James Barrington - Overkill

Abbas nodded. ‘And we will make a much better job of it than you have,’ he spat. ‘It is our destiny. We will bring the word of Mohammed to the godless masses, if not now then later.’ And then he added something which chilled Richter even more than Baker’s news. ‘I am not the only one who knows the backdoor code,’ he said.

‘Who else?’ Richter demanded, but Abbas just smiled slightly and shook his head.

‘I will not tell you,’ he said. ‘You will find out, and he will finish what I began. Your time is at an end.’

Richter nodded, decision made. ‘And so is your time,’ he said, and raised the Glock.

‘You would not dare,’ Abbas said. ‘This is France, a civilized country. You cannot just execute me. I expect medical treatment. I want to talk to my Embassy in France.’

‘Expect away,’ Richter said, and shot Abbas twice in the stomach. The Arab’s eyes widened with the sudden searing pain, and he began a keening, wailing sound as he toppled sideways, clutching his belly.

‘One for Abilene, one for Albany,’ Richter said, stood up and turned away.

‘You want me to finish him?’ Dekker asked.

‘No,’ Richter shook his head firmly, picked up the Samsonite computer case and walked out of the ruined building. ‘Leave him there. Let him die slowly. It’ll give him time to make his peace with Mohammed.’

Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

Sadoun Khamil looked at the television set with a broad smile on his face. The satellite receiver was tuned to CNN, and already the first still picture – shot from a safe distance, probably several miles away – of the characteristic mushroom-shaped cloud over what was left of Abilene was more or less a fixture on the screen. The correspondents were visibly appalled, and trying desperately to make any kind of sense of what they and the world were seeing.

American government buildings were already under siege from the news media, but there had been no announcements of any sort from any officials. Experts from various disciplines were being dragged into studios, or just stood in front of camera crews, and asked for their comments and conclusions, but the quite unmistakable fact was that nobody in America had any idea of what had happened or why. The best guess on the part of the CNN anchor was that it was just a terrible mistake – an American nuclear weapon had been accidentally detonated, with appalling loss of life and wholesale destruction.

Khamil smiled again as he heard this. ‘There will be a few more such accidents,’ he prophesied, and laughed out loud.

10 Downing Street, London

Sir Michael Geraghty sat down heavily in the leather chair opposite the mahogany desk in the Prime Minister’s private office, and looked across at the grey-haired man who’d been roused from sleep by his staff minutes earlier when the news from Texas broke. His hair was tousled, and he was still in pyjamas, a mauve dressing gown wrapped tightly around him. Geraghty was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t look much better himself, though he was fully dressed.

‘This is appalling, simply appalling.’

‘I can only agree with you, Prime Minister. You know that we in SIS did everything we could, and I have already congratulated Simpson on the performance of his people. The presence of this Arab—’ he almost spat the word ‘—with a backdoor code into the Russian computer was completely unexpected, and something nobody could possibly have foreseen.’

‘And what now?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘After Abilene, what will the Americans do? The weapon was Russian in design, construction and placement. The fact that it was triggered by an Arab is probably, in this context, irrelevant. At the very least we can expect them to demand substantial reparation from Russia, and at worst they might decide on a surgical strike, to visit upon the Russian people the same sort of losses they have experienced.’

‘That, Prime Minister, is why I’m here,’ Geraghty said. ‘Simpson has informed me that the SAS and his man successfully stopped the Arab terrorist from detonating any further weapons, although he was trying to do just that when they caught up with him. As far as we are aware, there is no further danger from any of the weapons that the Russians positioned on American soil. It would be a tragedy if America struck at Russia now, and precipitated any kind of a nuclear exchange. May I recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you discuss the matter immediately with the American President and suggest that, for the moment, he does nothing precipitate.

‘It may help if you advise him that we have evidence which definitely links al-Qaeda with the Abilene bombing. It was not, in the final analysis, the Russians who pulled the trigger, and any retaliation should probably not be directed towards them.’

Camp David, Maryland

‘I hear what you say,’ the President said, the secure telephone pressed close to his ear, ‘and your views are not too dissimilar from my own. Of course, the hawks will want to strike back immediately, and I’ll no doubt face a lot of criticism if I take no military action, but we have to think of the long-term consequences. And, as you rightly put it, the Russians didn’t actually pull the trigger.’

St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

Three of the troopers had been sent down the lane back to the village, and had returned with the three Renault Espaces.

They swiftly moved the bodies of the two dead SAS troopers into one of the vehicles, then Richter and Ross supervised the removal of almost everything portable in the house, from the computer in the back bedroom to the prayer mats in the lounge, taking anything and everything that could provide clues to the identity of the four dead Arabs. They stripped the bodies, collected their clothes, personal possessions, weapons and ammunition, and all the spent cartridge cases they could find. Everything went into the cavernous boots of the Espaces.

They photographed each of them, several times, full face and profile, even Ibrahim, who nobody, not even his own mother, would recognize. They worked quickly, aware that the noise they had created in assaulting the house would certainly have been heard by someone, and that quite possibly the gendarmes were already en route to the village. Confrontation with French law-enforcement officers would not be a problem, because one call by Richter to Lacomte should sort it out, but he and Ross had agreed that a swift and silent exit from the scene was by far the best option.

Twenty-eight minutes after Richter had shot Abbas in the stomach, the three vehicles began the descent down the hill into St Médard.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

‘This is appalling,’ the Russian President said, unconsciously echoing the words the British Prime Minister had used just minutes earlier and almost two thousand miles away. ‘You are absolutely certain of the facts?’

‘Yes, Comrade President,’ Yuri Baratov said, his familiar smile for once completely absent. ‘A low-yield nuclear weapon was detonated in the American south-central region approximately one hour ago. Our initial estimate based on technical analysis and seismograph data suggests that ground zero was Abilene in Texas and this has been confirmed by the American news media. CNN, in particular.’

The President rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I am not familiar with American centres of population. What size city is Abilene?’

‘The population of the city is around one hundred and twenty thousand,’ Baratov said, ‘and about a further one hundred and seventy thousand people live in the surrounding area.’