Ted Bell - Tsar

It was five-fifty-nine A.M., coming up on six A.M.

“I won’t miss it, Andy. I can’t find my damn smokes, that’s all. You got any?”

“Hell, no. Cops can’t smoke for insurance reasons. Besides, my wife’d up and kill me she thought I was puffing on them cancer sticks. Why, she’d-”

Paddy was walking back toward the rear of the truck with his finger on the button, eyes glued to the red digital display that was spinning down to zero.

Now.

You could feel the ground shaking, even up here on Hickory Hill. The three men stood and stared down in wonder at the little town as it exploded. It was like watching a movie of a building coming down, only it was all of the buildings, all of the neighborhoods, and they were all coming down at once, sending a huge cloud of smoke rolling skyward as the noise and sheer force of the blast came rolling up the hill and rocked the truck, spilling the coffee from all three cups and sending the doughnut boxes flying off the back of the truck.

“Holy shit!” Andy screamed, walking out to the edge of the overlook. “They freakin’ did it! The goddamn A-rabs blew up our whole goddamn town!”

Fires broke out everywhere. Power lines sparked, ignited, and came down, writhing like angry snakes in the streets. Underground gas lines exploded up through asphalt intersections, the power station was sparking into yet another inferno, and every last filling station in town had turned into a brilliant fireball that climbed into the dawn sky and lit up what used to be Salina like the Fourth of July fireworks every summer up at Hickory Hill.

Paddy had his snubbie out, was looking down the barrel at the backs of the two Kansas policemen. He could easily put a bullet in each of them, shots to the back of the head, walk away. He raised the pistol, put a pound of pressure on the trigger…and then changed his mind.

Having admired his work from afar, Paddy climbed up into his truck and stuck the key into the ignition. He had a long way to go and a short time to get there. He was catching the next thing smoking out of Topeka to Miami. There was a lot to be done before Pushkin lifted off in a matter of hours.

He left Officers Andy and Gene standing there at the edge of the bluff, looking down at what was left of the town they’d both grown up in, tears already drying on their cheeks.

Happy had mixed emotions about sparing the lives of Officers Andy and Gene of Salina PD. But, but, but. He was a professional. He didn’t kill people for fun. Only for money. Or for a good reason. And he could see no good reason to off these two guys. If the two cops identified a crazy baker delivering doughnuts to a deserted town, so what? He’d be long gone before anyone could tie him to the multiple explosions that had flattened the place. And he seriously doubted anybody ever would.

Anyway, by the time anybody had a clue what had blown Salina to smithereens, the world would be an entirely different place. A lot of America might look like the blackened ruins smoldering at the bottom of the hill. And Happy? Hell, he’d be sailing the skies above the blue Atlantic, enjoying the many pleasures of the floating pussy palace on what promised to be a very interesting voyage to Stockholm.

The Happy Baker, his mission accomplished, silently rolled away, gone in a flash.

Taking care of business, baby.

TCB.

It was gone.

The whole damn town, just flat gone.

Standing beneath one of the giant monitors mounted on a granite lobby wall, Stokely and Fancha, along with everybody else, were watching CNN images of a small Kansas town that no longer existed. Rumors were flying.

The buzz inside the teeming Miami Herald lobby was this, it was that; it was al-Qaeda, it was Hezbollah, no, it was the Iranians, some kind of small nuke, a dirty bomb, hell, no, it was simply a main gas line under the town that had blown, a fertilizer factory, some even theorized a fertilizer bomb, set off by some home-grown disciples of Timothy McVeigh, antigovernment militia still simmering over Waco and Ruby Ridge.

The real truth was, nobody knew what the hell had happened to Salina, Kansas. Especially not the talking heads on CNN, in Stoke’s opinion, anyway. Anybody who did know, wasn’t talking to the media.

On the oversized monitors throughout the lobby, the all-too-familiar banner “Breaking News” was running beneath devastating live pictures of what used to be the little town of Salina, Kansas, population 42,000. Salina was now a charred, smoking ruin, with nothing standing but a few brick chimneys and a blackened water tower.

“What’s this all about, Stokely?” Fancha asked, a worried frown on her face. “Terrorists?”

“I don’t know, baby. Could be terrorists. Maybe just a chemical plant or an underground natural-gas main. Could be anything. But we’ve got to be getting aboard, anyway. We’ll get more scoop soon as we’re settled in our stateroom.”

“A whole town? Just gone?” she said, staring at the monitor. “Unbelievable.”

“Yeah, but the town was completely evacuated before, right? So somebody knows something, and whatever it is, they ain’t saying yet.”

One thing Stokely Jones did know for sure: this might turn out to be very, very bad news. For America. For the whole damn world. Say it wasn’t a simple accident, gas main or whatever. Some terror group takes out an entire American town? That’s a message, no matter who sent it. But he’d cleared this trip with Brock, check out Tsar and besides, he’d promised Fancha he’d accompany her, and a promise was a promise.

He gave her waist a squeeze.

“Let’s go, baby, this is going to be fun.”

She was nervous as a cat about this trip, and she was counting on him, big time. Hell, he’d been smiling since the second he woke up that morning, making breakfast, making bad jokes, trying hard all day to keep things upbeat. He took her elbow and steered her toward the short lines waiting at the elevators to the rooftop. They were a little late, and most of the passengers were already onboard.

“You believe all the famous faces we’re rubbing elbows with?” he said.

“You don’t rub elbows with faces, Stokely.”

“You don’t?”

“Faces don’t have elbows. People have elbows.”

“True enough.”

Still, the lobby was celebrity-packed, filled to overflowing with the rich and famous and their entourages, all of the remaining people who would shortly be boarding the giant airship Pushkin for her maiden voyage to Stockholm and the Nobel awards ceremony four days from now.

“You excited, sugar?” he asked her, leaning down to whisper in her ear.

“Now that you’re coming, I am. I only feel safe when you’re next to me, Stoke. I need you by my side. That’s the Lord’s truth.”

“I’m there for you, baby, you know that.”

“What about you, Stoke? Aren’t you even a little excited?”

“Honey, you know me. I only got two emotions. Hungry and horny. You see me without an erection, quick, make me a sandwich. Hey, look. You see who I see coming through the door? The Marlboro Man himself.”

The vice president of the United States, a tall, rugged-looking rancher who hailed from the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, was entering the lobby. Tom McCloskey had come to see his wife, Bonnie, off. The veep was originally supposed to go on the voyage himself, but something had come up at the last minute. Stoke had been shaving early that morning when he’d heard on the radio that the vice president’s wife would now be traveling alone.

Now Stoke figured it was maybe this disaster in Kansas that was keeping McCloskey close to home. Washington probably knew more than they were saying? Security was tight, crew-cut guys talking into their sleeves everywhere. Hell, Stoke had never seen so many Secret Service personnel in one room in his life. “M &M is in the lobby, moving to the elevator bank,” he heard an agent say. M &M, Stoke knew, was the Secret Service call sign for McCloskey. It was based on a moniker the agents had given McCloskey when he first arrived at the White House, Marlboro Man.