Day of Wrath

And the whole course of history — of the centuries-old struggle between the House of Islam and its enemies — would be altered forever. Nothing would ever be the same again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN ARMS RACE

JUNE 19

_{Outside the Caraco Complex, Chantilly, Virginia (H MINUS 57)}

The floodlights surrounding the Caraco complex were bright enough to turn night into day — even two hours past midnight.

Lying prone in the tall grass fifty meters away, Colonel Peter Thorn lowered the bulky Russianmade thermal imager they’d bought at a military surplus store several hours before. A quick check of the imager’s small display confirmed his earlier supposition. The warehousesized building with the antenna-studded roof had to contain Ibrahim’s command and control center. This many hours after the end of the normal workday, the other two buildings in the compound were both cool — near ambient temperature. But the third was still warm — with distinct hot spots near the main door and on the roof. There were people awake and hard at work in there.

Satisfied, he laid the thermal imager to one side and picked up a pair of binoculars — scanning slowly back and forth along the well-lit fence line. He fiddled with the focus on the binoculars and whistled softly.

“They’ve got cameras covering every close approach to that perimeter.

And I’d swear there are some power leads running up that fence.”

Helen Gray turned her head toward him. “You think it’s hot?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But I bet they can throw a few thousand volts through it on command.”

“Lovely. Just lovely,” she muttered. “So we’re looking at a complete security network — an electric fence, cameras, armed guards, and probably motion sensors, too.”

Thorn nodded. “Nobody said this would be easy.”

Sam Farrell spoke up. “As I recall, Pete, I said this would be impossible, crazy, illegal, and probably fatal.”

Thorn grinned back at him, feeling somehow more cheerful than he had for weeks. The prospect of action, of actually striking back at a physical enemy, was acting as a tonic. “Geez, Sam!

Somebody should really get you to stop mincing your words.”

“Let’s take what we have to the FBI and let them run with it!”

Farrell argued heatedly. He glanced toward Helen. “Let the HRT handle any raid on this place. They’ve got the manpower, the gear. and the legal right!”

Helen shook her head. “What we have, Sam, is a lot of supposition and guesswork — some of it based on evidence we took off two dead men. Men who were killed in very suspicious circumstances.”’ Thorn nodded.

They’d heard the first news reports on the bodies found near Middleburg while driving back from Leesburg.

Nobody from the FBI was saying anything publicly yet, but they knew the Bureau had to be going crazy trying to figure out how its Deputy Assistant Director heading the International Relations Branch had wound up dead in the rural Virginia woods — right beside the corpse of Caraco’s chief of European security.

Helen frowned. “If we walk into the Hoover Building with what we’ve got now, I guarantee you the first thing they’ll do is handcuff us to the nearest solid object and start piling up charges. By the time we get anybody high-ranking enough to pay attention to our story—”

“Those nukes will be detonating left and right,” Thorn finished for her.

Farrell still looked troubled. “I just don’t like going off the reservation like this. Acting this far outside the law goes against the grain.”

Hell, Thorn thought, it bothers me, too.

But he honestly couldn’t see any other way through the tangle they were in. Not only didn’t he believe official Washington could react fast enough to stop Ibrahim, he wasn’t sure who they could really trust with their story. If Caraco had one mole inside the Hoover Building, why not two?

Even if Mcdowell had been the only traitor feeding information to Wolf and Ibrahim, Caraco’s chief executive had already demonstrated the power he could exert over the capital’s political establishment. What federal official with any brains or sense was going to take on the head of a multibillion-dollar corporation who also happened to be a member of the Saudi royal family with close ties to the White House?

Especially on the unsupported testimony of a rogue FBI agent and a former Delta Force officer now slated for forcible retirement — both of whom were wanted on a variety of charges ranging from insubordination to kidnapping and murder?

Thorn snorted. That was an easy question. No one. Certainly not in time to make any difference.

He and Helen had also ruled out contacting the media. It would take the press too much time to get off its collective ass and start digging.