London Bridges

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.”

Chapter 4
    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 Daisy Cutter will leave nothing but scorched earth below. Sunrise Valley will be a burn mark in the desert. A memory. Just you watch.”

Chapter 5
    “EASY DOES IT, gentlemen. No one is to be hurt. Not this time.”
    Nearly eight hundred miles away, the Wolf was watching in live time what was happening in the desert.
What a flick!
There were four cameras on the ground at Sunrise Valley that were pumping video footage to four monitors in the house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, where he was staying. For