83.

'What's going on in there?' one of the marines outside the cave entrance asked. 'I heard explosions ...' He was clearly shaken by the urgency with which Jason and Meat were making their exit.

Jason hooked him by the arm as they pa.s.sed, pulled him towards the slope. Meat grabbed the guy's partner by the shoulder and goaded him along right behind them.

'I need you to help me get everyone down to the MRAP ... right now,' Jason said.

'Why? What's-'

Jason quickly conveyed the seriousness of the situation. He verified the elapsed time on his wrist.w.a.tch then said, 'There's a nuke inside this mountain that's going to blow in less than four minutes.'

'A nuke?' Hearing his own words rattled the marine even more. 'Get outta here!'

'A really big nuke,' Meat said with extreme drama.

'Now go!' Jason said, prodding the marine down the slope. 'Everyone needs to be inside the vehicle!' He took a moment to survey the camp and confirmed that the backup platoon still hadn't arrived. For once, he was grateful for their inefficiency. Down below, six more marines were in plain sight, including the wounded.

'You too,' Meat said to the second marine, who was showing signs of disbelief. 'Get going.'

'But where's Crawford?' he asked.

'Dead. Same as Holt and Ramirez,' Meat told him. 'Same as us if we keep standing here.' Meat wasn't about to debate the issue. He turned and started down the slope. If the guywas smart,he'd follow.

'Dead?' the marine muttered in disbelief. He stared at the cave for a long moment wondering if he'd just been fed a line of bulls.h.i.t. Then he came to his senses and hurried after Meat.

Jason secured the MRAP's rear doors the best he could since the ma.s.sive indentations made by the earlier boulder collision had misaligned the hinges. 'All clear. Go!' he yelled to the driver.

The engine roared and the hulking troop carrier lurched forward.

'How much longer?' Meat asked.

He glanced at his watch again. 'Less than a minute.'

Jason hoped that the walkie-talkie had enough juice left in it to hold back the rats for just a little longer. But even if the brood managed to break through the ultrasonic barrier, they'd have a tough time squeezing through the rubble pile Meat had plugged up using Crawford's three grenades.

He scanned the worried faces of the marines huddled tight along the side-wall benches. One of the soldiers had his left arm in a sling, two others had bandaged heads, and the cute robot operator with the pageboy haircut had a makeshift splint wrapped tight over her right shin. 'Everybody all right?'

Some nods, some affirmative responses.

'Sergeant Yaeger,' the driver called back. 'I just received confirmation that 5th Division has turned around again and is returning to base camp. They're about three klicks to the west.'

'Good,' Jason said.

The MRAP gathered speed as it climbed on to the roadway and headed south.

'Jesus, what happened in there?' one of the marines asked.

Casting his eyes to the floor, Jason wasn't sure how to respond. Would anyone really believe the truth?

Meat answered for him: 'A weapons stash. Huge Huge weapons stash. It was b.o.o.by-trapped. Crawford must've hit some kind of tripwire that activated a timed detonator.' He looked to Jason for corroboration. weapons stash. It was b.o.o.by-trapped. Crawford must've hit some kind of tripwire that activated a timed detonator.' He looked to Jason for corroboration.

Jason nodded.

'But you said there was a nuke in there,' the second marine who'd been guarding the cave entrance challenged. 'How are we supposed to believe-'

'Hey, wise guy, I think you should shut up and grab hold of something,' Meat advised sternly, counting down the final seconds in his head.

The testy marine wisely clammed up and clasped the handle hanging over his head, tight enough to turn his knuckles white.

The others also hunkered down. Tension and antic.i.p.ation filled the air.

n.o.body spoke.

Five seconds later, a brilliant white light flashed through the rear window, accompanied by an earsplitting explosion on par with a thunderclap. There was a deceptive delay that preceded the shockwave. When it hit, the MRAP groaned and bucked, jostling everyone inside. Arms and legs flailed and bodies rolled. The hull filled with screams and expletives.

A barrage of heavy debris pounded the roof, clanging the vehicle's thick armour plating like a gong. The white light dissipated and a second wave of pelting debris came raining down over the truck's exterior.

Then came an eerie calm.

The intensity of the blast had Jason feeling confident that even if some of the rats had managed to escape before the nuke detonated, either the searing heat wave would have vaporized them, or the crunching pressure wave would have pulverized them.

'Told you it was a nuke,' Meat said to the sceptical marine.

