Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  “This contraption says it’s a quarter to eight,” Nimec said, glancing at the WristLink as he buckled it on. “Still gives us fifteen minutes to get out of here.”

  Chris checked his own watch.

  “Pete, mine says it’s almost five to eight…”

  “And mine’s synched to radio signals from the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which makes it official,” Nimec said. “Think yours can beat that?”

  Chris looked at him.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “And I can beat you at karate.”

  “Someday you might,” Nimec said. “Meanwhile, I need to call your mother.”

  He took the cellular from Chris, flipped it open, held it up to his cheek.

  “An-nnuh-ieee,” he mouthed with a dragged-out slowness that made him sound piteously speech-impaired… and feel idiotic since he knew it was unnecessary with advanced voice dial interfaces. Old habits died hard, he guessed.

  A ring tone in his ear, and then Annie’s name appeared on his caller identification display… as he imagined would be true in the reverse.

  “Hi, Pete.”

  Nimec smiled. Hearing her gave him a lift. It also made him feel like a lovesick adolescent. She’d been gone four days, what was that? But to be fair with himself, it had been like this since they got back from their honeymoon. Three or four days a week, every week. The separations demanded by Annie’s unfinished job commitments weren’t your standard ingredients for newly wedded bliss.

  “Annie, you at work?”

  “I wish,” she said. “Stuck in traffic.”

  “Where about?”

  “Maybe a half mile from the Center,” she said, using NASA shorthand for the immense complex of research, operational, training, and administrative office facilities that constituted the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center between Houston and Galveston. “Routine maintenance. They’ve closed two lanes on the interstate.”

  “Lousy timing.”

  “Couldn’t be worse,” she said. “Talk about a screw-up, Pete. Orion Three launches in about a month…”

  Five weeks, two days, he thought. Then you’re finished working, over and out, and we’re back in orbit together.

  “… and we’ve got the shuttle crew in the last stage of intensive training. Full phase mission sims, a rendezvous and docking run-through this morning. So what happens? Some geniuses on the Texas Highways Board decide now’s when to repave.”

  “You’d think they’d have the sense to coordinate with LBJ,” Nimec said.

  “You sure would… and I left the apartment forty minutes early to avoid this jam, if you can believe it.” Annie sighed. “Anyway, enough griping. Everything okay at home?”

  “Yeah,” Nimec said. “Well, pretty much. Got a small problem. Or two. But if you’re driving…”

  “More like staring at the butt end of a tanker truck,” she said. “What are ‘nonedible animal fat products,’ by the way?”

  “No idea. Why?”

  “Because the term’s so disgusting it fascinates me,” Annie said. “And because a sign on the truck says it’s carrying them and warns not to tailgate.”

  “Really, Annie, this’ll wait until you get off the road… ”

  “Come on, I’m hands-free with my phone,” she said. “What can’t you find this morning?”

  “How’d you know—?”

  “Pete, you have the same problem or two every morning,” Annie said. “So let’s hear.”

  Nimec cleared his throat.

  “Fresh razor blades,” he said. “Been looking for them everywhere.”

  “Did you try your bathroom closet?”

  Nimec turned toward the closet door right behind him, raised his eyebrows in consternation.

  “Well, no…”

  “There should be a bunch on the middle shelf.”

  He went to take a look, found several packages in plain sight beside hefty oversupplies of shampoo and shaving cream.

  “See them?” Annie said.

  “Yeah, thanks.” Nimec reached for a pack and tore open the cellophane. “Could’ve sworn I had my blades under the sink, though…”

  “Once upon a time, Pete. Under it, over it, on it. But I’ve been putting them all in the closet for months.”

  “That long?”

  “Since I came along to impose order on your existence.”

  Nimec thought a moment.

  “Guess we have been over this before,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Annie said. “What’s next?”

  “My dress shirts.”

  “None in your drawer?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “Then Chloe didn’t get around to putting away the laundry on Friday,” she said.

