operators left.
On the screen, a helicopter landed on the pad.
Daro gave a weak wave and another cell phone was unwrapped and passed to him. He dialed. Listened. “Excellent,” he whispered. Closed the phone and handed it to Ali, who extracted the guts and broke them between his hands.
“Lights,” he said to the operator.
The operator pressed a key and squinted at the screen. “Back on,” he said.
The views of the power plant were illuminated, one showing a body with a surprising pool of dark liquid around it, the others empty corridors, and then back to the helicopter, its blades still rotating.
Daro took a lemon drop and chewed it. Vashni was working on a tiny palmtop.
The operator continued to type ferociously. “I have control of the turbines, now. Shall I run them backward?”
“Not yet,” Daro said. On the screen, dark figures were pushing a heavy metal cart toward the helicopter; another cart followed, then a third. The uncertain light shone on reflective tape outlining the edges of the carts, and the distorted image glowed. The glow framed matte black cradles in each cart.
It took six men to lift the payload from one cart into the helicopter. By the time they reached the third cart, Daro could sense their fatigue. He watched them lift the last black cradle off the cart and swing it up to reach the open door of the helicopter. Their effort fell short. The cradle swung back and one of the men fell away, clutching his arm.
Daro looked at his watch. Another man appeared in the frame with a rifle slung over his back, and then another. They helped to lift the last cradle aboard the helicopter.
Daro watched them as he had watched the lotus, his attention tuned to their actions, his wretched abdomen churning in response to their struggles. Even Vashni watched them, her eyes flicking to her palmtop and then back to the men loading the helicopter.
Then the copter stirred on the pad. It began to lift, lights blinking. In seconds it vanished from the screen, tail high.
Daro sighed as if he had been holding his breath. “Let’s go,” he said.
He was now the possessor of three nuclear warheads
CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia
Mary Totten stood looking at a TV screen in the CIA’s Center for Weapons of Mass Destruction and felt an adrenaline rush—the first good feeling since she’d been transferred out of Operations. A map of India was on the screen, and a talking head was telling them about the destruction of a power station at a place called Ambur. That was what had triggered the adrenaline—Ambur! She knew a lot about Ambur. Ambur is more than an electrical power station, sweetie. Ambur is a secret nuclear-storage site.
She ran for her desk, hungry to be the first. She grabbed her phone, checked on the fly that it was secure, and whammed the top button.
“This is Mary Totten at WMD,” she said to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. “We have a situation.”
Mahe, India
They got to their hotel by back roads and industrial streets; what was normally a ten-mile cruise from their hotel door to the Mahe naval base’s main gate became a hurried, nervous search through a very different, very unfamiliar India. When, at last, they pulled up at the hotel’s glass and marble front, Fidel said, “Amen,” and Clavers, who was driving, screamed, “Hey, whoa—we made it!” Ong burst into tears. Benvenuto, whose high had crashed, looked as if he’d been sandbagged. Fidel told Clavers not to turn the engine off and waited for her to get out, then slid behind the wheel and said, “I’ll park it around back.” He glanced at Alan as if expecting an objection. Alan only nodded.
Clavers seemed to take it personally. “What the hell for?”
“Because I don’t want it around front.” He looked at Alan again, then back at Clavers. He put his right hand on the gearshift. “Always find the back way out—right?”
Alan herded the rest of them into the hotel. The airconditioned lobby, not over-large but handsomely done up in shades of red and brown, seemed odd to him, different—and then it struck him: Nobody’s sitting or waiting or checking in. The place is empty.
“Commander Craik!” The high female voice seemed to echo in the space. “Commander Craik!” A woman was calling, almost screaming, to him from the front desk.
Alan shouted back at his crew as he crossed the lobby, “Nobody go out! Everybody stay close to a phone!” The woman at the desk was holding up message slips, and he was thinking that there had been a dozen calls for him from Bahrain, angry people wondering why he wasn’t at Mahe, why they couldn’t reach him, what was going on—He turned back to his ragtag army. “And don’t get in the shower!” Looks of shock. “If the phone rings, I want you to pick up!” They were already at the elevators, headed for their rooms.
“Commander Craik!” The tall young woman coming around the reception counter was Miss Chitrakar. In this hotel, where the reception clerks also functioned as concierges, she had been wonderful all week. Now, she looked terrified.
“Messages, messages—” She started back for the high marble and almost fell. “People calling and calling—especially—” She handed him a slip of paper.
The message said, Stay where you are until I get you. Important! Harry.
Harry? Harry wasn’t Fifth Fleet. Still—
“The telly said the Pakistanis are preparing to attack!”
He looked at her, saw her frightened eyes, then realized that a small television set was on behind the counter, images of soldiers filling its screen.
Then the telephone rang and she flinched and answered and almost at once jerked, her head and looked at him, listened, nodded, tried to speak, listened, held out the phone. “Your friend.”
Their fingers touched. She flinched as if shocked.
“Harry?”
“My God, you’re a hard man to find. Al, what the hell is happening there—? I tried the navy base, the phones are down!”
“Harry—I can’t talk—I’ve got to call Fifth Fleet—”
Miss Chitrakar moved away.
“Al, shut up! Listen—something’s happened to the Jefferson. Some sort of accident. What do you know about it?”
Alan was watching the mini-TV. The picture was incom-prehensible—a building on fire, a talking head, an air shot of the fire, a flasher in the corner that said “Calcutta”.
“Harry, what’re you calling me for?”
“Something’s going down, Al.
