Cold Shot

DAY EIGHT

Elham watched Presidente Avila as the chief of state read the intelligence report for a third time, disbelief on his face. Carreño and Ahmadi both stood in silence on the other side of the antique desk. None of the senior men had spoken a word in five minutes. The soldier turned back to the window and stared at the manicured garden below. The sun was behind the office towers now and soon would drop below the hills to the west. Dark shadows were stretching out behind the buildings with bright sunbeams cutting through the spaces between them. Farther away, an American Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter glided over the skyline, descending toward the embassy that sat out of sight beyond the trees that surrounded the complex. Smoke was rising out past the gates, some of it black as ink. The locals were burning tires now, some not too far from the presidential offices.

Avila had made a great show of machismo when they had finally arrived, calling them hermanos and boasting that matters were proceeding as planned. That last claim was a lie. Getting here had been tedious, the motorcade having to move slowly through the streets clogged with protesters. The crowds had been mixed, some among them turning on each other with their words, some with their fists and whatever weapons they could find lying about. An unhealthy number had attacked the cars, requiring the SEBIN guards to assault more than a few men to clear a path to the gates. The presidente was like so many other civilian leaders Elham had served over the years, assuming that the world would happily comply with their grand designs and having no contingency plan when events refused to go as they willed. If nothing else, the Americans certainly had shown themselves to be a disobedient bunch.

“They fired on our ship,” the presidente finally muttered. “I had not thought they would fire.”

“Actually, our ship fired first,” Carreño corrected him. “The captain claims it was an accident but the American vessel then opened up with all guns and beat her into submission. Why they didn’t put a missile in her, I have no idea. A single one would’ve finished our vessel. The Brión would have been sunk in short order had she not surrendered.” It was not a pleasant statement but it was an honest one, though not the kind that Avila usually liked to hear in this room. “The Americans boarded, helped the wounded and repaired the damage to the navigation system, then sent her on her way back to our naval base at Puerto Cabello.”

“There must be some way we can play this to our advantage,” Avila suggested.

His voice reeked of desperation to Elham’s ears and the soldier found his patience was exhausted. “You have nothing,” he said. Carreño and Ahmadi both turned toward him, surprised to hear the Revolutionary Guard soldier interject himself into the conversation.

“Elham—” Ahmadi started, caution in his voice.

“They have denied you victory at every level,” Elham noted. “Had they sunk her, you could have claimed American aggression had cost Venezuelan lives and there would have been no witnesses to contradict you. Had they left her adrift with wounded sailors, you could have yelled about American arrogance or cruelty. Had they seized her, you could have cursed the Americans for seizing Venezuelan property and holding your men. Now they have beaten you with both guns and charity. And the UN Security Council has agreed to their quarantine of your coast, denying you even the claim that they are acting as imperialists. I believe the Americans would say that you have no leg to stand on.”

“You speak out of turn, Elham,” Ahmadi said, his words tinged with anger.

“And when would my turn come?” Elham asked. “I have been a soldier for more than twenty years and if I have learned one thing, it is that the lowest-ranking man in the room is usually the one who sees the truth most clearly. The higher the rank, the more one is concerned with how the situation makes him look before his peers and the world instead of how to solve the problems at hand. And the problem is that we are all trapped here now with an illegal weapon of mass destruction that the world won’t tolerate.”

Avila dropped the paper and pushed it away from him. He leaned back in his chair, lifted his chin, and puffed up his chest. “No, the Russians will help us,” he began. “They are our allies too. We have conducted joint naval exercises with them—”

Are you truly that stupid? Elham thought but didn’t say. Patience gone or not, he still had some small sense of propriety left in him. “The Russians in the Security Council abstained from the vote to cut your country off from the civilized world,” Elham pointed out. “They are happy to take whatever you give up freely but they are not prepared to risk anything for you. If they won’t even cast a vote in your favor, they certainly won’t send warships to face down the United States Navy.” He finally turned away from the window and looked to his countryman. “We are on our own here, you and I. Our hosts cannot protect us, not from the Americans and certainly not from the Israelis who will be coming. This country will be crawling with CIA and Mossad within days.”

“That is not true,” Avila protested. “The Americans have no power here! They cannot touch you so long as you are under our protection. You can stay here indefinitely. Our patience is greater than theirs—”

“Is it?” Ahmadi asked. “Even if that is true, the question is what will the Americans do when their patience runs out? And the Israelis will have no patience whatsoever in this matter.”

Avila looked up at his intelligence adviser, desperate for some good solution. “What do you think, Diego?”

Carreño scratched his beard, then pulled up a chair and lowered himself into it carefully, trying to avoid touching his tender ribs. “I think we must strengthen our position.”

Avila leaned forward, anxious. “What do you propose?”

The SEBIN director made a show of pondering the question for several long seconds before answering. “First, we must move the weapon. Clearly, it is not safe where it is. The Americans know about the facility—”

“The Americans know about all of your facilities,” Elham interrupted.

Avila leaped to his feet and pounded on the desk with a closed fist hard enough to crack a knuckle. “That is not possible!”

“It is not only possible, it is certain,” Elham corrected him. “The American shooter on the hilltop spoke to his superior as he fled, no? Yet the call was made on a common cell phone, which we found. He used no encryption. Why not? To be certain that you would intercept the call, which you did. And what did you do? Order security sweeps at every facility in the program. Do you really think the American satellites didn’t see that?” The look on Avila’s face delivered his answer. “You were outmaneuvered, presidente,” Elham told him.

“Even if that is true, we can still win,” Carreño said, cutting in. It never hurt to help a superior preserve his sense of machismo in the presence of allies, especially ones who were dubious and wavering. “As long as the Americans and their allies don’t know where the cargo sits, we will still have a path to victory. They can’t go about the country randomly striking at sites hoping to destroy it. Eventually the world would turn against that and the American public themselves always tire of long military operations. Uncertainty would be our greatest tool.”

“Yes. Yes!” Avila agreed. “How soon can it be moved?”

“Assuming we want to finish construction first, we could have it ready for transport by tomorrow,” Carreño said. “Do you agree?” he asked, turning to Ahmadi.

“I would,” Ahmadi said after a slight pause. Elham grunted in disgust.

“I would also suggest,” Carreño continued, “that perhaps we should consider seizing the American embassy.”

“To what end?” Elham asked, incredulous. Madness, he thought.

