The Ares Decision

71

Sepehr Mouradipour peered through his scope at the line of men partially obscured by blowing snow. The shallow draw they were traveling along was nearly flat, and the easier terrain had, as anticipated, allowed their formation to tighten.

He was wearing a white hooded jumpsuit and was partially buried, lying on an inflatable mattress to keep him insulated from the cold. Even his face was streaked with greasy white paint, breaking up its outline and transforming it into just another exposed area of earth and rock.

The group he was tracking appeared to consist primarily of his own countrymen — followers of Farrokh, according to his information. Traitors and atheists. It would be a pleasure to kill them, but that was just an unplanned bonus.

He finally found the men he was being paid to take out near the middle of the column. Both were wearing light gray Western ski clothing, the one in front broad shouldered and dark complected, with black hair poking out from beneath a wool hat. His companion was thinner and had fair skin burned red behind ski goggles.

Mouradipour pressed a button on the side of his rifle, sending a signal that the targets were two hundred meters out. An LED built into his sunglasses flashed seven times in response. His men were ready.

It took a little longer than expected for the column to cover the distance, but speed was notoriously hard to predict in this kind of terrain and he was confident that his team would make any necessary adjustments without his involvement. He demanded nothing less than perfect discipline from his men and had dug many graves for those who didn’t live up to that standard. The group he was working with now had completed nine missions of this type without a single material error.

Mouradipour waited until the middle of the column was even with a cliff band that he was using for perspective, then sent out three clicks in quick succession.

It was over almost before it started.

His men burst from their buried positions and snipers appeared along the ridge across from him. A few of Farrokh’s men made awkward grabs for their weapons, but most were hung on packs out of reach or were incompatible with the bulky gloves they seemed to favor. In less than five seconds, everyone in the column was on their knees with hands laced on top of their heads.

Mouradipour snowshoed down the slope and approached the first of the Westerners, ripping his hat off and comparing his face to the photo he’d burned into his memory. The coloring was right, as were the high cheekbones, but the eyes were not the intense blue he’d been expecting. A trick of light? Contacts?

When he dragged the broad goggles off the second man’s face, Mouradipour was horrified to find the unlined skin of someone in his early thirties.

“Trap!” he screamed in Persian, clawing for the rifle on his shoulder.

The intermittent crack of controlled gunfire sounded and his men began crumpling around him. Their prisoners, who had seemed so awkward and exhausted a moment before, dove to the icy ground so as not to block their hidden compatriots’ line of fire and pulled weapons from beneath their jackets.

Mouradipour had barely managed to get a hand around his rifle when his feet were swept from under him. Before he’d even landed, a thin strand of wire was looped over his head, cutting through the insulated collar of his jumpsuit and tightening around his neck. Every move he made now caused the icy metal to dig a little deeper.

A lone skier became visible down canyon, moving stiffly through his dead and dying men. The outline was inexplicable — strangely curvaceous and willowy despite heavy clothing. He squinted upward, his confusion growing when the figure stopped in front of him and pushed back a thick hood, revealing the short blond hair and perfect skin of a young woman.

“Make your phone call,” Randi Russell said, gritting her teeth and adjusting her rifle into a slightly less excruciating position on her shoulder.

The flight from America crammed into the cargo hold of a C-141B Starlifter, the clandestine crossing of the Iranian border, and nineteen hours tracking these bastards hadn’t done much for her mood.

Fred Klein had been so enamored with the body armor he’d provided her — waxing rhapsodic about how the genetically modified silk was four times stronger than Kevlar and how it tipped the scales at only ninety-eight pounds including the fake blood packs duct-taped to it.

In the end, though, her reluctance to stand in front of an Afghan assassin’s bullet wearing something made of the same thing as her lingerie had been entirely justified. The bruise across her back was almost a foot in diameter and radiated over her spine in roughly the color scheme of a Miami sunset.

“Phone?” Mouradipour said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Randi retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen and shook five into her mouth, swallowing hard before speaking again. “You don’t want to screw with me today, Sepehr. I swear you don’t.”

He didn’t answer immediately, instead watching the bodies of his men sink into snow melted by the heat of their blood. “And what if I agree to make your call?”

“Then we’re going to hold you long enough to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid like use some sort of code word to indicate you’d been caught. Then, if everything works out, we’ll let you go.”

“What assurances do I have?”

“How’s this: I assure you that if you don’t get on that damn phone in the next five seconds, I’m going to have my friend here cut your head off.”

The wire around his neck tightened, and after a brief hesitation, he reached slowly for his pocket.

Randi took a step back and squinted into the distance. All the maps, satellite photos, and coordinates Mouradipour had been working with were elaborate fakes — carefully altered to hide the fact that Jon and Peter were actually a hundred miles to the north. That is, if they hadn’t frozen to death, run into an Iranian border patrol, or been shot in the back of the head by the notoriously unpredictable Farrokh.

She pulled out her own sat phone and sent Covert-One a notification that Mouradipour’s call was about to go through so they could begin tracking it. Unknown to Klein, Charles Mayfield would be doing the same thing at CIA headquarters — a little independent verification to help her sleep at night.

Randi turned and skied slowly away, feeling the anger building inside her but also an unfamiliar sense of despair that wasn’t as easy to deal with. Only when the voices of her men had been swallowed up by the wind did she stop and reflect on how much she’d hoped to find nothing out here but snow. How much she’d wanted Klein to be wrong.

But there was no way to nurse that illusion anymore. In her gut, she knew that call was going to go exactly where he said it would: to a man whose orders she’d risked her life countless times to carry out. To a man she’d respected and admired.

To Lawrence Drake.