Jonas, page 16
And then, maybe, he could tick off one box on his list of nightmares.
Nine
“Ready to save the world?”
Jonas had asked the question over two hours ago as they’d left her house in Cerkno, after dropping off his low-riding Panda rental and switching to her SUV for the drive.
She’d answered quickly, the words just falling out of her. “Let’s—what did you say? Punch it.”
“Now you’re talking like a storm chaser,” he’d said.
She’d laughed, but frankly, the closer they got to southern Croatia, the more her stomach tightened. It had taken them two hours to get back to Cerkno. She’d picked up her kit while Jonas petted Len, and then he received a text from someone in America.
He’d gotten on the phone then, and maybe woken someone up but had a not-quiet, pacing conversation outside where he used words like “can’t wait” and “radiation poisoning” and then “hurry up.”
Then he’d hung up and headed back inside, a grim look on his face.
She’d made them a couple sandwiches while he prowled around the kitchen, silent.
He’d finally explained the call when they got inside her SUV.
“My contact in America sent an agent to my lab in Ljubljana—apparently, that’s the address that Tarek sent them. Apparently, they are pretty hot that I’m not there. But I sent them the pin, so maybe they’ll find us at the dirigible location.”
She hoped they showed up armed, because their arsenal included a couple ham sandwiches and her kit, as well as a suit—because who knew but Jonas would want to follow her into danger.
Of course he would. Because the guy made a living of running into storms.
Which was almost as bad as her profession, so maybe they were actually right for each other.
And that thought had simply fallen through her, turned her silent.
Truth was, she’d never felt so in sync with someone as she had with Jonas, soaring over the mountains. He loved it like she did and…
And maybe that’s why she’d made promises to him. Okay, not a promise, really, but she had agreed to teach him to paraglide.
Which meant he was planning on sticking around.
Oy.
He’d offered to drive, and she’d let him, trying to do some research on the kind of bomb that might have been attached to his dirigible. She studied the pictures on his phone and compared it to some of the bombs she’d dealt with.
What she didn’t know was the trigger, although she guessed it might be—
“You’re very quiet over there.” He drove with one hand on the steering wheel, atop it, tapping his thumb as if also thinking. In fact, they might not have said a word to each other for the past thirty kilometers.
Which felt okay. Easy. Like he understood the weight of his earlier words.
She could appreciate a man who didn’t have to fill all the silences.
“What if the trigger is an altimeter? It detonates as soon as the bomb reaches a certain height.”
“Someone would have to control it, because the dirigible is designed to stay aloft.” He nodded, however, as if letting that thought sink in. “That makes sense, because if they hacked the radio frequency and the RFID, then they would have the ability to direct it, even hover it above the city, or village or wherever they wanted to deploy the caesium-137.”
“By the way, did you take your blue pill today?”
“I did, doc. And you?”
“Yep. Not bleeding from my eyes.” But maybe her heart felt a little less heavy. As if he’d gotten inside it, started to dissolve the hard case around it. “So, what’s your plan?”
“I programmed into the software a back door—another way to connect with Sally if the main FM radio receiver went down. It’s on an AM frequency, which has greater range than FM, and I can initiate an automatic descent.”
“And once it lands, I can disable the bomb.”
“That’s the hope.”
“So, what’s the rest of the plan? How are we going to find Sally?”
“I have her last known location. We’ll track her down.”
“And then what?”
He went silent. Looked at her. “That’s all I got.”
She stared at him. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“I figured I’d—we’d figure it out as we went.”
Silence as his words churned through her. “Jonas, I never figure it out as I go. I always have a plan. If I don’t know exactly what kind of bomb I’m dealing with, if I don’t know what the trigger type is, if I don’t know how to reach the trigger and neutralize it then…then I don’t go in. I…” She looked out the window. They were driving through villages, past farmhouses and fields, the country slowly giving way to forest. “You can’t just live your life without a plan. Even if it’s a…”
“One-meter plan?”
“Yes.” She turned to him. “I might not want to look too far ahead, but the part I can see…I know what I’m doing.”
“And if it doesn’t work out the way you plan?”
She opened her mouth, closed it. Drew in a breath. “I…”
“You run. You hide. You blame yourself.”
