Drone Strike

1

The Cessna stayed level to the last seconds, her wheels touching the earth nearly together. A great deal of speed had already bled off with the destruction of the engine and subsequent descent, but she was still moving at a good clip, racing forward with no brakes to help slow her.

The only piece of luck was the fact that they had cleared the last of the low hills, coming to ground in the desert behind them. Baked by the sun and scraped by the wind, the ground was hard if not perfectly smooth, and they bumped along for a few hundred feet until the right wing found a patch of loose dirt. The plane pitched and turned sharply, skidding along for another hundred feet before tipping back the other way. The left wing snapped; the Cessna dug into the earth for a few yards, then teetered back upright, as if the laws of physics had decided to give the occupants a break.

By the time the aircraft stopped, Turk had been tossed around like stone in a polishing machine. He was dizzy and his nose felt as if it was broken; his face, neck, and shirt were covered with blood. He’d fallen or been dumped into the narrow space between the rear and front row of seats, wedged sideways against one of Grease’s legs. Unfolding himself upright, he flexed his arms, surprised that though disoriented, he still seemed intact. He coughed, and felt as if he was drowning — the blood from his nose having backed into his sinuses.

Grease grabbed Turk’s arm and pulled him in his direction, yanking Turk across the folded forward seat and out the passenger side.

The Israeli stood a few feet away, waving an AK-47. “Come on. We have to get out of here,” he yelled at them.

Turk turned back to the plane, not quite comprehending where he was or what had happened. He put his hand to his lip, then his nose.

“Damn!” He cursed with the pain.

“Your nose,” said Grease, next to him. “You have to stop the bleeding. You have a handkerchief?”

“I need the control unit,” said Turk.

He took a step back to the plane but Grease stopped him.

“I’ll get it,” said the sergeant, handing him a patch of cloth — his shirt sleeve, which he’d cut off with a knife. “Put your head back and stop the bleeding. You’ve already lost a lot of blood.”

Turk’s nose felt numb until he pushed the wadded cloth against the nostril. The pain ran up the bone ridge and into the space between his eyes, as if he’d taken an ice pick and plunged it there.

“Let’s go,” said Grease, remerging with the control unit stuffed into Turk’s rucksack.

“Where’s the pilot?” managed Turk through the wadded cloth.

“Dead,” said Grease.

“Aren’t we going to bury him?”

“No time. They’ll be looking for us.”

“It’s a mercy he’s dead,” said the Israeli. “I would have had to kill him myself when we landed.”

They debated briefly whether they should set the plane on fire, but decided that whatever small advantage it might have in making it harder to get information about them was more than counterbalanced by the fact that it would make it easier to find. Grease squared away the plane as well as he could, hoping to make it less obvious that there had been passengers, but there was nothing he could do about the blood splattered around the interior in blobs both big and small in the back. They set out east, walking along a wide plateau that sat like a ledge above the valley to their right. Had they settled down a few hundred yards in the other direction, or perhaps stayed in the air for another mile, they would have all died in the crash. It was luck or Providence, take your pick, but Grease clearly was awed, giving Turk complete credit for their survival.

“You did a hell of a job,” he told him. “It was a great job.”

It was the first time Grease had said anything positive to him, and yet Turk felt he had to be honest: he hadn’t really done much.

“I just held the nose up, the plane did the rest,” he said, then asked where they were going.

“Train line runs to Naneen,” Grease told him. “We’ll parallel the road and the train tracks. Our guys will pick us up where and when they can.”

“You talked to them?” asked the Israeli.

“They’ll know. I have the GPS. We just have to get there.”

“We blew it up,” said Turk. “The whole place — I wonder.”

“What?” demanded the Israeli.

“The explosion was huge.”

“Nuclear explosions usually are. Even underground.”

“It was a bomb?” asked Turk incredulously. He’d been told they were blowing up machinery.

“Why else would they send you on such a suicide mission?” asked the Israeli, trudging onward.

2

Breanna Stockard rubbed the tears away from her cheeks. They were tears of relief, if not outright joy — the indicator on the map was moving in a way that what the computer declared meant Turk was still alive.

She pushed her hand away quickly; she didn’t want the others to notice her emotion.

“I’ve transmitted the information to the ground team,” said Danny Freah. “Gorud just acknowledged.”

“Good.” Breanna glanced away for a moment, collecting herself. “How long before they get there?”

“Hard to say. They were already up near the original rendezvous point.” Danny looked at the three-dimensional holographic display in front of him, tracing the area. “It’s a couple of hundred miles back east. And they’ll have to go south to avoid patrols and whatever else the Iranians put out there.”

“Will they make it in time for tomorrow night?” Breanna asked.

“I can’t even guess. Not at this point.”

“I have preliminary numbers,” said Jonathon Reid from his station. “Just under four megatons. On par with Chagai Two, roughly, at least. Given that the device wasn’t completely ready. It was a close call. A good, good mission.”

Reid rose. Chagai II was an early Pakistani atomic test. Though Western experts continued to debate the matter, it was generally regarded as something of a failure, since it didn’t yield anywhere near the explosion that was intended, which was at least eighteen megatons. (The blast yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima measured between thirteen and eighteen megatons.) The final measure would take some time to determine, using instruments that would provide different data sets, including the magnetic distortion — while the underground explosion did not yield an electromagnetic pulse effect like a high-altitude bomb would, even the extremely slight disruption it produced could be analyzed. In any event, while the yield of the bomb was relatively small, it was still large enough to do considerable damage, and contaminate the area where it was used for decades to come.

“I told the President we would give her a more complete update at the half hour,” Reid told Breanna. “We won’t have visual imagery for another few hours, but the seismic data should be quite enough.”

“We can take some of the video from the WB-57,” Breanna said. “It’s quite impressive.”

“Agreed.”

“Have the Iranians said anything yet?”

“They know something is up — the communication lines went down with the explosion. But it should take them a while to realize the extent of it. They may fear the worst. We’re monitoring the local communications with ferret satellites, so we’ll know pretty much as soon as they do.”

“Mr. Reid, you better look at this,” said Lanny Fu, a CIA analyst tasked to monitor current intelligence from sources outside the operation. “The Iranians just made a status request for all facilities under the Qom directorate.”

“Right on time,” said Reid as he turned back to Breanna. “They fear there’s been an accident or an attack. Their procedure now will be to ask each one to check in, and in the meantime they’ll send someone to the targeted facility.”

“Sir,” interrupted Fu. “The significance here — there’s a code number for a facility on the list that we have no record of.”

“What?”

“I believe there may be another bunker somewhere.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” said Reid. “They have been well calculated. Double-check.”

“I already have,” said Fu. “The analysts have been alerted. We’re working on it.”

“Another lab?” said Breanna.

“I doubt that,” insisted Reid. “I strongly doubt it.”

3

In the first few moments after his aircraft was struck, Captain Parsa Vahid thought for sure he would have to bail.

Rather than setting off a panic, the knowledge calmed him. It also saved the plane.

Vahid, like many well-trained pilots, became in the crisis a logical, methodical engineer. He worked through a long list of procedures and directions necessary to save the aircraft. If one thing didn’t work — if too much fuel was leaking from one tank, if a control surface didn’t precisely respond — he switched to another, then another, and another, moving on down the checklist as calmly as an accountant tallying the numbers of a sale.

Even when he landed the plane, he confined his thinking to a very narrow checklist. He taxied to the maintenance area, trundling past the white skeleton of a transport that had been battered by an Iraqi attack some twenty-five years before. He shut down the plane and then, finally freed of his life-or-death lists, rose in the cockpit and took the deepest breath of fresh, desert air that he had ever managed.

He was met on the tarmac by the base commander, who asked with a grave face how many of the American B-2s he had seen.

“There were no B-2s,” said Vahid. “There was a small plane, a light plane. My missiles shot it down.”

“There must have been B-2s,” said the general. “They have blown up Natanz.”

“What?”

“There is no contact with one of the plants. We were asked to try, and failed.”

“There was no B-2. I shot down the only plane.”

The commander shook his head. Stunned, Vahid walked slowly to the nearby transport vehicle. Rather than taking him to his squadron room, where he ordinarily would debrief, he was driven to a bunker at the far end of the military complex. The colonel in charge of intelligence met him outside the entrance and led him downstairs to his office.

“I’d like to change from my gear,” Vahid objected when they arrived.

“You will change when we are done.”

The room smelled of fresh concrete. It was much larger than the squadron offices upstairs. Two long tables, twice the size of normal conference tables, sat at the middle of the room. There were only chairs, but each was a well-padded armchair.

The interview began as soon as he sat down.

“How long after takeoff did you encounter the enemy bombers?” asked the colonel. He was tall and thin, with glasses, a beak nose, and a brush moustache above a thin and close beard. In the harsh light he looked as if he were a cartoon character, a caricature of an officer created as a foil for a popular hero.

“I never encountered enemy bombers, or any bombers,” said Vahid. “I will tell you what happened.”

“First answer my questions,” said the colonel. He lifted his glasses higher on his nose. “How many bombers did you encounter?”

“You keep talking about bombers. There was one aircraft, a light plane. Maybe a Cessna. A small trainer at most.”

“It was more likely an American Predator,” suggested the colonel.

“I—”

“You shot it down.”

“I believe I shot something down,” answered the pilot. He had never encountered the American UAV known as the Predator, but he was naturally familiar with the profile, and the plane he had encountered bore little resemblance to the drone. “But I think it was—”

“I think that is what you encountered,” insisted the colonel. “A Predator.”

“You’ll see when you recover it, then,” said Vahid. He was trying to keep his temper in check, but couldn’t help the note of sarcasm that crept into his voice.

“How many other planes were there?”

“None. I saw none. Check my video record.”

“Sometimes those are not complete.”

“Yes, at times there are things not recorded,” said Vahid, finally surrendering. It was foolish to resist; the man was trying to help him. His goal was probably to spare the commander and the air force in general, but to do that most effectively, he had to help Vahid as well.

There would soon be other interviews, much more difficult.

“Men in the heat of battle do not know everything that is going around them,” said the colonel. “They cannot fly that way. They have to focus on the immediate threat.”

Vahid nodded. “What happened at Natanz?” he asked.

The colonel stared at him.

“The Americans attacked it?” the pilot prompted. “But the facilities are many miles beneath the ground. No one could attack them. Unless they used a nuclear bomb. Did they use a nuclear bomb on us?”

“You are not the one to be asking questions. You know absolutely nothing, beyond the fact that you did your duty. You shot down a plane.”

“Yes.”

The colonel folded his hands in a tight cluster in front of him, pressing them down on the tabletop as if he might try and bend it toward the floor. Finally, he took a small tape recorder from his pocket and put it on the table.

“We will start from the beginning of your flight,” he said. “Recount everything from your takeoff. Leave nothing unmentioned, however trivial. Remember what the end result is.”

4

“Their response indicates they don’t know what happened, not yet, anyway.” National Security Advisor Blitz frowned as he assessed the situation for President Todd. The operation had gone extremely well — a good thing, since the Iranian bomb program appeared to have been much further ahead than anyone had believed. “It’s been three hours now and they’re only just starting to seal off the site. Or what’s left of it.”

“Was it totally destroyed?” Todd asked. She and Blitz were sitting alone in the room. The President had decided she would have no witnesses to the discussion; even her Secret Service bodyguards were in the hall, none too happy at having been summarily ordered to stay outside the door, a rare Todd decree.

“Our satellite won’t be passing overhead for another two hours, and we don’t want to risk a plane,” Blitz told her. “But the images of the explosion and its aftermath from the NASA aircraft show the tunnels and entire underground complex were completely wiped out. It’s history.”

Several hundred workers had died along with it. Regrettable, but necessary.

Blitz’s phone vibrated in his hand. He glanced quickly at the face.

“Ms. Stockard and Mr. Reid are ready for the video conference,” he said.

The President turned to the console as Blitz flipped it on. Breanna and Reid appeared on a split screen, their faces projected from the Whiplash command center at the CIA complex.

“I understand congratulations are in order,” she said. “Job well done.”

“Thank you, Madam President,” said Reid.

“Have we recovered our team yet?”

“We’re working on it,” said Breanna. “But there has been — there is a complication.” She turned to her right, evidently looking toward Reid in the center.

“There’s new information,” added Reid. “We’re still compiling it. But there appears to be another facility that we haven’t known about until now. And it’s possible — very possible, I’m afraid — that there is another nuclear device there, waiting to be tested.”

“How is this possible?” Todd felt her chest catch.

Her lungs acting up? She ignored the pain and continued.

“The facilities were examined in great detail before I approved the mission,” she said. “Well before.”

“I know, Madam President,” said Reid. “I can’t make any excuses. There does seem to be another facility. We have a code name, a radio address, really. We’re trying to match it up to a physical plant. At the moment, we have two different possibilities. Both were closed two years ago. At that time we believed one was completely shut down because of an accidental explosion there; the other housed centrifuges that were no longer needed. Our best theory is that one or both may actually have been kept open and developed — it’s the same pattern they used for the lab we targeted.”

“Which we found.”

“Thanks, actually, to the Israelis.” Reid was very big on giving credit where credit was due, even if it went to a competitor; he’d even been known to laud the Defense Intelligence Agency, something most CIA officers and nearly every Agency bureaucrat would never do. “In any event, we’re working to determine what is going on at those facilities. Whatever it is, the Iranians have gone to great lengths to keep their status secret. Given that, we believe it’s very possible — likely — that one may be another bomb assembly area. Because the amount of fuel in the explosion is about half of what we projected, worst case. And now, well, worst case seems to have been too conservative, given the state of the bomb we destroyed.”

Christine Todd was famous for keeping her temper. She prided herself on being able to control her emotions: all of them, but her temper especially. As a little girl, her mother had said she had the famous “Irish temper” of her ancestors.

You are easygoing in your needs, Mother often declared, but let someone fall short of their job or responsibility, and there’s hell to pay. ’Tis a flaw, Christine Mary, a flaw that will make people dislike you, friends especially.

By the time she was out of her teens, Todd had learned to control herself — and more important, learned that everyone was human, most especially herself. The Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—had become something more than just a biannual theme for a fifteen minute sermon at Sunday mass.

But every so often the forces that she’d chained deep in her psyche reasserted themselves.

“Why in the name of all that is holy,” she demanded, “was this site not found earlier?”

Reid didn’t answer.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jonathon,” she continued, her Irish-American heritage asserting itself with the mild profanity. “How many times did I go over this with your agency?”

“I don’t have control over the analysts,” he said mildly.

“We believe we can deal with the problem,” said Breanna, stepping in. “We’ve drawn up a tentative plan for a second strike tomorrow night.”

Breanna. Good job. God bless Magnus for recommending you.

“Why tomorrow night?” Todd asked.

“It’s the soonest the assets will be in place,” said Breanna. “We want to strike quickly, obviously.”

“Before I say anything else, let me note that I expect better information, more timely, from the intelligence community,” said Todd.

“Understood,” replied Reid.

How could he argue?

This was one more reason to fire the head of the Agency — not that she needed any more.

And replace him with Jonathon?

Hmmph.

“You can determine which site it is?” asked Todd sharply.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Reid. “Or we’ll hit both.”