Carreño twisted in his chair to address the Iranian soldier. “Two years ago, the last presidente ordered me to run an operation to capture an American spy on our soil. The mission failed, but the goal was to hold up the criminal to the world as a useful diversion away from the start of this operation. We wanted to put the United States back on its heels and we need that now. We may not find these spies in the countryside, but the Americans must have any number of spies in that embassy… but only for a few more hours. They’re evacuating their staff and if we hesitate, they will slip past us on one of those helicopters. But even if we don’t catch their real spies, anyone we could grab could be accused of such and no one will accept American denials outright. And if we have prisoners”—Elham noted that the man declined to use the word hostages—“the Americans will have to proceed much more slowly.”

Elham watched Avila nod slowly, as though Carreño’s words were the wisdom of God Himself. “I think that would be good,” the presidente agreed.

“What do you think, doctor?” Avila said, turning to Ahmadi.

“I… I think it might work,” the Iranian said. “We seized the American embassy in Tehran in my youth. If their president now is as weak as their president then, it could give you some considerable leverage.”

“And if he isn’t?” Elham said.

“Do we know how many members of the embassy staff remain?” Avila asked, ignoring the question.

“No idea,” Carreño admitted.

“Then move quickly… tomorrow morning, I think. We want the cameras to see it… but kill the cellular network when the order is given. We don’t want the Americans warning their asesinos in the countryside,” Avila ordered. “You see, my friends,” he said, turning back to Ahmadi and Elham, “this will work itself out in our favor. Watch and see.”

You are a fool, Elham thought. The man was choosing to believe his own fantasies instead of dealing with realities. You want the Americans to tire of this quickly but you want to kidnap their citizens? Fool wasn’t a strong enough word.

Holland stuffed the last Krispy Kreme donut into his mouth, his fourth of the morning. The sugar crash would hit him before ten o’clock and it would be terrible, but for now it kept him going. The last file of bank records appeared on his screen and he started to filter through the account numbers, then stopped to rub his eyes. He’d been staring at spreadsheets throughout the night and his vision was rebelling, refusing to focus on any more of them. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and shook his head. Finally the laptop screen sharpened and he began to scroll through the numbers again.

The morning sun was to the Marines’ backs, pouring its rays square into the faces of the mob. Small favors, Corporal Charlie Mansfield thought. If I gotta stand here decked out at the crack of dawn without a cup of coffee, the least you morons can do is go blind. He shifted his feet slightly, trying to relieve the discomfort. He and his brothers from the Corps were standing in a line, twenty feet behind the embassy’s main gate, all dressed in riot gear. The caraqueño mob on the other side had been mostly quiet during the night. It took a dedicated protester to shout curses at dirty Americans in the dark hours before the dawn. Many of the mobbers had stretched out on the grounds outside, finally submitting to nature’s demand for rest, but sleep had come hard as Seahawks from the U.S. Fourth Fleet descended over them at least twice an hour throughout the night. The helos had landed behind the embassy, each taking up a load of passengers, then rising over the building and passing low back over the protesters on its way out to sea. Mansfield didn’t know whether the pilots had been doing it on purpose to annoy the crowd but he couldn’t say that he disapproved.

He heard boots on the asphalt behind him and turned to see another Marine approach at a slow jog, one of the guards stationed inside the building. His fellow leatherneck slowed to a stop, dispensing with the salutes that would’ve required Mansfield’s setting his gear on the ground in order to return. He leaned in close so the corporal could hear through his riot helmet. “Last Seahawks from the fleet are prepping for launch, ETA one hour. They’ll touch down on the back field and keep the engines warm in order to evac us if it comes to that. Everything quiet?”

“No trouble so far this morning. But it’s early. That’ll change,” Mans-field replied. The other Marine nodded and jogged off back up the hill toward the embassy.

It took another fifty minutes to fulfill Mansfield’s prophecy. The mob stood quiet most of that time, a few of the younger groups singing patriotic songs and starting to wave their signs and flags, hoping to inspire some zeal in their tired comrades. It seemed too early for that yet…

… and then Mansfield felt the emotions rise in the air. Something changed in the crowd, some kind of excitement moving through them in a wave. The murmurs and Spanish curses began to rumble through the air and the sergeant could feel the anger spread like a morning fog. This is going to be ugly, he thought.

The Molotov cocktail came over the wall from the middle of the crowd. Mansfield couldn’t see who’d lit the bottle that landed just in front of the Marine guard line, close enough to burn. They stepped back a few feet. The next homemade munition followed a few seconds later, this one passing just over the heads and exploding behind the Marines, spreading its payload across the black asphalt.

The crowd’s yells would’ve been deafening now if not for the helmets. The Venezuelans were pressing themselves against the gates, hands and fists reaching through the bars, and Mansfield spoke more than enough Spanish to know they were screaming death threats—

It happened in an instant. A roar went up from the crowd and suddenly the men in front were grabbing at the bars, trying to shake them from their hinges again. The younger caraqueños, impatient with that approach, began to scale the gates and the wall.

This is it, Mansfield told himself. They’re coming over. Some had tried before, ones and two. Now they were trying almost by the dozen.

The corporal stepped forward and raised his tear-gas launcher to his shoulder. The crowd didn’t recoil, started yelling louder instead. As the first youth reached the top of the gate and stood straight up, waving his comrades forward, Mansfield pulled the trigger, heard the launcher utter a loud thump, and felt it press against his shoulder. The CS grenade struck the teenager square in the chest, white smoke trailing, and the young man pitched backward, falling into the bodies below. The rest of the Marine line followed Mansfield’s lead, more CS grenades sailing over the wall into the crowd, pouring out their white smoke. The yells turned to coughs, then gagging, tears flowing as the vicious aerosol attacked the crowd’s tear ducts. One of the protesters sucked in a lungful and immediately vomited onto the ground, collapsing to his knees. Someone grabbed one of the grenades and threw it back inside the compound. Mansfield returned the favor and sent another canister over the wall to replace it. I can do this all day, morons, he thought, though he knew it wasn’t true.

“Get ready to fall back,” he ordered his men. The president had denied them permission to use their guns and without that, intimidation had been their only defense and that was failing fast. Mansfield checked his watch. I hope those Seahawks aren’t late, he thought. We don’t have ten minutes—

It was the shouting that finally woke Marisa. The couch had been disturbingly comfortable, a sign of how tired she really was. The sunlight was breaking through the slats of the window blinds in her office, forcing her to squint until her eyes could adjust, a process that was taking a little longer every year. But the loud voices in the hallway drove her to sit and force her mind to focus faster than she normally preferred to do. There was no coffee in the pot to help this morning. Gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way, she thought.

She managed to get her feet on the floor just as a Marine sergeant threw her door open. “Report to the back field, now!”

“What’s happening?”