  “The advantages of our hiring on a housekeeper.”

  “Come on, Pete. She’s only part-time.”

  “Still, I used to know where—”

  “The washroom,” Annie said. “That wicker basket on the floor next to the machines.”

  “You sure?”

  “Guaranteed. She always stacks them there after picking them up from the dry cleaner,” Annie said. “Sorts it with the laundry when she’s done so she can put everything away at once.”

  “Hold it, let me see.”

  Nimec held the phone away from his mouth, sent Chris on a hurried bee through the condo. A couple of minutes later he reappeared in the doorway, his younger sister scrambling up behind him. Each of them had a folded, banded white shirt held out flat with both hands like a pizza box.

  “Pete…?”

  “We’re good here, Annie.”

  “Good that you’re good,” she said. “Traffic’s starting to move.”

  “And we’d better do the same at our end. Call you at the apartment tonight?”

  “Make it late if you’re going to,” Annie said. “I’m in for a long day in Building Five.”

  Nimec quietly scratched under his ear.

  “I love you, Pete. Hugs and kisses to the brats.”

  “Back at you.”

  Nimec flipped the phone shut, dropped it into the pocket of his robe, and ordered the kids out of the room while he shaved.

  Rushing to finish, he nicked his face badly in several spots.

  * * *

  The trio of battered old coal trucks and their fully laden open-bed trailers had thundered through the Pakistani night under a three-quarter moon, journeying almost a hundred-fifty kilometers northwest from the rail yard in Islamabad toward Chikar, an inkblot-small village with limited overland access amounting to a few lightly traveled ribbons of blacktop that dipped and wove between jagged, snowy mountain peaks.

  As he crested a steep rise under a projecting spur of hillside, the lead vehicle’s driver puzzled at what his headlights revealed straight ahead.

  He glanced at the man dozing beside him, then reached across to shake his elbow. “Khalid, snap to it.”

  Khalid stirred, his head still nodding against his chest.

  “What’s the problem?” he said fuzzily.

  The driver shot him an annoyed look.

  “See for yourself,” he said.

  Khalid jerked himself erect in his seat. Perhaps fifty or sixty meters up ahead on his right, he could see a string of electric warning flashers along the roadside, where snowbanks were piled high against the slope. They led toward a portable wooden barricade, casting bright red reflections off the inches-thick sheets of recently fallen cover on the blacktop and overhanging rock ledges. A pair of soldiers wearing combat helmets, hooded dun coats, and winter boots stood in front of the barricade, assault weapons slung over their shoulders. Angled crosswise behind it were three jeeps. They idled with their lights on, exhaust wisping from their tailpipes. There were more soldiers inside the vehicles, shadowy outlines in the silver moonlight.

  “Maader chud,” Khalid swore. His eyes had popped wide open. “Do you think they’re regular infantry?”

  “Look carefully. Those
rifles should give you an answer.”

  Khalid stared out his windshield at the soldiers and muttered another curse. The submachine guns were the H&K G3s issued to border-patrol units.

  “Rangers,” he said.

  “So it seems.”

  They rolled on in silence a moment

  “This could be something routine. A spot check,” Khalid said, sounding none too confident. “In any event, Yousaf, we have the proper documents.”

  The driver inwardly dismissed his weak reassurances. Chikar was twenty-five klicks from the restricted zone encompassing the western boundaries of Kashmir’s Muzaffarabad and Poonch districts, with their military outposts and heavily guarded refugee camps. It was, furthermore, twice that distance from the Line of Control. In the relative quiet that had held across the frontier over the past six months, Yousaf ’s team had made runs to the area many times without encountering rangers this far from their forward posts.

  The coal trucks rumbled toward the barrier, their tires pressing wide tread imprints into the snow. Yousaf saw the two standing guards move into the middle of the road and wave phosphorescent wands over their heads to bring the procession to a halt.