“Prepare for a second mission,” Todd said. “I want updates on the hour, and I want you, Jonathon, personally to vouch for the final briefing, and personally available for questions if the need arises.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Very good.” Todd hit the switch and dismissed them.

“It was an intelligence failure — unacceptable,” said Blitz. His face was red.

“That, Dr. Blitz, is an understatement.” Todd glanced at her watch. It was later than she thought — she was due to speak with the Secretary of State upstairs in five minutes; there was a full National Security Committee session slated immediately afterward. “Your staff will have to explain itself as well. We’ll deal with the immediate problem, then worry about Monday morning quarterbacking.”

“In this sort of situation,” said Blitz, “failure — this is why we need a change of leadership from the top at the Agency. You’ve given everyone concerned more than enough time to fail. And now, this will be—”

“Failure is not acceptable,” snapped the President, standing. “Get the Joint Chiefs ready — I want a plan to take out the remaining site. They are to report to me in an hour. Less, if possible.”

5

The TV droned on in the other room. Zen, home early and hungry, barely paid attention as he made a sandwich with leftovers from the fridge. He wheeled himself back and forth between the refrigerator and the counter island at the center of the kitchen, which was set at wheelchair height to make it easier for him to work. He was just trying to decide whether to add prosciutto to the leftover roast pork and marinated sweet peppers when the word “Iran” caught his attention. He left his sandwich and wheeled over to the family room. The late afternoon talk show had been replaced by an announcer, who according to the flashing red legend at the top of the screen was presenting “Breaking News.”

“… an isolated area in Iran north of the capital, Tehran. The area where the earthquake struck includes at least one known Iranian atomic research facility, raising the question of whether an accident occurred there. However, the Iranian government immediately denied there had been any human activity in the area that could have led to the earthquake…”

Zen listened as the reporter described the earthquake, saying that preliminary data estimated that it was in the “high fours or very low fives,” which while causing shaking would only damage very poorly built structures. This section of Iran was often subject to earthquakes, added the announcer, and it was too early for information about casualties.

“Interesting,” said Zen to himself, wheeling toward his bedroom, where he’d left his cell phone turned off. Sure enough, he’d missed a dozen calls in the last ten minutes. He scrolled through the list, then selected the number of Jenny Shapiro, one of the staff members of the Intelligence Committee.

Shapiro answered on the first ring. “Senator Stockard, have you heard the news?”

“Earthquake in Iran?”

“Atomic explosion in Iran,” said Shapiro. “More P waves than S.”

“That means something to you, I’m sure.”

Shapiro gave Zen a brief explanation of the type of shock waves generated by explosions and earthquakes. While every event had its own particular “fingerprint,” scientists generally had little difficulty differentiating between earthquakes and man-made explosions by the overall pattern of the shock waves. In this case, said Shapiro, one of the committee’s technical experts, there seemed little doubt that this was some sort of event — almost surely an accidental explosion of a nuclear device.

“Why accidental?” asked Zen.

“A couple of reasons. For one thing, the epicenter wasn’t set up as a test area, or in a known facility.” Shapiro’s Boston accent got quicker and quicker as she spoke. “But if I had to make a guess, I’d say they were putting a device together for testing elsewhere and somebody made a very big mistake.”

“Or they were helped.”

“You said that, Senator. I didn’t.”

“And we don’t know about this facility?”

“If the epicenter of the waves is where the scientists say it was—”

“What’s the word from the White House?”

“No word is the word. NSC staff say, ‘Evaluating.’ State is preparing a statement on ‘the Iranian earthquake.’ That’s what I know,” she added. “Are you going to be available for the special meeting?”

“Which is when?” Zen glanced down at the list of callers. Two were from the secretary in charge of arranging the Intelligence Committee’s meetings.

“Fifty-two minutes and counting.”

“On my way,” he said.

6

The stars faded ever so slightly as they walked, as if they were pulling back from the earth. Turk’s thigh muscles burned with fatigue, but there was no time to slow or complain. He wasn’t afraid of being caught but of being left behind. The Israeli and Grease had moved at the same steady pace since they’d started, and even if he hadn’t been exhausted he would have had trouble keeping up. But he had to keep up, because the alternative was being left in Iran, and being left in Iran was unacceptable, was impossible.

Turk’s confidence wavered under the weight of his fatigue. He was back to being a pilot — competent, more than competent, in the air; nearly useless on the ground.

When they first set out for the train tracks, he thought they would arrive within minutes. To keep his brain occupied, he amused himself by picturing his arrival home, back in Las Vegas, back in Li’s arms. He felt her arms and smelled her perfume; he remembered the way they’d lain together in bed.

Now he thought of nothing and simply walked.

“Up there,” said Grease, stopping ahead and crouching.

Turk walked up to him. Grease put his hand on his shoulder and pushed him down. “Sssssh,” said the soldier.

The railroad tracks were about fifty yards away on the right, just on the other side of a hard-packed dirt road. The ground sloped gently from their position to the tracks, then fell away a little steeper. The cover was sparse, large clumps of stiff grass and clusters of low bushes.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Turk, hoarse.

“Ssssh,” said Grease, this time sternly.

The Israeli started ahead, then suddenly flattened himself.

“Come on,” hissed Grease, moving on his haunches to a nearby bush.

Turk lost his balance as he got up. He managed to push and fall forward, half diving and half crawling into position behind Grease. Under other circumstances it might have been hilarious, but Turk was not in the mood to laugh at himself, and Grease seemed congenitally averse to humor of any kind. Neither said anything.

A hum grew in the air, vibrating stronger and stronger. Turk didn’t realize it was a train until it burst in front of him. There were no lights on either of the two diesel engines in the front, nor were there any on the two passenger cars and a half-dozen freight cars that followed, or the flatcars with trucks and tanks. The train melted into a brownish blur, leaving a film of dust floating in the air in its wake. The scent of half-burned diesel fuel was so strong Turk thought he would gag.

“They’re sending troops to cordon the area off and find out what happened,” said Grease. “There’ll be patrols.”

“Yeah.”

Turk remembered the image of the ground as it imploded. He wasn’t sure what the radioactive effects would be. Would the entire area be poisoned for years?

Was five miles far enough way to avoid the effects? A slight twinge of paranoia struck him — maybe his fatigue was due to radioactive poisoning.

Unlikely. He was just exhausted, plain and simple.

They both rose, Turk unsteadily, Grease as solid and smooth as ever. The Israeli trotted toward them.

“There’s a truck at the other side of the intersection,” he said when he reached them. “I think it is your people.”

A few minutes later Turk was sitting in the back of the truck, wedged between Gorud and Grease. The other members of the team were spread out along the floorboards, sitting or leaning toward the back, watchful. The Israeli had gone up front with the driver.

Gorud had been emotionless when Turk reported that the mission was a success. Turk wondered at his own peculiar lack of elation as well — they’d just struck a tremendous blow against Iran, probably prevented a war or at least a wider conflict, and yet he didn’t feel particularly elated. He didn’t feel anything, except the aches and pains of his bruises, and the heavy weight of his eyelids.

“We’ll be there soon,” said Gorud, checking his watch. “Granderson and one of the men are already there. It should be safe until morning, or beyond.”

“Why are we waiting there?” asked Grease.

“They didn’t explain,” said Gorud as the truck bounced along the dirt road. “They just want us to stand by for further instructions.”

“We should be getting as far away as possible,” said Grease.

Turk completely agreed. There were still a few hours before dawn. They ought to use every one of them to get closer to safety.

Several plans had been drawn up for their “exfiltration.” The preferred one had been by airplane from the airport where they were supposed to meet the helicopter. But that option had apparently gone by the boards when they were shot down.

“I don’t disagree,” said Gorud. “But this is what they said. Maybe they know something we don’t.”

“Right,” sneered Grease.

A few minutes later the truck slowed to a stop. One by one they got out. Dread helped Turk down, easing him onto the ground as if he were an old man. Turk was mildly amused — until his legs went rubbery on him after a step or two. He stood stock-still for several seconds, regaining his composure.

They saw what looked like a large construction area, with bulldozed sections and piles of dirt, sand, and gravel. Captain Granderson, waiting here with one of the troopers in the car they’d “borrowed” earlier in the evening, said the area had been used by the Iranian army for maneuvers some years before. There were buildings across the road to the east. They were abandoned, but Granderson had decided to avoid them.

“We’ve been monitoring the radio,” he told Turk. “There’s been an announcement of an earthquake. But the military has been put on alert. They have aircraft all over the place.”

“Probably looking for us. We were shot down.”

“You were shot down?”

“Yeah. I managed to get it in, more out of luck than anything else. The pilot was killed.”

“Damn.”

“Did you hear anything about a MiG?” Turk asked. “I went after it with the nano-UAVs. I don’t know if I got it down.”

“I haven’t heard anything. It’s not always easy to understand what they’re saying, though.”

“What are they talking about, you think?” Grease asked, nodding toward Gorud and the Israeli. The two appeared to be arguing.

“Don’t know. Gorud doesn’t like him, though.”

“He said that?”

“You could just tell.” Granderson stared at the two men as if he could read their lips in the twilight.

“Does he trust him?” asked Grease.

“I don’t think like and trust are related,” said Granderson.

“If he didn’t trust him, he wouldn’t have let us go with him, right?” said Turk.

“He’s Mossad?” asked Grease.

“I don’t know. I think he’s actually a Russian who’s paid by Mossad,” said Granderson. “Based on what he was cursing about.”

“How do we get out of here?” Grease asked.

“At this point, go north through the mountains to the Caspian,” said Granderson, understanding the question to mean the country, not the pit where they were hiding. “We have two stash points along the way, and there should be two guys near the water waiting for us. There’s also a SEAL unit that’s a quick reaction force, more or less, that can help us once we’re farther north.” Granderson seemed almost matter of fact, but he was proposing they travel through rough mountains. “But we can’t do anything until I get the OK from the States.”

“You think we can sit here all day without being sighted?”

“If we have to.”

7

“The White House position that it’s an earthquake is untenable,” said Shapiro, the Senate committee aide who was an expert on, among other things, the Iranian nuclear program. “Even if they are just referring everyone to the Iranian government. Every scientist looking at the data will know it’s false. They’re not going to be quiet about it. Already someone from MIT was quoted in a Web report saying it must have been related to their nuke program.”

Zen leaned his head back, gazing at the ceiling in the closed conference room. He could think of exactly one reason why the White House wouldn’t want to confirm that it had been a nuclear accident: the explosion was the result of a U.S. operation which was still under way.

Senator Brown, the chairman of the committee, gave him a sideways glance as Shapiro finished. He seemed to have come to the same conclusion.

Not that this necessarily made the President’s silence right.

“So am I correct that the members are not comfortable with the lack of information coming from the White House?” said the chairman mildly. He of course knew he was, and waited for only the briefest moment before proceeding. “What we want is an up-to-date, no-holds-barred, closed-door briefing. Do I have that correct? I’ll set about getting one.”

Brown tapped his gavel lightly before anyone could answer. Zen rolled backward from the table, trying to make a quick escape.

He didn’t make it.

“Jeff — Zen — if you could hold on a second,” said Brown. “I just need a word.”

Zen smirked as if he was a grammar school kid caught trying to leave class via the window. He backed himself against the wall and nodded to the others as they filtered out in twos and threes.

“You want me to talk to the President,” he said to Senator Brown when they were alone.

“Exactly.”

“You don’t think that’s the chairman’s job?”

“I’ll definitely call her, but it’ll be next year before she returns the call.”

“I doubt that.”

“Will you talk to her?”

“All right. But I don’t expect her to say more to me than she’s willing to say to you or the committee as a whole.”

“We’re supposed to be informed.”

Zen nodded.

“If this is the start of a war,” added Brown, “there’ll be hell to pay. Impeachment maybe. She’s got plenty of enemies around here.”

“Maybe she’s trying to stop one.”

“Either way,” said Brown, “the result may be the same.”

8

As far as president Todd was concerned, there was no choice — she had already committed herself to destroying the Iranian bomb program. If there was another site, or even ten more sites, they had to be eliminated.

Far better to do it with the tiny and apparently undetectable Whiplash aircraft. But the B-2s and B-1s were ready. If the team inside Iran couldn’t pull this off, she’d send the bombers in. She was not about to do what her predecessor had done and leave the problem for the next shift.

An overt attack by the U.S. was sure to have dire consequences. The Iranians couldn’t strike the U.S. directly, but they would surely unleash wave upon wave of terrorists. They might also take another shot at blocking the Persian Gulf.

Todd expected Secretary of State Alistair Newhaven to use that as part of his argument against an attack. But he surprised her, telling the packed conference room in the White House basement that he thought the attack must be pressed.

“I think it’s not a matter of debate,” said Newhaven, gesturing with the back of his hand at the map on the display screen at the front of the room. “In for a penny, in for a pound, as the old saying goes. The real question is what the Iranians will do. If I’m them, I push up my timeline. A lot.”

“If they’re capable,” said the Secretary of Defense Charles Lovel. “We don’t have enough data. Frankly, it’s not even clear whether they would go ahead with a test.”

“We have to assume that they have the capability,” said National Security Advisor Blitz. He studiously avoided looking at the head of the CIA, who sat glumly at the side of the table, all but wearing a dunce cap. “They have been ahead of every estimate. Consistently.”

“If they do test the bomb, they’ll have no material for another,” added Lovel. “We’ve wiped out their centrifuge arrays.”

“They’ll build more,” said Blitz. “We’ll have a twelve month to three year window.”

“I’ll take that,” said Todd. “In any event, that isn’t the issue at the moment. We’ll have time to analyze the situation further once we have more intelligence.”

She took a quick poll on a second attack, going around the room; it was unanimous. As was her custom, Todd let the others think that she was undecided until they had given their opinions; as usual, her mind was already set.

“We will continue the campaign,” she said, rising. “Covertly if possible, overtly if necessary. I expect a second strike within twenty-four hours. Our official posture, until then, will be as it has been: an earthquake. No leaks. Absolutely no leaks — lives are on the line here. And I don’t mean those of just our operatives.”

“Congress,” said Blitz. “The intelligence committee has been screaming—”

“I’ll deal with Congress,” said Todd.

Zen was a little surprised when the White House called back so quickly, but the “invitation” to join the President for an early dinner did catch him off guard. When he hesitated before answering, the President’s chief of staff came on the line personally and told him that “Ms. Todd really wants to talk to you as soon as possible, and if you can’t make supper—”

“I can certainly get to the White House right away,” said Zen. “And I’d love to have dinner with the President. Should I bring my wife?”

“Actually, it’s supper, not dinner. And while I happen to know that the President thinks very highly of Mrs. Stockard, the invitation is for one only. Would you like us to send a car?”

“I’ll drive my van over,” said Zen. “I’m leaving now.”

Christine Todd liked to walk around the White House kitchen, not because she felt the urge to cook or check on the staff, but because it was a refuge from the formal business of the rest of the house. The people doing their jobs here — chefs, cooks, assistants — could have been anywhere in the world. They were naturally circumspect and on their best behavior when she walked in, but even so, the hint of the world beyond the bubble she lived in was welcome.