“The barbarians finally decided to storm the gates, ma’am. The boys outside hit ’em with tear gas and ran them back, but that won’t keep ’em away long and we don’t have permission to shoot ’em. The last Seahawks are inbound, ETA four minutes. If you’re not aboard in five, I can’t promise you won’t end up on the business end of a long rope,” the Marine told her.

“Understood,” Mari said. The sergeant turned back to the hall and she heard his boots pounding on the thin carpet as he moved to the next room to make sure it was clear. The chief of station reached for her phone. It would take her sixty seconds to reach the rally point the Marine had identified. That meant she had three minutes to make two phone calls.

“This is the senior watch officer,” Drescher announced, pressing the headset to his ear.

“This is chief of station Caracas,” Marisa announced. “The Marine Security Detachment advises me that the embassy is about to be overrun. I am abandoning the station and will be evac’ed by helicopter to the U.S. Fourth Fleet.”

“Are all your people out?”

“My staff moved out last night per my orders and arrived aboard the Harry Truman. We still have our two officers in the field. I’m the last one in station. I will reestablish contact as soon as I’m aboard a U.S. vessel.”

“Copy that,” Drescher said. “I’ll inform the director. We’ll be expecting your call.”

“Drescher, I need the director to make a call for me,” Marisa advised.

“What’s up?”

“The plan is for everyone to get flown out to the Truman, but I need to stay on-site until we retrieve Burke and Stryker from the field. Vicksburg is the closest ship. I need the director to talk to the SecDef or someone else with some pull and get me out onto that ship.”

“I’ll mention it to her.”

“Grazie. Talk to you soon. Caracas out.” The line went dead.

Drescher turned to the bullpen and pointed at the array of monitors on the front wall. “I want the embassy in Caracas on that screen now!” Everyone in the room scrambled. The senior watch officer had never yelled like this before that any of them could remember.

They parked the truck farther out this time, at least three miles from the CAVIM site. The hike to the hilltop would be far longer… Jon estimated it would be nightfall by the time they reached the summit and made it back to the truck, assuming the SEBIN didn’t intercept them first. The humidity was no worse than a Virginia summer but Kyra was sure she’d be sweating heavily within the hour.

“That’s all you brought?” Jon asked. The girl had holstered her Glock and no other weapon was in sight.

“I left my HK under a rock with the comms gear,” she told him. “I was traveling light at the time. If you’d brought it and the rest of the gear back when you came down, we wouldn’t have to do this right now.”

“I was also traveling light,” he told her.

Kyra’s smartphone sounded in the truck’s cab. “I’ll get it,” Jon announced. He jumped from the bed, threw open the passenger-side door, and disconnected the phone from its charging cable. The screen showed a single bar for reception. “Sherlock,” he announced.

“Sherlock, this is Quiver. The station is about to be overrun and I’m bugging out. I’ll contact you as soon as I reach the fleet.”

For the first time, Kyra saw Jon reel, his mind scrambling to answer. “Copy that,” he finally said.

“You and Arrow—” Jon heard the call drop. He stared at the screen in surprise. No Signal. He lowered the phone, then dropped it on the passenger seat. “We just lost the embassy,” he said, quiet.

The line died.

Marisa looked at the smartphone screen in surprise: No Signal.
She dug another phone out of her desk and it delivered the same message. The cell towers are down, she realized. The timing was too good to be coincidence… and that meant the mob coming over the wall was under Avila’s control. Anyone they caught in the building would find themselves at the tender mercies of the SEBIN by nightfall.

“Time to be going,” Marisa muttered under her breath. She ran for the hall.

“He let them go?” Rostow asked in disbelief. “They killed two U.S. sailors and he let them go?”

“Sent them back across the red line to port,” Feldman confirmed. “After his chief engineer fixed their navigation system and the ship’s medical officer treated sixteen wounded Venezuelan sailors. No fatalities.”

Rostow cursed, crumpled the cable report the national security adviser had given him, and threw it across the Oval Office. The director of national intelligence held his peace. “Who’s the captain of the Vicksburg?” the president asked.

Feldman had to consult a binder for that answer. “Dutch Riley. Good service record—”

“He doesn’t make admiral as long as I’m president,” Rostow ordered. “Taking the ship would’ve given us a card to play with the media—”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, you’ve got that anyway,” Marshall pointed out. “There’s visible damage to the Vicksburg’s hull. The chief of naval operations says the sailors killed in the incident will be arriving at Dover Air Force Base later this morning and you know the media will cover that. I think Captain Riley’s decision to release the Almirante Brión will play well overseas, and especially with the countries that voted with you on the UN resolution. It makes President Avila look like the aggressor and your quarantine like a measured response.”

Rostow grunted but chose not to rebut the DNI’s observation.

The Oval Office door swung open and an aide hurried inside, clutching a piece of paper. Rostow pulled the report out of her hand and skimmed the text. He stared at the paper for a long time, long enough to make Feldman and the staffer uncomfortable. “Thank you,” he said. “That will be all.”

The staffer shuffled out a little slower than she had entered and closed the door behind. The president passed the report to Feldman. “CIA and State both say the Venezuelans are coming over the wall at the embassy.”

“But everybody’s going to get out,” Feldman noted, not looking up from the paper. “That’s good news. You won’t have a hostage crisis to manage like Carter did. That cost him reelection as much as anything else,” he observed, still reading the report. “This works in our favor as long as they only get the building.”

“Don’t you see it, Gerry?” Rostow asked. “This whole thing is coming apart. Avila’s not going to negotiate. He’s attacked one of our ships and he’s trying to seize the embassy. He wants to throw us off until he can figure out what to do.” The president stood up from the couch, walked to the Resolute desk, and pressed a button on his phone. “Get me Kathy Cooke at CIA,” he said. The secretary in the reception room outside the Oval Office complied.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Cooke said.

“I just got your report on the embassy. What’s new with the warhead?”

“We have no new information on the state of the warhead itself. However, the latest imagery at the facility suggests they might be getting ready to move it. I’ll bring it to you—”

“Don’t bother,” Rostow said. “Just send the files to the Situation Room. What’re you seeing?”

“A new convoy of five-ton cargo trucks are lined up at the CAVIM plant by the boneyard. There were no heavy vehicles on-site prior to their arrival a few hours ago,” Cooke confirmed. “We can’t say for sure—”

“If they move that warhead, can your people track it?” Rostow said, cutting the woman off.

“We can’t guarantee it, no,” Cooke replied. “Satellite coverage isn’t perfect. We could get some drones in the air but the Venezuelans do have an air force. Without a tracking device on the warhead itself, there’s always a chance we could lose it.”

“That’s not acceptable,” Rostow said.

“It’s the reality, sir,” Cooke replied.

“How many troops are stationed at the CAVIM site?” Rostow asked Cooke.

