From the hallway, Ding called, “John, you’re gonna want to see this.”
Clark and Jack found Ding and Dominic in the master bedroom. Sitting atop a chest of drawers was a laptop. Ding said, “We found it in the nightstand.” He hit the return key.
After a few moments, the Emir’s face appeared on the screen. The backdrop was the living room couch and wall. “My name is Saif Rahman Yasin. I am also known as the Emir, and I am the commander of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. I speak to you today as a devout Muslim and a humble servant and soldier of Allah. By now the world has already witnessed the vengeance of Allah visited upon the infidel nation of America. ...”
Clark tapped the return button, stopping the video. “That’s the sonofabitch’s last testament.”
Jack asked, “What’s the date on this?”
“Yesterday,” Dominic answered.
“Christ.”
They followed Clark down the hall and back to the dining nook. Clark sat down at the table while everyone else hung back.
“Tariq.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me where Saif is and what he’s doing. Before you answer, you need to understand the ground rule: You get one chance to answer, and then—”
Tariq stared ahead. “You’re going to kill me? Go ahead; I do not fear death. I’ll be welcomed into paradise as a—”
“We’re not going to kill you, Tariq, but before another hour passes, you’re going to wish you were.”
Tariq turned and looked at Clark. “I’m not afraid.”
Clark regarded him solemnly for a few moments, and then, without taking his eyes off Tariq, said over his shoulder to Ding, “Go fill up the bathtub.”
Clark had never quite understood the debate over whether or not waterboarding was torture. Anyone who’d either been through it or seen it firsthand knew that it was torture. It got results, the validity of which could be ascertained only by a particularly astute interrogator or subsequent intelligence gathering. Clark was blessed with the former attribute but lacked the time and resources for the latter.
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