She wondered how they would take the news of the cancer. Certainly they’d feel bad for her. Would they feel that she betrayed them by not mentioning it?

Maybe she should arrange to tell them first. Or not first, but very soon in the process. Personally.

It was still too theoretical to contemplate. She had too many other things to do.

“Our guest enjoys his beer,” she told the head steward as he came over to greet her. “Anchor Steam is one of his favorites, as I recall. I believe you have that.”

“We’ll look after Senator Stockard, ma’am. Not a problem.”

The President walked around the steel-topped prep island, glancing at the stove and the young cook watching the gravy.

“Very good, very good,” Todd announced. “Wonderful, actually. Thank you, everyone. It smells delightful, as usual.”

One of the chief of staff’s aides intercepted her in the hallway; he had the latest update on the Iranian situation — the strike unit was standing by in Iran, waiting for the next target. The backup set of nano-UAVs were being programmed for the attack. The intelligence agencies were scrambling for more data on the possible target — still unsure which of the two former sites it was.

The update, ironically enough, had come straight from Breanna Stockard. The President had no doubt that Zen knew nothing about the operation, at least not from Breanna.

What an interesting household that must be, she thought as she headed to the family dining room where Zen was already waiting.

She entered the room with her usual bustle, greeting Zen and going straight to her chair. He moved his wheelchair back as a sign of respect.

“Senator, so nice to see you. I hope I haven’t kept you long.”

“I just got here,” said Zen politely.

The residence dining room — occasionally known as the President’s Dining Room or the Private Dining Room — was one of three in the building (not counting the formal room), and when she was dining with someone, Todd chose the room depending on the tone she was trying to set. This was the most intimate, less ornate than the Family Dining Room and less work-oriented than the Oval Office Dining Room. At least that was how she thought of it.

“I’m glad you could make it,” said Todd, pulling out her chair. “Especially on short notice.”

“I don’t get invited to the White House very often,” said Zen. “Especially without my wife.”

“Yes.” She turned to the attendant who was waiting nearby. “Perhaps the senator would like something to drink. A beer? Maybe an Anchor Steam?”

“That’d be fine,” said Zen. “Just one, though — I’m driving.”

“I’ll try one as well, and some water,” Todd told the attendant. She turned back to Zen. “I never understood — what’s the difference between regular beer and steam beer? Or is that just something for marketing?”

Zen elaborated on the difference in brewing styles. The beer arrived before he finished.

“It’s very good,” said Todd, taking a sip. “Crisp.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t invite me over to discuss beer styles,” said Zen.

He drank heartily, very much like her husband, Todd thought.

“No, though it has been educational.”

Todd studied him. He would make a good President: sure of himself, easygoing yet intelligent, with sound judgment — usually. An excellent service record, a decorated hero, which in some ways made him virtually unassailable.

Then again, she’d seen more veterans than she could count chewed up by the political naysayers. Washington was a place where real achievements meant much less than the dirt others could throw at you.

Todd felt an urge to tell him about her condition, and what it meant, and would mean, for the future. She wanted suddenly to suggest he run for President. But she couldn’t do that. Too many questions, too many complications. And that wasn’t why she had called him here.

“My invitation came after I called on behalf of the Intelligence Committee,” prompted Zen.

“Yes.” Todd pulled herself back into business mode. “Your committee is wondering, no doubt, what’s going on in Iran.”

“Exactly.”

“You and I, Senator — occasionally we have disagreed.”

“More than occasionally,” admitted Zen.

“Even so, I consider you one of our finer senators.”

“I’m flattered.”

“We’re wondering what’s going on in Iran ourselves.”

Zen raised his eyebrow.

“Of course, there are situations when we — when I — cannot tell everyone precisely all that I suspect about things that go on in the world,” said Todd, using her most offhanded tone. “I’m always faced with the question: will what I say jeopardize other people?”

Zen nodded. “I imagine it must be difficult to make that call. I think I may have even said something like that to the committee earlier.”

“Are you here personally?” she asked. “Or as the representative of the committee?”

“Both, I guess.”

“What is it that you personally want to know, Senator?” asked Todd.

Zen had pushed his wheelchair sideways — the table was a little higher than what would have been comfortable. He leaned his right elbow on it, finger to his lips, thinking.

“I would not want any information that would jeopardize anyone’s lives,” he told her.

“That’s good, because you won’t get any.”

“What I would want to know is that the administration is aware of the implications.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m told that the signature of the earthquake is not the sort of signature that one sees in earthquakes.”

“Interesting.” Todd reached for her beer and took another very small sip.

“I think that news is going to be public knowledge pretty soon,” added Zen.

“Well, it is a fact that the area contains a number of nuclear research centers,” said Todd, choosing her words as carefully as he had.

Zen glanced toward the door. The steward was approaching with their dinners.

“Meat loaf,” said Todd. “One of your favorites.”

“It is,” said Zen, sounding a little surprised.

“You must have mentioned it somewhere,” said Todd. “The staff doesn’t miss much.”

“I bet they don’t.”

“I like it, too,” she confessed. “Especially the gravy. But it’s very fattening.”

They ate in silence for a while.

“Very good meat loaf,” said Zen.

“I think a full and candid report is in order for your committee,” said the President. “As soon as it can be arranged.”

“How long, do you think, before that can happen?”

“It may be twenty-four hours,” said Todd.

“That’s quite a while,” said Zen. “There are a lot of historical precedents with much shorter time spans.”

“Hmmm.”

The Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war, of course, but the operation was far short of that. Current law called for the President to “consult” with Congress about the use of force, but even that was a gray area here. The previous administration, and the two before that, hadn’t felt the need to inform Congress of every covert operation being undertaken, and in fact had even been rather “loose” when talking about specific programs.

On the other hand, this was an extremely volatile issue, and the dire consequences could certainly include war. Todd knew she needed to keep Congress on her side, and alienating the Intelligence Committee would not help her meet that goal.

“I think we should have enough information for a thorough briefing by then,” she said. “But there’s always a possibility it will take longer.”

“I would think that if something was going to happen that involved a great deal of resources,” said Zen, “a lot of resources, then consultation would have to take place before those resources were ultimately committed.”

Todd took that to mean the committee wanted to be informed before she sent the bombers in.

“I don’t know that that would be possible,” she parried.

“Possible or not, I would guess that would be the sentiment of the full committee.”

“So the volume of resources makes a difference?” said Todd.

“Well, I don’t know how one measures that,” said Zen carefully. “I do know that, personally, I draw a line somewhere. But if there were, well — to speak theoretically — if there was a sizable commitment, something so large that the press couldn’t help but notice — there are a lot of members who naturally, and rightly, would press for an explanation.”

Todd didn’t answer. Zen wasn’t necessarily demanding that she inform Congress before she attacked, but he was certainly telling her that if she didn’t, there’d be consequences. But then, she was already aware of that.

“In the meantime, I’d like to schedule that briefing from NSC or the Agency,” said Zen, meaning the National Security Council or CIA staff. “Can we say first thing in the morning?”

“I think that’s premature.”

“The afternoon?”

“I don’t know that I could commit to that.”

“An entire day.” Zen’s voice more than hinted disapproval. “That’s a long time under the circumstances. A lot may happen by then.”

“I know some on the committee thinks the intelligence services are overstaffed,” said Todd, her tone matching Zen’s. “But I’m sure you don’t share that feeling.”

Zen only smiled. They ate for a while longer, each concentrating on the food, until Todd broke the silence with a remark about the Nationals, who had unfortunately just lost five games in a row. Zen responded with some thoughts about how soon the hitting might come around. Dessert arrived in the form of a peach cobbler, but Zen took only a few bites.

Todd skipped hers completely. She had a great deal of work to do; the staff knew to save it as a midnight snack, when it would get a fresh dollop of ice cream on the side.

“Tell me one thing,” said Zen as he got ready to leave. “Was it a success?”

Todd studied him. He would make a good President, she decided; his only problem would be the wheelchair. Were people ready to vote for someone with such an obvious handicap, even if it had been “earned” while in the service?

“Good night, Senator,” she said finally. “Best to your wife.”

9

Turk slept deeply, his mind plunging so far into its unconscious layers that he had no memory of dreams when he woke. He was disoriented for a moment, unsure where he was. Then he saw the boulders at the side of the dugout space where he’d bedded down. He rolled onto his back and saw blue sky above.

“Come on,” said Grease. He was a few feet away, hastily grabbing gear. “We have to go.”

Turk rose to a sitting position. “What time is it?”

“Oh-seven-twenty. Come on. We have to move.”

“Did you wake me up?”

“Yeah. Come on.”

“What’s happened? Were we spotted?” asked Turk.

“No — they have a new mission for us. For you.”

“Huh?”

“We’re not done yet,” added Grease, walking out around the sand pile.

Turk shook out the blanket he’d slept on and folded it up. The control gear and his rifle were sitting next to him. He checked the pack, made sure everything was there, then shouldered it and went to find the others.

Gorud, the Israeli, and Captain Granderson were standing near the hood of the car, bent over a paper map. Not one of them looked anything less than disgusted.

“Here’s the pilot now,” said the Israeli. “Let’s ask him.”

“We have to get up beyond Qom without being seen,” said Granderson. “We have to be up there before midnight. They want you to launch another strike. And they won’t tell us where it is until we’re in place.”

“How can we go somewhere if we don’t know where we’re going?” asked Turk.

“Even the pilot is baffled,” said the Israeli darkly.

“It’s not his fault,” answered Gorud. He slid the map around to show Turk. “We’ll backtrack up this way, and go the long way around, across the mountains, then come down through the desert. This way, we avoid the area they hit altogether.”

“Back up a second,” said Turk. “How are we going to attack the place again? It blew up.”

“It’s another facility,” said Gorud. “They didn’t know it was there. But they’re not sharing details at the moment. This is roughly where we’re going. It’s north of Qom.”

Qom — rendered sometimes on maps as Q’um, Qum, or Ghom — was located about a hundred miles south of Tehran, and at least two hundred by air from where they were. Qom was a holy city, with hundreds of seminaries and universities. It housed a number of important sites sacred to the Shi’ite branch of Islam, and served as the general locus of several nuclear enrichment plants.

“We have to go north,” said Granderson. “Stay as far away from the crash site as possible. Then we’ll cut east. We don’t want to be stopped, if at all possible.”

“What do we do if we are?” asked Grease, peering over Turk’s shoulder.

“Deal with it, depending on the circumstances.”

With the car ahead of the troop truck, they drove northward through the desert on a barely discernible road. They risked the lack of pavement to cut an hour off their time and avoid the highway, which one of the scouts said had been heavily traveled by military and official vehicles since dawn. The scrub on the hillside gradually became greener as they drove, and soon they saw a small patchwork of narrow streams and ditches, with an occasional shallow pond.

Turk, sitting in the back passenger seat of the car, passed the time by trying to imagine what sort of people lived here and what their lives were like. Farmers of some sort, though most seemed to have given up tilling some years before. The handful of buildings they passed — always very quickly — looked abandoned.

As they wound their way down on a road that led west, they passed a high orchard whose fruit trees were fed from a shallow but wide creek along the road. Two men were inspecting the trees. Turk slid down in the seat and watched them stare as they passed.

A few minutes later they found the road blocked by a dozen goats ambling passively down the hill. The goatherd was in no hurry to move, even when the Israeli, impatient in the driver’s seat, began to use the horn. The goatherd cast an evil eye at the car and the truck behind it, slowly guiding his charges off the road.

“You think he knows we’re foreigners?” Turk asked Grease when they finally cleared the obstruction.

“I think he doesn’t like the government or the army,” said Grease. “Common out here.”

A few minutes later, as they approached the heart of the valley, Gorud spotted a pair of Iranian soldiers near the side of the road. They were about a half mile outside of a small hamlet that marked the intersection of their trail and a wider road that led to a local highway north.

“There’ll be a roadblock,” said Gorud over the team radio to Granderson and the others in the truck. “You’re escorting us away from the earthquake zone. We’re under orders from the oil ministry to report to Kerman by noon.”

Kerman was an administrative center, sufficiently big and far enough away that it should impress whoever stopped them.

Sure enough, a checkpoint appeared two bends later. Two soldiers ambled from the side of the road as they approached. The men, both privates and neither old enough to grow more than a loose stubble on their chins, raised their arms to stop the car.

“I talk,” said Gorud. “You can mumble in Russian, but it’s best if you don’t say anything.”

He rolled down the window as Dread eased on the brakes. Rather than getting out, Gorud climbed up so that he was sitting on the ledge of the door, talking over the roof to the two soldiers. He waved papers at them, speaking in rapid Farsi.

An officer walked out from behind the small clump of trees. His body language said he had a long day in front of him and didn’t want it to start badly.

Gorud took full advantage, and began yelling at the man before he even reached the road. He slipped out from the window, papers in hand, and began walking toward him, still yelling. The officer finally put up his hands apologetically, then waved at the driver to continue. The two privates stepped back and Gorud got in the car.

“Go, go, go, go,” he said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”

Turk relaxed and leaned his head to the right, looking past Gorud to see what lay ahead.

The sharp crack of rifle made him start to turn his head. There was another shot a second later, then automatic rifle fire and a light machine gun, but by then Grease had grabbed him and pushed him down toward the floor to protect him.

10

Ray Rubeo touched his ear before replying to Breanna’s question — a bad sign, she realized.

“You might have enough vehicles to strike both plants,” he told her.

“From what you’ve seen of the three-dimensional map,” said Danny, “do you think it’s possible?”

“Possible, Colonel, is one thing. Just about anything is possible. But will it happen? That is another question.”

“Your best guess, Ray. Will it work?”

Rubeo frowned, and crossed his arms. The body at the front of the conference room appeared almost real — if Breanna squinted, she would have sworn that Rubeo was actually standing there. But in fact he was speaking from his home out West; his image was a hologram.

“I think it’s the sort of gamble we can only decide to take when we have all the target data,” said Rubeo.

“What if we don’t get any more?” asked Breanna.

“Then it becomes a computing problem. A difficult one.”

“All right, thank you,” she said. “We’ll be in touch soon.”

The holographic projection disappeared.

“He’s in a particularly upbeat mood,” said Danny.

“What do you think?”

“Unless the Agency develops more information in the next few hours, I think you have to split the forces,” said Danny. “You only have a few hours left.”

“I’m not even confident they can get the best route figured out by then,” confessed Breanna. “There’s so little data on the sites.”

She swung in the chair and picked up the phone to call Jonathon Reid, who was over in the CIA main building.

“We’re still working on it,” said Reid when they connected. “By eight A.M. our time, I hope to have a definitive word on which of the two sites it is. New images from the 57 would be helpful.”

“If we send the aircraft now, it won’t be ready to support the assault,” said Breanna. The problem was not the plane but the gear — it had to be carefully reprogrammed and calibrated before the mission.

“Understood.”

“If we can’t get more data, we’ll find a way to strike both sites,” she said. “It’s our only option to make the President’s deadline.”

11

Turk struggled to get up from the floor of the car, but it was impossible with Grease holding him down. The car whipped up the road, fishtailing and taking several turns before straightening out.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked when Grease finally let him up.

“I’m keeping you alive,” said Grease roughly.

“I mean with the gunfire.”

