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refashioning three of his four Canon BP-975 battery packs into nuclear weapons with ground-based detonation capabilities. It couldn’t have been easy trying to squeeze all that ordnance and technology into a prepackaged size, each with a combined yield many times greater than the much larger bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The filmmaker Najjar actually used a smaller battery pack, with too small of a casing to use to hide a bomb, so this was the one liberty McCracken took with the man’s process, prepared to explain the anomaly to Hosseini had he been challenged.
    The four portable camera batteries, three of which had been converted to nuclear bombs, had been waiting for him when he reached Tehran. The fourth was all he needed to work the lights, the others purportedly there for backup power on the chance it was needed.
    He came to the final number and paused briefly before pressing it.
    “Boom,” he said softly.
    Hosseini and the Revolutionary Guard captain were halfway back to the elevator, each lugging two of the portable batteries, when a buzzing sounded. The men detected it in their ears but couldn’t determine its source, until they cast their eyes downward in the last moment before the three flashes erupted together. The blast wave spread outward in a millisecond, consuming everything it reached in the last instants before the secondary blast sent fiery heat reaching a million degrees a mile in every direction underground.
    Sal Belamo had just reached the rendezvous point a dozen miles away when McCracken felt the earth rumble. It wasn’t so much beneath as all around him, the world itself quaking. There was no sense of a primary or secondary blast, no air burst that flushed heat into the atmosphere. Instead there was only a vast cloud of dirt and debris coughed into the air, not in the shape of the traditional mushroom cloud so much as a smoke storm kicked up from an oil fire.
    McCracken continued to feel the rumbling for several more seconds in the pit of his stomach, wondering whether it was his imagination at work or if this part of the world was literally shaking itself apart. Then it subsided, slowly, leaving Belamo to let out a hefty sigh.
    “Now that was some ride,” he uttered. “You ask me, even Disneyland’s got nothing to match it.”
    “I might head there myself, now that this is over,” McCracken grinned, noticing Belamo exchange a wary glance with Johnny Wareagle. “Uh-oh, what am I missing here?”
    “It’s not good, boss,” Belamo told him.
    “The Hellfire reborn, Blainey,” Wareagle elaborated, using the term he’d coined way back in Vietnam. “Only in our own country.”
    “And this time it hit close to home, boss,” added Belamo grimly. “Up close and personal.”

CHAPTER 9
    Missouri River
    McCracken stood on the shore just short of the cordoned-off eastbound span of the Daniel Boone Bridge that had been blown up by placing explosives strategically in line with the aging supports. The entire span had ruptured, plunging more than sixty vehicles into the waters below the previous morning while he was still in Iran.
    He ran his eyes past the assortment of uniformed and other investigative personnel identified by the initials on their jackets, stopping on a civilian who viewed the scene with feigned detachment. Blaine made his way toward him, watching rescue and search efforts that had continued unabated for twenty-four straight hours now.
    He reached the civilian standing apart from all the others and flashed an ID he hadn’t used in years, still enough to make the man’s eyebrows flicker and to study Blaine’s face closer.
    “I read you as the kind of man who goes after the shitheads who pull of shit like this,” the stranger said.
    “Likewise.”
    “Di Oppresso Liber,” the man said, quoting the Special Forces motto: To Free the Oppressed. “Wish I was still in that game. Rather be pulling grenade pins than strings.”
    “ ’Nam?”
    The man didn’t nod,