Day 7: May 21, 0030 Hours, Daylight Saving Time
Sandy Creek—Sand Town—Rural Frederick County, Virginia
“WHERE IS SAEED Mansouri?” Caine asked the mechanic standing on a ladder and inspecting the bus’s engine. “Where is the other bus?”
“He left a while ago,” the mechanic said. “He said he will meet you at the resting place. This bus would not start. I fix it now. You may go soon.”
Caine looked around the garage at the bus. Seats had been ripped out and tossed about the garage. Three or four of Saeed’s best mechanics worked feverishly outside the bus. Just walking off the bus were two men wearing gray, baggy biohazard suits complete with respirators. They moved sluggishly as they climbed down the stairs onto the garage floor. Sitting across the garage floor, eyeing Caine, were two of Saeed’s men. Both held AK-74 assault rifles and lazily guarded the group of mechanics around the shop.
A young man, perhaps twenty, walked from a rear storage area carrying a heavy wooden crate that had the top open. Caine stopped him and glanced inside.
There were dull, grayish bricks wrapped in opaque plastic.
“Plastic explosives?” Caine asked the mechanic. “Where’d you get this?”
The man shrugged. “I do not know. Saeed had us place them inside the other bus. Now we must do the same to this one.” He gestured to one of the biohazard-suited men to retrieve the box from him.
“Why was I not told about this?” Caine moved closer to the bus as the mechanic closed the bus hood and descended the ladder. “How long ago did Saeed leave?”
“Maybe an hour?” He wiped his hands on a rag from his pocket. “Is everything all right? I do what he say. Can I go home now? Will he release my wife?”
“I hope so.” Caine threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Go now. All of you. Go to the old theatre building at the edge of town. Your families will be there. There are four dead men. Saeed Mansouri’s men. Say nothing. All of you, stay in the theatre with your families until I come for you.”
The mechanic’s eyes got big and the other workers surrounded him. “What is this you tell us, Caine? Is this a trick?”
One of the armed guards spoke to his partner, and they both stood and approached Caine. The first guard said, “They stay. Their work is not done. Saeed ordered—”
Caine slid the silenced .22 from the small of his back and shot both guards where they stood. He turned to the group of garage workers and eyed them one at a time.
“Go. Saeed won’t be back tonight. I’ll come for you all in the morning. Go now. Stay there. No one will harm you or your families any longer.”
* * *
Caine waited until the men were well down the road and gone into the darkness. He quickly inspected the mechanics’ progress on the bus. They were all but finished. Only the explosives were left to be connected. The sarin cylinders had been connected to Doc’s makeshift spray system beneath the bus and readied to be primed using the air tanks mounted inside the rear of the bus. With the plastic explosives in place, the bus would have been capable of killing thousands more.
He looked around to make sure he’d not missed any of Saeed’s men on the streets. Satisfied he was still undetected, he carefully checked the cylinders inside the bus. He found the three notches he’d scrapped into the cylinders and breathed easier. Then he retreated from the bus.
Taking one last survey of the street outside the old garage, he tossed an M-67 fragmentation grenade into the open bus door and ran full flank for cover.
Five seconds later, the bus and garage erupted. The ball of flames lit the night sky like a ravenous thunderstorm and the explosion split the air with deafening percussion.
Operation Maya was nearly through.