“They just started shooting.”

They drove another five minutes before pulling over. Gorud hopped out. Turk reached for the door but Grease stopped him.

“No chances.” Grease shook his head. “Stay in the car.”

“Come on, damn it. I’m not a fuckin’ kid.”

“It’s safer in here, and it won’t be a minute. Two guys got shot up pretty bad,” added Grease.

“So you want me to just sit here while the CIA and Mossad figure out what to do?” asked Turk, reaching for the door handle to his left. “No thank you.”

This time Grease didn’t stop him. Turk slammed his door and stalked back to the truck. Gorud stood talking to the Israeli at the passenger side of the cab. Captain Granderson, grim-faced and blood splattered, came out from the back.

“What the hell is going on?” demanded Turk.

Both men ignored him. Turk grabbed Gorud by the shoulder and turned him around with such ferocity that he surprised even himself. Taken off guard, the CIA officer stumbled back against the side of the truck, dropping the paper map he had folded in his hand.

“I said, what the hell is going on?” demanded Turk.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get north as quickly as possible, without too much risk,” said Gorud. He straightened, trying to recover his composure.

“You were talking about the Caspian,” said Captain Granderson.

“He was,” said Gorud, gesturing at the Israeli. “Not me.”

“My mission here is complete,” said the Israeli. “You can do what you want. I am leaving.”

“Then start walking,” snapped Turk.

The Israeli looked as if he’d been slapped across the face. He turned to Gorud and said something in Farsi. Gorud didn’t respond.

Turk looked at Granderson. “What happened back there? Why did they shoot?”

“I don’t know. They just started firing as we drove up. They must have seen something about the truck. We killed them all. I don’t think they had time to radio, but we won’t have too much of a head start once someone checks with them and they don’t answer.”

Turk reached down and picked up the map. They were at the edge of high desert, land that on the map seemed empty, but he knew from the satellite images that it would be studded with small settlements.

“This spot here — this is where the fuel rendezvous was to be with the helicopter, correct?” He pointed out the mark to Gorud.

“That’s right.”

“Let’s take the road that leads to it, sweep north, and then back west.”

“It will add hours of travel time,” said Gorud. “Better to go directly. Our gas is limited.”

“There’s a town here,” said Granderson, pointing to Khur. “We can get gas there.”

“We may be questioned,” answered Gorud.

“We’ll be questioned everywhere. Let’s go — we need to move.”

“I agree,” said Turk. “Let’s do it.”

He turned and found Grease standing so close to him that he nearly collided with him.

The Israeli started to object. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s what we’re doing,” said Turk. “Like I told you, you can always walk.”

The sixty miles by air to the refuel site were easily doubled by the switchbacks and curving roads that took them there. In several places the road was only theoretical, a fictional notion on the map describing a path that had been brushed away by a surge of wind-driven dirt and sand.

At least they weren’t being followed. Turk kept expecting aircraft to appear overhead, but the only ones he heard were well to the south.

It was nearly noon by the time they reached the abandoned strip mine where the fuel for the helicopter had been hidden. Waiting about a half mile south for a two-man scouting team to make sure the area was clear, Turk considered what he would do if it turned out to be an ambush. He checked and rechecked the AK-47 and pistol.

I’ll save the last bullet for myself.

A fine, romantic thought. But almost impossible to carry out, he suspected. In the heat of battle, who was going to count bullets?

He would gladly exchange the pistol or rifle, for that matter, for an airplane. On the ground he was nothing. Put him in the air and he could take on anyone.

“It’s clear,” said Gorud, touching his earphone as the radio transmission came in. “Drive in slowly. We don’t want too much dust.”

The hiding place was a man-made horseshoe canyon, with the two arms squeezed together at the southwest, away from the road. They went in slowly, but still kicked up so much sand that Turk couldn’t see when he got out of the car.

The supplies had been tucked into a crevice at the side of the right arm, where the site had been quarried and workers created or enlarged a small cave. Besides the fuel drums, there were emergency supplies including water and packaged food.

Green, the Delta top sergeant, opened up one of the food packages and passed out the contents. Turk ate with abandon. The Delta troopers took theirs and then fanned out into protective positions outside the perimeter. Grease stayed with Turk; Granderson and Green huddled near the barrels, whispering together. Gorud and the Israeli, meanwhile, sat together in the car, silent.

Ironically, the two Delta men who’d been wounded were the designated medics. Tiny was by far the worse. Semiconscious, he’d lost a great deal of blood from two bullet holes in his thigh, and a third at the top of his hip looked nearly as bad. The other man who’d been hurt was Dread; his shoulder was shot up and he had a graze wound to his cheek.

“Chick magnet,” he told Turk, pointing to the bandage. “Scar’ll get me laid for the rest of my life.”

Doc was less cheery about Tiny’s wounds. “Medevacking him out would be a good idea.”

“Yeah,” was all Turk could say. They both knew it was impossible.

Granderson had dropped off two of his men a few miles south to make sure they weren’t being followed. They checked in every few minutes, reporting that the road remained deserted. But they could see a good amount of activity at a town just two miles to the east, a patch of green in the chalky hills.

Set in the shadow of a Z-shaped hill, the town was crisscrossed by green fields divided into small rectangles flanking the shallow valley. There were maybe two hundred houses on the outskirts of the fields.

What looked like army barracks were located directly across from a group of large barns. They appeared to be empty, save for a single pickup truck baking in the middle of the courtyard.

“I’d like to take that truck,” said Granderson, relating to Turk what the men had seen. “If we did, maybe at some point we could get rid of this one. The hole in the windshield is a pretty obvious giveaway.”

“You think you can grab it in the middle of the day?” asked Turk.

“Why not? If it’s just sitting there.”

“Be a good idea to use their gas as well,” said Grease. “Give us more of a reserve.”

“True.”

Green had quietly listened to the discussion. Now he stepped forward. “If they have med supplies, that would be even better. If we can get some plasma for Tiny, it might make the difference. Might.”

“Unlikely they have plasma,” said Grease.

“Worth a try,” said Granderson.

“If we’re going there, then it makes sense to look,” said Green. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“What’s Gorud say?” asked Turk.

“I wanted to get it straight with you first,” said Granderson.

The captain was trying to get his votes together, as it were, before confronting Gorud and the Israeli with what he assumed they would think was a risky venture. Turk guessed the Israeli would be opposed, but he wasn’t sure what Gorud would do.

“Do you think you could pull it off?” Turk asked.

“Yeah,” said Granderson without hesitation. “We could.”

Turk looked at Green. The soldier nodded, then at Grease. His stone-faced expression gave nothing away.

“I’ll back you,” Turk said to Granderson. “Let’s talk to Gorud.”

They walked over to the CIA officer and the Israeli. Turk spoke first.

“The Delta boys think they can get a truck in town,” he said. “They can get medicine for Tiny, too.”

“Plasma,” said Granderson.

“There’s a set of army barracks that are deserted,” continued Turk. “It’s a little out of town, isolated — we could get in and out.”

“At the barracks?” asked Gorud.

“Place looks empty,” said Granderson. “Or I wouldn’t suggest it.”

“Risky.” Gorud looked at Turk. “Your mission is our primary concern. We’re not even sure where we’re going yet.”

“Understood.” Turk noted that Gorud’s attitude toward him had subtly changed. He wasn’t deferential, exactly, but he was at least treating him with more respect. “And I know it’s a gamble, but it might help us get there easier. And we might be able to save our guy.”

Gorud frowned. He took the paper map from his pocket and examined it, as if the answer were written in the topographic lines that waved across the landscape, or the symbols at the bottom of the page.

“If we can get in and out of the compound without trouble,” he said finally, “it would definitely be worth it.”

They set up a perimeter, men watching the back and sides of the compound as well as the road, and then they went with a plan both simple and audacious — they drove directly to the buildings. Granderson leapt from the truck, followed by Dome and Meyer; they ran and began clearing what they assumed was the barracks. Gorud and the Israeli took the second building.

Meanwhile, Grease and Turk went to the pickup. Grease pulled it open, intending to jimmy out the ignition wiring with his combat knife. But the key was in the ignition. He hopped in and started it up while Turk watched anxiously with the rifle.

“Full tank,” said Grease. “Your luck is holding.”

A burst of automatic weapons fire sent Grease scrambling from the cab as Turk ducked behind the rear tire. Two more long bursts followed. Turk felt a twinge of self-doubt — he’d argued that coming inside with the others was as safe or safer than staying outside. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Grease put his hand to the radio headset. “It’s just them,” he said. “They’re good. Come on. Get in.”

Turk jumped into the back of the truck bed as Grease got behind the wheel. He drove the pickup to the door of the building, backing around so they could load it easier. Meanwhile, the troop truck was driven across the way to the fuel pump at the end of the compound. One of the troopers hopped out and began filling it with fuel.

“We can get fresh uniforms,” said Gorud, appearing. “Help.”

Turk shouldered the AK-47 as he ran into the building, Grease close behind. The structure looked at least a hundred years old. The clay bricks leaned toward the interior and the ceiling hung low. Turk ducked through the door and entered a long hallway that ran along the front of the building. It had been modernized during the seventies or eighties; ceramic tile lined the floor, and the walls had faded to a dirty gray.

Meyer waved to Turk from the far end of the hall. Turk passed two empty barracks rooms on the left; a body lay on the floor of the second in a pool of blood. Two more lay at the intersection at the far end, just to the left of Meyer.

“Medical room at the back.” Meyer thumbed down the other hall. “They’re getting supplies. There’s a computer in that office,” he added, pointing to the first doorway down the side corridor. “We’ll take that, too. Grab any clothes you can find.”

Turk stepped over the bodies. One had a pistol in his hand; another gun, an older rifle with a wooden stock, lay on the floor. As he stepped into the office, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and spun right; he jerked around, ready to fire, only to discover it was a small oscillating fan, moving left and right.

Shaking his head, he went to the computer. It was an American-made Dell with an Internet Explorer browser open to an odd porn site: it featured a virtual game where the characters were in the process of disrobing each other.

There were several other tabs open. One was for what looked like a news site in Tehran; the lettering was Persian, and he had no idea what it said. Turk clicked on the video player at the middle of the page and footage of a desert began to play — it appeared to be a report on the “earthquake” that had struck Natanz.

The footage showed rows of demolished houses. He stared at them for a few moments, amazed at the damage, wondering if it was real.

“That’s Badroud,” said Gorud, coming into the room behind him. “They didn’t know they were sitting on an atomic bomb. Excuse me.” After gently pushing Turk aside, he took the mouse and started fiddling with the browser, first checking the history and then opening the Favorites folder.

“You can read this?” Turk asked him.

“You think I’d be here if I couldn’t?” Gorud frowned at him. “I want to make sure they didn’t get an alert out,” he added, his voice less antagonistic. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Do they know what happened?” Turk asked.

“The news, at least, believes it’s an earthquake.” Gorud straightened. “Or that’s what they say. Come on. We gotta go.”

He pulled the wires from the back without turning the machine off. Granderson and the others were already outside. They’d found plasma and were treating Tiny. Turk peeked into the back and saw the soldier lying comatose, his skin so pale it looked like a sheet of paper. He was about to ask if the man would make it but thought better of it.

“We better get moving,” said Granderson, hopping off the back. “Let’s go.”

The pickup went first, driving out of the compound and back to the helicopter rendezvous point. There, some of them changed out of their uniforms, with Turk and Grease putting on a set of civilian clothes that had been found in one of the rooms. They were tight on Grease, loose on Turk. Then the team rearranged themselves in the vehicles — the Israeli in the car with Grease and Turk, who went back to posing as Russians; the captain and Green in the pickup, with their hired bodyguards, Gorud, and the others in the truck, in theory their Iranian escort.

“How you doing back there?” asked Grease from the front seat.

“I’m good.” Turk was alone in the back.

“You’re so quiet, I thought you were sleeping.”

“No.”

“You might try. You’re going to be awake all night. And you have to be alert.”

“I’ll be all right. This area we’re driving through,” he said to the Israeli, “what are the people here like?”

“Iranians.”

Grease scoffed.

“That much I knew,” said Turk.

“They live at the edge of the desert. They scrape by,” said the Israeli. “If you think too much about them, you’ll have trouble doing your job.”

The comment effectively ended Turk’s try at conversation. He slumped back in the seat.

How many people had died in the nuclear explosion, or been buried by the resulting tremors? It was the Iranian leaders’ fault, he told himself, not theirs, and certainly not his. If anything, he had saved thousands, millions. Destroying the weapon meant it couldn’t be used, and even the crudest math would easily show that the damage here was far less than if the weapon had been.

But though he didn’t feel guilt, exactly, Turk felt unsettled. He was uneasy — uneasy with the way the world was, unsettled by reality. In a perfect world, no one would kill, no one would threaten to exterminate a race. It was disappointing to be reminded that the world was far less than perfect.

“Farmers,” muttered Grease. “Right side.”

Turk leaned back against the seat, watching from the lower corner of the window as they passed. Two men were doing something to a tractor; they didn’t look up as the trucks passed.

A few miles later they turned westward, following a road that was little more than a trail down the side of a ridge. Probably flooded with water during the rainy season, he thought, when the rare but heavy rain washed through the area, the road now dry and wide. Its surface consisted almost entirely of small stones and pebbles, but the dirt below was soft.

Before long they started bogging down. The Israeli tried to compensate by building his momentum, but the car refused to cooperate, sliding to one side and then the other as he struggled to keep it under control. Then they spun around in a 360, jerking to a stop when the front wheels slid into a deep layer of soft sand.

The Israeli began cursing in Russian. Turk, a little dizzy, got out and fell to the ground, tripping in the loose dirt. Grease pulled him up.

The pickup stopped a short distance away, the troop truck stopping right behind it.

“We’re going to have to push it out,” said Grease as Granderson and Gorud ran up. “Going to have to push it this way.”

“If it will come loose,” said the Israeli.

“The question is whether we can get it any farther,” said Granderson, looking down the path in the direction they were to take. “Nothing that way looks much better than this stretch.”

Most of the men had gotten out of the truck to stretch their legs. Turk walked over and leaned in the back. “How’s Tiny?” he asked.

Dread looked at him but said nothing.

Turk understood what that meant. He put his lips together. “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

“It’s OK.”

“We’ll get home soon,” offered Turk.

“Yeah.”

A few awkward moments passed. Turk felt as if he should be able to offer something to the others, consolation or something. He felt responsible for Tiny. He’d been killed protecting him, after all. But there was nothing to say, nothing that wouldn’t sound bizarrely stupid.

He asked Dread for water, but the trooper was listening to something else.

“Truck,” he said, grabbing his pistol with his good hand. “Couple of them.”

A funnel of dust appeared down the ridge.

Grease was staring at the vehicles when Turk reached him.

“Three Kaviran tactical vehicles, and a pair of two-and-a-half-ton trucks,” Grease told him. The Kaviran were Iranian Land Rover knockoffs. “Two miles off, maybe a little more. They’re coming right up this way.”

12

Zen stared at the number on his Blackberry phone. It looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it or the name above: DR. GROD.

He looked up from his seat in the stadium box. The National Anthem was still about five minutes off.

What the hell.

