Day of Wrath

“Absolutely, sir,” Degarza said, unfazed by Leiter’s apparent lack of trust in his common sense. Only an idiot would want to screw around with weapons packing a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand ton punch — especially when nobody knew whether or not these terrorists had booby-trapped them.

Which left him with one burning question. “Is there any word yet from the other dispersal fields, sir?”

“So far, so good,” Leiter replied. “We’ve hit them all now.

Took a couple of minor casualties in a firefight at Page and at Shafter-Minter, but nothing serious. A few of the bastards apparently got spooked early and ran when they couldn’t make contact with Ibrahim — but we know where they’re headed. They won’t get far. And we’ve recovered nineteen bombs. According to Special Agent Gray and Colonel Thorn, that’s all they had left.”

All they had left, Degarza thought in disbelief. He sure hoped Leiter knew just how lucky the Bureau had been — and how much it owed to Helen Gray.

JULY 5

Vienna, Virginia Colonel Peter Thorn gingerly poked his head into Farrell’s booklined office. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything, Sam.”

Farrell looked up from the yellow legal pad he’d been furiously scribbling on. He tossed the pad onto his desk and stood up to shake Thorn’s hand. “Not at all, Pete! But I’m surprised Louisa didn’t let me know you were here.”

Thorn grinned sheepishly. “I don’t think she saw me come in.

I waited till I saw her go out into your garden and slipped in the back way.”

Farrell wagged a finger at him. “No more cloak-and dagger stuff in my house, Colonel. I’m retired for good this time.”

“Yes, sir.”

The general waved him toward a chair and sat down himself.

“I don’t see why you’re acting so skittish around my wife, Pete,” Farrell continued, smiling. “You know you’re one of her favorites.”’ Thorn shook his head. “That’s hard to believe — since we both know I dragged you into the middle of one hell of a mess — not to mention the ten thousand bucks of your money we spent. And Louisa’s been around the Army long enough to know how long it’ll take the green eyeshade boys to cough up any reimbursement— if ever!”

Farrell shrugged. “Who knows? I may just write that ten thousand off as research on a book I might write someday. And maybe I’ll even bill the FBI for the time I spent answering their questions.”’ Thorn grinned. Sam, Helen, and he had been held in FBI “protective” custody for nearly two days while the Bureau, the Pentagon, and the CIA all ran them through extensive and exhausting debriefing sessions. At first, it was clear that the government would really have preferred to keep the whole crewed-up affair hushed up. But there was no way the administration could clamp a lid on a major firefight out in suburban Virginia and half a dozen heavy-duty HRT and SWAT raids around the country. Not to mention a nuclear explosion right over Chesapeake Bay.

Thorn frowned. He looked out the window at Farrell’s big, green, peaceful backyard.

They’d been lucky. Very lucky. Because it was an airburst, the blast hadn’t created a lot of fallout. Plus, the prevailing winds had pretty rapidly pushed what radiation there was well out into the Atlantic.

Still, the police and National Guard units had been forced to temporarily evacuate several thousand people from the Virginia portion of the Delmarva peninsula — mostly as a precaution. Fortunately, the Defense and Energy Departments decontamination teams surveying the area were reporting only very minor levels of background radiation.

Anyway, what started out as a trickle of news leaks had rapidly turned into a flood.

The first stories had focused on the horrifying news that someone had somehow smuggled a large number of stolen Russian nuclear weapons into the U.S. itself. That had generated a whole week’s worth of mile-high headlines and hour-long TV news specials. Now the other shoes were starting to drop one right after another.

There were questions about Caraco’s involvement in domestic American politics, questions about Ibrahim’s close ties to the administration, and questions about the roles senior officials had played in trying to shut down investigations into Caraco’s secret arms smuggling.

So far he had dodged the press, but he was just about out of excuses and running room. Especially now that Congress was getting its act in gear. Both the House and the Senate were talking loudly about forming special committees to investigate the administration’s recent conduct.

One of the people they were zeroing in on was Richard Garrett — Ibrahim’s former chief lobbyist.

There were also stories that the IRS was focusing its attention on the ex-Commerce Secretary — pursuing evidence that he’d avoided paying taxes on large unreported bonuses paid by the Saudi prince.