“We don’t have a precise number but our analysts believe it’s somewhere around two hundred,” she replied.

“Thanks, we’ll let you know what we decide to do.” Rostow pressed a button on the phone, disconnecting the call.

“We could send in a Special Forces team to recover it,” Feldman suggested. “That invasion option is still on the table.”

Rostow shook his head. “I don’t want casualties,” he said. “It’s one thing for Avila’s people to kill ours when they cross the quarantine line, it’s another for us to invade their country, put boots on the ground, and then have them come out in body bags for the media to see. But we can’t lose the thing. If Avila squirrels it away somewhere and then it goes off next year in Baltimore or Denver or who-knows-where…” He trailed off, then shrugged. “If they’re trying to move it, we have to take it out. Call the National Security Council. I want the SecDef and the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room in thirty minutes.”

The SH-60B Seahawk touched down on the grass as Marisa threw open the door to the rear courtyard. She sprinted across the asphalt onto the grass as the helicopter doors slid open and the last members of the embassy staff started to board, naval aviators pulling the civilians in. Marisa recognized the ambassador as the last man to climb onto the first aircraft. Good for you, sir, she thought.

She reached the second and the Marine sergeant who had ordered her out grabbed her hand and pulled her up. The helo began to lift off before he slid the door shut.

The Seahawk rose into the air, whipping the short grass underneath its blades until it cleared the embassy building, then leaned forward and began to move north. Marisa craned her head over the sergeant’s shoulder and looked out the window, down at the complex. Civilians were racing through the main gate and over the fence by the hundreds. The guard shack by the entrance was burning, smoke rising into the air high enough for the Seahawk to pass through the dirty column of ash.

The glass doors to the front entrance were already smashed open and the mob was moving inside.

“You didn’t tell her what we’re going to do,” Kyra noted. She checked the rearview mirror. The highway behind was still empty.

“She’d say it was stupid. She’d be right.”

“And yet here you are,” Kyra said. “Besides, wasn’t this your idea?”

“Do you remember Sherlock Holmes’s old maxim that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I have my own variation on that. Once you’ve eliminated the worst options, whatever remains, however stupid, must be the best option available,” he told her.

“And people say you don’t have a sense of humor.”

Holland’s link chart was a masterpiece ten years in the making. The graphics depicting Hossein Ahmadi’s proliferation network had more than five hundred pieces scattered across it, with lines connecting people and companies, showing who had called whom, who had done business, where the money had flowed. The paper showing the Ahmadi network was eight feet long, three feet high, and getting wider by the year. It was a complex work of art so large that Holland’s office had invested in an industrial-size large-format printer just so he could put it all on one page. It was as close to producing a Monet as any DI analyst ever got, and there was the curse of the job. So long as Ahmadi was free to do business, Holland could never finish the chart because the Iranian doctor was making new contacts and creating new front companies, forcing the young man to add more and more nodes to the array.

Holland was tired of it. Ten years was enough; he now had five more banks and a tangle of new lines added to the picture, and he renewed his vow that he was going to make Dr. Ahmadi retire from business. That decision was out of his hands, but he now had friends in high places who were paying attention.

“That’s an impressive piece of work, Mr. Holland,” Cooke said. “Twenty-five years from now, when they can declassify everything, somebody should frame it and hang it in one of the hallways.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the analyst replied, letting some pride seep into his voice. “It would be pretty to look at if it wasn’t showing something so ugly. But here’s what I wanted you to see.” He pointed at a series of linked nodes sitting near the right edge of the paper. “These are the front companies that hired the IRISL cargo ships that made the Venezuela trips. This”—he pointed to a bank in the center of the new nodes—“is the bank that secured the bonds for those companies for all of those trips. Treasury sent over the records and I was able to dig up some extra information from the Counterterrorism Center and the Information Operations Center. They’ve been helping track where Ahmadi’s money goes and between the two, I’ve got his operation figured out.”

Holland moved back toward the center of the chart and waved his hands over the graphics. “This is the core of his network. Ahmadi receives money from the government in Tehran through a series of banks and front companies, which he then funnels into a secondary series of front companies that do business in Europe and Asia. That’s where he buys the nuclear tech that he ships home to Tehran. The money has always been moved through at least three front companies before any purchase is made and the technology always passes through at least three more front companies before it gets back to Iran.”

“That’s all to evade sanctions,” Cooke noted.

“Right,” Holland agreed. “But here’s the good part.” He moved back to the new nodes on the far right end of the chart. “These front companies stand apart from his usual network. The rest of this”—he waved at the other parts of the picture—“is for buying nuclear technology and bringing it home. But this”—he pointed to the new nodes—“is for selling nuclear technology, as far as I can tell. None of those last five IRISL shipments were handled through his usual network.”

“Meaning what?” Cooke asked.

Holland took a deep breath. He was about to leave the realm of pure fact for the land of analytic conclusions. “Whenever Ahmadi buys technology or moves money, he usually accounts for it with the mullahs through the central banks. But this operation in Venezuela is going through an outside bank he doesn’t use for anything else.” Holland traced a line from the new bank on the chart across the page to another node. “The Venezuelans have been paying Ahmadi through this bank here, and after the money comes back to him, he’s been diverting funds to this bank in Switzerland.”

The implications took a few seconds to settle in. “He’s skimming funds,” Cooke realized.

“I think so,” Holland said. “I’ve been looking at this stuff for ten years. I always got the feeling that the mullahs have given him wide latitude in how to run the proliferation network… not wanting to burden themselves with all the messy details, as it were. But the money behind this operation is all running through a separate network that doesn’t connect to anything linked up to the regular organization. I can’t imagine that the mullahs would approve of this. If they find out that he’s skimming funds and endangering their nuclear acquisition network, going home could be a very dangerous proposition for him.”

The CIA director finally smiled. “Good work, young man. Get this all ready to take on the road. You’re coming to the White House with me.”

The sun was far above the low hills in the distance by the time they approached the summit. They hadn’t seen or heard a SEBIN patrol until they’d come within a mile of the base, and the Venezuelan jeeps were staying within a few hundred yards of the fence line. Jon and Kyra closed the last mile largely on their stomachs, pushing through the underbrush with their elbows and knees. Kyra watched her partner, tried to imitate his movements, and found herself impressed by how smoothly he moved.

“It doesn’t look like they’re running extra patrols,” she said, almost whispering. “If anything, they’ve pulled them all closer in.”

“The wider the radius out from a fixed point you want to patrol, the more people you need to cover the area,” Jon explained. “We got through once. The riots are probably tying up the military, and if they don’t have more people available to expand security here, it makes sense that they’d draw them closer in and sacrifice distance for coverage. Makes our job easier, if we’re lucky.”