“Excuse me,” he told his guests, a pair of junior congressmen from Florida who had supported one of his bills in the House. “I guess I should take this. It’s on my personal line.”

He wheeled himself back a few feet and hit the talk button.

“This is Zen.”

“Senator Stockard?”

“This is Zen. What can I do for you?”

“It’s Gerry Rodriguez from the Vegas clinic. Remember me from Dreamland? I know it’s been a while.”

“Gerry.” Zen closed his eyes, trying to associate the name with Dreamland.

“I had interviewed you as a follow-up to the experiments that followed, well, what the press ended up calling the ‘nerve center experiments.’ The cell regeneration group.”

“Right, right, right.” The experiments he remembered; Gerry he didn’t.

“You asked if I ever came up with anything… about regenerating the spinal tissue. If there was a project—”

“Sure.” Zen glanced toward the front of his box. The two congressmen were rising; the National Anthem was about to begin.

“I’m going to be in Washington tomorrow, as it happens. And I’d like to talk to you. If, uh, we could arrange it. I know your schedule is pretty tight, but—”

Zen got requests like this all the time: scientists looking for direction on how to get funding — and often specifically handouts. Standard Operating Procedure was to fend them off to one of his aides.

“Come around to the office and we can discuss it then,” he told his caller.

“Um, when?”

“Whenever. I don’t have my appointments handy. Tomorrow, the next day. See Cheryl. She’ll take care of you.”

“Great. I—”

“Listen, I’m sorry. I have to go.” Zen hit the end call button and rolled toward the front of the box just as the music began.

13

The Iranian military column was too close for them to simply avoid. Granderson decided their best bet was simply to play through — keep moving along the road, moving with purpose, and hope to pass the column without hassle.

It almost worked.

With the car in the lead, the American caravan quickly set out, moving along the scratch road as quickly as it could. As they approached the lead Kaviran, the Israeli tucked as far to the side as he dared, the wheels of the car edging into the soft dirt. The Kaviran kept going. Turk, who had his head back against the car seat, caught a glimpse of the driver, eyes fixed on the road ahead, worried about getting past the pickup and truck. The next Kaviran thumped by. Turk saw the passenger in the front of the third Kaviran turn toward them, craning his neck to see inside.

“Faster,” muttered Grease.

But the Israeli was struggling to keep the vehicle simply moving. The two troop trucks hogged the road, and the only way to pass them was to swerve onto the loose gravel at the side. The Israeli waited until the last possible moment, then pitched the car to the right, drifting precariously toward a drop-off on the other side. They held the road, though just barely. Turk grabbed the handle of the door next to him as the car slipped around, the back wheels sliding free on the gravel.

Clear of the last truck, they had just started to accelerate when Turk heard a loud pop behind them. It sounded a little like a firecracker or a backfire, not a bullet, and he at first couldn’t make sense of it. In the next second, Grease barked at the Israeli to keep going and get the hell out of there. Turk turned around, trying to see what was going on, but all he saw was dust swirling everywhere, a massive tornado of yellow edged with brown. Reaching to the floor, he retrieved his rifle. By the time he got it, Grease had leaned over from the front and was pushing down on his shoulders, yelling at him to stay down.

“We have to help them,” protested Turk.

“Just stay the hell down.”

The next few minutes passed in a blur, the Israeli going as fast as he could up the road, Grease holding Turk down while he tried to get the rest of the team on the radio. The jagged hills played havoc with the low-intercept; he kept calling to the others without a response. Turk struggled to free himself even as he realized there was little he could do.

By the time Grease let go, the Israeli had started braking. They came around a curve in the mountain, swerving into a descent and two switchbacks until finally coming to a flat piece of land. He pulled over behind a tumble of rocks.

“Where are our guys?” demanded Turk.

“Easy,” said Grease, letting him go. “You’re more important than all of us combined. We’ll sort it out.”

Turk’s legs shook when they first touched the dirt. He took a few steps toward the road before Grease caught him, the Delta trooper’s thick fingers clamping hard into his arm.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Grease demanded.

Turk spun toward him. Their faces were bare inches apart. “I’m not going to stay back while our guys are getting pounded.”

“Our job isn’t to save them.”

“Screw that.”

“No,” said Grease firmly. “Your mission is more important than their lives. Much more important. If you fail — they fail. They don’t want you hurt.”

Flustered, Turk opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t.

“Listen,” said the Israeli. “Something’s coming.”

They ran back to the rocks, Grease dragging Turk with him. Turk took a knee and peered out, trying to sort his feelings. Grease was absolutely right — and yet he felt responsible for the others. In his gut he knew he had to help them, no matter the cost.

The curve of the hills muffled the noise at first, and it wasn’t until the pickup appeared that Turk was sure the vehicles were theirs, and only theirs.

Granderson leaned out the passenger-side window of the troop truck. The truck had been battered, the windshield and side window completely blown out, and half the front fender hung down. “What the hell are you stopped for?” he yelled. “Go! Go!”

“Are you OK?” Turk shouted.

“Just get the hell out of here!” yelled the Delta captain. “Just go, go go! Damn. Grease! Get the hell out of here.”

“We’re going,” he said, practically throwing Turk into the car.

They stopped a half hour later, in the shadow of the foothills, within sight of Jandagh, a small city that commanded one of the north-south valleys at the edge of the desert. Old archeological digs, long abandoned, sat nearby. Windswept sand pushed across low piles of rocks; the outlines of forgotten pits spread before them in an intricate geometric pattern, disturbed by an occasional outlier.

The troopers had blown up the two trucks with grenade launchers they’d taken from the barracks but were still badly mauled; the only one in the truck who hadn’t been hit by bullets or shrapnel was Granderson, who miraculously survived without a scratch. Green was the worst; he’d taken shots in both legs and lost considerable blood. It was small consolation, but they’d killed all of the Iranians.

The back of their stolen troop truck had been turned into a makeshift rolling clinic. Turk climbed up, talking to the men as Grease watched from below. Dread tried to make a joke about seeing the “beautiful Iranian outback,” but it fell flat. The canvas top had been punctured by bullets, but the air inside still hung heavy and fetid, smelling of blood and cordite.

Granderson came back from the pickup to get Turk and figure out what to do next. Turk had been lingering with Green. It seemed impossible that the solid old warrior could be wounded, as if his body was made of steel and concrete, yet his legs and fresh green uniform blouse were covered with blood.

“I’m good, Pilot,” he kept muttering. “I’ll be all right.”

There was nothing Turk could do for Green, or any of them. He slipped out and walked around the side with Granderson, who was explaining what had happened.

“The passenger in the front of the first troop truck jumped out with a handgun and tried to wave down the pickup,” Granderson told him. “We didn’t stop. When he started to fire, Gorud and the troop truck ran him down, but the second truck swerved to block us. We fought it out.”

It hadn’t taken too long — three minutes, five — but Granderson was worried that they got off a call for help; one of the command vehicles had disappeared before they could fire at it.

“Hills are so bad Grease couldn’t even hear your radios,” said Turk. “Probably, they couldn’t get anything out.”

“Maybe.” Granderson turned and pointed to the troop truck. “We won’t get far with this. It’s pounded to crap. And the pickup’s not too much better. We’ll have to steal something from Jandagh.”

It was just visible in the distance, off to the right. Turk rubbed the sand off his face and looked at the dunes scattered between them and the small city. Yellow buildings floated below a wavy haze. Patches of green appeared like bunting amid the parched landscape and distant bricks.

“We’ll never get a truck out of there during the day without being seen,” said Gorud, walking over with the Israeli. His left arm was wrapped in a thick bandage. “Assuming we find one.”

“Sitting here is not a good idea,” said the Israeli.

They studied the GPS and the paper map. They were roughly two hundred miles from the target area, and that was if they went on a straight line. Even the best roads would add another hundred miles.

“Maybe the best thing to do is split up,” Gorud suggested to Granderson. “Take the pilot west for the mission. You wait until dark, then take the truck and go north to the escape route. Route 81 is nearby.”

“We’re not leaving without you,” said Turk.

“Gorud is right,” suggested the Israeli.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Turk. He glanced at Grease. The soldier’s stone face offered no hint about what he should say or do. “What if we wait until nightfall?” he asked. “Then we slip into the city and take what we need.”

“Not with wounded,” said Granderson.

“What other cities are there along the way?” Turk asked. “We could go a little distance, stretch it a little bit, then steal something.”

That seemed promising, until they examined the map. The desert west of Jandagh was mostly dunes; the car probably wouldn’t make it and the pickup might not either. So the only route possible was north, where about eighty miles of travel would take them to a cluster of hill cities and oases. If the truck made it that far, it could go the entire way.

Before they could make a decision, Turk heard helicopters in the distance. As they scrambled back to the vehicles, he had an idea.

“We’ll go back up the hill,” he yelled. “We’ll make it look like we’re investigating what happened.”

He spotted the helicopters a few minutes after the car pulled onto the road. There were two, both Shabaviz 2-75s, Iranian reverse-engineered variants of Bell’s ubiquitous Huey series. They looked like Bell 214s, with a thick, rectangular-shaped engine box above the cabin. Dressed in drab green paint, they were definitely military aircraft. They flew from the north, arcing over the sand in the general direction of the gunfight, though about two miles from it.

“They going to be close enough to see what happened there?” Turk asked as they drove back up the road. They were going as slow as the Israeli could manage without stalling the car.

“Absolutely,” said Grease.

The helicopters continued southward for a half minute, then turned in a circle and headed toward the vehicles. Grease radioed a warning to the others but got no response, even though they were within a few hundred yards of each other.

Turk fingered his rifle as the helicopters approached. They appeared unarmed, but someone inside the back cabin with a machine gun could do a hell of a lot of damage.

On the other hand, if the choppers did land, the crews might be overpowered.

Turk didn’t know how to fly a helicopter, but he certainly had every incentive to try.

The helicopters skipped low near the side of the mountain, passing near the vehicles. They flew over the car and the small caravan and promptly banked away, back in their original direction.

The sound of the rotors grew steadily softer. The Israeli continued for a short while and found a place to turn around. They passed the pickup as it started into a three-point turn.

The troop truck wheezed up the road, then just stopped as they drew near. Granderson got out and started to climb underneath. As he did, the truck lurched backward. Granderson froze, then looked underneath gingerly as Dome pressed hard on the brake.

“Oil case is dinked all to hell,” the captain told them. “There’s mud all across the top of the chassis. Must be from the fluid leaking.”

“We can back it down to the spot where we were,” suggested Turk.

There wasn’t too much question now. They needed another vehicle. They were going into Jandagh.

14

If they weren’t going to wait until nightfall, Gorud suggested, then the best approach would be to drive straight in and attempt to buy — or steal — an extra vehicle. And in that case, the most likely candidates were Gorud and the Israeli, since they both spoke the language well and were reasonably familiar with the country. But Gorud was wounded and wouldn’t be much in a fight, so Turk suggested that he go in his place, which would have the advantage of leaving behind a guide in case something went wrong. Grease, his shadow, would go with him.

No one else liked the idea, but it didn’t take long for them to see it was the most practical alternative if they weren’t going to wait until night. They worked out a cover story on the way — they were Russians, one of their vehicles had broken down, and they wanted to buy or lease another to make it across the desert to the town where they were supposed to meet an official from the oil ministry.

Jandagh, like many Iranian cities, had a broad but only lightly used main street. It was anchored by two roundabouts on the southern end. Trees lined both sides of the road, though their short branches provided little shade. Beyond them to the west, wind blew the loose sand off the dunes, driving it toward the white walls of the houses. It hadn’t been exactly cool in the hills, but now the heat built oppressively, overwhelming the car’s air conditioner and drawing so much sweat from Turk that his white button-down shirt soaked through, graying with the flying grit.

They saw no one on the street until they neared the second traffic circle. Two children were standing in the shade of a doorstep, staring at the car. Farther on, a small knot of men sat on some boxes and leaned against the facade of a building that looked to Turk like an old-fashioned candy shop. A police car sat opposite the end of the circle, its lone occupant watching from behind closed windows.

They passed it slowly, then continued along the road, which was divided by a center island of trees, these in slightly better condition than the others. Turk guessed that there might be a dozen people walking or standing in front of the buildings on either side of the next quarter mile of road. On the right side the buildings were separated by long alleys in a perfect if small grid; from above they would look like a maze for learning disabled rats. The buildings on the other side were larger and more randomly arranged. Most met the public with plain walls of stuccoed stone.

“See anything worth taking?” Grease asked the Israeli.

“Nothing.”

Another large intersection marked the end of the quarter-mile main street. The Israeli passed through it cautiously. The buildings surrounding them were residential, and there were more vehicles on the side of the street — many more, including several vans that Turk thought they might take.

“Easy enough to find once the sun goes down,” said the Israeli. “There are too many people around to try it now.”

They avoided the old city and fort area on the hill, turning left and heading toward the highway. Here, there were more vehicles, including several tractor trailers parked around a large open space at the side of the highway. An array of small shops stood at the city end of the space; they were family-run restaurants. Men stood in most of the doorways, bored touts who perked up as soon as they saw the car, but then slouched back when it became obvious it wasn’t stopping.

“There was a junkyard just where we first turned,” said Grease when the road opened up. “There were some cars and a pickup or two. We might try there.”

The Israeli turned around.

The junkyard was actually a garage, the finest not only in Jandagh but the best in any desert in the world, according to the gap-toothed man in his seventies who ambled over to greet them when they got out of the car. The Israeli gave him a brief version of the cover story, but the old man didn’t seem too interested in why they were there. He had several vehicles they would be interested in, he said, urging them toward a group parked in front of the ramshackle buildings on the lot.

None of the cars was less than a decade old, and a few appeared to be missing significant parts, ranging from a fender to an exhaust system. The prices, as best as Turk could tell, were commensurate; the highest was only 50 million rials—$2,500, give or take. The Israeli haggled over the prices, but it was all show; none of these vehicles would suit their purposes.

Turk saw one that might — a school bus, parked next to a pair of vans and a panel truck at the far end of the lot. The Israeli saw it as well, but he worked the owner like a pro, meandering around, arguing, dismissing, obtaining a price for everything and committing to nothing. Eventually, he settled on one of the vans next to the bus, going back and forth on the price and requirements — he wanted new seat cushions, which the dealer couldn’t do, and a full tank of gas, which would have come close to doubling the price of eight million rials. Feigning frustration, he pointed to the school bus and asked how much that was.

One hundred million Rials, with some diesel thrown in.

Too, too much. The Israeli went back to the van.

“I’m going to get him to help me buy my next car,” Turk whispered to Grease.

Grease didn’t answer. He was gazing across the empty lot at the side, to the far road. The police car they’d seen earlier had driven over and parked nearby.

“Watching us?” said Turk when he saw it.

“That or they’re thinking of upgrading.”

The Israeli spent a few more minutes haggling before the lot owner gave up in frustration, deciding that he was just a tire-kicker.

“We’ll come back,” whispered the Israeli, walking over to them. “I think we can steal the bus.”

“Cop’s watching us,” said Grease under his breath.

“I see.”