“Ouch. Maybe I should get out and walk from here.”
He looked at her. “I didn’t mean it that way. But you’re the one who told me that Rokko’s death was your fault.”
“It was.”
“No. It was because of the fire and circumstances and things way beyond your control.”
She folded her arms over herself.
“The fact is, life is a storm. It’s unpredictable and mistakes are made and you can try and control your one meter, but really, one day you simply wake up and your life has been ripped apart.”
She stared at him, frowning. What—
“And then you stop wondering how to control it and just try and get past it. Or through it. Or…survive it.”
“Jonas?”
He drew in a breath. “My grandpa, the one who loved storms, was killed by a tornado.”
“Oh no.”
He nodded, his mouth tight. “He was driving home from Florida for my graduation from high school and just happened to drive through a town in Missouri right about the time a storm hit it. He tried to get to cover with grandma—they hid in an underpass. Which I could have told him was a bad idea, but anyway…
“One minute he was there, the next he was flung from his car. Grandma was trapped in the car and had to wait two hours before help came. Grandpa was killed almost instantly.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. It changed everything for me. Up until then, storms were fun to chase and a sort of thrill. I’ll never forget standing by my dad at Grandpa’s funeral. I don’t know why, but I sort of felt like it was my fault. Of course it wasn’t, but my dad must have figured that out, because he put his arm around me, and I’ll never forget what he said.”
She stayed silent.
“He quoted a verse from Isaiah. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ And then Dad said that God is in the storm. That though the winds blow and my life feels torn apart, if I can just trust Him, I’ll discover Him at the center.”
He tapped the brakes as they came into a village, the sun turning the red roofs to fire. “There’s a story in Matthew about Jesus sleeping in a boat while a huge storm comes up. And the disciples are terrified, and they wake Him and say, ‘Save us, we’re going to drown.’ And He responds by saying, ‘You have such little faith!’ And then He calmed the storm.”
“I know this story. My grandfather told it to me.”
“I always hated that story because I felt like Jesus got angry with them for being afraid. But what He was saying is ‘I’m aware of you and your storms and your dangers, even when it feels like I’m “sleeping.”” He finger quoted the word with one hand. “I had thought that God simply blinked, or didn’t care that my grandfather died. But my dad reminded me in fact, my grandfather had to be in exactly that place at that time for this to happen.”
“So, God made it happen.”
“Or allowed it, depending on your theology, but either way, He knew it would happen.”
“And didn’t stop it.”
“Nope. Just like He doesn’t stop a lot of storms, tragedies, and…” He looked at her. “Bombs that go off in our lives.”
“He should.”
“Maybe. But how many times do we discover that the storm saved us from something else, or made us stronger—”
“Or made no sense at all.”
“Yes, there’s that. To us, it makes no sense. But that’s when we just have to stand. Believe that God is with us in the storm. Even if it feels like He’s sleeping.”
“I don’t know. It feels like God should save us from tragedy.”
“It does. Yes. From our perspective, always. But while I can’t see past one meter, He can. And His purposes and thoughts are much greater than mine. So…I trust Him in the storm. In fact, I even run into them. And there, I expect to see Him already at the center.”
He looked over at her, then switched hands and reached across the console to touch hers. “So no, I don’t have a plan. I have faith, and hope and my meager skills. And you.”
He squeezed her hand.
And probably she was crazy, but she squeezed it back.
She still preferred a plan, however.
They were coming into a larger town. She read the sign. “Ilirska Bistrica. It was a defense city during the Ten-Day War. They blocked the Yugoslavian army from reaching the interior of Slovenia.”
“According to the GPS, we’ll cut east after this town. No highways, so we’ll just have to find a road that heads into the forest.”
She pulled up her cell phone and widened the map. “There’s a service road up ahead. It looks like it heads to a tiny village. Or maybe just a cluster of houses, but it leads up to Snežnik Mountain. Turn here and cross over the railroad tracks.”
He turned left and onto a side street, and she directed him through a small neighborhood, a row of whitewashed townhomes with red clay roofs and tiny green yards. Two blocks later, they’d left the neighborhood, taking a half-paved road into the forest. He cut down his speed, and they wove into the hills, the old mine, and after a switchback, they came to the small community, a cluster of houses.
