Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [280]
Eight minutes, a saturated towel, and exactly thirty-two ounces of water was all it took. Satisfied, Clark rose from his crouched position over the barely conscious and sputtering Tariq and turned to Ding, who stood, arms folded, as he leaned against the bathroom wall.
“Pull the plug,” Clark ordered. “Get him cleaned up and locked down.”
“You buy it, John?”
“Yeah.” Clark checked his watch. “Either way, we’re outta time.”
87
CLARK STRODE back into the kitchen. “Jack, grab the phone book. We need the closest airfield. Commercial helicopter tours will be our best bet.”
“On it.”
“Dom, you’ll drive. Doctor, are you comfortable staying here with him?” Ding was coming down the hall, dragging Tariq behind him. “We’ll be back for you.”
“Sure.”
Jack called, “Paragon Air Helicopter Tours on Highway Two-fifteen. Three miles from here.”
They were out the door in thirty seconds and on the highway in two minutes. Clark used the sat phone to dial The Campus. Rick Bell answered, and Clark said, “I need you, Gerry, and Sam on conference call right now.”
“Hold on.”
Thirty seconds passed. Hendley came on the line. “What’ve you got, John?”
“I’ve got Jack on the line, too. Our guy is gone, left yesterday. A bodyguard was still at the house. They’ve got a bomb, Gerry, probably something below ten kilotons but big enough for what they’ve got planned.”
“Wait, back up? Is this credible?”
“I believe it is. We have to assume it is.”
“Where’d they get it?”
“No idea. Our guy didn’t have that info.”
“Okay, what else?”
“The Emir’s meeting with six other men about a hundred miles north of here. The bodyguard didn’t have the nuts-and-bolts details, but their target is Yucca Mountain.”
“As in the nuclear waste repository?”
“Yep.”
“It’s not even open yet. There’s nothing there.”
“There’s groundwater,” Jack replied.
“Come again?”
“Think of it as an underground nuclear test. Detonate a nuke under five thousand feet of rock and the shock wave goes straight down. The engineers there have already dug storage tunnels down to a thousand feet. The water table is five hundred feet below that. It’s a geological sieve,” Jack explained. “All the radiation from a nuke goes straight down into the aquifers, then to the rest of the southwest. Maybe all the way to the West Coast. We’re talking about thousands of square miles poisoned for the next ten thousand years.”
There was silence on The Campus end. Then Granger said, “Where the hell did they get this?”
Clark answered. “It’s homemade—probably a simple gun-barrel setup: shoot one chunk of uranium called a ‘slug’ into a second, larger chunk called a ‘pit’ and you’ve got critical mass.”
“And the material? Where’d they get that?”
“Not sure. The bodyguard said one of the Emir’s captains was in Russia up until a couple weeks ago.”
Hendley said, “You’re the man on the ground, John. What do you wanna do?”
“We’re handicapped, Gerry. Anybody we call isn’t going to just send in the cavalry. There’ll be a hundred questions before anybody moves: Who are we, where’d we get the info, what’s our proof. … You know how it’ll go.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re about two minutes away from an airstrip. We’re gonna see if we can borrow a helo. Depending on what we get, we could be over Yucca in thirty minutes. If we get there first, we’ll hold the fort until you can get somebody to listen.”
“And if you get there second?”
“Not even gonna think about it. I’ll call you when we’re airborne.”
Ninety miles north of Las Vegas, on Death Valley’s Highway 95, the Emir slowed his car and crossed over the median onto the shoulder. The dirt tract was barely perceptible through a berm of cactus scrub, but he picked his way down into a shallow spot and soon found himself in a pair of tire ruts. Through his windshield, a half-mile away, the Skeleton Hills rose from the barren terrain like mountains of the moon.
The tract kept descending, then swung north and began running parallel to a shallow canyon. A quarter-mile