He faced forward again and shouted at the Brazilian driver to go faster. Hurtling over the road, Abbott closed his eyes, visualized the destruction inside the complex, the burning metallic sodium, the hydrogen fires, the technicians cremated alive. He knew that as the seconds and minutes passed without the flowing sodium coolant, the temperature of the uranium and plutonium fuel core would rise. If the fuel melted, if the isotopes and transuranium elements fused, if the metals went critical and he remained within a mile of the complex, he would never feel the flash that vaporized him. Only distance could save him.
George Abbott, scientist-turned-addict-turned-pirate atomic physicist, shivered with the knowledge of his certain death. He might die in the next minute, the atomic flash reducing him to ash and superheated vapor and charged particles. Or he would die in months or years, destroyed by the cancers eating his body. But his death was certain.
Death by nuclear explosion. Death by plutonium cancer. Death.
2
On the video projection screen, the white of a storm a thousand miles wide swirled over the Atlantic Ocean and the coast of Brazil. Hundreds of miles into the continent, as the vast, river-veined geography turned beneath the satellite camera, the storm feathered to specks that left another thousand miles of Amazon jungle under a cloudless tropical sky. Sunlight flashed from a twenty-mile-wide tributary of the river.
Raising his voice over the whine of the air force jet's engines, Hal Brognola, Mack Bolan's chief liaison officer for the president's secret antiterrorist force known as Stony Man, touched a pointer to the video screen.
"Notice this one cloud," he said, pointing to a smear of white several hundred miles east of the snow-crowned Andes. No other clouds marked that expanse of green.
"Spectrographic analysis revealed it wasn't water vapor." Brognola pressed a control button. The natural greens and blues disappeared, replaced by phosphorescent reds, blues, purples. "This is computer-enhanced videography. Notice that little cloud now..."