Kyra’s legs burned as they pushed up the back side of the hill. There were some tire tracks in the underbrush now. Some crazed SEBIN driver had tried to steer his vehicle to the top, slid out on the steep grade, then turned back down. If anyone had made it to the top, they’d finished the journey on foot, and her own tracking skills weren’t good enough to find signs of that in the leaves and dirt. She scanned the hillside below, saw nothing, then paused to listen. She heard vehicles in the far distance, but no voices. “Almost there,” she said quietly.

Kyra shifted the Glock in her hand and moved forward.

Marisa first saw the Vicksburg when the Seahawk was still ten miles out. She’d had to take it on faith that Kathy Cooke would twist the SecDef’s arm and her faith had been rewarded much sooner than expected. The trio of helos had all gone “feet wet” over the Atlantic, the pilots had confirmed which was carrying the chief of station, and the other two had peeled away from the third, headed for the Truman a hundred miles east. The unfortunate passengers aboard Marisa’s Seahawk, a pair of senior Foreign Service secretaries and a Marine, had been surprised to learn they wouldn’t be joining the ambassador and his party on the C-2A Greyhound that would fly him out. Vicksburg would ferry them over, just an hour or so late. The CIA chief of station had other business to conduct, the Vicksburg was the closest ship, and her needs trumped theirs so long as she had officers in hostile territory.

The Seahawk arced around the ship, tilted aft, as though the pilot wanted the passengers to see the damage to Vicksburg’s hull. Marisa stayed silent, but the other civilians couldn’t hold their peace, curses and gasps erupting as they saw the hole in the ship’s island. They were still a quarter mile out by the station chief’s guess. Engineers were welding plates over the open wound, and she could see the small lights of their torches flashing and dropping sparks into the blue water.

The helo took its place over the aft end of the ship and Marisa looked down at a flight deck that was too small for the purpose. And still moving, she realized. Vicksburg wasn’t a stationary target and the Seahawk pilot was matching the forward motion of the vessel as he descended. Marisa was sure that maneuver was far harder than he was making it look. The Seahawk was maybe sixty feet long, as best Marisa could judge, and the flight deck seemed smaller than that. She supposed the pilot could’ve lowered a cable and let the ship winch them down, but the Atlantic water was calm, visibility good, and the pilot didn’t bother, putting the aircraft down on the center of crosshair painted on the deck and giving his passengers a landing as smooth as any they’d ever felt. They uttered silent prayers of gratitude and scurried from the helicopter with the help of sailors outside as soon as the side door opened. Marisa waited until the rest were gone, then crawled out, declining the proffered hand of the master chief standing below to help her.

“I need to speak with the captain,” she yelled over the noise of the hangar doors sliding open.

“You’re Mills?” Master Chief Amos LeJeune asked. “Come with me, ma’am.”

Marisa had expected an escort to the Vicksburg bridge, but it made sense, she supposed, to have her conversation with Dutch Riley in a more private space. The J2 (intelligence) office was a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility not unlike those at headquarters, probably not that different from the other offices aboard the Vicksburg except for the massive spin-dial lock on the heavy door. The SCIF was empty now except for the two of them, whether by some order Riley had given out of earshot Marisa didn’t know.

The captain closed the door behind them and took his seat on the edge of one of the low desks bolted to the bulkheads. “Well, Miss Mills, you got me down here,” Riley said. “What can I do for you?”

“I have two officers who were out in the field when the mob surrounded the embassy and they couldn’t get back—”

“And you want me to execute a personnel recovery mission?” the captain interrupted.

“Something like that.”

“I sympathize, but I just finished a shooting match with a Venezuelan warship that could’ve started a war,” Riley told her. “I don’t want to press my luck by violating Venezuela’s sovereignty without direct orders.”

“Captain, my people are in clear and present danger. They are in the woods somewhere, not ten miles from the coast—”

Riley held up his hand to cut her off. “I have no doubt that you’re telling me the truth and that your people are in some serious trouble. You’ve got promises to keep but I’ve got orders to follow. If we can help your people, we will, but I’ll need the green light from some higher-ups before I can violate Venezuelan airspace, and that’s the end of the argument.”

She felt her anger surge inside her, but fought it back. Cursing this man would accomplish nothing and she might well need his help later. She had no cards to play here and she was in no position to make enemies. “Captain, I need to contact Langley and then my officers.”

“You can use anything in here, and I’ll tell comms to render any assistance you might need,” Riley said, waving toward the rest of the SCIF. “We’ll get you set up with a rack and mess privileges for as long as you’re here.”

Marisa nodded blankly. She could hardly think. “I understand,” she said.

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the bridge.”

“Of course.” The captain let himself out of the security vault, the heavy door closing behind him with the sound of clanking metal. Marisa looked around, saw that she was alone in the intelligence center, then barely stifled a scream of frustration.

The members of the National Security Council looked around the table, counting heads. They weren’t idiots. Fools did not reach these men’s level and they weren’t oblivious to the fact that some members of the council weren’t sitting at the table — SecState, CIA director, all of the staffers. The only men around the table, they noted, were the ones directly involved in the movement of military forces and everyone else was out of the room, probably to minimize leaks, and that meant covert action was on the table. Then shouldn’t Kathy Cooke or Cyrus Marshall be here? they would be wondering.

Time to stop that. Rostow didn’t bother to thank them for coming. Subordinates didn’t merit that particular courtesy. “Gentlemen, the best intelligence we have right now suggests that the Venezuelans are preparing to move that warhead,” Rostow said, nodding at the screen. A staffer worked the touch-screen control from his seat at the desk and the monitor at the front of the room went live, a satellite video of the CAVIM site playing on the screen. Cargo trucks were lining up at the chemical factory loading dock. “If it goes missing, we might not find it again before it turns up somewhere we won’t like.”

“And you don’t want ‘the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud’?” the SecDef asked.

Rostow frowned at the inference. He’d been a vocal critic of that particular argument when it had first been made more than a decade before. It rankled him how often he’d found himself having to sustain the policies of predecessors that he’d attacked during his election campaigns. “What I want is to either seize it or destroy it,” the president replied, evading the question. “I want a plan on the table that we can execute immediately to make that happen.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs reached under the table, opened a briefcase, and pulled out a binder. “We’ve had a CONPLAN worked out for similar contingencies ever since Chávez first started inviting Iranians into his country,” he said. “It doesn’t precisely address the current logistical situation but we can adapt it in short order. That said, Mr. President, we need you to answer a few questions.”