They got into their car and drove a short distance to a small restaurant. The Israeli did all the talking here, ordering an early dinner and filling the server in on their backstory — Russians, visiting sites that promised to yield oil, and how bad was the earthquake? The story was intended for the policeman, who had followed but stayed outside; surely he would come in and question the owner if he didn’t stop them himself. Turk and Grease played along, exchanging bits of Russian while the Israeli chatted up the waiter, who turned out to be the owner of the place.

The man’s face grew worried when pressed for details about the earthquake. He had heard rumors, he said, that it wasn’t an earthquake at all, but an attack by American stealth bombers. If so, there would be hell to pay, he predicted; the Americans would be wiped off the face of the earth.

The Israeli pretended to translate all of this into Russian, then translated their “responses,” agreeing with the Iranian that the Americans were the worst people on earth, always ready to stir trouble. Absolute devils.

No, said the shop owner, it was just their government that was bad; he had met Americans several times, and always they were polite and even generous. It was a shame that their leaders were so horrible.

Grease grinned when the Israeli relayed this after the owner disappeared into the back. The dishes came out shortly — rice and vegetables covered with a thin sauce. The sauce had a curried taste, which ordinarily would have turned Turk’s nose if not his stomach, but he was hungry, and he finished his small plateful quickly.

They spent just under an hour in the café. During that time, they could have been tourists or even the Russian oilmen they claimed to be, oblivious to the dangers both of their mission and Iran in general. But reality confronted them as soon as they emerged — the policeman who’d been watching them earlier had been joined by a companion. They were now camped on the front bumper of their car.

They’d obviously searched the vehicle — the two AK-47s they’d left under the seats as a precaution were on the hood.

“I’ll handle it,” whispered the Israeli. “Stay back a bit. They just want bribes. Speak Russian only.”

The Israeli stormed toward them, yelling in Russian that they were thieves and waving papers in their faces. The Iranians wilted under the pressure of his complaints, backing toward the car and gesturing with open palms.

Grease casually positioned his hand at the back of his right hip, ready to grab the pistol hidden in the small of his back. Turk’s pistol was at his belt, under the baggy shirt — harder to grab. He stood with his arms crossed, trying to rehearse grabbing it in his mind. All he could think about was an infamous case a few years before back in the States, where a football star accidentally shot his leg while grabbing a Glock from his waistband.

The Israeli modulated his tone, and it was clear they were now negotiating the price of a “fine.” Turk started to relax, until he saw Grease’s mouth tighten. He followed Grease’s stare out to the highway, where another police car was just turning toward them.

“Getting expensive,” said Turk.

“Let’s hope that’s all it is.”

Grease took a small step toward their car, then another. Turk realized what he was doing — he wanted to be as close as possible to the rifles if there was trouble. Turk decided to take a more direct route; he walked over to the Israeli as if listening in. The Israeli swatted the air, waving him off; Turk slid back against the fender of the car. Grease joined him.

The policeman the Israeli had been negotiating with suddenly stopped talking, noticing the other police car for the first time. He yelled something at the Israeli and pushed him back, his fist suddenly in the Israeli’s chest.

The other officer went for his gun.

Grease got his first, firing two shots into the man’s chest. Turk grabbed both AKs and ducked behind their car as Grease fired at the policeman they’d been negotiating with. The police car that had come off the highway, meanwhile, sped toward Grease and the Israeli. Turk rose and began firing, riddling the passenger compartment with gunfire as the car careened across the lot toward Grease. The sergeant leapt out of the way at the last moment, but the Israeli was caught by the back end of the police car as it fishtailed. He fell back, just barely missing being pinned as one vehicle smashed against the other.

Turk had backed away from both vehicles, but the impact drove the police car against the front of their car and pushed it all the way to where he was standing, knocking him onto his back.

“Turk, Turk!” yelled Grease.

“I’m good, I’m good.”

He struggled to his feet, the rifle still in his hands. Grease made sure the policemen were all dead, then went to the Israeli, who was bent over the hood of the second car.

“I’m all right,” said the Israeli. “We have to get out of here.”

Turk looked into the police car. His bullets had shattered the heads of both men inside; the interior was full of blood. He pulled open the door, then pushed the driver toward his companion.

“What are you doing?” Grease asked as he got in.

“I’ll back it up.”

The car had stalled. Turk turned the key but nothing happened. The smell of blood and torn body parts started to turn his stomach. As calmly as he could, he put the car in park, put his foot on the brake, and tried the ignition again. The car started; he backed up.

Grease helped the Israeli limp back to the vehicle. Though in obvious pain, he remained silent, moving stoically. Turk backed the police car out of the way, then got out and ran to the others.

“We better get the bus now,” Turk told Grease.

“They’ll look for it.”

“You don’t think they’ll look for this?”

They drove over to the lot. The man who ran the garage must have seen or at least heard the gunfire, but he was nowhere to be seen. Turk pulled near the school bus and got out. Unsure how to work the exterior lock — it was a handle that turned on the front part of the cab — he forced the door open with his rifle, then dashed up the steps.

The key wasn’t in the ignition. He dashed back down, running toward the small building where the office was. The door was locked. Turk put his shoulder against it twice but failed to budge it, so he took the rifle, put it point-blank against the lock and fired. The gun jerked practically out of his hands, but the burst did enough damage that the door swung open. He pushed in, expecting to see the owner cowering inside, but the place was empty.

A large board with keys stood by the door. Turk tossed the ones that were obviously car keys, but that still left him with half a dozen to try.

Outside, Grease had lifted the Israeli into the bus, then gone to work jumping the ignition wires. He had the bus running by the time Turk appeared with the keys.

“Take the car and follow,” he yelled. “Let’s go. Back to the others.”

15

Captain Vahid spent the morning after the attack in an administrative “freeze.” While the rest of his squadron conducted a patrol around the scientific research area, the pilot was told to prepare a personal brief for the area air commander. That meeting was scheduled for 8:00 A.M.; it was postponed twice, then indefinitely “delayed.” He sat the entire time in a vacant room next to the squadron commander’s office, waiting with nothing to read or do. The only furniture were two chairs, both wooden; one was sturdy but uncomfortable, the other so rickety that he didn’t dare to use it even as a foot rest.

A pair of plainclothes guards from the interior ministry stood at the door. He wasn’t under arrest, but he wasn’t allowed to leave either. He wasn’t given anything to eat.

Vahid had reviewed his mission tapes, and knew that what he had shot down was some sort of light plane, not a drone and certainly not a B-2. It seemed impossible that the plane had made any sort of attack itself, or been involved in one. He had a host of theories, but they boiled down to this: either there had been a genuine earthquake, or the nuclear program had a major accident.

He favored the latter.

Vahid sat in the uncomfortable wooden chair until his butt was sore, got up and paced around until he tired of that, then sat back down. He repeated the ritual until after two in the afternoon, when one of the squadron commander’s aides appeared in the doorway to tell him that the general was finally on his way.

Vahid straightened his uniform. In the days of the Shah — long before he was even born — the Iranian air force was a prominent organization, equipped with the finest fighters in the world — F-14s and F-4 Phantoms. They trained with the Americans, and while the larger Israeli air force might claim it was better, many rated the Iranians just as good. The branch was an elite part of the Iran military and its society.

The overthrow of the Shah hurt the air force tremendously. An order for F-16s was canceled. Needed parts became almost impossible to get. Worse, though, were the questions, innuendo, and accusations leveled at the pilots and the service in general. The air force had supported the Shah to the bitter end, and in the Revolution’s wake, many of the officers were shunned, purged, and worse.

The service regained a measure of respect with the blood of its members during the Iran-Iraq war, where its aces shot down a number of Iraqis and carried out many successful bombing missions. But some thirty years later, the air force continued to be viewed with suspicion by many, especially the government and the Revolutionary Guard, which was jealous of any entity that might have a claim to power and influence.

Politics had always been a distant concern for Vahid, who joined the air force only because he wanted to fly. But the longer he sat in the little room with its bare walls and blue-shaded fluorescents, the more he came to realize that he was a pawn in something he didn’t understand. So when the door opened and General Ari Shirazi — the head not of his wing or subcommand but the entire air force — entered, Vahid was far less surprised than he would have been twenty-four hours before.

The general studied him for a moment.

“You’re hungry,” Shirazi said, more an order than a statement. “Come and eat.”

Vahid followed him from the room, falling in behind the general’s two aides and trailed by a pair of bodyguards. They walked out of the building to the cafeteria, where the VIP room had been reserved for the general. Two sergeants were waiting near the table, already stiff at attention, as the general entered. Shirazi ignored them, gesturing to Vahid to sit before taking his own chair. He folded his arms, worked his eyes slowly across the pilot’s face, then turned to one of the sergeants.

“Get the captain some lunch,” said the general.

“Sir, for you?” asked one of the sergeants.

“I am not hungry.”

The general placed his hands on his thighs and leaned forward. Energy flooded into his face, and determination.

“Tell me, in your own words, everything that happened,” said the general. “Hold nothing back. Begin with the alert.”

“I was with my plane…” started Vahid.

He spent the next thirty minutes relaying every detail he could, ignoring the food that arrived. The general listened without interrupting; when Vahid paused too long, he gestured with his index finger that he should go on. Finally, Vahid was back on the ground, taxiing to the hangar area. He recounted the debriefings quickly, adding that he had not had a good look at the damage to the plane himself.

“Do you have the identification of the ground unit that fired at you and struck your plane?” asked the general.

“No, sir. I–I’m not even sure if it was a ground unit.”

“What else would it be?”

“I wondered if an airplane had been far above and fired down from a great distance, random shots, or a missile that went undetected—”

Vahid stopped. The theory was too ridiculous to be credible. The way he remembered the incident, he had been struck from above. But it was impossible. His mind surely had been playing games.

“We’ve looked at the damage,” said the general. “Multiple shots from larger caliber antiaircraft weapons. There is a Sa’ir battery south of Natanz. The weapon was fired; undoubtedly that was your assassin. Fortunately,” he added dryly, “the battery is a Sepa¯h unit.”

Sepa¯h was the shortened term for the Sepa¯h-e Pa¯sda¯ra¯n-e Enqela¯b-e Esla¯mi, the Revolutionary Guard. The general’s implied slur would have been daring in a lesser man; Shirazi was obviously sure of his position — or planning to have the pilot executed shortly.

Vahid was not sure which.

“You will leave us, and close the doors,” the general told the servers. They quickly ducked back into the kitchen. He glanced at the guards and his aides; they stepped out, too.

“There was an accident at their facility,” the general told Vahid. “It is clear from the seismic data. But they are trying to cover it up. That is impossible. Scientists are already explaining about their information. There are some near the president—”

The general stopped abruptly, considering his next words very carefully.

“Some members of the project are claiming that the Americans blew up the facility,” said the general. “They have no evidence for this, of course. On the contrary, we know that was impossible — there were no bombers in the air, or missiles. They would have been on our radar. And you would have seen them.”

“Yes, General.”

“The reports of B-2s — you saw none.”

“None. Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.” Vahid nodded. And then he thought: This is odd. It’s the truth, and yet saying it feels like a lie.

“Clearly, it was an accident,” continued the general, “but those jackals will do anything to keep themselves alive. They take no responsibility. Nothing. None.”

The general’s face reddened, blood flowing with his anger. It happened in a flash, as if he were a computer image changed by the flick of a button. Vahid lowered his gaze to the table. He was helpless, really, trapped by powers that regarded him as little more than an ant.

With the grace of the one true God, thought Vahid, they will shoot me and I will die quickly.

“I am going to make use of this incident, son, as others will. I tell you this because I want you to have confidence — others will pressure you to change your story. But you will stick to the truth. Because if you do stick to the truth, you will have a powerful protector. Do you understand?”

“I think I do.”

“Just stick to the truth. To what you saw.”

“Yes, General.”

“Once an announcement is made, then that will be the government’s position,” continued the general, his tone now heavy with sarcasm. “There will be questions for you. Simply trust that I will watch out for you. And that your career will proceed accordingly.”

Vahid faced a truly Faustian bargain. If he did what the general said, he could well be targeted by the backers of the nuclear program, including the Guards. Shirazi, so confident in an air force base, might not be nearly as powerful out in the wide world. Hitching his career, and more likely his life, to the general could prove disastrous.

On the other hand, what was the alternative? Going against Shirazi was simply impossible.

I just want to fly, thought Vahid. I don’t want to be in the middle of this at all.

“Are you OK, son?” asked the general.

“Yes, General.”

“We’re agreed?”

“Of course. I can only tell the truth.”

Shirazi leaned back from the table. “You’re feeling well, now that you’ve eaten?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, why are you not back in the air, then?” asked the general.

“I… was waiting to speak to you, sir.”

“Good, very good.”

The general started to rise. Vahid shot to his feet. “Sir — the plane?”

“Which plane?” asked the general.

“The light plane that I encountered.”

“Ah. A spy for the Israelis — delicious — a member of Sepa¯h. The plane was stolen from Isafahan. It flew south, then to the Esfahan region, southeast of the Natanz complexes. A body has been recovered. You don’t think he was trying to bomb the plant, do you, Captain?”

It would make a great propaganda story, thought Vahid, and he would be the hero, as he had shot down the aircraft. But anyone with any knowledge of aircraft and their capabilities would scoff and point to a thousand inconsistencies.

“No,” said Vahid.

“Good. Because there were no bombs or evidence of any aboard. There may have been a passenger. We’re searching. As are the Pasdaran.” The general gave him a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “Get back in the air, son. The sooner you fly, the better you will feel.”

16

The bus’s body was battered, but its drive train was in top condition; Turk had trouble keeping up as they drove back to the site where the rest of the team was holed up. The troopers accepted the appearance of the bus without comment, as if they’d been expecting one all along. Turk told Granderson all that had happened as they carried Green into the back of bus. It started in disconnected bits, punctuated by gasps of air. Even to Turk it sounded unreal.

“Was it just a cock-up?” asked Granderson. “Or were they looking for us?”

“It might have been — I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

They got the wounded inside the bus, then took off, Granderson in the lead at the wheel of the school bus, followed by the Israeli alone in the pickup, and Gorud, Grease, and Turk together in the car. They let the bus get a little ahead, figuring it would be what the Iranian authorities would be looking for; the others would close the gap if there were trouble.

Gorud had plotted a route east of the city over mining and desert roads that would keep them away from most towns. But the roads were nearly as treacherous as driving through the town would have been. Soon after they started, they hit a long stretch of hard-packed pavement completely covered with sand. Even though the bus and truck passed over it without a problem, Gorud lost traction for about twenty yards until the front wheels found the hard surface again.

“Maybe one of us should drive,” suggested Turk, noticing that Gorud’s injured arm had given him problems.

“Yeah,” said Grease.

“Let me,” added Turk. “You can watch with the gun.”

“I’m OK to drive,” protested the CIA officer.

“It’s better this way,” said Turk, tapping him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

They changed places. Turk, too, had trouble with the loose sand. Once on the highway, the car steadied and he settled down a bit. He didn’t relax — his heart still pounded like a racehorse nearing the finish line. But his view expanded, the cloud of fear lifting slightly. It was as if the horizon had pushed back — he could see farther out and plan before reacting.

