02 Thunder of Heaven: A Joshua Jordan Novel (27 page)

A fourth man appeared. He was also armed. One of the men turned back as if to reenter the barn, perhaps to close the doors.

Deputy Colwin’s voice came over the bullhorn: “This is the sheriff’s department … drop your weapons immediately. Drop them …”

Then the two-second count, one thousand one, one thousand two …

The men by the barn froze. They lifted their weapons, trying to figure out where the warning had come from.

Gallagher gave Dumpster the signal.

There was a chest-punching boom from Dumpster’s 50-caliber that echoed through the valley. The gunman closest to him dropped as if pulled by an invisible cord.

The two gunmen closest to Dumpster saw the flash. Dumpster quickly squeezed off another shot, winging one of the men in the leg and causing him to drop his weapon momentarily. The other gunman yelled out wildly and scattered automatic fire through the woods, back and forth in the direction of Dumpster and Gallagher.

Gallagher unloaded his 357 toward the gunman, but he was moving as he was returning fire, and then skirted around the truck.

Don’t shoot at the back of the truck! Gallagher told himself.

Blackie’s shotgun was blasting from the other side of the clearing along with the sound of shots being fired by Frank Treumeth and Deputy Colwin.

In the melee, the gunman injured in the leg by Dumpster had crawled under the truck and was clawing his way to the cab. Gallagher tried to get a clear shot at him but couldn’t. He yelled to Dumpster, “You okay? Dumpster!” Gallagher thought he heard groaning coming from Dumpster’s position.

More shots on the other side of the truck, on his blind side. Then a final furious volley of shots. Gallagher was trying to figure it out
quickly. One bad guy down, probably dead. Another injured and under the truck. A third, apparently not hit, was on the other side of the truck somewhere.

Where’s the fourth guy?

The answer came. The fourth gunman popped up from his position, crouching under the truck engine, and he frantically opened the cab door and swung himself inside the truck. Then he geared it forward. Gallagher reloaded and blasted several rounds from his .357 into the door as it roared past. He couldn’t tell if his shots had found their mark.

Gallagher could see three dead terrorists on the ground. The fourth was driving a truck armed with a nuclear device down the gravel road. Gallagher took off running after the truck, thinking that it might have to slow down at the security gate. He was panting and out of shape, but he kept running. He could see the truck up ahead racing down the dirt road spitting gravel and dirt.

Then something popped out of the woods in front of the truck.

It was Ruby with her Remington shotgun. She fired once into the windshield from her shoulder. The truck kept coming. She pumped it with jackhammer speed and fired again, this time from the hip, again into the windshield.

The truck slowed, swerved slightly, and then rolled to a stop with the front end in the underbrush.

Gallagher ran up, yelling to Ruby to stay clear of the truck. “Great shooting, Ruby. Wow, you’re incredible. I married the wrong woman. Listen, I think Dumpster was hit. Go find him back there and help him …”

Gallagher, holding his handgun, swung the truck door open. The mess inside of the cab told him immediately that the threat was over. By the time Ruby reached Dumpster, Blackie was there. Their Allfones were working again, and they called for an EMT and the sheriff’s department to come. Dumpster had been hit in the clavicle, and he was squirming in pain. But in between groans, while they tried to stop the bleeding, he kept saying, “We got ‘em … we got ‘em … we got ‘em …”

Frank Treumeth and Gallagher slowly opened the back of the truck
and turned on the overhead dome light. Several thick cables ran from the crate into the cab of the truck. They lifted the top off and looked in.

“Ever seen one of these?” Frank asked, as they surveyed the compact nuclear bomb.

“Only in pictures,” Gallagher said. Then he added, “How about we put the top back on, okay?”

In Union Beach, the truck with the Mexican food markings on its side was still parked in front of the machine shop, fully loaded. Several of the men were milling around.

The assault team had picked up their conversation through their listening device, so they knew they had automatic weapons underneath their jackets. The three-man assault team in the black SUV now had to intercept the truck. The driver slammed the vehicle into gear and sped toward the machine shop, two blocks away. They had to round the large sewage treatment facility to get there.

Inexplicably, a parade of seven septic trucks from the local community had chosen the night hours to pull into the access lane leading to the sewage plant, lining up to unload at the site, two abreast. They were blocking the access road in both lanes.

The driver of the special-ops team blasted his horn. He shouted for them to get out of the way.

The septic-truck driver stuck his head out the window and shouted back a few profanities.

The team could see, off in the distance, that the truck with the nuke was leaving the parking lot of the machine shop. It stopped momentarily and then turned onto the street. It was on a road parallel to the access road by the sewage plant, about a hundred yards away. The driver of the SUV immediately saw that they had only one option.