“Where now?”
“According to your GPS pin, we keep going.” She pointed to a dirt road that continued past the houses.
He drove past the houses, onto the road.
“So, what happens if we simply drive into a party of Russians—”
“I’m very good at driving. I’ve mentioned that, right?” He slowed as they came to a large quarry, the pit deep all but abandoned. The quarry seemed almost a mile around, some one hundred meters deep, a barren wound in the land.
“The GPS is pinned here,” she said as he came to a stop.
“It’s not a bad place for a dirigible to go down.” He pulled over and got out. Grabbed a pair of binoculars from his pack in the back seat. Then he stood behind his car and scanned the area. “There are fresh truck tracks up the hill.”
He passed the glasses to Sibba.
“It looks like they disappear on down the service road.” She handed him back the glasses.
“Let’s go.”
She got in. “I feel like I’m in an episode of Strike Back.”
“What?”
“It’s a British show—about this team of MI-5 types who follow trouble around the globe. They’re always chasing bad guys…”
“Except they have guns and grenades, and we have…”
“Sandwiches.”
He glanced at her as he pulled around the quarry. “They were good, too.”
She grinned at him, perfectly on board with ignoring the possible danger they were driving into.
He went quiet as they rounded the quarry, however, and turned onto the road.
Ahead, maybe a hundred meters, she spotted the truck she’d seen outside the village parked in front of a large metal garage.
He did too, because suddenly he was pulling off the road and driving right into the forest.
“What are you doing?”
“Hiding.”
Yes. Good.
He got out, the binoculars around his neck, and grabbed his backpack.
She reached for her kit.
“Leave it.”
“What?”
“Here’s the plan.”
“Finally.”
“It’s not brilliant. But we sneak through the forest up to the shed. Take a look. If Sally is there, I try and connect with her and shut her down.”
“Good enough for me. And if you can’t?”
“Then…we get out of here and call the right people.”
She looked at him. “Really? I thought I was here to shut it down.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.” He stepped up to her. “It might have been an impulsive, desperate move to see you again.”
Her mouth opened, closed. Oh.
Oh.
She grabbed her kit anyway. “Listen, if the Russians are in control of a dirty bomb, then I can’t let them deploy it.”
“Sibba—”
“No. You might have brought me because…well, whatever reason, but I came along because this is my job, Jonas.”
He stilled, his mouth a grim line. “We’ll see.”
“What does that mean?”
But he just took her hand and pulled her into the forest.
Beech, spruce, and chestnut trees rose to clutter the canopy, but the ground was mostly old needles and scrub as they hiked through it. He finally dropped her hand and then motioned her to crouch as they came to a clearing.
The two trucks she’d seen were parked in front of a massive metal garage. Next to it were a couple outbuildings that looked like offices, populated with a handful of men.
The door to the garage hung open, and Jonas studied it a long time. “I see Sally, so they haven’t launched her yet.”
But just as he spoke, a man climbed into a truck and backed it up to the building.
They watched in silence—she could almost feel Jonas’s horror—as the men loaded the dirigible onto the back of the truck.
“Can you send the kill signal?”
“I’ll try.”
He pulled out the radio transmitter from his pack. Turned it on. “She’s not receiving. It’s possible they replaced the entire system.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Look.”
They’d backed up another truck to the open space. Then even she went cold when another dirigible was loaded onto the second truck.
“Is that…what’s her name?”
“Farah? No. It looks like a copycat.”
“Which means they, what—stole your design?”
He looked at her, swallowed.
The man in the first truck drove to the edge of the parking lot and got out. Walked to the building, where he joined the other driver and the group of men.
They went inside, and Sibba got up.
“What are you doing?”
“If this is an altimeter fuze, it’s a variation of a proximity fuze—my guess, after looking at your pictures, is that it operates on a GPS, correspondent to height. So, as long as it’s on the ground, it isn’t armed. I can defuse it without triggering the explosion. Which means I need to go now.”
“Sibba—” Jonas hissed.
“It’ll take me two minutes,” she whispered back. She cut across the forest, her gaze on the truck.
But in her head, she was doing the math. As long as the Russians hadn’t changed the electronics to detonate if she short-circuited the fuze, she could pull the fuze and be out of the truck in a minute.