EPILOGUE.

LONDON, ENGLAND.

TWO MONTHS LATER.

'I feel like I'm hanging from a noose,' Meat grumbled as he tugged at the starched white collar that strangled his eighteen-and-a-quarter-inch neck. The rented black tuxedo paired a size 46 long jacket with a pair of 34 x 34 pants. But it all felt too restrictive, particularly at the shoulders and crotch. The shiny black patent leather 14 EE shoes were no great shakes, either; he hated the way they clicked along the marble tiles of the museum's Great Court. 'G.o.d, I hate playing dress-up.'

'What do you mean?' Jason said, fixing his own bowtie and taking extra-long strides to keep up with Meat. 'Dressing up is all we've been doing for the past five years,' he reminded him. 'Except this time we get to shower and shave, even smell nice. Nothing wrong with looking cla.s.sy once in a while.'

Jason gazed up to admire the deep cerulean sky coming through Norman Foster's gla.s.s and steel canopy - a segmented dome of triangular gla.s.s panels which covered the hectare Great Court that was the heart of the British Museum. At the court's centre, he scanned the mingling VIPs who sipped champagne in front of the circular Reading Room. Still no sign of Flaherty.

'Doesn't look like Tommy's here yet,' he said, claiming a spot beneath a life-size statue of a Roman youth riding a horse, in search of conquest. Giving the statue only a cursory glance, he couldn't help but draw a parallel to Randall Stokes's lofty ambitions to chart a new course for human history.

A tuxedoed waiter carrying a tray of long-stemmed gla.s.ses br.i.m.m.i.n.g with bubbly immediately came to them. 'Champagne, gentlemen?'

'Cheers,' Jason said to the waiter as he took a flute by its stem.

'Yeah, thanks,' Meat said, grabbing his own gla.s.s by its narrow bulb as if were a chopper control grip.

A lithe brunette wearing a skimpy c.o.c.ktail dress and high heels strode by, gazed at Meat appraisingly, then flashed him an approving smile. Meat smiled back, and miraculously the tuxedo felt comfortable. He reconsidered his position, saying, 'I suppose cla.s.sy isn't so bad.'

'That's the spirit.'

'I'm just not used to getting all dressed up like some rich socialite.'

'Funny you should say that,' Jason said. He slid his hand under his lapel and pulled out a white envelope.

Meat looked at it suspiciously. 'If that's another G.o.dd.a.m.n subpoena-'

'Calm down ...' Jason said.

There'd been plenty of court requests over the past weeks since they'd returned home from their mission. The Department of Defense had begun what would surely prove to be a lengthy inquiry into the events that had transpired in Iraq. Accompanied by an army of counsellors from Global Security Corporation's Legal Affairs division, Jason and Meat had endured exhaustive questioning at a Congressional hearing. They'd quickly been absolved of any formal charges, thanks largely to the tell-all video captured on the disc Jason had recovered from the camcorder in Crawford's tent. The footage corroborated everything Jason and Meat had described in their testimony. It showed Crawford's crude interrogation of Al-Zahrani, Jason's unheeded demand to Crawford to call for backup, Al-Zahrani's rapid decline in health as proof that the Genesis Plague was a very real threat, plus a chilling offscreen altercation between Crawford and Dr Jeremy Levin just before a gunshot rang out to silence the medic. The video's grand finale, however, was when Crawford and Staff Sergeant Richards (dressed in nomad garb) appeared onscreen to hoist Al-Zahrani off the bed while Crawford barked orders to secrete the terrorist out the back door for a clandestine escape. Scathing testimony provided by the surviving troops of the 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Division Expeditionary Force, also emphasized Crawford's schizophrenic behaviour, as well as the lifesaving air attack staged by the GSC mercenary unit.

The day after he'd been taken into custody, Randall Stokes had suffered a miserable and poetic demise, choking to death on his own blood in a quarantine ward at Nellis Air Force Base. Shortly thereafter, NSA cryptographers succeeded in cracking the sophisticated encryption on Stokes's computer hard drive, and retrieved all the operational details for Operation Genesis, including schematics for the breeding facilities installed beneath the Zagros Mountains and gene sequencing data for the Genesis Plague. There were even simulation models that forecast the spread of the disease - an expected 90 per cent kill rate of the Middle Eastern male population in just the first three months of the contagion's initial introduction.

