Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

A soldier pulled Jonathan behind a crate and helped him sit up.

“Get him,” said Jonathan, disoriented, gesturing toward the jeep. “Get Haq! He has the warhead!”

“He can’t go anywhere,” the soldier shouted in Jonathan’s face. “The place is sealed tight as a drum.”

A female voice. So familiar. “Emma?”

The soldier pulled the black balaclava off her face. “Are you okay?”

Jonathan looked into the woman’s face. Blue eyes, not green. Hair a raven’s black. “Danni? You’re here?”

“I tried to alert you last night.”

Jonathan blinked, recalling the assault on Balfour’s estate. “Connor sent you?”

“No,” she said. “I came on my own. This morning I found out he’d been trying to reach me ever since you left. He hooked me up with Delta. My orders were to keep an eye out for you and make sure none of the good guys took you out by accident.”

“But Haq,” said Jonathan rolling to one side, seeking out the jeep, no longer seeing it.

A monstrous blast rocked the foundations of the hangar. Giant pan lights fell from the ceiling. A second rafter broke loose, crashing to the floor.

“We have to get out of here,” said Danni. “Before the whole place goes up.”

Before he could protest, she grabbed his collar and hauled him to his feet. Together they ran back through the canyon of crates and boxes until they emerged into the daylight, coughing and sputtering.

An American officer directed them to an aid truck at the side of the hangar, but Jonathan was still too amped up to worry about himself. “Haq,” he managed, bent double and clearing his throat. “Did you get him? Black jeep… he has it… he has the bomb.”

“Sir, you need water and medical attention.”

Jonathan ignored the offer of assistance, forcing himself to stand upright and confront the officer. “Did you get him?”

“Sir, we’re handling this operation. Right now you need aid. Corpsman! Take this man to the aid truck.”

“I’ll do it,” said Danni.

“Didn’t you hear me?” shouted Jonathan. “He’s a got a WMD. I saw it-it’s in there!”

“Get him out of here! Now!”

“Cool it,” said Danni, restraining Jonathan. “There are over a hundred troops here. They’ve got the perimeter sealed. Haq isn’t going anywhere.”

Danni guided Jonathan around the side of the hangar to a spot fifty meters across the tarmac where two Humvees and a half-ton truck were parked. A Pakistani soldier offered them water and tea and energy bars.

“Who are they?” Jonathan asked, eyes glued to the hangar doors. “Where did they come from?”

“Delta Force and regular Pakistani army,” said Danni.

“How did they know where to be?”

“The information you forwarded to Connor. He contacted U.S. Central Command and they called out Delta.”

“The information I forwarded?”

“The files started coming through soon after my diversion. It was smart of you to take advantage of it to break into Balfour’s office.”

“And Connor told you all this?”

“He said he’d gotten the files you sent from Balfour’s. He called them a goldmine.”

“But I didn’t…”

Jonathan left his words unsaid. His world had momentarily divided into parallel tracks. While one part of his mind replayed the events in Balfour’s office last night, another watched in fearful surprise as a dozen soldiers ran out of the hangar en masse, heads bowed, followed by a Humvee reversing at full speed. At the same moment that Jonathan recalled Emma holding the flash drive in her open palm and realized that it could only have been she who had sent Connor the information, he spotted the obdurate American officer at the head of the fleeing soldiers, waving his arms furiously and shouting, “Get back!”

The words were slammed to the ground by a flash of orange, a burst of light so bright it eclipsed the midday sun. And in that instant before the shock wave struck him, Jonathan saw the Humvee rise up on one end, as if standing on tiptoes, and a soldier suspended in midair, and he thought, This is what it is like to see a nuclear weapon explode from two hundred meters away.

Jonathan blinked and opened his eyes. Stunned that he was alive, he rose to an elbow and watched as huge sections of the corrugated iron roof tumbled from the sky amid coils of black smoke and plummeted into the fire and debris.

“Stay down,” shouted Danni, knocking the elbow out from under him. “It’s a hellstorm. The whole place went up.”

Jonathan ignored her. He had seen something else, something besides the fire and the debris and the Humvee traveling end over end. Lifting his head, he stared across the tarmac, squinting to see into the distance.

There, beyond the flames and smoke and mayhem, two jeeps were driving rapidly away from the hangar. A fireball blossomed from the carnage, obscuring his view. When the flames receded and the smoke cleared, the jeeps had disappeared into the airport’s busy ground traffic.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

Frank Connor sat on the edge of a desk in the middle of the op center, jaw agape and not giving two shits about it, as he watched Hangar 18 disintegrate before his eyes. The screen blinked repeatedly, then went black, and he knew he’d lost the feed from Islamabad Airport.

“Get me hooked up with the on-scene commander,” he said to his telecom tech.

“Audio is intact, sir. We just lost the picture.”

“Well, get it back.”

The room was packed with Division’s senior staff. Victories were few and far between, and it was doubtful that any person present, Connor included, would ever again witness one of this magnitude. He had followed the operation from inception via a camera attached to the assault commander’s shoulder harness. He had witnessed the breaching of the hangar, the killing of Lord Balfour and Massoud Haq, and the subsequent firefight. And now he was having a very difficult time remaining calm as he waited for the boys from Delta Force to bring him his prize.

“Have you retrieved the package?” he asked the commander.

“No, sir. We can’t get near the place. The way that ammo is still cooking off, it’s a war zone. Right now I’ve got to look after my men. I’ve got two seriously injured and one KIA.”

The news sent a sobering chill through the assembled viewers.

“Keep me posted,” said Connor.

It had been a long day. Upon receiving Balfour’s files, he’d immediately run the batch through a keyword search. The results yielded a mountain of information about Balfour’s various businesses and over a hundred articles about cruise missiles and the American nuclear arsenal, but precious little about the nuts and bolts of his operation to retrieve the warhead from Tirich Mir.

After three hours of sifting through thousands of individual files and letters, Connor chanced upon an e-mail retrieved from Balfour’s trash addressed to Massoud Haq, agreeing upon a time and place for the exchange of the weapon. Again there was no overt mention of a WMD, just a cryptic and oft-repeated reference to a “carpet for sale.” This e-mail, coupled with inquiries to a team of Pakistani nuclear physicists about traveling to Blenheim to examine “an object that required their expertise,” was all Connor had to go on. Disappointingly, there had been no photographs or other concrete evidence of the weapon.

Connor looked to his side, where Peter Erskine stood, arms crossed, a glum expression aging his boyish features. “See, Pete, we did it. We took a risk and it paid off. If we’d sent this info upstairs, that WMD would be in Times Square by now and New York City would be a smoldering ruin.”

“I agree, Frank,” said Erskine. “It looks like your gamble paid off.”