She climbed aboard, the burn of Jonas’s gaze on her neck.
Inside the truck, the darkness blinded her, but she felt around the dirigible and then lowered herself to the ground. Pulling her penlight from her kit, she shone it on the mechanism below.
Yes. A simple fuze, on the underside of the bomb, a diode no more than the size of her pinky finger, probably battery operated. She could use liquid nitrogen to freeze it, then pull it out.
Feeling around in her kit, she found her insulated bottle and pulled it out.
Voices.
She glanced out of the back, between the slits in the canvas cover, and spotted the driver headed back her direction.
Oh, Jonas was going to murder her.
Quick, quick—she sprayed the nitrogen on the fuse as the driver got into the cab.
Twenty seconds to freeze through, and she could pull it.
The truck started up, the engine running beneath her.
Hurry!
She pulled out her wrench to tug the fuse out.
The truck lurched into drive, and suddenly the dirigible wobbled.
Oy! She rolled toward the edge of the truck just as the massive balloon banged against the side.
She shuddered with the impact, but she wasn’t hurt. Instead, it trapped her in the pocket of its arch, the bomb casing at the bottom now out of reach.
And then the truck bumped down the dirt road, away from the camp.
Away from Jonas.
And her, without a plan.
He wasn’t a superhero, not a Navy SEAL like Fraser—or Ned, for that matter—but Sibba was in that truck.
Jonas didn’t even have to think.
As soon as the driver walked past, heading for the driver’s seat, Jonas took off for the truck.
Get out, Sibba! Get out!
In a second, the driver had fired up the engine, wrestled the gears into place, and with a cough, the truck lurched ahead.
Jonas turned and ran at an angle through the forest, toward the road.
It lumbered onto the drive, and the truck hit a rut, jerking the entire truck to one side. He heard something in the back slam, but maybe it was just the old shocks.
The rut did slow it down, just enough for Jonas to break through the forest, a step behind it, and leap for the back hatch.
His feet landed on the fender, his hands on the tailgate, and for a second he debated—stop the truck, or help Sibba—
Then he heaved himself over and rolled inside.
Nine
“Ready to save the world?”
Jonas had asked the question over two hours ago as they’d left her house in Cerkno, after dropping off his low-riding Panda rental and switching to her SUV for the drive.
She’d answered quickly, the words just falling out of her. “Let’s—what did you say? Punch it.”
“Now you’re talking like a storm chaser,” he’d said.
She’d laughed, but frankly, the closer they got to southern Croatia, the more her stomach tightened. It had taken them two hours to get back to Cerkno. She’d picked up her kit while Jonas petted Len, and then he received a text from someone in America.
He’d gotten on the phone then, and maybe woken someone up but had a not-quiet, pacing conversation outside where he used words like “can’t wait” and “radiation poisoning” and then “hurry up.”
Then he’d hung up and headed back inside, a grim look on his face.
She’d made them a couple sandwiches while he prowled around the kitchen, silent.
He’d finally explained the call when they got inside her SUV.
“My contact in America sent an agent to my lab in Ljubljana—apparently, that’s the address that Tarek sent them. Apparently, they are pretty hot that I’m not there. But I sent them the pin, so maybe they’ll find us at the dirigible location.”
She hoped they showed up armed, because their arsenal included a couple ham sandwiches and her kit, as well as a suit—because who knew but Jonas would want to follow her into danger.
Of course he would. Because the guy made a living of running into storms.
Which was almost as bad as her profession, so maybe they were actually right for each other.
And that thought had simply fallen through her, turned her silent.
Truth was, she’d never felt so in sync with someone as she had with Jonas, soaring over the mountains. He loved it like she did and…
And maybe that’s why she’d made promises to him. Okay, not a promise, really, but she had agreed to teach him to paraglide.
Which meant he was planning on sticking around.
Oy.
He’d offered to drive, and she’d let him, trying to do some research on the kind of bomb that might have been attached to his dirigible. She studied the pictures on his phone and compared it to some of the bombs she’d dealt with.
What she didn’t know was the trigger, although she guessed it might be—
“You’re very quiet over there.” He drove with one hand on the steering wheel, atop it, tapping his thumb as if also thinking. In fact, they might not have said a word to each other for the past thirty kilometers.