Then, almost imperceptibly, either seeking relief from the present or simply lulled into a relaxed moment, his mind began to wander. He thought of Li and their last moments in the hotel room. He ached to see her. He felt her weight against his shoulder. He wanted to brush his fingers across her breasts.

Grease’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “You getting tired of driving?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Careful where you are on the road.”

Turk steered back to the lane gently, trying to stay in control. He glanced over his shoulder; Gorud was dozing in the back. He was tempted to ask Grease if he thought they’d get out of this, but the question seemed too defeatist, as if it implied he’d already decided they wouldn’t.

“They’re looking for a place to change the bus,” Grease said after talking to the others by radio. “I don’t know if we’re going to reach your target area by tonight.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that myself.”

“You have to talk to them, don’t you? You haven’t checked in.”

“Oh, God.”

“Keep driving. They’ll wait.”

Turk hunched forward, leaning toward the wheel as if that would help him focus. He needed to use his pilot’s head — he needed to be clear and precise, not dreamy, not distracted. Being on the ground unhinged his concentration.

No more thinking of Li. No more thinking, period. Except for the job.

“Road,” said Grease.

This time Turk jerked back. His fingers gripped the wheel so tightly they started to cramp.

“I’m thinking maybe we just abort,” said Grease, his voice almost a whisper. “Go straight north while we still can.”

Shocked, Turk jerked his head. “No fuckin’ way.”

Grease stared at him for half a moment, face blank. Then, though the rest of his face hinted at sadness, the ends of his lips peaked upward ever so slightly. “You’ve been hanging around with us too long.”

The first plane passed nearby about an hour later.

They were south of Sar-e-Kavir, a small town in the shadow of the desert hill where Highway 81 connected with the east-west highway they needed to take. Turk couldn’t see the aircraft, but from the sound he knew it was propeller-driven, something small, very likely similar to the aircraft they had crashed the night before. It didn’t linger, but that was small consolation; for safety’s sake they had to conclude they had been spotted.

Not that they had many options.

Granderson turned up a mountain path about two miles from the town. The steep and rocky path turned out to be a driveway to a pair of small farms dug into the rock outcroppings. Both had been abandoned some years before, though when they first drove up they didn’t know that, and they spent ten minutes checking and clearing the dilapidated far buildings on the larger of the two properties. Sure they were secure, they took the bus into the barn, where there was just barely enough room amid the clutter of old crates and a dilapidated trailer to hide it.

They parked the pickup under a lean-to roof shed at the side; the rear poked out a little, but it would be hard to see even directly overhead. Turk drove the car fifty yards down the hill to what had once been a grove of pomegranate trees but was now mostly a collection of dried stumps. Here and there green shoots and a leaf struggled from the twisted gray trunks, nature refusing to give up even though the underground spring that once supplied the crisscross of irrigation ditches had dried to bone.

He got out of the car and walked a short distance away before using the satellite radio to check in.

Breanna Stockard herself answered. “Turk, are you OK? Where have you been? Why haven’t you checked in?”

“We had a setback in Jandagh,” he told her. “The police — there was an incident in town. A lot of our guys are hurt. We escaped with a bus.”

“The mission tonight, can you—”

“We won’t make it in time.”

Breanna went silent.

“I’ll be in place tomorrow,” said Turk. “Tonight’s going to be too tough. We’re still pretty far away. And we’re pretty banged up.”

“All right. All right. Listen, I know where you are. We have intercepts from the Iranian police and the interior ministry about a stolen bus in one of the towns where you spent time. Is that you?”

“Must be.”

“All right. Stand by.”

Turk heard another aircraft in the distance. This was another propeller plane, but larger; two engines, he thought.

“The report concerning the bus stolen in Jandagh talks about terrorists,” said Breanna. “They’re looking for Russians.”

“That fits with our cover. Do they mention the other vehicles?”

“Negative. The descriptions are vague: three Russian males. Some of these communiqués claim it’s a robbery.” Breanna paused, obviously skimming through screens of data. “They haven’t made a connection with the attack.”

“OK.”

“Turk, what kind of condition are you in?”

“I’m fine. Not a scratch.”

“Your team?”

“Very shot up,” he said. “Only Grease, me, and Granderson are really at full strength. We have two guys — no, three now — who are just immobile. Coming in and out of consciousness. Everybody else is hurt to some degree, though they can still fight.”

“Have you considered aborting?”

“No.”

“You’ve already completed the mission you were sent on.”

“We…” Part of him wanted to say yes, they were through; it was time to go home, time to bail.

But the larger part wanted desperately to complete the mission — the next phase. Because the object was to stop the Iranian weapons program. If there was another site, they had to hit it.

So much of a sacrifice, though. For all of them. Was it worth it? Couldn’t they just send in bombers and be done with it?

There was no guarantee they’d make it out alive in that case either. Better to go ahead. Better to do his duty.

At such a cost.

“I can do this, Bree,” Turk insisted. “We just have to get to the other side of the desert. And if they don’t really know what we’re up to—”

“I can’t guarantee that they won’t,” Breanna told him. “The reaction force can’t reach you that far deep in Iran.”

“It’s all right. I’ve done harder things.”

In the air, perhaps, but not on the ground. Definitely not on the ground. But Breanna didn’t call him on it.

“I want you to contact me at the top of the next hour,” she told him. “Do you understand?”

“I will if I can. Sometimes—”

“No. You are to check in every hour. I need to know you’re still alive.”

“I will call you if I can,” he said, hitting the end call button before she could respond.

17

Breanna turned to Reid as soon as the transmission from Turk ended. “They’ve taken heavy casualties. I think we should pull them out.”

“It’s not our decision, Breanna.”

“They’re all shot up.”

“He’s not.”

“Let the bombers go in. If they stay, it’s suicide.”

“It already is suicide.” Reid picked up the phone and told the computerized operator to get him the President.

Twenty minutes later Breanna and Reid were on Lee Highway, speeding toward the White House. As a security precaution, the driver had always to follow a different route; at four in the morning traffic was not a particular concern, and for once they were going on a relatively direct route.

Reid stared out the darkened window at the cars passing in the distance. The lights in the parking lots of the buildings and on the signs and streets melted together in a blur.

He would tell the President that they should continue. It would inevitably mean the death of his officer, Gorud, of the Whiplash pilot, and whoever remained from the rest of the team. The Israeli operative, a deep, valuable plant with an impeccable cover. And a family.

But Reid knew absolutely that this was the right thing to do. The nano-UAVs had done a perfect job on the first strike; they would succeed here as well. The result would be far more desirable than a missile strike. No matter what the Iranians did, the scientists who rebuilt the program would never be sure whether there had been an attack or a critical flaw.

Delaying the strike twenty-four hours would increase the odds of success. Even if the analysts didn’t identify which of the two sites was the one with the bomb — or if they decided both had enough material to be a threat — the delay would give Rubeo and his people more time to work on the programming for the mission.

The scientist had demurred when asked for a prediction about the outcome of a split attack. The first strike had been heavily modeled. This one was still being calculated.

“Lovely night,” said Breanna. It was first time she’d spoken since they got in the car.

“It is.” Reid forced a smile. He had grown to like the younger woman, though he felt at times she was too easily influenced by her Pentagon superiors. “Though it’s almost morning now.”

“Technically, it is morning.”

“How’s the senator?”

“Still stubborn as ever,” said Breanna. “And still swooning over the Nationals. Their losing streak has him in the dumps.”

“I hear there’s talk he might run for President.”

“God help us.”

The words were so emphatic that Reid didn’t know how to respond. He remained silent the rest of the way to the White House.

President Todd had managed barely an hour of sleep, but she felt a surge of energy as Breanna completed briefing the current situation, ending with a PowerPoint slide showing the general vicinity of the two possible targets.

Charles Lovel, the Defense Secretary, opened his mouth to speak. Todd cut him off.

“The question comes down to this,” said the President. “If we wait twenty-four hours, do we guarantee success?”

“There are no guarantees for anything, ever,” said Blitz, the national security director.

“The odds will be greatly improved,” said Reid, sitting next to Breanna. “Getting our pilot in place helps if there is a problem with the units. True, they were impeccable in the first strike, and compensated well. But I think, as Ms. Stockard said, the human factor increases the chances of success. Plus, we may be able to narrow down the possible targets. At a minimum, we’ll have a better plan for dealing with both facilities.”

“I don’t know that we can afford to guess which of the sites is the real target,” said Blitz. “Not at this point.”

“On the other hand, the odds of the ground team being discovered will also be higher,” said Reid. “And if they’re discovered, we lose them.”

“We may lose them anyway,” said Lovel.

“The Iranians may close the sites,” said the Secretary of State, Alistair Newhaven.

“Twenty-four hours is not enough time to do that,” said Reid.

“If the attack fails—”

“If it fails, we go ahead and we eliminate both sites with B-2 attacks,” said the President, cutting in. “That’s an easy decision.”

“I would vote to launch a B-2 attack now,” said Lovel. “Why wait?”

“Nothing has happened at that site — at either of the possible sites,” said Reid.

“We were rushing to strike tonight,” said Lovel, “because we needed to hit quickly. Now we’re going to delay another twenty-four hours. The sooner we get this over with, the better. For everyone.”

“Not for our people,” said Breanna. “If we strike, if the bombers go in, we’re writing them off. Because they’ll know that the first attack was launched by us, and they’ll be on the alert.”

“I agree it increases their risk,” said General Maximillian Fresco, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fresco had only been on the job for a month, and was still feeling his way — a disappointment to Todd, who had selected him because he seemed determined and, like her, prone to err on the side of hawkishness rather than caution. But maybe he would come around.

“They are already at considerable risk,” said Reid dryly. “No matter what.”

“I think we should pull them out,” said Breanna, her voice quivering. “Then send the bombers in.”

Todd was surprised. She looked at Reid. His expression showed he clearly disagreed. Ordinarily, they were in lockstep; she couldn’t remember a time when they had offered even slightly different opinions.

“Our best chance, overall, is to use the nano-UAVs,” said Reid. “We know they work. We haven’t seen the bunker busters yet. This is our best chance.”

Fresco started to object, but Reid cut him off.

“The Hydras work. They leave no trace of our involvement; they raise no moral or ethical questions if there is a mistake. They limit the casualties strictly to those involved in the program.” Reid sounded like a college professor, summing up a semester’s worth of instruction. “The benefits are obvious. At worst, we have the bombers in reserve.”

Todd agreed. She saw from the corner of her eye that the Secretary of State was going to say something — probably, she thought, questioning Reid’s statement about moral questions: they were, after all, setting off a nuclear explosion, even if it was the Iranian’s own bomb.

There was no need for that debate now.

“I think I’ve heard enough,” she said quickly, raising her hand. “We will delay for twenty-four hours. After that, the bombers will be authorized to attack.”

In the car on the way back to the CIA campus, Breanna fiddled with her personal phone, thumbing through text messages from the past several days, even though she’d read them already. She longed to talk to Zen about the operation but couldn’t.

Her only acceptable alternative was Reid, and she didn’t want to talk to him about anything.

“Why did you change your mind?” asked Reid.

Breanna looked up. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re opposed to the operation now. You weren’t earlier.”

“I’m not opposed.”

“You sounded like you are. Your tone was negative. Even in the presentation.”

“No. I was trying to be neutral. My concern — I just want to get our people out. I feel responsible for them.”

Reid looked at her, his old-man eyes peering into her soul. He was beyond retirement age, and at times like this — deep into an operation, under heavy stress — he looked even older.

He reminded her of her father, once commander of Dreamland, now a virtual recluse.

“Your guilt is misguided,” said Reid.

“I don’t feel guilty.” The words spit out quickly, beyond her control. They weren’t true. “Why would I be guilty?”

“You’re not. That’s my point.”

“I’m responsible for my people. It’s my job to think of them.”

“We are,” said Reid softly. He turned his head toward the driver in the front seat, separated by a thick, clear plastic barrier that made it impossible for him to hear. “But our first responsibility is to the mission. The nano-UAVs are clearly the best choice.”

“Yes,” said Breanna reluctantly. “I can’t disagree.”

18

Walking down from the barn into the abandoned grove, Turk checked his watch, then took out the sat phone. He was a few seconds early, but there was no reason to wait.

“This is Breanna.”

“I’m checking in.”

“Good. What’s your status?”

“Same as it was forty-five minutes ago.”

“We have approval to push the operation off until tomorrow night,” said Breanna. “Twenty-four hours. And then it’s on.”

“Thank you.”

“Turk, we’ve been speaking with WARCOM. The SEAL command landed the recovery team from the Caspian. They’re not going to be able to reach you before the attack. We’re sending as much support as we can, but—”

“I know, I know. It’s all right. We’re good. Don’t worry about me.”

Turk felt a little annoyed — first at Breanna, then at himself for sounding like a teenager fending off an overanxious mom.

“We have a plan,” he added. “We’ll execute it.”

He heard the sound of another aircraft in the distance. It was flying quickly, moving in their direction.

One engine. Loud. The plane must be low.

“Listen, I have to go,” he said to her. “I’ll check back at the top of the next hour.”

He clicked off the satcom, then took a few steps toward the barn before realizing that he would never make it before the plane was overhead. The closest thing to cover nearby was an empty irrigation ditch; he jumped into it. Grease, his constant shadow, followed. They crawled a few yards to a spot where the sides were nearly horizontal and the shadow was thick.

It was another light civilian aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, a later model with a conventional tail instead of the trademark V. Turk saw it flying from the northeast, paralleling the other side of the highway. It looked to be at about eight hundred feet.

He ducked his head, as if believing that if he didn’t see it, it wouldn’t see him.

The plane made another pass, this time to the north. Turk remained prone until the sound sunk into a faint and distant drone.

“I don’t think he saw us.” Turk stood and stretched the muscles in his back, then his legs. He leaned against the soft dirt of the ditch and kicked his toes into the other side. “He would have circled a few times.”

“Maybe,” said Grease, noncommittal.

“When do you think Granderson will be back?” Turk asked. He and the Israeli had taken the pickup into town, hoping to find another vehicle to either buy or steal.

“Soon.”

“I was wondering — maybe it would be better if just you and I went and finished this. Let them take care of their wounded.”

“They’re never going to leave you, Turk. To the last man. They’ll crawl along and bleed out before they let that happen. Every one of them.”

“That wouldn’t make much sense.”

“It’s their mission. It’s their job and duty. Their honor.”

“Together, we attract more attention than if we were on our own. Way more.”

Grease shook his head.

“We could take Gorud,” said Turk. “Because he speaks the language. But we don’t need escorts. I don’t really even need you. No offense.”

“Not happening.”

Turk started to laugh, but Grease’s grim expression warned him off.

“Let’s get inside,” he said instead.

Granderson and the Israeli returned not fifteen minutes later, the latter driving an open farm truck. The truck had been parked in the town center, in front of a small building. They’d driven up in the pickup, spotted it, jumped out and walked over. The keys were in the ignition.

“Pretty quiet town,” the captain told Turk as they checked it over. “If anybody saw us, they didn’t say anything.”

“You sure you weren’t followed?” asked Grease.

“If we were, they’d be here by now, right?”