You were ready for this coming in, Rostow realized. There’d been no looks of surprise, no confusion at all. They’d anticipated this and coordinated among themselves before they’d set foot in the West Wing. No, these men were not idiots. That’s what military men do, he realized — prepare for contingencies and he was just another contingency to them. He kept the anger generated by that thought off his face. “Proceed,” he ordered.

“Sir, depending on the operational window, seizing the CAVIM site is possible,” the chairman answered. “The logistics aren’t complicated and Venezuela is close enough to U.S. soil to let us place airlift assets over the target site without midair refueling on the inbound leg. We could certainly put enough troops on-site to make it happen with a high probability of success, but we need to know three things. First, do you want the operation to remain covert or do you want a public show of force? Second, what is your tolerance for casualties? Third, do you want the facility destroyed after the warhead is seized?”

Rostow rocked back in his chair. Casualties. That nuisance again. “I don’t care if it remains covert. In fact, I think we should send a message to Iran and anyone else who’s trying to develop their own nukes in our half of the world in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obviously, I want casualties kept to a minimum.” He shared looks with Feldman. The sight of coffins being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base was something he didn’t want on CNN and the other news networks. “And do I want the facility destroyed? Yes. I don’t want them trying this again.”

“Very well,” the chairman said, nodding. “Our analysts and Kathy Cooke’s concur that the CAVIM site appears to have somewhere around two hundred armed personnel at present. Assuming those men are all armed, to assure a high probability of success and minimize the probable number of casualties, we’ll need to move forces at least at a five-to-one ratio—”

“Five-to-one!” Feldman yelled. “That’s a thousand men. You’re talking about moving an entire brigade!”

“Sir, that would just be for the CAVIM site—”

“Wait… ‘just the CAVIM site’?” Rostow repeated.

“Mr. President, you yourself pointed out at the UNSC that the Venezuelans have numerous other facilities involved in this enterprise. If you want to ensure that they can’t try this again, then I assume you’ll want those facilities destroyed as well. So we’re talking about one or more brigades per facility. At least an entire division total, possibly more—”

“You’d be invading the entire country!” Feldman protested. “You’d have to take on the entire Venezuelan Army.”

“Please don’t think I’m speaking lightly when I say the Venezuelan military wouldn’t be a problem if it came to that,” the chairman observed. “Yes, we are talking about deploying entire combat brigades. The First and Second Brigade Combat Teams, Tenth Division, stationed at Fort Drum in New York specialize in mountain warfare and would be our choice for taking the CAVIM site. The First and Second BCTs, First Infantry Division, out of Fort Riley in Kansas—”

“Stop,” Rostow ordered. “Just stop. This is overkill.”

“No, sir, it’s not,” the SecDef countered. He took a deep breath. Guiding a president through military planning without appearing insubordinate was always a delicate affair. “Sir, what you’re really asking for is the guaranteed elimination of an entire country’s ability to proliferate weapons of mass destruction. That means an entire infrastructure has to be dismantled or destroyed with a high degree of confidence. And there are three levels at which you need to think that through. The first is tactical… how do you want these facilities seized and destroyed? Do you want us to round up the key personnel involved for detention and debriefing? We’ll need to gather considerable intelligence on the ground to confirm that the entire infrastructure has been identified, targeted, and neutralized.”

Neutralized, Rostow thought. Such a clean word.

“The second is operational… how do you want to move the forces into the theater needed to execute those tactics?” the SecDef continued. “The CONPLAN answers those tactical and operational questions. But if you want to deviate from it by deploying fewer forces, that will affect the probability of success we’re prepared to offer and will likely result in higher casualties. The way to keep our men from getting killed or wounded in large numbers is to keep the fight short and overwhelm the enemy quickly. If the Venezuelans choose to make this a national fight and mobilize their full military capabilities, then we’ll have to discuss logistics for reinforcing our brigades on the ground and possibly launching a counteroffensive that will buy us enough time to confirm the nuclear infrastructure has been destroyed.”

Rostow turned and shared looks with Feldman, incredulous.

“You said there were three levels,” Feldman pointed out. He was sure he didn’t want to hear what the man was going to say.

“The third level is strategic, and that one’s entirely your call, not ours,” the SecDef advised. “You can’t mobilize an operation of this size without other countries noticing. We know the Iranians are involved in this, so how will they react? They could start car-bombing our bases in the Middle East or tell Hezbollah to start launching Katyusha rockets into Tel Aviv. So how will the Israelis react? There will be global blowback to this, which is why the SecState should be here.” He nodded toward the empty chair. “And there’s the issue of how all of this will affect our intelligence and counternarcotics operations. Will the Colombians support the operation? It would be helpful if we could stage out of their bases along the border—”

“Stop!” Rostow ordered again. He certainly didn’t want the man saying that Kathy Cooke or the DNI should be in the room. The president rubbed his hands against his eyes, then ran his hands through his hair as his mind raced, trying to process the arguments the military officer was laying out. This isn’t going the way I hoped, he told himself. Why couldn’t Avila just fold? “I’m not prepared to invade an entire country,” he finally admitted.

The chairman nodded sympathetically. “The other option would be air strikes,” he offered. “That would eliminate any possibility of seizing the warhead, but we can pretty well guarantee destruction of the facilities that we know about. The question then would be whether our picture of the entire infrastructure is complete.”

“Casualties?” Feldman asked.

“There’s relatively little risk that the Venezuelans could shoot down a B-2, and the Truman can establish air superiority and clear a corridor if necessary. She’s already had combat air patrols running in case the helicopters evac’ing the embassy staff needed cover.”

“Then do it—” Rostow started.

“There is one potential issue with that course of action, sir,” the SecDef said, interrupting.

“What?” Rostow asked through clenched teeth, failing to contain his exasperation.

“Ms. Cooke’s people haven’t been able to deliver the video they collected of the site, so we still don’t have any solid intel on the interior of the factory where the nuke is being stored. It’s supposed to be a chemical factory, but nobody knows whether that’s true or whether the interior has been rebuilt. If the Iranians had a hand in it, they might have a hardened bunker underneath. That’s what the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is for, but it was designed to take out hardened facilities underneath mountains,” the SecDef advised. “You can use a MOP against that type of site because the mountain will collapse down and trap any nuclear material. But if this site doesn’t have a hardened bunker, or if the bunker isn’t very far down, the MOP could blow nuclear material up and out. It could turn into a giant dirty bomb.”

“What about a MOAB?” the president asked.

“Same problem,” the chairman told him. “Anything powerful enough to guarantee that the entire facility and the warhead get taken out runs the risk of spreading radioactive material all over the countryside.”

Rostow nodded, leaned back in his chair, and pretended to think. “Better that than a nuclear device going off on U.S. soil and spreading fallout all over our countryside.”