Which felt okay. Easy. Like he understood the weight of his earlier words.
She could appreciate a man who didn’t have to fill all the silences.
“What if the trigger is an altimeter? It detonates as soon as the bomb reaches a certain height.”
“Someone would have to control it, because the dirigible is designed to stay aloft.” He nodded, however, as if letting that thought sink in. “That makes sense, because if they hacked the radio frequency and the RFID, then they would have the ability to direct it, even hover it above the city, or village or wherever they wanted to deploy the caesium-137.”
“By the way, did you take your blue pill today?”
“I did, doc. And you?”
“Yep. Not bleeding from my eyes.” But maybe her heart felt a little less heavy. As if he’d gotten inside it, started to dissolve the hard case around it. “So, what’s your plan?”
“I programmed into the software a back door—another way to connect with Sally if the main FM radio receiver went down. It’s on an AM frequency, which has greater range than FM, and I can initiate an automatic descent.”
“And once it lands, I can disable the bomb.”
“That’s the hope.”
“So, what’s the rest of the plan? How are we going to find Sally?”
“I have her last known location. We’ll track her down.”
“And then what?”
He went silent. Looked at her. “That’s all I got.”
She stared at him. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“I figured I’d—we’d figure it out as we went.”
Silence as his words churned through her. “Jonas, I never figure it out as I go. I always have a plan. If I don’t know exactly what kind of bomb I’m dealing with, if I don’t know what the trigger type is, if I don’t know how to reach the trigger and neutralize it then…then I don’t go in. I…” She looked out the window. They were driving through villages, past farmhouses and fields, the country slowly giving way to forest. “You can’t just live your life without a plan. Even if it’s a…”
“One-meter plan?”
“Yes.” She turned to him. “I might not want to look too far ahead, but the part I can see…I know what I’m doing.”
“And if it doesn’t work out the way you plan?”
She opened her mouth, closed it. Drew in a breath. “I…”
“You run. You hide. You blame yourself.”
“Ouch. Maybe I should get out and walk from here.”
He looked at her. “I didn’t mean it that way. But you’re the one who told me that Rokko’s death was your fault.”
“It was.”
“No. It was because of the fire and circumstances and things way beyond your control.”
She folded her arms over herself.
“The fact is, life is a storm. It’s unpredictable and mistakes are made and you can try and control your one meter, but really, one day you simply wake up and your life has been ripped apart.”
She stared at him, frowning. What—
“And then you stop wondering how to control it and just try and get past it. Or through it. Or…survive it.”
“Jonas?”
He drew in a breath. “My grandpa, the one who loved storms, was killed by a tornado.”
“Oh no.”
He nodded, his mouth tight. “He was driving home from Florida for my graduation from high school and just happened to drive through a town in Missouri right about the time a storm hit it. He tried to get to cover with grandma—they hid in an underpass. Which I could have told him was a bad idea, but anyway…
“One minute he was there, the next he was flung from his car. Grandma was trapped in the car and had to wait two hours before help came. Grandpa was killed almost instantly.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. It changed everything for me. Up until then, storms were fun to chase and a sort of thrill. I’ll never forget standing by my dad at Grandpa’s funeral. I don’t know why, but I sort of felt like it was my fault. Of course it wasn’t, but my dad must have figured that out, because he put his arm around me, and I’ll never forget what he said.”
She stayed silent.
“He quoted a verse from Isaiah. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ And then Dad said that God is in the storm. That though the winds blow and my life feels torn apart, if I can just trust Him, I’ll discover Him at the center.”
He tapped the brakes as they came into a village, the sun turning the red roofs to fire. “There’s a story in Matthew about Jesus sleeping in a boat while a huge storm comes up. And the disciples are terrified, and they wake Him and say, ‘Save us, we’re going to drown.’ And He responds by saying, ‘You have such little faith!’ And then He calmed the storm.”
“I know this story. My grandfather told it to me.”
“I always hated that story because I felt like Jesus got angry with them for being afraid. But what He was saying is ‘I’m aware of you and your storms and your dangers, even when it feels like I’m “sleeping.”” He finger quoted the word with one hand. “I had thought that God simply blinked, or didn’t care that my grandfather died. But my dad reminded me in fact, my grandfather had to be in exactly that place at that time for this to happen.”