Gorud thought they should leave the school bus in the barn, but Turk suggested that it might work better as a decoy — if the planes they’d seen and heard earlier were part of a search party, making the bus easier to find would give them something to do. By the time they spotted it and then checked it out, it would be nearly nightfall, maybe later. He volunteered to drive it himself down along the highway.

“I’ll get rid of it while you’re organizing to go,” Turk said. “I’ll point it south on the highway.”

“You’re not going,” said Grease.

“You sound like my mother. It’s better than waiting around.”

“I’ll follow you in the pickup,” said Grease.

The ride back to the highway was longer than Turk remembered, and bumpier; he didn’t reach it for a good fifteen minutes. When he did, an SUV approached from the direction of Sar-e-Kavir; Turk sank behind the wheel, hoping whoever was in the vehicle wouldn’t get a good glimpse of his face. The SUV continued south, moving at a good pace; Turk drove out cautiously, starting to follow. His speed gradually picked up, the bus accelerating slowly but steadily. After about five minutes Grease sped up in the pickup and began flashing his headlights. Turk slowed, then pulled off.

“I kept it running,” he told Grease when he reached him in the truck. “If they find it with the motor on, it’ll be a mystery. Maybe it will buy us more time.”

“Wishful thinking,” said Grease.

“It’s all we got,” replied Turk as they headed north to join the rest of the team.

19

Back in the flight rotation, Captain Vahid found himself assigned to a late afternoon patrol, flying what was in fact a combat air patrol mission over the area of the atomic lab, though officially the mission was written up as a “routine observation flight.” Given the air force’s fuel woes, the fact that it was being conducted at all meant it was hardly routine, but that was the least of the official lies involved.

Vahid was not allowed to overfly the epicenter of what was officially termed the earthquake area; he had to maintain a five mile buffer between the ostensible fault point at all times. He tried avoiding the temptation to glance at the area, though he couldn’t help but notice the roads in the vicinity were empty. Checkpoints had been established; rescue teams were supposedly heading in to help relieve victims, but there was no surge of aid. Clearly, the state and national authorities were still confused about what to do.

Vahid accepted that what General Shirazi had told him was correct; it made the most sense and fit with what he himself had observed. He wondered if the facts about what had happened would ever come out. It would be much easier to blame the Americans or the Israelis than to admit that the project had suffered a catastrophic setback. On the other hand, blaming the Americans or the Israelis would be tantamount to admitting that the Iranian nuclear program was not aimed at producing a peaceful source of energy rather than a weapon.

Everyone knew, of course, that it was aimed at making a bomb. But admitting that it was a lie before the bomb was completed would be a great loss of face. Only when the weapon was completed could it be revealed. Then the lie would not be a lie, but rather a triumph against Iran’s enemies.

Vahid knew this the way he knew that one plus one equaled two, as every Iranian did. “Truth” was a subjective concept, something directly related to power; one accepted it as one accepted the fact that the sun rose and set.

With General Shirazi as his backer, he knew his future was bright. Squadron commander was in his sights. Wing commander would not be an unattainable goal. There were already signs of his improved standing: he had been assigned the squadron’s reserve jet and given the most sensitive area to patrol.

Vahid ran his eyes around the gauges, confirming that the aircraft was operating at spec, then checked his six, glancing briefly in the direction of his wingman, Lieutenant Nima Kayvan, who was flying off his right wing and about a half mile behind. Their box north of the Zagros Mountains was clear of clouds, as well as enemies. The flight had been completely uneventful — another sign to Vahid that the Americans had not struck the lab, since they would surely be conducting reconnaissance and perhaps a follow-up raid.

The ground controller’s adrenaline-amped voice caught him by surprise.

“Shahin One, stand by for tasking.”

“Shahin One acknowledges.” Vahid listened as the controller told him there had been a terror attack in Jandagh; he and his wingman were to head west and join the search for a school bus.

“So now we go after auto thieves,” said Kayvan on the squadron frequency as they changed course. “What would the Jews want with a bus?”

Kayvan certainly had a point, but Vahid chose not to answer. The wingman was an excellent flier, but his mouth would one day land him into much trouble.

Jandagh was some three hundred kilometers away, across a series of high desert mountains and a mostly bare landscape. Vahid immediately snapped to the new course, tuning to the contact frequency he’d been given for the Revolutionary Guard unit assigned to coordinate the reaction. He tried for several minutes but couldn’t get a response to his hails.

“We’ll go down to three thousand feet,” he told Kayvan. “Look for anything moving.”

“Goats and sandstorms included?”

They saw neither. The ground appeared as empty as the sky. Kayvan did see something moving near a road about two miles west of their course north, and they made a quick pass, only to discover a pair of dump trucks and an excavator working a gravel or sand pit. Swinging back toward their original vector, the commander of a local militia unit contacted Vahid on the radio and asked him to help check a vehicle a civilian had spotted south of Sar-e-Kavir.

“We have another unit to rendezvous with,” Vahid told him.

“I am making this request at the order of the special commander,” explained the officer, saying that the colonel who originally requested the air support had now delegated him to use it. The radio garbled the name of the commander — it sounded like Colonel Khorasani — but as the officer continued, Vahid realized the special commander was a member of the Pasdaran — the Revolutionary Guards — assigned to investigate the “earthquake.” The fact that there would be an investigator had been mentioned by the intel officer at the preflight briefing: alienating the Pasdaran was a greater danger than American F-22s.

“That’s over a hundred kilometers away,” said Kayvan, once again using the short-range squadron radio so his disrespect wouldn’t be overheard. “They don’t have other planes?”

“You’d rather sit on the ground?” snapped Vahid.

“I would rather see the girl who will be my bride. And we do not have much fuel.”

The wingman was right. Vahid did a quick calculation, and figured that once they reached Sar-e-Kavir they would have about ten minutes of linger time before having to head back to their base.

“We’ll make the most of it,” he said. “Stay on my wing.”

“I do not plan to disappear.”

Vahid found Highway 81. The road climbed over the desert ridges, paralleling a route once used by silk traders; well before that, it had overlooked the edge of a vast lake. Now the area was largely desolate. Barriers lined long sections of the road to cut down on the sand drifts.

Passing over a pair of white four-door pickup trucks heading north on the road, Vahid angled his jet toward a collection of ruins ahead on his left. He descended quickly, thinking he might catch a glimpse of anyone hiding amid the old clay brick walls and foundations. But he was by them too quickly to see anything other than shadows and broken earth.

As he nudged back toward the road, he spotted the bus about two kilometers ahead. Slowing to just above stall speed, he leaned toward the canopy, getting a good view of the road and the vehicle. It was facing south, off the road on the shoulder. The old highway was to the right.

“I have found a bus,” Vahid told the local ground commander. “Stand by for the position.”

The commander took the information with great enthusiasm. Vahid’s description seemed to match the bus that had been stolen. The only problem was it was facing in the wrong direction — toward the town where it had been taken. But that didn’t seem to bother the ground commander, who asked Vahid to take a low pass and see if there were enemies nearby.

“Vehicle looks abandoned,” Vahid radioed the ground unit. “The area around it is empty.”

“Acknowledged, Shahin One,” said a new, more authoritative voice. It belonged to Colonel Khorasani, the Guard officer who had been assigned to investigate the situation. He was handling his communications personally. “I have ground units en route. They should arrive in zero-five minutes.”

“Acknowledged. We’re going to spin around the area and see if we can find anyone.”

“Police units are coming down from the north,” added the local ground commander. “They will arrive quickly.”

“Acknowledged.”

Vahid and his wingman began a slow, spiraling rise above the area.

“Farm building to the north on the side of the hill,” said Kayvan. “Maybe they are there.”

“Make a run,” Vahid told him. “I’ll follow you.”

Vahid climbed out and changed positions with his wingman, so that Shahin One was now trailing Shahin Two. The buildings were on a small, nearly flat tongue of land. Just below, he saw an abandoned orchard, its trees parched stubs.

A crooked road ran from the highway to the farm, then petered out. Neither Vahid nor the wingman could see any other vehicles, let alone people.

“Shahin One, what’s your status?” asked the Pasdaran colonel.

“We’re waiting for ground units to arrive. We have no contacts.”

“We have a report of a vehicle stolen from Sar-e-Kavir. A farm vehicle. We believe there may be a connection.”

“Do you have a description?”

“Stand by.”

20

They took a shortcut across the ridge, driving on a hard-pack road that got them out in front of Granderson and the others. Grease had been studying the maps and gotten advice from Granderson; there was an Iranian army barracks about twenty-five miles ahead on the highway. Once past that, they should have an easy time north; they could cut south of the cities of Semna¯n and Sorkheh, then follow the highway west for another two hours or so before veering once more onto narrower roads in the mountain foothills. At this point they would pick up one of the trails the Delta team had scouted as an alternate route to the target area, aiming for a hiding place originally planned as part of the escape route. Ironically, it was within a half-hour drive of their new target area. They would stay there through the next day, achieve their objective, and leave.

It was easy when you laid it out step by step that way. Simple and direct.

Turk leaned into the back, grabbing one of their last two bottles of water. He took two sips, then put it back.

“Rationing yourself?” Grease asked.

“Yeah.”

“There should be more water at the place where we stop. A team went in and set it up two weeks ago.”

“What if it’s been found?”

“Nobody’ll find it.”

Turk folded his arms. “I hope you’re right.”

“Granderson and the truck are two miles ahead,” said Grease. “Pickup’s about a half mile ahead of that. Gorud’s driving. The Israeli swapped with him in the troop truck.”

“Why?”

“His leg’s pretty screwed up. Didn’t you notice?”

“I thought he was all right.”

Grease shook his head. Badly battered when they encountered the police, the Israeli’s knee had locked; most likely there were torn ligaments and cartilage damage as well.

“You think Green and the others are going to make it?” Turk asked.

Grease thought for a moment before answering. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Probably or maybe?”

Another pause as he weighed his estimate. “Probably,” he announced at last.

“That’s what everybody has to say, right?” asked Turk, suddenly oppressed by the weight of what they had to do. His energy had completely drained, taking his optimism with it.

“You know what will help?” asked Grease. “Focus your mind on the next checkpoint, the next step along the way. If you try to keep the whole mission in your head, it may wig you out. But if you go from A to B to C, it’ll be much easier. It’s a fact.”

Turk’s ears perked up — he heard a jet nearby, low.

Two of them.

“Somebody’s looking for us,” he told Grease, thumbing above.

Five hundred meters above the ground, Vahid rode Shahin One up over the ridge, banking easily to the west. There was a car ahead, white and fairly new — probably a government official, Vahid thought, maybe even someone from the interior ministry. As he nudged a little lower, he saw a glint in the distance — another vehicle three or four kilometers farther along the highway.

In normal times this would hardly have been unusual, but today there was so little traffic it couldn’t help but pique his interest. Vahid steadied himself at three hundred meters and waited for the vehicle to appear.

It was a pickup truck. Just as Vahid was about to turn off, he saw the top of another vehicle just descending a low hill. This one was larger, another truck.

“Shahin Two, do you see the vehicle beyond the pickup?”

“Confirmed.”

“Looks like it could be a farm truck. I’m going to get a closer look.”

“On your six.”

Vahid pushed even lower, dropping through three hundred meters. The truck matched the description — a green farm vehicle with slat sides — but it had a canvas top, which hadn’t been described.

“Two, radio the Pasdaran colonel and see if you can get a definitive description,” said Vahid. “I’m going to take another pass.”

Turk felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as the MiGs turned ahead. They were definitely interested in something on the highway, and since there was no other traffic nearby, that meant them. He bent forward to the dashboard, trying to get a glimpse as the planes flew by.

“Only air-to-air missiles,” he said as the lead plane thundered past. The wingman was higher and offset to the south; hard to see, but Turk guessed he would be equipped the same.

“What’s that mean?” asked Grease.

“Means he won’t be able to bomb us. But he’ll have a cannon he can use if he decides to shoot.”

Turk opened the car window and leaned out, trying to see where the planes were. He wished them away far to the east. Instead, he saw them turning in the distance behind them.

“Coming back for another look,” he told Grease.

“Captain, you seeing those airplanes?” Grease asked over the team radio as Turk slid back down. The sun was just setting; the red glow on the horizon might make it tough for the pilot to see.

Not tough enough, though.

Vahid asked the commander to repeat what he said.

“You are ordered to stop the farm truck,” said Colonel Khorasani. “Destroy it.”

“Colonel, it appears to be a civilian vehicle.”

“It is a vehicle filled with Israeli commandos.”

The colonel’s voice was completely rational, and soft rather than loud — which chilled Vahid even more. “It is a little different than you described when you radioed me earlier.”

The colonel was silent for a moment. “Should I call your commander?”

“Of course not,” said Vahid. “I want to make sure I understand your requirements. My fuel tanks are close to empty.”

He was, in fact, about sixty seconds from bingo, the calculated point where he would have only enough fuel to get home. He considered using that as an excuse not to shoot up the truck, but what was the point? Already two other members of his squadron were flying northward; they would destroy the truck if he didn’t.

And going against the Pasdaran colonel was not a wise move, even if General Shirazi was his patron.

But to kill civilians?

Surely they were thieves. As unlikely — as impossible—as it must be that they were Israeli commandos, they still had no right to steal a truck. So it was Allah’s punishment that he was meting out.

“Shahin Two, you’re on my wing,” he told Lieutenant Kayvan, glancing at the armament panel to make sure his gun was ready.

“We’re going to shoot up the truck?”

“We’re going to stop it, yes.”

Turk heard the rumble of the jet engines as the MiGs came up the road behind him. Once more the muscles in his stomach clenched. He pushed back in the seat, waiting as the car began to shake.

“Shit,” he muttered as the plane shot overhead, then rose into a quick turn.

“Tell them to get out of the truck!” Turk yelled. “Tell them he’s coming in to fire! He’s firing!”

As Vahid pushed the MiG’s nose down, the farm truck seemed to fly into the pipper. He gave the trigger a gentle squeeze before breaking off. The rounds missed, flying into the pavement well ahead of the vehicle.

Which was what he intended. In his mind, an innocent civilian would see the bullets and realize something was wrong. He would pull off the road and run from the truck.

“Shahin Two, did he stop?” Vahid asked.

“Still moving.”

“Stay clear.”

“No fun for me?”

Vahid ignored his juvenile wingman, moving into position to destroy the truck. He rode the MiG through five hundred meters before tucking his left wing toward the highway. He leveled the wings and found the vehicle speeding ahead.

It started to weave left and right. He pressed the trigger.

A gray geyser of smoke erupted ahead.

“Shit, shit, shit!” yelled Turk. He pounded the dashboard as the gray turned black. A funnel of red appeared from within, like a volcano.

They rushed toward it as the cloud shifted downward, folding itself across the road. Turk had shot up trucks himself a few months before, pouncing on them from the air. Now he was seeing things from the other side, from underneath and inside out.

The truck was on the right, off the road, completely destroyed, smoldering.

Two bodies, black, lay between it and the road.

“You’re not stopping!” Turk yelled at Grease.

“I know that.”

“You gotta stop!”

“We can’t.”

“Grease! Grease!”

Turk grabbed for the door handle. Grease reached over and grabbed him with his hand, holding him in place even as he accelerated away from the wreckage.