The Ares Decision

92

Arfa! Do you copy? Respond!”

General Asadi Daei watched angrily as his men brought an armored SUV down the C-130’s ramp with almost comic slowness. The biomedical team was already suited up and had been standing by the side of the dark road for almost five minutes.

The condition of their primary landing site had been far worse than the deskbound academics at Omidi’s intelligence ministry reported, forcing them to fly over the road to Avass and search for a place wide and smooth enough to set down. It was an unforgivable error that had put them twenty minutes behind schedule and farther from the village than planned.

“Arfa! Respond!”

The radio sputtered to life and the barely intelligible voice of the man in charge of the containment troops became audible through the static. Daei stalked up the road, putting distance between him and the nervous scientists double- and triple-checking their equipment.

“General? Do you read me?”

“Barely. What’s your situation? Have you secured the town center?”

A burst of gunfire came over the radio followed by indecipherable shouts from Arfa.

“Major! Are you there?”

“I’m here, sir. No, we haven’t been able to fully secure the area. It’s difficult to tell the police from resistance, particularly now that we’ve lost the light. And there are civilians—”

“I don’t care who’s who!” Daei shouted. “You’re to eliminate anyone who isn’t actively helping you. Was that not clear?”

“It was, sir, but—”

“There are no excuses, Major! Follow your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

His commander’s reticence was understandable under the circumstances. What he didn’t know, though, was that heavy bombers were on their way and that, upon Daei’s orders, Avass would be obliterated with Arfa and his forces still in it. The remaining paratroopers would create a wide perimeter, cutting off any fleeing residents, and, in the end, forfeiting their lives, too. The area would be completely sterilized.

“Have you captured a parasite victim yet, Major?”

“We’ve made two attempts, but they’re much faster and stronger than we anticipated. One was killed in a fall and we were forced to shoot the other.”

Daei slammed a fist angrily against the C-130’s fuselage as he continued up the road. The sound of approaching air cover became audible behind him, but he didn’t bother to look back.

“I want to be perfectly clear, Major. If I arrive in Avass and you haven’t secured a specimen, not only you but your family will pay the price. Am I being clear?”

Arfa responded, but between the static and the approaching jets, his words were impossible to understand. Daei spun angrily, looking into the sky at a tight formation of fighters barely visible in the moonlight. What in the name of Allah were they doing?

“Repeat your last transmission, Major. I—”

He fell silent when one of the fighters broke formation and began to climb, displaying an unmistakable profile against the black sky.

Daei dropped his radio and ran for the open desert. “Get away from the plane!” he shouted at the startled scientists watching him sprint across the loose sand. “Find cover!”

The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, lifting Smith off his feet and knocking the gun he’d been so carefully aiming from his hand. He tried to twist himself out from beneath the man who had jumped him but realized there wasn’t time and instead braced for the impact with the rocky ground.

He ignored the soft crunch of at least one of his ribs and threw a hand out for the loose weapon. It was pointless, though. The man on top of him had both superior position and a fifty-pound weight advantage. He was going to get to it first.

“Peter! The g—”

There was a brief flash of blond hair in the darkness and suddenly the weight was gone. Smith rolled and grabbed the pistol, ignoring the excruciating pain in his side as Sarie began losing her wrestling match with the man she’d tackled. The scales swung back in her direction, though, when Smith pressed the gun against the back of the man’s head.

He pulled her away, examining the moonlit faces around them over the sights of the pistol. The group of refugees they’d joined during their escape from Avass had dwindled to about twenty-five individuals, four of whom were definitely infected. Three were still in the confusion stage, but the other had just turned on two boys helping him walk.

Farrokh had immediately waded in, shouting in Persian and waving his machine gun, but the scene quickly turned to chaos. Some people fled, pushing and tripping over each other, while others tried to control the screaming, bleeding man and protect the boys from what Smith assumed was their father.

Howell had taken over the attempt to put the man down but was facing the same problem of a shifting crowd and dim light that Smith had been contending with. Finally, the infected man escaped the person trying to hold him and presented his chest for a split second before he could turn again on his fallen sons.

It was a stunning shot — barely missing no fewer than four people before impacting center of mass. The man went down on his back, thrashing wildly and howling like a wounded animal.

By the time he went still, all eyes were on Howell and the gun still smoking in his hand. None of the people fully understood what was happening or why there were three Westerners with them, but they’d tolerated their presence. Now, though, a British stranger had just shot an unarmed man they’d known all their lives.

Farrokh tried to take advantage of the ominous silence to offer an explanation, but no one seemed to be listening. He hadn’t been lying about his credibility in this part of Iran — it wasn’t much better than theirs.

The boy whose life Howell had saved jumped to his feet and shouted at them, his accusations falling on what appeared to be sympathetic ears.

“I think we’ve worn out our welcome here,” Smith said. “Time to go.”

Farrokh ignored him, continuing his pointless explanation and barely managing to sidestep a much older man’s lunge. More and more people approached, hurling epithets and insults that even Smith’s nearly nonexistent Persian could decipher.

Finally, Farrokh faced reality and squeezed off a quick burst over the crowd’s head before joining their retreat. They kept their weapons trained on the mob, dodging hurled rocks and not stopping until they’d put a good five hundred yards between them.

“The other three are going to go fully symptomatic in less than an hour,” Sarie said. “We can’t just leave those people. We’re the only ones who’re armed.”

“The guns don’t matter,” Smith said. “They’ve turned against us. There’s nothing more we can do.”

“Nothing more we can do?” she responded, the fear and despair twisting her voice into something very different than what he remembered from their first meeting. “The Iranians aren’t going to be able to control this. These people have no idea what they’re facing.”

“She’s right,” Farrokh said. “You said the Americans were going to help us, Jon. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? You spoke with them.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“And?”

He looked at Howell, but there was no help there.

“I told them to wipe out the entire area.”

“What do you mean ‘wipe out’?” Sarie said.

“We have a nuclear submarine off the coast. I told them to use it.”

There was a brief silence before Farrokh spoke. “I don’t understand. By nuclear submarine, you mean a nuclear-powered submarine armed with conventional weapons—”

“I mean a submarine armed with nuclear missiles.”

Smith saw it coming but didn’t bother to defend himself, instead taking a rifle butt to the center of the chest and falling painfully to the ground. Howell’s hand hovered over the gun in his waistband, but beyond that he didn’t seem to want to get involved. Sarie just stood in dumbfounded silence.

“You told your people to attack my country with nuclear weapons?” Farrokh shouted, aiming his rifle at Smith’s head. “I trusted you. My men died for you!”

“Farrokh…,” he started. It was hard to get the words out with his cracked ribs and the weight of what he had done trying to suffocate him. “What choice did I have? I couldn’t risk—”

An explosion flashed to the west, followed a moment later by a deep rumble that shook the ground. They all turned and saw a wall of flame at least a hundred feet high spring up from the main road about fifteen miles south of Avass.

The planes over it broke formation and began spreading out, their outlines gaining detail in the glow of the fire until Smith could positively ID them. American F-16s.

It took him longer than it should have to process what was happening. The prospect of certain death had dulled his sense of the here and now, bogging him down in past regrets.

“Castilla’s not going to do it,” he said finally. “He’s not going to use the nukes! Farrokh, give me your phone again. If I can call in our position, there’s a chance I can get us the hell out of here.”