“So, God made it happen.”
“Or allowed it, depending on your theology, but either way, He knew it would happen.”
“And didn’t stop it.”
“Nope. Just like He doesn’t stop a lot of storms, tragedies, and…” He looked at her. “Bombs that go off in our lives.”
“He should.”
“Maybe. But how many times do we discover that the storm saved us from something else, or made us stronger—”
“Or made no sense at all.”
“Yes, there’s that. To us, it makes no sense. But that’s when we just have to stand. Believe that God is with us in the storm. Even if it feels like He’s sleeping.”
“I don’t know. It feels like God should save us from tragedy.”
“It does. Yes. From our perspective, always. But while I can’t see past one meter, He can. And His purposes and thoughts are much greater than mine. So…I trust Him in the storm. In fact, I even run into them. And there, I expect to see Him already at the center.”
He looked over at her, then switched hands and reached across the console to touch hers. “So no, I don’t have a plan. I have faith, and hope and my meager skills. And you.”
He squeezed her hand.
And probably she was crazy, but she squeezed it back.
She still preferred a plan, however.
They were coming into a larger town. She read the sign. “Ilirska Bistrica. It was a defense city during the Ten-Day War. They blocked the Yugoslavian army from reaching the interior of Slovenia.”
“According to the GPS, we’ll cut east after this town. No highways, so we’ll just have to find a road that heads into the forest.”
She pulled up her cell phone and widened the map. “There’s a service road up ahead. It looks like it heads to a tiny village. Or maybe just a cluster of houses, but it leads up to Snežnik Mountain. Turn here and cross over the railroad tracks.”
He turned left and onto a side street, and she directed him through a small neighborhood, a row of whitewashed townhomes with red clay roofs and tiny green yards. Two blocks later, they’d left the neighborhood, taking a half-paved road into the forest. He cut down his speed, and they wove into the hills, the old mine, and after a switchback, they came to the small community, a cluster of houses.
“Where now?”
“According to your GPS pin, we keep going.” She pointed to a dirt road that continued past the houses.
He drove past the houses, onto the road.
“So, what happens if we simply drive into a party of Russians—”
“I’m very good at driving. I’ve mentioned that, right?” He slowed as they came to a large quarry, the pit deep all but abandoned. The quarry seemed almost a mile around, some one hundred meters deep, a barren wound in the land.
“The GPS is pinned here,” she said as he came to a stop.
“It’s not a bad place for a dirigible to go down.” He pulled over and got out. Grabbed a pair of binoculars from his pack in the back seat. Then he stood behind his car and scanned the area. “There are fresh truck tracks up the hill.”
He passed the glasses to Sibba.
“It looks like they disappear on down the service road.” She handed him back the glasses.
“Let’s go.”
She got in. “I feel like I’m in an episode of Strike Back.”
“What?”
“It’s a British show—about this team of MI-5 types who follow trouble around the globe. They’re always chasing bad guys…”
“Except they have guns and grenades, and we have…”
“Sandwiches.”
He glanced at her as he pulled around the quarry. “They were good, too.”
She grinned at him, perfectly on board with ignoring the possible danger they were driving into.
He went quiet as they rounded the quarry, however, and turned onto the road.
Ahead, maybe a hundred meters, she spotted the truck she’d seen outside the village parked in front of a large metal garage.
He did too, because suddenly he was pulling off the road and driving right into the forest.
“What are you doing?”
“Hiding.”
Yes. Good.
He got out, the binoculars around his neck, and grabbed his backpack.
She reached for her kit.
“Leave it.”
“What?”
“Here’s the plan.”
“Finally.”
“It’s not brilliant. But we sneak through the forest up to the shed. Take a look. If Sally is there, I try and connect with her and shut her down.”
“Good enough for me. And if you can’t?”
“Then…we get out of here and call the right people.”
She looked at him. “Really? I thought I was here to shut it down.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.” He stepped up to her. “It might have been an impulsive, desperate move to see you again.”
Her mouth opened, closed. Oh.
Oh.
