The Zero Hour

There was a loud crackling sound. Sarah, crouching out of the way of the EMP, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It felt as if the shock were running through her body.

There was a burning smell.

There, some seventy feet away, was the pile of boxes, DetCord looped around them. On top was the fusing mechanism. Its tiny ruby-red LED light was dark.

“Is that it?” Sarah asked.

“I-I think so,” Suarez said. “Uh, the sensor isn’t picking up any microwave emissions. Tom?”

The man in the green Kevlar protective suit said, “Spectrum analyzer finds no evidence of any electric flow. No current flowing through the thing.”

“Approach the device,” Suarez ordered.

The helmeted man in the protective gear lumbered through the doorway.

Sarah held her breath, found herself praying.

Suarez explained to her: “Everything about it seems to be dead, but EMP won’t defeat a mechanical fuse, so he’s got to look for himself.”

Tom approached the device, walking up to it slowly, and did not feel his foot brush against a taut, almost invisible wire. He unfolded a flat, canary-yellow screen and placed it behind the black box, then pointed a small cylindrical object at it.

Suarez explained: “Those are CB2 screens. They fluoresce when hit by X rays. He’s using a Min-X-Ray SS-100 portable fluoroscope to send X rays through the thing, so he can see an image on the screen. He knows what to look for-mostly, any deviation from the device you folks intercepted.”

“Looks clear,” Tom shouted.

“Clear,” Suarez shouted to the rest of the team members, some three hundred yards off.

Tom opened the black box and looked inside. All the solid-state electronic guts of the fusing mechanism had been fried.

The bomb was dead.

But something caught his eye, just a glint at first, and he felt his stomach go cold.

It was a large mechanical stopwatch. A big, old, round-faced stopwatch that appeared to have been modified. A sweep second hand was moving at a normal pace, but to Tom, seized with panic, it seemed to be racing.

Two wires came out of the watch, snaked out of the box into the explosives.

He whirled around, saw the simple trip wire he had set off as he approached the bomb. A low-tech kind of thing commandos used in the jungle. The kind of thing that’s not affected by electromagnetic pulses or anything fancy like that.

The second hand continued to sweep along the face of the stop watch, toward a steel pin, and when it made contact, the bomb would blow. A sixty-second stopwatch. Less than thirty seconds remained.

From behind him, Tom heard a shout: “What the hell…?”

“Back off!” Tom shouted hoarsely. “It’s not dead!”

A simple booby trap, Tom thought. It hadn’t been in the mechanism they had inspected. Of course: Baumann trusted nobody, not even whoever had made his fusing mechanism. He’d put in a backup.

Two wires.

Two wires emanated from the watch. What did that mean?

Did he dare cut the wires?

What if it were a collapsing circuit, which meant that if you cut the wires, the circuit would automatically close, and the fucking bomb would go off?

Tom felt his fingers tremble.

Cut the wires or not?

Two wires.

Less than ten seconds remained.

No. A collapsing circuit always needed three wires.

Just over five seconds before the steel second hand touched the steel pin…

He snipped the wires.

Involuntarily, he winced, braced himself.

A second… two… three.

Nothing.

He exhaled slowly, felt tears spring to his eyes.

The thing was dead. He turned around slowly, numbly, and said, too quietly: “The render-safe is complete. The thing’s dead.”

Suarez sank to the ground in involuntary expression of relief. Sarah braced herself against the doorjamb and stared at the bomb in disbelief. Tears of relief welled up in her eyes.

“The render-safe is complete,” Suarez called out. “The thing’s dead.”

And then Sarah’s walkie-talkie crackled. “Cahill, Cahill, Roth.”

“Roth, Cahill,” she replied. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve spotted your man.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

The area six miles in radius from the center of La Guardia Airport is officially La Guardia airspace. As Dan Hammond’s ASTAR approached the uncontrolled airspace above the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, he was contacted by La Guardia Class B service operations. Flying into a high-density air-traffic area as he was, his craft was now under strict ATC control. ATC mandates your helicopter route, at a prescribed altitude. For each flight, you’re issued a transponder code, which was in this case 3213. The transponder code tags up on the radar screen with your tail numbers, also known as registration numbers or N numbers. The tail numbers used to be painted only on the bottom of the aircraft, but now they are required to be visible from both sides. Also, because of drug-smuggling problems, the numbers are now required to be fully twelve inches high, which makes them visible from quite a distance.