  He tapped his hydraulic brakes and the truck slowed with a hiss.

  Khalid lurched in its passenger seat. He, too, had grown increasingly sure of imminent trouble. And wasn’t it a fair expectation in these times of bottom-dollar loyalties? His country’s president was nothing more than a bharway, a pimp, his regular army a stable of debased whores — now on their knees for the Americans, now raising their bottoms to let the Indians have a poke at them. For Khalid and his confederates it had been the ultimate shame when even the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate began turning itself out for the greenback. Praise be to God, there were yet a few who refused to cheapen themselves.

  “Make certain the others are ready,” Yousaf ordered now, tilting his head back toward the trucks at his rear. “Use only the beep code.”

  Khalid looked at him across the cab.

  “You think those men can break our encryption?” he said.

  Yousaf shrugged, his hands on the wheel.

  “Who knows what brought them here,” he said. “If they’re going to pick up anything, let it be meaningless noise.”

  Khalid grunted. Again, he saw the wariness on Yousaf’s features. And again he understood what was at its root. It wasn’t only the army they had to worry about — their Hindu bedmates across the LoC were especially skilled at radio intercepts.

  He took his cell phone from inside his coat, switched on its walkie-talkie channel, and used the tone pad to transmit a short series of beeps. A moment later he heard a response sequence in the earpiece and slipped the radio back into his pocket.

  Yousaf brought the truck to a full stop as one of the soldiers approached his door, glanced at the painted company name on its exterior, and then motioned for him to roll down his window. He lowered it halfway with his right hand, noticing that the second guard had walked around the front grille toward the passenger side.

  “It’s a hideous night to be out, my brother,” Yousaf said, leaning his head out of the cab. “Has there been some sort of local disturbance?”

  The ranger ignored his question, his bearded face showing no flicker of expression. His eyes skimmed the inside of the cab, lingered on Khalid a second, then returned to Yousaf.

  “I see you’re with Daud Fuel and Energy out of the capital,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Headed where?”

  “The power station at Chikar,” Khalid said.

  The ranger’s eyes were steady on him.

  “I’ll have a look at your papers, if you please,” he said.

  Khalid had them ready on a clipboard. He leaned over and passed it out the window.

  “Is it not late for a delivery?” the guard said, flipping through the permits and manifests

  Yousaf had kept his left hand on the steering wheel. Now he flapped it in a gesture of long-suffering resignation and let it drop onto his seat near the floor-mounted stick shift.

  “In winter our rail shipment from Dera Ghazi comes when it comes… and what can we do but wait for our pickup?” he said. “Today a storm in the valley put them — and us — three hours behind schedule.”

  Silence. The wind blew across the snow-decked summits and ledges of the vast mountain range, swirling shrouds of powder into the air. They drifted under the moonlight and sprinkled crystalline glitter onto Yousaf’s hood and windshield.

  He glanced into his rearview mirror and watched the second border guard continue down the left side of the truck toward its flatbed. He’d expected the rangers would not leave well enough alone, although his answers to the questions posed him had been verifiable. The shipment’s destination, his explanation for its lateness… that was all true as far as it went. Daud was a legitimate coal and petroleum company, and nine times out of ten its trucks to points out along the country’s eastern and western territories carried only their declared cargo.

  Yousaf doubted it was any coincidence that this stop had occurred at the odd trip out. Someone had been clued to something. Presumably something vague and largely dismissed, though. Otherwise there would have been more than a token military presence out on the road.

  “Respectfully, might we be allowed to get underway?” he asked. “The drivers are tired, and we still have a distance to travel.”

  The ranger looked at him.

  “I’ll let you go as soon as possible,” he said. “But my men will need to inspect the back of your trucks.”

  Yousaf made a surprised face, eased his left hand down into the space between the driver’s and passenger seats.