She grabbed her kit anyway. “Listen, if the Russians are in control of a dirty bomb, then I can’t let them deploy it.”
“Sibba—”
“No. You might have brought me because…well, whatever reason, but I came along because this is my job, Jonas.”
He stilled, his mouth a grim line. “We’ll see.”
“What does that mean?”
But he just took her hand and pulled her into the forest.
Beech, spruce, and chestnut trees rose to clutter the canopy, but the ground was mostly old needles and scrub as they hiked through it. He finally dropped her hand and then motioned her to crouch as they came to a clearing.
The two trucks she’d seen were parked in front of a massive metal garage. Next to it were a couple outbuildings that looked like offices, populated with a handful of men.
The door to the garage hung open, and Jonas studied it a long time. “I see Sally, so they haven’t launched her yet.”
But just as he spoke, a man climbed into a truck and backed it up to the building.
They watched in silence—she could almost feel Jonas’s horror—as the men loaded the dirigible onto the back of the truck.
“Can you send the kill signal?”
“I’ll try.”
He pulled out the radio transmitter from his pack. Turned it on. “She’s not receiving. It’s possible they replaced the entire system.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Look.”
They’d backed up another truck to the open space. Then even she went cold when another dirigible was loaded onto the second truck.
“Is that…what’s her name?”
“Farah? No. It looks like a copycat.”
“Which means they, what—stole your design?”
He looked at her, swallowed.
The man in the first truck drove to the edge of the parking lot and got out. Walked to the building, where he joined the other driver and the group of men.
They went inside, and Sibba got up.
“What are you doing?”
“If this is an altimeter fuze, it’s a variation of a proximity fuze—my guess, after looking at your pictures, is that it operates on a GPS, correspondent to height. So, as long as it’s on the ground, it isn’t armed. I can defuse it without triggering the explosion. Which means I need to go now.”
“Sibba—” Jonas hissed.
“It’ll take me two minutes,” she whispered back. She cut across the forest, her gaze on the truck.
But in her head, she was doing the math. As long as the Russians hadn’t changed the electronics to detonate if she short-circuited the fuze, she could pull the fuze and be out of the truck in a minute.
She climbed aboard, the burn of Jonas’s gaze on her neck.
Inside the truck, the darkness blinded her, but she felt around the dirigible and then lowered herself to the ground. Pulling her penlight from her kit, she shone it on the mechanism below.
Yes. A simple fuze, on the underside of the bomb, a diode no more than the size of her pinky finger, probably battery operated. She could use liquid nitrogen to freeze it, then pull it out.
Feeling around in her kit, she found her insulated bottle and pulled it out.
Voices.
She glanced out of the back, between the slits in the canvas cover, and spotted the driver headed back her direction.
Oh, Jonas was going to murder her.
Quick, quick—she sprayed the nitrogen on the fuse as the driver got into the cab.
Twenty seconds to freeze through, and she could pull it.
The truck started up, the engine running beneath her.
Hurry!
She pulled out her wrench to tug the fuse out.
The truck lurched into drive, and suddenly the dirigible wobbled.
Oy! She rolled toward the edge of the truck just as the massive balloon banged against the side.
She shuddered with the impact, but she wasn’t hurt. Instead, it trapped her in the pocket of its arch, the bomb casing at the bottom now out of reach.
And then the truck bumped down the dirt road, away from the camp.
Away from Jonas.
And her, without a plan.
He wasn’t a superhero, not a Navy SEAL like Fraser—or Ned, for that matter—but Sibba was in that truck.
Jonas didn’t even have to think.
As soon as the driver walked past, heading for the driver’s seat, Jonas took off for the truck.
Get out, Sibba! Get out!
In a second, the driver had fired up the engine, wrestled the gears into place, and with a cough, the truck lurched ahead.
Jonas turned and ran at an angle through the forest, toward the road.
It lumbered onto the drive, and the truck hit a rut, jerking the entire truck to one side. He heard something in the back slam, but maybe it was just the old shocks.
The rut did slow it down, just enough for Jonas to break through the forest, a step behind it, and leap for the back hatch.
His feet landed on the fender, his hands on the tailgate, and for a second he debated—stop the truck, or help Sibba—
Then he heaved himself over and rolled inside.