The three men grabbed their weapons, jumped from the car, and sprinted through a gate in the chain-link fence that cordoned their SUV from the other street. Their legs were windmills as they ran furiously across the grassy grounds of the sewage plant and toward the
truck. They knew that they were now in plain sight, but they also knew that if they did not stop this truck, it would get into Manhattan and destroy New York City and a whole lot of its inhabitants.

The truck, which had been rolling about fifteen miles per hour, now sped up quickly. Two men were in the front cab and two were out of sight in the back. The driver glanced over at the three men sprinting toward the truck, who were now about thirty yards away. The lead man for the assault team gave the command, “Drop and fire!”

The three men hit the ground and began firing, two at the tires and one at the driver. The driver fell forward and then was pulled down by his passenger who took over the wheel. The tires were flattened. The truck was slowing and rumbling loudly as it rolled forward, shuddering on shredded rubber.

The three men jumped to their feet and raced furiously toward the truck, shooting as they ran.

But the man behind the wheel had his eyes opened so wildly they could see the whites from their running position. The man in the truck mouthed something. Then he reached under the dashboard. One of the special-ops men saw it as he ran. It was his last utterance.

“Oh my God, no …”

Then the blinding flash — and the nuclear fireball from the small nuclear device. Heat as if from an exploding star incinerated everything in its blast radius, vaporizing much of Union Beach and those residents who had not commuted out of the small town to work. The blast spread outward in a horrific wave of decimation. It started fires in the adjoining towns. Several miles away, the cars that were traveling on the Garden State Parkway were rolled over by the force of the blast. The sonic explosion whipped the harbor into ten foot waves, which plowed across the lower New York Bay and battered the opposite coast of New York. To the north, the blast was heard through New York City and shook the pavement and rocked office buildings. Electric grids were overloaded, shutting down traffic lights and darkening the marquees and jumbo screens that were usually blazing along Times Square. Pedestrians on the sidewalks of New York screamed
when they saw it: the nightmare vision of a nuclear mushroom cloud rising into the sky across the bay, over in New Jersey.

A few miles from Union Beach, Jim Yaniky had been waiting in his Hummer for a report from his three fellow special-ops contractors. It would never come. Instead, the blast blew out his windows and rolled his big car over on its side. He was temporarily knocked unconscious. When he came to, he climbed straight up out of his tipped-over Hummer through the passenger door. He staggered to his feet. Buildings were on fire around him, and cars were scattered as if a tornado had just swept through the area. He felt a powerful easterly wind blowing. But amidst the nuclear horror he didn’t calculate the small blessing in that. How could he?

The wind was blowing the radioactive cloud out to sea rather than north into the heart of Manhattan.

In Tehran, the crowds spilled onto the streets. The news had spread that Bushehr had been decimated in some kind of nuclear explosion, but the government had promptly cut all of the Internet service for its citizens to try to contain the news of its embarrassing defeat. Rumors spread wildly. Iranians were hearing some theories that Bushehr had been incinerated during a nuclear mishap caused by the Iranian scientists. Was it another Chernobyl? They didn’t know. Most of the rioters in the streets didn’t care. They were now even doubting the reports of a supposed Israeli attack against Natanz. They had missed their opportunity to topple their own tyrant during the Middle East upheavals of 2011 when the citizens of other nations in the region were overthrowing dictators. This was finally their chance. They had grown weary listening to the eccentric lies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for more than two decades while the people starved or were arrested by the secret police or worse.

They had had enough.

The crowds in the streets numbered nearly thirty thousand. The Iranian army was ordered to quell the protest, but half of the enlisted men refused to respond to the order. They quietly decided that they would no longer serve in a military headed up by a lunatic.

In the middle of the protest were ninety members of the CDCI, the Committee for Democratic Change in Iran. Yoseff Abbas was striding next to his friend whose apartment had been serving as his safe house.

“Over there,” Yoseff announced and pointed to a forlorn-looking
two-story warehouse. “That is where they are keeping the political prisoners.”

His friend touched something under his belt, covered by his shirt, making sure his revolver was still there. He turned to Yoseff. “You are sure this is the special prison?”

Yoseff nodded. His contact in the Israeli Mossad had told him they had irrefutable intelligence about the prison. Yoseff had been promised safe passage to Israel. He didn’t want that. All he cared about was the release of his brother and sister, and to get that done, he would have to do this one last thing: encourage the CDCI to stage a raid on the prison that housed political dissidents. It also happened to house the real target of the rescue: Joshua Jordan. None of the Iranians realized that this was the same strategy used by Colonel “Bull” Simmons back in 1979 when he rescued Ross Perot’s EDS employees from a Tehran jail. It was Rocky Bridger who had borrowed that page from Simmons’s playbook when he laid out the rescue plan for the Israelis.

