No Survivors Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE:

  PROLOGUE: - March 1993

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  FIVE YEARS LATER: - January 1998

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  FEBRUARY

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  MARCH

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  APRIL

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  GOOD FRIDAY

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  EASTER SATURDAY

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  EASTER SUNDAY

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  POSTSCRIPT:

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © Tom Cain, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Great Britain as The Survivor by Bantam Press.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Cain, Tom.

  No survivors : a novel / Tom Cain.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01445-5

  1. Nuclear terrorism—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.A365N6 2008

  823’.92—dc22

  2008028475

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  PREFACE:

  These Are the Facts. . .

  On September 6, 1997, the Princess of Wales was laid to rest on an island in the Oval Lake at Althorp, her ancestral home.

  On September 7, 1997, General Alexander Lebed, former National Security Adviser to Russia’s President Yeltsin, appeared on the prime-time American television news program 60 Minutes. He revealed that his government no longer knew the whereabouts of many of their small-scale nuclear weapons, commonly described as suitcase nukes.

  “More than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of two hundred and fifty are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen. I don’t know.”

  On February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden used the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi to issue a declaration of war against what he termed “the crusader-Zionist alliance.” Bin Laden declared, “[The] crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. . . . On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

  On October 20, 1999, the FBI released Project Megiddo, a long-term investigation into fundamentalist Christian cults who “believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.” In its section on “apocalyptic religious beliefs,” it noted, “Many extremists view themselves as religious martyrs who have a duty to initiate or take part in the coming battles against Satan.” The report also commented, “There is no consensus within Christianity regarding the specific date that the Apocalypse will occur. However, within many right-wing religious groups there is a uniform belief that the Apocalypse is approaching.”
>
  This much is true.

  Everything and everyone else in this book is pure fiction.

  PROLOGUE:

  March 1993

  1

  The airport mechanic was a shade under six feet tall, and the body beneath his overalls and padded cold-weather vest was lean and athletic. The single line that bisected his strong, dark brow suggested a determined fixity of purpose, and his clear green eyes conveyed a calm, almost chilly intelligence. A woolen knitted cap covered his short brown hair. The lower part of his face was hidden behind a beard.

  There was a badge on his chest. It gave his name as Steve Lundin.

  The badge was fake. The mechanic’s real name was Samuel Carver.

  No one in the hangar batted an eyelid when Carver unscrewed the hatch at the tail end of the executive jet and hauled himself up into the rear equipment bay for a standard preflight inspection.

  This area was not reachable while the jet was airborne. It was simply a place filled with ugly but functional components, much like the basement of a building. Things like bundles of wires linking the plane’s electronic circuits, the cables and hydraulic lines that controlled the rudder and elevators, the accumulator holding the hydraulic fluid that got pumped out through the system, the pipes that carried super-heated, high-pressure air off the engines and sent it for use in the plane’s cabin heating system. None of these things were much to look at, or remotely exciting, until, of course, they went wrong.

  The air pipes were what interested Carver. They were covered in thick silver-colored cladding, held with plastic clips, and they formed a network through the plane via valves and junctions, pretty much like a domestic water system. So he messed with the plumbing, loosening one of the junctions so that the hot air would leak from it. The junction in question was barely a hand’s breadth away from the hydraulic accumulator.

  By the time Carver closed the equipment bay hatch and walked away, the fate of the aircraft was sealed.

  There was a TV on in the passenger lounge, the CNN reporter having a hard time holding back his tears as he stood in front of a blackened, burned-out church.

  “We can’t show you what it looks like inside the smoking charnel house behind me,” he said, an undertone of barely restrained passion coloring his lyrical Irish brogue. “The scenes are too appalling, too sickening. The charred and mutilated corpses of four hundred innocent women and children lie in there. The scent of their burned flesh fills the air all around.

  “While Western politicians turn their eyes away from this insignificant corner of West Africa, a ten-year civil war has descended into genocide. The rebel forces mounting this ruthless campaign are better-trained and equipped than ever before. Their leaders are showing levels of organization and strategic planning far ahead of anything they have displayed before. Somehow, somewhere, these merciless killers have acquired new resources, new expertise. And so, as the village’s few survivors search among the corpses for their loved ones, one question comes inevitably to mind: Who is backing the rebels? For whoever they are, and whatever their motivation, they have the blood of an entire people on their hands.”

  “Shit, this boy’s a friggin’ comedian!”

  Waylon McCabe slapped a hand against his thigh as he addressed the three other men in the room. Most of the time McCabe’s eyes were cold, narrow slits in wrinkled folds of leathery skin that seemed permanently screwed up against the glare of his native Texan sun. Now he was letting his guard down, opening up a little, taking it easy with his buddies.

  “Man, I swear he’s about to cry, just to show how sensitive he is. But I’ll bet he don’t care about a bunch of dead niggers, any more ’n I do. He’s just in it for hisself, thinkin’ on the prizes he’s gonna git for being such a damn humanitarian . . . hell, he might make almost as much money outta this war as me.”

  “I seriously doubt that, boss,” said one of the other men, swigging from a bottle of Molson Canadian.

  “Well, I don’ know, Clete,” replied McCabe with a grin. “Sure, my diamonds’ll pay better. But you gotta consider the costs. He ain’t had to ante up for guns ’n’ ammo, instructors to train them native boys. . . . Here, throw me one of them beers afore I die of thirst.”