  “To what purpose?” he said, and felt his heartbeat quicken. In a moment, he knew, the soldier would radio the jeeps. “Each is carrying upwards of forty-five thousand kilos of coal. It will be this time tomorrow before you’re finished.”

  “Relax, I didn’t say we’d have to shovel it all onto the road.” The ranger started to pass the clipboard back through the open window. “You have your job, we have ours.”

  And that was the regrettable catch, Yousaf thought.

  With the ranger’s arm still inside the cab, holding out the clipboard, Yousaf grabbed his wrist with his right hand to pull him forward and off-balance. At the same instant he brought his knife up from the space behind the clutch with his other hand, swept it in front of and across his own chest, and plunged it into the ranger’s throat under the angle of the jaw to penetrate the trachea, sharply turning its serrated blade in the wound, then jerking it to the right to cut a wide horizontal slit that severed both carotid arteries.

  The ranger’s eyes rolled and he emitted a barely audible sputtering sound. His hot blood steaming in the cold night air, pulsing over Yousaf’s hand and arm from the ragged gash in his throat, he slumped forward as Yousaf held on to his wrist to keep his body pressed up against the side of the truck a little longer.

  “Khalid, fast!” he rasped.

  Khalid had already thrown open the passenger door. Now he whipped his sound-and-flash-suppressed Steyr tactical machine pistol from inside his coat, leaned out, and twisted around at the waist to where the second ranger now stood by the trailer, his back to the truck’s cab.

  In the loud throbbing of wind between the mountain flanks, the soldier hadn’t yet heard anything unusual. Nor did he notice until after Yousaf had released his dying companion to let him hit the ground with the knife buried in his throat, and then clenched the steering wheel in one hand, rammed the truck’s gearshift into “forward” with dripping, blood-slicked fingers, and lowered his foot onto the gas pedal.

  It was only as the truck lurched toward the barricade that the second ranger looked to see what was happening and was struck by a muffled, flashless volley from Khalid’s polymer-skinned weapon. The ranger went down at once, collapsing as if deflated, his legs folding underneath him.

  The passenger door still open, Khalid pulled his
head back into the cab and faced forward.

  Tensing, he dug the fingers of his free hand into the side of his bucket seat, holding the grip of his TMP with the other. The coal truck trundled slowly forward, the barrier growing larger in its windshield. Khalid saw soldiers pour out of their jeeps in disorganized haste, expecting to be rammed broadside, firing at the truck as they split toward the opposite shoulders of the road.

  His head ducked low as bullets peppered the windshield, Khalid triggered a return salvo out his wide-flung door and saw one of the evacuating soldiers go down. In back of him the two other coal trucks remained at a complete stop, their doors also thrown open now. The men leaping from their cabs onto the road carried heavier firearms than his own compact machine pistol, Kalashnikov AK-100s with night optics and GP-30 underbarrel grenade launchers.

  Shattered windshield glass flying over him, blood streaming into his eyes from cuts on his cheeks and forehead, Khalid fired the Steyr until its clip was spent, then tossed it onto his seat, reached down between his legs, pulled open a camouflaged access panel in the floor of the cab, and extracted an AK-100 from a hidden compartment. A moment later it was stuttering in his hand.

  Now a pop from behind, a whistle overhead, and Khalid knew one of his confederates at the rear had sent a 40-mm VOG projectile arcing over the barricade from his tube. He mentally counted down and heard another streak past him at a level trajectory — this grenade issued from the same weapon, its direction and angle of elevation changed to confuse its targets about their enemy’s position. The first air-burst round lit the night above the left side of the road where several of the rangers had scrambled for cover, its nose detonated by a timed fourteen-second fuze, pelting the area below with a hail of fragmented metal. The next bounding round exploded an almost imperceptible three seconds later and shredded apart lower to the ground on the right. Khalid could hear high, piercing screams through the blast, punctuated with sharp little spaks of shrapnel nicking the parked jeeps behind the barricade.