The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

The next-door neighbor, Delta Shore, ran over to Frances. “What’s happening, hon? Why are all these soldiers here? My good God Almighty! Can you believe it? They must be from Nellis or Fallon or someplace. I’m a little scared, Frances. You scared, hon?”

The clothespin in Frances’s mouth finally dropped to the ground as she spoke to Delta. “They say that they’re evacuating us. I’ve got to get the girls.”

Then Frances ran inside the mobile home, and at 240-some pounds, she had believed her sprinting, or even jogging, days were far behind her.

“Madison, Brett, c’mere, you two. Nothin’ to be scared of. We just have to leave for a while! It’ll be fun. Like a movie. Get a move on, you two!”

The girls, ages two and four, appeared from the small bedroom where they’d been watching Rolie Polie Olie on the Disney Channel. Madison, the oldest, offered her usual “Why? Why do we have to? I don’t want to. I won’t. We’re too busy, Momma.”

Frances grabbed her cell phone off the kitchen counter—and then the next really strange thing happened. She tried to get a line to the police, but there was nothing except loud static. Now that had never happened before, not that kind of annoying, buzzy noise she was hearing. Was some kind of invasion going down? Something nuclear, maybe?

“Damn it!” she snapped at the buzzing cell phone, and almost started to cry. “What is going on here?”

“You said a bad word!” Brett squeaked, but she also laughed at her mother. She kind of liked bad words. It was as if her mother had made a mistake, and she loved it when adults made mistakes.

“Get Mrs. Summerkin and Oink,” Frances told the girls, who would not leave the house without their two favorite lovies, not even if the infernal plague of Egypt had come to town. Frances prayed that it hadn’t—but what had? Why was the U.S. Army swarming all over the place, waving scary guns in people’s faces?

She could hear her frightened neighbors outside, verbalizing the very thoughts racing around in her head: “What’s happened?” “Who says we have to leave?” “Tell us why!” “Over my dead body, soldier! You hear me, now?”

That last voice was Dougie’s! Now what was he up to?

“Dougie, come back in the house!” Frances yelled. “Help me with these girls! Dougie, I need you in here.”

There was a gunshot outside! A loud, lightning-bolt crack exploded from one of the rifles.

Frances ran to the screen door—here she was, running again—and saw two U.S. Army soldiers standing over Dougie’s body.

Oh my God, Dougie isn’t moving. Oh my God, oh my God! The soldiers had shot him down like a rabid dog. For nothing! Frances started to shiver and shake, then threw up lunch.

Her girls screeched, “Yuk, Mommy! Mommy, yuk! You threw up all over the kitchen!”

Then suddenly a soldier with a couple of days’ facial growth on his chin kicked open the screen door and he was right in her face and he was screaming, “Get out of this trailer! Now! Unless you want to die, too.”

The soldier had the business end of a gun pointed right at Frances. “I’m not kidding, lady,” he said. “Tell the truth, I’d just as soon shoot you as talk to you.”

THE JOB—the operation, the mission—was to wipe out an entire American town. In broad daylight.

It was some eerie, psycho gig. Dawn of the Dead, either version, would be mild compared to this. Sunrise Valley, Nevada; population, 315 brave souls. Soon to be population, 0. Who was going to believe it? Well, hell, everybody would in less than about three minutes.

None of the men on board the small plane knew why the town was being targeted for extinction, or anything else about the strange mission, except that it paid extremely well, and all the money had been delivered to them up front. Hell, they didn’t even know one another’s names. All they had been told was their individual tasks for the mission. Just their little piece of the puzzle. That’s what it was called—their piece.

Michael Costa from Los Angeles was the munitions expert on board and he’d been instructed to make a “bootleg fuel-air bomb with some real firepower.”

Okay, he could do that easily enough.

His working model was the BLU-96, often called a Daisy Cutter, which graphically described the end result. Costa knew that the bomb had originally been designed to clear away mine fields, as well as jungles and forests for military landing zones. Then some really crazy, sick dude had figured out that the Daisy Cutter could wipe out people as easily as it could trees and boulders.

So now here he was inside an old, beat-to-hell cargo plane flying over the Tuscarora Mountain range toward Sunrise Valley, Nevada, and they were very close to T, for target.

He and his new best friends were assembling the bomb right there on the plane. They even had a diagram showing how to do it, as if they were idiots. Assembling Fuel-Air Bombs for Dummies.

The actual BLU-96 was a tightly controlled military weapon and relatively hard to obtain, Costa knew. Unfortunately for everybody who lived, loved, ate, slept, and shit in Sunrise Valley, Daisy Cutters could also be assembled at home out of readily obtainable ingredients. Costa had purchased a thousand-gallon supplemental fuel bladder, then filled it with high-octane gas, fitted a dispersing device, and inserted dynamite sticks as an initiator. Next, he made a motion brake and trigger assembly using a parachutist’s altitude-deployment device for parts. Simple stuff like that.

Then, as he’d told the others on board the cargo plane, “You fly over the target. You push the bomb out the payload door. You run like your pants are on fire and there’s an ocean up ahead. Trust me, the Da

isy Cutter will leave nothing but scorched earth below. Sunrise Valley will be a burn mark in the desert. A memory. Just you watch.”

“EASY DOES IT, gentlemen. No one is to be hurt. Not this time.”