As soon as it was past, Jack jumped to his feet and looked through the binoculars. The building was virtually gone. Only a small portion of the rear wall was still there. Bricks from the walls had been thrown out in every direction.
He doubted the US forces would have set off an explosion like that with a nuke inside. It had to be that the terrorists inside the building had wired the place with explosives beforehand. Lots of explosives. By the size of the blast they obviously wanted to die as martyrs and make sure there were no survivors who could be taken prisoner and questioned. Clearly, they also wanted to take as many people with them as possible.
With an explosive kill zone that large, whatever force had gone in there would have lost a lot of men.
Angela took the binoculars so she could have a look. After a moment she said, “I can see people moving around. There are men going into what’s left of the building. That, and no more gunfire, is a good sign, right?”
“Right.” He put a hand on Angela’s shoulder. “You did a good thing, Angela. It looks like we were in time. The bomb was close to being assembled and then on its way to New York City. You saved the lives of a great many people.”
She didn’t show any emotion, but she said, “Thanks, Jack.”
After a short time, Jack’s phone vibrated. It was Dvora.
“They recovered the nuke and have it secured,” she said. “It’s still mostly in one piece. My god, Jack, that was close.”
“Too close,” he said. “Did the team report anything else?”
“They lost men. I don’t know any numbers. There are a lot wounded. But they have the scene secured. They haven’t found any terrorists alive. They don’t know yet if there might have been lookouts who survived, but they’re searching now.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Now that they have everything under control, I think we’d better get out of here.”
“I’ll let you know if we get any other information. Just so you know, we kept your name out of it.”
After he hung up, he and Angela made their way back through the trees to the truck. Quiet had returned to the night. With the danger ended and the bomb secured, he suddenly felt drained.
“How about running me by the bar so I can get my car. I’m exhausted. I could use a good night’s sleep.”
“I think we both could,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to help.”
“Help? If not for you getting the information out of Miguel, an atom bomb would be on its way to New York City within a day or two. The world owes you a lot.”
“I’d rather be left out of it, if it’s okay with you,” she said as they reached the truck.
Jack chuckled his understanding of her rationale. They drove back out onto the highway and turned toward the city.
“You and I are a lot alike,” he told her. “I don’t want them to know I’m involved, either.”
Her face was lit in the glow of the dash lights as she looked over. “Why not?”
He sighed. “They don’t like that I work with people like you who can recognize killers. It’s not politically correct. They canceled the contract I had with them over it. The Israelis are thankful for my help, though.”
She looked skeptical. “You mean, there are other people like me?”
“Well,” he said, “I know a great deal about people who can recognize killers, but I’ve never met anyone like you.”
As she was thinking it over while negotiating the curving mountain road, a car closed rapidly from behind. Its high beams lit up the cab of the truck. When it cut into the oncoming lane and charged up beside the truck, Jack could see that it was a beige Toyota.
Angela glanced briefly out her window and saw the car.
“Hell no,” she muttered, “this isn’t happening.”
The car cut over toward them, trying to slam into her truck to drive her off the road and into the trees. Angela anticipated what they were about to do and floored the gas. The truck accelerated so hard it laid Jack back in his seat. The car cut over, but as the truck had already shot ahead they completely missed her.
Jack looked out the back window and saw what he thought were the silhouettes of AK-47s sticking out the passenger windows.
“I think you had better give me your gun.”
“You won’t need it,” she said, completely composed as she kept the gas pedal floored. “These guys don’t know what they’re doing.”
The truck flew into the night, the tires at the edge of adhesion as they arced around curves at speeds he would have thought impossible. He knew this was no ordinary truck and Angela was proving to be no ordinary driver. On top of that, she knew the road well. Jack had to brace himself between the door and the center console.
She led the car following them on a wild chase along the mountain road, sometimes only feeding in half throttle on the straights so that the Toyota could catch up, then accelerating to stay just far enough ahead to goad their predatory chase instinct.
As she reached a particularly twisty section of road that in places revealed steep drop-offs, she backed off just enough for the car to begin to catch up again, to let them feel confident they had her. Jack realized she was giving them slack and then reeling them in, playing them along, until she could get them where she wanted them.
As they came around a bend onto a straight section, she again accelerated at full power. Jack glanced to the speedometer and saw that they were surging past a hundred miles an hour. He looked up and in the headlights saw a road sign with an arrow curving to the right.
Angela backed off the gas as she approached the curve enough to allow the car to inch up beside them in the oncoming lane. Just as it did, she suddenly slammed on the brakes. As the car shot past, she cut the wheel to the left and caught the rear right quarter of the Toyota with her bumper. At that speed, they had no chance to regain control as momentum turned their car. It slid sideways into a sharp, right-handed curve around the side of the mountain. In a high-speed sideways slide, the Toyota flew off the road as Angela shot past them. The out-of-control, sideways Toyota hit a small ditch and flipped. It barrel-rolled down the embankment at tremendous speed, throwing chrome moldings, glass, and dirt flying everywhere.
Angela braked hard to a stop, then backed up and pulled off to the left side of the road just in time to see the car tumbling down below them abruptly slam roof-first into a tree. With a resounding boom it instantly came to a dead stop.
The world suddenly went dead quiet. Steam and wisps of smoke rose from the crumpled remains.
Angela, cool as could be, opened her door and calmly got out. “Let’s go have a look.”
She pulled her gun from the holster at the small of her back and started down the embankment. Jack pulled out his knife. In this circumstance he would rather have had a gun as well.
After making their way down a rocky, forested hillside, they came to the site of the wreck. It amazed him that the car had managed to barrel-roll over and over down the steep hillside, shearing off a series of saplings, without hitting any of the mature trees until it finally encountered a big one just before a drop-off over a sheer cliff. Had it missed the tree, it would have sailed out into thin air and landed far below on a boulder field. As it was, encountering the tree was no salvation. It was lethal.
The car had hit roof-first and wrapped itself backward around the tree. No one had been thrown from the car as it tumbled down the hillside. Everyone had somehow remained inside until the impact.
As Angela, in her cutoffs and suede boots, stood guard with her gun, Jack climbed up on the car to look down through the narrow openings that were all that was left when the roof hit the tree trunk and crushed the windows. The bodies inside were ripped and crumpled into a gory mess. There was no one remotely in one piece. There was nothing alive to be rescued.
Angela had efficiently killed them all without having to fire a shot. He doubted that anyone looking at her would realize how deadly this woman truly was. He couldn’t begin to imagine what her life had been like up to this point, but he hoped to find out.
The sky was just beginning to get a blush of color. It wouldn’t be long until dawn.