In the street, Yoseff’s friend signaled to his group leaders. Then he said to Yoseff, “You realize the Iranian MOIS will now put you on the list … because you are part of the CDCI … no turning back.”

There was a funny look on Yoseff’s face as he nodded. His friend could not possibly have known that Yoseff was already an enemy of the state, beyond anything the CDCI could imagine.

Over sixty of the CDCI were armed as they stormed the warehouse prison. They broke down the front door and fired shots in the air. There was no resistance — at least, at first. Some of the dozen jailers for the ten prisoners had already left their posts and escaped. Most of those who had remained walked down the hallways with their hands held over their heads. They quickly filed out of the facility and slipped into the night, leaving the keys to the cells behind in their offices.

Three of the jailers, however, were bent on toughing it out. One of them, the head of the torture crew, knew that there would be no escape for him. The citizens of Tehran would track him down when the news spread, and what they would do to him would be worse than death.

As the CDCI rebels climbed up the stairway, they were met by a
hail of automatic gunfire. Fourteen protestors dropped to the ground in a bloody heap.

That is when the four bearded American special-ops veterans shouted out their presence in the middle of CDCI mob. Cannon announced, “We’re Americans — we’ve come here to help your cause. Pull back. Go back down the stairs, and we’ll get you back upstairs again to save all of your friends in the jail …”

Jack and Cannon pushed their way through the retreating crowd until they were on the street level. Cannon pulled out two projectile guns with two anchor hooks attached to zip lines. He fired two up to the second-story windows. The hooks held. Cannon, the ex-Ranger, tied the end of the zip lines around a street pole. Then he turned to Jack, his SEAL buddy. “I know you Navy guys like flopping around in the water, but you think you can handle a rope climb on land?”

Jack grabbed one rope while Cannon wrapped his hands around the other. Jack gave a challenge. “On three, big guy. First one up to the window gets a free steak dinner — courtesy of the loser.”

Cannon nodded and smiled. One of their team members gave the count. One. Two. Three. The two warriors scampered up the ropes like monkeys. But Cannon got there first. They swung through the busted windows on the floor that housed the jail cells. They had landed in an empty file room. They quietly slipped to the doorway with their weapons ready. They could see the three armed jailers peeking over the railing at the top of the stairs, ready to shoot the next intruder.

Jack gave the signal. Cannon would take the guy to the right. Jack would fire on the two on the left. Jack held up a finger on his left hand. Then two fingers. Then a third.

They both fired a furious volley through the doorway and into the three jailers. One fell over the railing and down the stairwell. The other two crumpled where they stood.

“All clear!” Cannon shouted out. “Come on up.” Then he searched the desks until he found the keys for all of the cells.

On the first floor, as they ascended, the rebels saw the torture rooms splattered in blood. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and found Cannon and Jack waiting with the keys in their hands.
Cannon handed them over to the CDIC rebels with a grin. They began to open the cells one by one. When they got to the second-to-last cell, they released Dr. Hermoz Abdu, who cried out, then hugged them and pronounced a blessing over them. Then they yanked open Joshua Jordan’s cell. Joshua struggled to his feet.

Just then someone spoke in a voice that Joshua recognized as American. “Sir, I’m a former Navy SEAL, and I’ve got a message for you,” Jack said, helping Joshua out of his cell. “General Rocky Bridger says hello and to tell you that it turns out your wife is an even better leader of the group than you ever were.”

Joshua belly laughed and kept on laughing, despite the pain walking.

Then another American stepped forward and said, “Colonel Jordan, I’m Tom Cannonberry, but they call me Cannon. Former Army Ranger. We’re going to get you out of here.”

Joshua turned and gestured toward Dr. Hermoz Abdu. “Men, this is Dr. Abdu, my friend. He’s a marked man here in Iran. We need to take him with us.”

But Dr. Abdu waved his hands and said, “No, Joshua, you are very kind, but I am staying here. The people of Iran need to hear about the love of Christ … how can I leave such a great mission as that?”

Then Dr. Abdu turned and put his arm around another prisoner standing next to him, who was grinning through missing teeth. The man said in halting English, “I follow Jesus now.”

Joshua recognized the voice. He was the man who had said the same prayer as Joshua. Joshua smiled and gave him a nod. Then Joshua grabbed Dr. Abdu by the shoulders. There was so much he wanted to say but couldn’t. Not now. No time. He could only blurt out, “God bless you, my friend …”

Dr. Hermoz Abdu returned the benediction, “And may God bless you mightily, my brother …”

Then the four American special-forces veterans surrounded Joshua like a group of linemen protecting a running back, and they started down the stairs. As they did, Cannon turned to Jack, with a sly grin on his face. “I take my steak medium rare …”