Auditors had forensically reconstructed the money trail for the project's financing to reveal a complex web of twenty-seven phantom accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, all funnelled into a numbered account held by Our Savior in Christ Cathedral. The majority of funding had been misappropriated from defence money earmarked for biochemical research at Fort Detrick shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. The balance of funding came from charitable donations to Stokes's evangelical mission made by a veritable 'who's who' of wealthy donors. Every contractor and benefactor a.s.sociated with Operation Genesis was being vetted for complicity in the plot.

Just last week, both Jason and Meat had been recommended for the highest commendations for their heroic actions in averting what might have been the most egregious act of bioterrorism ever doc.u.mented. But the kudos didn't end there. There were other rewards too.

'Calm down, it's not a subpoena,' Jason said in a taming voice. He held the envelope out and waited for Meat to accept it. But Meat just stared at it.

'What is it?'

'Just open it. Come on ... it won't bite. Trust me, you won't regret it.'

Meat reluctantly s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from Jason. After confirming that his name and address appeared in the small window on front of the envelope, he began tearing at the seal.

'After that fire at the safe house burned out,' Jason explained, 'six skeletons were recovered from the ashes. Five were unidentifiable. But one of the skeletons had a very unique dental implant, as well as a t.i.tanium pin implanted surgically in the left ankle to correct for an old soccer injury.'

'All right,' Meat said, not grasping the connection. He peeked into the envelope and saw the backside of what looked like a cheque.

'Turns out the FBI matched the dental work with records already in its database,' Jason explained. 'The serial number on the t.i.tanium pin came up too.'

Meat froze before fishing out the contents from the envelope. He looked at Jason in disbelief. 'Al-Zahrani?'

Jason grinned widely and nodded. 'The only positive ID. Of course, those photos I took before we set the place on fire helped too.'

Suddenly the piece of paper pinched between Meat's fingers felt impossibly heavy.

'Go ahead, look at it,' Jason said, pointing at the paper.

Meat squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. Slowly he flipped the cheque over. His mouth dropped open when in the numeric field he saw nothing but two threes and five noughts separated by two commas. For once, he was speechless.

'Your cut of the bounty. Three-point-three million. A bit bigger than expected since Lillian had GSC match our share.'

'I always liked her,' Meat said.

'And you're about to like her even more ... because she agreed to send Jam's and Camel's widows their cut. Hazo's sister, Anyah, got his share. I've got an envelope for Tommy, too. How's that for cla.s.sy?' He patted Meat on the shoulder.

Finally Meat raised his eyebrows and said, 'Whoa. Now that that is a nice payday.' is a nice payday.'

'Sure is.' Jason raised his champagne and made a small toast. 'Here's to living to fight another day.'

'I'll drink to that,' Meat said, clinking his gla.s.s, then gulping the champagne.

'Hey, Google!' a distinctly Bostonian voice called out.

Jason turned and saw Flaherty strutting towards him with a confident swagger. When he saw the beauty on Flaherty's arm, he almost swooned.

'Hubba hubba,' Meat said. 'That the archaeologist?'

'That's her.' Wearing an elegant evening gown that accentuated nothing but toned curves, Professor Brooke Thompson looked like she'd taken a detour off the red carpet at the Oscars.

'She single?'

'Flaherty's already staked a claim,' Jason replied flatly.

'Luck of the Irish.' Meat took another swig of champagne.

'Hey, fellas,' Flaherty said cheerily. He shook hands with Jason and Meat in turn, then formally introduced Brooke.

'Really great to finally meet a pair of modern-day heroes,' she said.

'We could say the same for you,' Jason said.

Flaherty cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows.

'Yes, and, of course, you're a hero too, Tommy,' Jason added with the utmost sensitivity.

They all had a laugh as the attentive waiter delivered two more champagne flutes for Brooke and Flaherty.

'By the way, Tommy,' Jason said, taking another white envelope out from his pocket, 'I've got something for you.'

'Looks important.'

'You could say that.' Jason grinned and held it out for him.

'It can wait, though, right? I mean, this is Brooke's night.'

'Sure.' Jason pocketed the envelope.

Flaherty raised his gla.s.s for a quick toast. 'To the vanquished foe and the heroes we know.'

They clinked gla.s.ses and sipped champagne.

'This must all be pretty exciting,' Jason said to Brooke. 'To be the honorary guest at the world's foremost museum for ancient artifacts. The press, the glitz ...'