“I can’t disagree with that, but our allies in that neighborhood won’t be so understanding,” the chairman counseled. “The SecState will have his own kind of cleanup to do.”

“Our allies don’t get to vote in our elections,” Rostow said. He stared at his SecDef as he pushed himself away from the table, ready to leave. “Cut the orders.”

Elham leaned against the cargo truck, the hard metal pushing into his lower back. His men stood off to the north, out of the way of the SEBIN soldiers who were scurrying between the convoy and the chemical factory, carrying boxes stuffed with papers and bits of equipment the Iranian soldier couldn’t identify. Carreño was standing near the main entrance, yelling at some subordinate, the Spanish flying from his mouth so quickly that Elham couldn’t understand anything but the profanity. The SEBIN director was anxious, he saw. No, not anxious … afraid, Elham realized. The wages of incompetence are fear, he thought.

Cleaning out the CAVIM site was a feckless exercise. Even if they moved everything out, down to the last scrap, they wouldn’t escape. The Americans knew there was a nuclear weapon here.

A memory roiled up in his mind. He had been sent to arrest a man once, a fellow Iranian suspected of taking money from the Israelis to betray his country and his God. The traitor had grabbed a woman and put a gun to her head, threatening to kill her unless he was allowed to leave. Elham had stared at the gunman and his hostage through the scope of his Steyr. The building was surrounded, no food or water would be sent in, the traitor would be allowed no sleep. How long can you stay awake with a gun to her head? How long can you go without water before you surrender? And if you shoot her, then what? he had thought. The man would collapse from thirst or exhaustion before the woman died from lack of either and killing the hostage would erase all the leverage he had, as he learned when he had panicked and made good on his threat. Elham had killed him before the woman’s corpse had hit the floorboards, a single shot to the head from a hundred yards. Taking the hostage had accomplished nothing. He had kept Elham and his men at a distance and earned a few minutes of life, nothing more. Killing the woman would have certainly earned him a death by hanging had they bothered to take him alive.

This was no different. The United States would not be held hostage by a brigand such as Avila and it couldn’t be killed with a single warhead, only angered. The Americans would strangle this country until the device was found, every ship searched, every plane grounded for years if necessary and Avila’s bid to capture American spies would not change that equation now. A few U.S. tourists were sitting in Venezuelan jails, but that would just earn more scorn and outrage from the UN. Threatening such innocents only made the Venezuelans the clear villains and earned them no leverage at all. And if Avila used the warhead? The United States would end his rule, and possibly his life, as surely as Elham had ended the traitor who had shot his hostage.

Neither would Iran escape, Elham was sure. The supreme leader could always cut off Ahmadi, claim he was acting on his own initiative, but even that would require admitting that Iran had, in fact, been pursuing nuclear weapons. Perhaps it was time finally for that, time to open up the facilities at Fordow and Parchin and Ramsar. That wasn’t his decision to make but it was the only outcome he could see that left his homeland in a better place than it was before. It was also one that his own leaders would refuse to accept. They would dissemble and lie and the sanctions and isolation would go on and on. Eventually they would get their bomb and celebrate their certainty that the revolution was now secure amid the economic and diplomatic ruin that Iran would become. They would pay a very high price to gain a security that was really within their grasp now and that they didn’t need nuclear weapons to reach.

Ironic, Elham realized. He hadn’t considered before that violence might not always foster security… might diminish it, in fact. It was a strange thing for a soldier to admit, and one he was sure that Ahmadi and Carreño and all the rest never would. Deceit and violence were all they really understood when the trappings were stripped away.

The game was already finished. These men just didn’t want to accept the fact.

You’re in it too, Elham told himself. But there was nothing for him or his men to do here… carry some crates perhaps, but he would not bother. What he wanted was some way to change the game itself and there were no such options that he could see. So he stood by the truck, cradling the Steyr, and wondering when the Americans would tire of it all. He looked into the sky. The American satellites were there. Surely they saw what was happening and wouldn’t stand for it.

When are you coming? he thought. Soon. They had to be coming very soon.

As a general rule, the United States Air Force didn’t give its aircraft individual names like the Navy did ships, but the B-2s were an exception. The Spirit of Oklahoma was nearly as old as the younger airman driving the hydraulic lifter that loaded the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) into the bomb rack. The ground crew weren’t privy to the details of the bomber’s mission orders, but none of them had to guess where she was going. The United States only had eight of the bombs and there was only one place on earth now where anyone felt 5,300 pounds of high explosive needed to drop uninvited out of the sky.

The crew chief checked the team’s work, then sealed up the bomb-bay doors and started working his way around the bomber, methodically stepping through the preflight inspection. Time was short on this one, he’d been told, but he refused to cut a corner. There was no point flying all the way to Puerto Cabello if the Spirit of Oklahoma couldn’t put the bomb on target when she arrived.

He finished just after the pilots, both captains, entered the hangar, suited up with helmets in hand. They did their own inspection, mirroring the crew chief’s procedure as they checked the weapons specialists’ work. Satisfied, they climbed the stepladder in the landing gear well, boarded the black wing and took their seats in the cockpit. The airmen rolled open the hangar door and the crew chief stepped out onto the tarmac, donning a headset, the communications cable uncoiling behind him as he walked.

Standing in front of the massive black bird, he called out to the pilots and confirmed their response. The three stepped through more of the preflight sequence together, tested the controls, and loaded the flight plan into the computer. The pilots finished the sequence and the crew chief walked to the side, coiling the communications cable in his hand as he went. He turned and gave the pilots the hand signal to proceed forward, marshaling the B-2 onto the tarmac.

The Spirit of Oklahoma rolled out of the hangar and taxied to the assigned runway. She was the only plane to fly this morning. Clearance from the tower for takeoff was immediate. The stealth bomber’s engines cycled up, the pilots lowered the flaps, and the aircraft accelerated down the runway and lifted off into the dark gray Missouri sky. She turned south and glided quietly into the low clouds that quickly stole her from the crew chief’s sight.

The hike to the top had taken longer than Jon had predicted. The last few hills had been steeper than Kyra remembered, with rocks erupting from the underbrush, forcing them to take a more convoluted path to the top. Jon showed no sign of the strain, but her legs were on fire by the end and she was grateful when he called for a stop.

Kyra huddled behind the tree line, gun in hand, with Jon just behind her, searching the area with the Barrett’s Leupold scope. They watched the clearing for almost a half hour before she finally judged that they were alone. Still, they moved around behind the trees until they reached the leeward side of the hill that overlooked the CAVIM plant. Men in the valley below were alternately running between buildings and trucks or standing around with guns, scanning the edge of the forest just beyond the fence, determined not to allow another incursion. Kyra smirked as she saw a line of them standing by the southern fence, watching the ordnance field.

