slug caught the other man in the stomach and threw him back against some kind of equipment console. Eyes already glazing over in death, he slid to the floor, smearing blood across the console, and toppled sideways.

Helen flowed in through the doorway, yelling, “Hands up! Get your hands up!”

A second man, this one older, hurriedly tossed his pistol to the side and stuck his hands in the air.

Thorn scrambled upright and joined Helen inside.

“Eight. Four. Alpha. Two …” someone said, speaking rapidly, but precisely.

He swung toward the voice and saw a tall, slender, handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes speaking intently into a telephone. Ibrahim. That had to be Prince Ibrahim al Saud — the man responsible for all this carnage. Rage flared inside him.

Thorn aimed the shotgun at the Saudi. “Drop the phone!”

Ibrahim smiled thinly and shook his head. “Delta. Tango.

Five …”

Helen fired. She was less than three meters away, and the pellets from her triple-ought shotgun shell were still tightly grouped when they hit — blowing Ibrahim’s right hand, the hand still holding the telephone, off just below the wrist.

The Saudi prince stood motionless, staring in horror at the blood pumping out of his shattered right arm.

Thorn grabbed the older man they’d taken prisoner and tossed him toward Ibrahim. “Use your belt! Put a tourniquet on him!”

“Oh, my God,” Helen said in horror.

Her shocked voice stopped Thorn in his tracks. He turned toward her.

She pointed at the several computer consoles that filled the room. One of them was live. It showed a digitally generated map of the surrounding region.

And a white dot blinked rapidly as it moved across the screen-heading inexorably toward Washington, D.C. One of the strike planes was airborne and closing on its target — with an armed 150-kiloton nuclear warhead aboard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE DETONATION

JUNE 21

_{Strike Control Center, Chantilly, Virginia}

Colonel Peter Thorn stared at the blinking dot in shock. Godfrey Field was barely thirty nautical miles from Washington, and the aircraft they’d seen based there had a cruising speed of two-hundred-plus knots.

Which meant they had maybe six or seven minutes before the equivalent of one hundred and fifty thousand tons of high explosive detonated right over the nation’s capital.

Several seconds trickled past — each an imagined lifetime of sorrow and regret. His shoulders slumped. “Oh, Christ.” Helen turned toward him. “We have to do something, Peter!”

Do what? What more could they do? Despite all the risks they’d taken, despite everything, they were too late. Ibrahim had managed to get one of his nuclear-armed planes off the ground.

And now the aircraft was following its preset flight plan, drawing ever closer to its programmed target.

He focused on the computer display. A single line below the digital map of the Washington metro area read: F1, FLIGHT CONTROL MENU.

Thorn grabbed the nearest chair, set his shotgun down, and sat down in front of the computer keyboard. He punched the F1 function key.

A new cursor popped on-screen, replacing the notation about a flight control menu: AIRCRAFT ID?: Swell.

Thorn whirled toward the older man they’d taken prisoner with the Saudi prince. The man had just finished rigging his belt around Ibrahim’s maimed right arm as a temporary tourniquet.

“You speak English?”

The balding, gray-haired man looked up from Ibrahim’s slumped, unconscious figure. The wounded man had fainted halfway through the effort to save his life. He hesitated. “Was? Ich verstehen She Night.”