The Ares Decision

86

General Asadi Daei stood in the C-130’s cockpit door looking through the windscreen as the plane rose from the air force base and banked right. The most recent reports were that as many as fifty resistance traitors were digging in at the lab and that another twenty-five or so were fighting in the streets of Avass. Fortunately, the local police had managed to get Mehrak Omidi to a defensible building and he was there awaiting the first wave of paratroopers to drop.

Daei was about to ask for an updated ETA now that they were in the air, but the pilot turned and tapped his earphones, indicating that a communiqué was coming through.

The general grabbed a spare headset and leaned over the copilot to toggle the switch isolating the line. “This is Daei.”

He straightened slightly when the static-ridden voice of Ayatollah Khamenei came on. “Security has been fully breached, General.”

Despite having been wounded three separate times in the war with Iraq, Daei felt a trickle of fear. “Breach” meant that the disease he’d been briefed on had escaped containment. “Full breach” meant the infected were loose in the streets.

“I understand, Excellency.”

“God be with you.”

The channel went dead, and Daei opened a separate line to the commanders of the other transports. “We are moving to plan Theta. I repeat. Plan Theta.”

After getting acknowledgments from the entire force, he hung the headset back on the wall and stood motionless for a moment, feeling slightly dazed. In the other planes, envelopes would be opened and his officers would be describing the nature of the expected resistance to their teams: people with the strength of three men, drenched in blood and attacking everything that moved like a pack of rabid dogs. It seemed impossible — a paranoid fantasy. But the intelligence had come directly from Omidi and he was not a man prone to fits of hysteria.

Daei walked to the back of the plane, where a well-equipped medical team was strapped into utilitarian seats. “We have a full breach.”

They immediately released their harnesses and began rushing around, opening crates filled with protective clothing, digging through stacks of medical equipment, and talking in loud, frightened tones.

He would now be forced to concentrate the vast majority of his troops on Avass. His biohazard team would unload at a nearby airstrip while paratroopers secured the streets. Their only mission now was to get a live victim of the parasite back to the plane. When they were in the air, he would be told where the deadly organism was to be taken.

Somewhere south of their current location, bombers with instructions to turn Avass into a burning hole in the ground were waiting for the green light. Even the Takavar soldiers would not be allowed to survive — the risk that they could spread the infection or relate details that didn’t support the official story was too great.