  McCabe was a long way past sixty, but for all the lines on his face, he was still tougher and possessed of more energy than most men half his age. He had spent the past three days on the northern coast of the Yukon and Northwest territories. From there on up to the North Pole it was pretty much just ice. Now he was sitting in a private room in the terminal at Mike Zubko Airport, right outside the town of Inuvik, waiting on the plane that would take him home.

  He was trying to decide whether to pursue his hunch that there were significant oil deposits in the region. The major corporations had all pulled out of the area. Oil was cheap, extraction would be expensive, and the local Eskimos—Waylon McCabe was damned if he’d call them Inuits; screw them if they felt offended—were getting uppity about their tribal lands getting despoiled. The way they saw it, the upside wasn’t worth the aggravation.

  McCabe, however, looked around the world at where all the oil was, and where all the trouble was, and saw they were all pretty much the same places. Sooner or later, between the towel heads in the Middle East and the Commies down in South America, supplies would be threatened. Meanwhile, there were billions of Chinese and Indians buying automobiles and building factories, so demand could only go up. High demand and insecure supply would mean rocketing prices, and fields that were only marginal now would become worth exploiting. At that point, who gave a damn what a bunch of seal hunters thought? A few bucks in the right pockets and that problem would be solved. And anyone who refused to take the money would soon find out they’d made the wrong decision.

  There was a knock on the door, and Carver walked into the room. His normal relaxed stride had disappeared. The way he carried himself was tentative, his expression hesitant and nervous. He gave the clear impression that he felt uneasy in the presence of a man as wealthy and powerful as McCabe.

  “Plane’s checked, filled up, and ready to go,” he said. “Don’t mind me saying so, sir, you’d best be on your way. There’s weather coming in.”

  McCabe gave a single, brusque nod that at once acknowledged what he’d said and dismissed him from the room.

  Carver paused briefly in the doorway, though nobody seemed to notice or care.

  “Have a good flight, sir,” he said.

  2

  The plane was routed out of Inuwik to Calgary, three hours and fourteen hundred miles away to the southeast, most of it over mountainous wilderness.

  The moment the engines were fired up, air started leaking from the pipe, gaining all the time in temperature and pressure. It was directing its heat right onto the hydraulic accumulator, which was filled with very sensitive, highly flammable fluid. As the minutes rolled by, and the plane rose to its cruising altitude at around thirty thousand feet, heading out over the Selwyn mountain range, that fluid got hotter and hotter. Finally, about forty minutes out of Inuvik, the temperature became critical and the accumulator burst open with an explosive blast that shook the rear of the plane. The airframe was strong enough to withstand the detonation, but the flames from the burning fluid greedily found more fuel in the plastic sheaths around the wires, the ducting within which the circuits were bundled, the cladding around the air pipes—all manner of combustible materials.

  The crew barely felt or heard the explosion over the juddering of air turbulence and roaring of the jets. The first thing the pilot knew for sure was the warning light telling him that fire had taken hold in the rear equipment bay. The second was that there was nothing whatever he could do to put it out. From this point he had a maximum of seven to eight minutes before the flames ate through the control systems for his rudder and elevators.

  The moment McCabe’s jet left the ground, Carver got into the three-year-old Ford F-250 heavy-duty truck he’d bought for cash two weeks ago in Skagway, Alaska, and heade
d to the nearest gas station. In the restroom, he shaved off Steve Lundin’s beard and took off his overalls, which he dumped in a trash can out back. Then he turned south, onto the Dempster Highway. A short while down the road, the asphalt ran out. For the next 450 miles, crossing one Arctic Circle, two time zones, five rivers, and several mountain ranges, he’d be on nothing but rough shale and gravel.

  They told you this kind of thing in Inuvit, the sheer, overwhelming scale of the local geography and the incredible absence of other people being the region’s proudest features. The Yukon Territory alone was almost as big as Spain, but had just thirty thousand people in it. But the Northwest Territories, next door, made Yukon look as impressive as a suburban backyard. Its forty thousand inhabitants were spread across an area bigger than Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, and England put together.

  Carver was perfectly happy to listen to these boastful recitals. He liked facts. He found their certainty reassuring, something reliably nonnegotiable in a world of compromise, betrayal, and unpredictable emotion. They took his mind off the thing that was eating away at his conscience, the thought of all the other people on the plane who would die with Waylon McCabe. Carver was used to the concept of collateral damage. He understood that the innocent often died alongside the guilty. He grasped, too, the human mathematics that said it was better that a handful of people should die in a plane crash than hundreds of thousands be wiped out by acts of genocide. He could even tell himself that the people who worked for Waylon McCabe probably knew what he was doing and had profited from his actions. That didn’t mean he had to like any of it.

  His secretive employers, who called themselves the Consortium, would not have been impressed by his principled qualms. They saw themselves as moral guardians in an immoral world, righting wrongs that defeated politicians, policemen, and armies, hidebound by laws and rules of engagement. The McCabe job was Carver’s third assignment. A former Royal Marines officer who had fought with the corps’ Special Boat Service, an elite within an elite, he had resigned his commission in disgust at the futility of his unit’s efforts. The dictators he and his men had fought were still in power. The terrorists were treated like statesmen. The traffickers in drugs, guns, and people had never paid for their crimes.