Carreño is down there. She knew it as surely as she knew Jon was beside her. His operation had been compromised in the worst way he could have imagined. He wouldn’t leave the cleanup to subordinates.

“There,” Jon said, pointing at the valley. There was a line of five-ton cargo trucks by the chemical plant, engines idling, she judged by the exhaust rolling out of their stacks. “They’re loading up. Looks like they’re cleaning house,” he said.

“You think Langley knows?”

“Probably.”

“Maybe we should hold this position,” Kyra suggested. “If they’re cleaning out, we might see something worth a call.”

“Any chance we can do that the easy way?” he asked.

Kyra pulled the smartphone from her cargo pants and checked the screen. “Still no signal,” she muttered.

Without a word, Kyra pushed forward and ran from the trees toward the spot where she had built her blind. She kept low, her head down, her hands brushing against the low clover and weeds as she ran. She heard Jon moving behind her, surprisingly quiet, more than she could manage. It was thirty yards to the site.

The blind was demolished. A stab of regret shot through her, coming from someplace inside she couldn’t identify. The little tent of brush and branches had been her protection, however feeble, for a night and she felt violated by its destruction.

No time for that, she thought, and pushed the feelings away. “The antenna is gone.”

“I threw it in the woods after I pulled the cable,” Jon said. “I’ll look for it but I’ll be surprised if it’s still there.”

Jon went for the tree line and Kyra began moving through the brush again. The flat rock was… there. She scrambled to it. The brush was still in place. Perhaps the soldiers hadn’t been thorough in their search, or had come at night and hadn’t been able to see well enough in the dark. She pulled the brush and netting away, then grabbed the flat rock under the lip and slid it to one side. It was all there, the HK where she had left it, the radio unmoved. “At least we have the transceiver,” she said into her headset.

“Antenna’s gone. We’ll have to find another one,” Jon replied.

“Yeah, they’re just lying around all over the place.” Kyra pulled the LST-5 radio out of the hole and set it on the rock, its cables falling over the edge into the dirt.

“What can I do for you, Kathy?” the SecDef asked. She’d tracked him down in the Tank, the conference room in the National Military Command Center of the Pentagon. He couldn’t recall ever having talked with the CIA director on the secure phone before. They’d shared some small talk at social functions since he’d assumed the office a few months earlier, but nothing official. She’d been professionally close to his predecessor, who’d retired at the end of President Stuart’s term. Lance Showalter was now fly-fishing in Montana somewhere, maybe drafting his memoirs, and the current secretary of defense could only hope that his own tenure would end so well. Current events weren’t promoting his faith in that particular future.

“I have two officers on the ground in Venezuela. They had to shelter in place out in the field when the embassy got surrounded. I need you to authorize a personnel recovery mission,” the CIA director replied.

“The president has approved?”

“Not yet. He will.”

The SecDef grunted in response. “We’ve got enough air- and sea-lift assets in theater to spare some units. Where are they?”

“We’re not exactly sure at the moment, but somewhere around Puerto Cabello,” Cooke admitted.

“Near the CAVIM plant?” The SecDef’s voice took on a worried tone that sent a shiver down Cooke’s spine.

“I don’t know. At one point they were conducting surveillance in the hills around the facility.”

“If they’re anywhere close, you have to pull them back.”

A dark feeling invaded Cooke’s chest. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“The White House hasn’t told you?”

“I haven’t heard anything—”

“Kathy, I don’t know why POTUS didn’t invite you to the meeting. He didn’t invite Marshall either.” The SecDef paused, and Cooke could hear him assembling his thoughts. “There’s an air strike under way on the CAVIM site… B-2 bomber with a Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The president wants to kill the nuke before Avila moves it.”

“How long?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. She had no idea where Jon was, but the man’s way with misfortune didn’t give her much hope.

“I cut the orders and the plane took off from Whiteman two hours ago. It’s twenty-five hundred miles to the target.” The SecDef was thinking out loud now. “B-2’s max cruising speed is a hair over six hundred miles an hour. It’s like flying from D.C. to Vegas. So a little over two hours at most, depending on weather,” he said, finishing the calculation. “I hope your people are nowhere near there, Kathy. There’s no way I can authorize a personnel recovery mission anywhere inside that box until after the strike.”

“I understand,” Cooke said. “I’ll call you back when we have a better idea where our people are.”

“If they’re still near Puerto Cabello, Vicksburg is the closest ship. I’ll give Captain Riley a heads-up.”

“Thank you.”

“Batteries are dead,” Kyra said. She realized that she should have expected it. She’d left the unit powered on before she’d entered the base, needing it to be active to handle her radio communications during the incursion, and Jon hadn’t known where it was to turn it off when he’d abandoned the hilltop. Without being connected to the small solar panel that charged them, the batteries had simply run out. Kyra pulled out the solar panel, set it on the rock, and aimed it toward the sun. “We’re charging again.”

“It’ll take a few hours before it’s charged enough to make a long distance call,” Jon told her. He was staring down at the idling convoy through his rifle scope again.

“Before they roll out?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter without an antenna.” Jon shrugged. “No way to know how close they are to leaving.” He lowered the rifle and offered it to her. “Take a look.”

Kyra took the Barrett from Jon’s hands, noticing that he seemed relieved to let it go. She shouldered the Barrett and put her eye to the scope.

One of the trucks was backed up to the loading dock. A small forklift was nudging forward, a metal cylinder strapped onto its teeth, technicians surrounding the operation. “What is that?” Kyra asked.

“My guess is a nuclear transport container. That’s probably what those pirates cracked open on the Markarid. Your buddy Carreño sent in that team of dockworkers you found to close it back up and they got cooked doing the job.”

“Marvelous,” Kyra muttered, deadpan. “Where’s the warhead?”

Jon just shrugged.

Kyra shifted the rifle gently to the right. She could see into the open beds of the other trucks. Some had small stacks of boxes, files and papers, she thought. Others were loaded with larger metal crates, but none seemed the right size for a warhead.

“Any word?” Cooke asked as she came through the door.

“Not exactly,” Drescher replied. “We know where they are. We just can’t talk to them.” He pointed at the flat-panel display mounted on the front wall.

Cooke walked around the table and stood in front of the monitor. Her task force had kept the overhead imagery of the CAVIM site on the screen since the revelation that a nuclear weapon was inside. Drescher zoomed the picture out until the chemical factory was a small square in the upper left, then pointed. “Here.” He panned the picture, switched to infrared, and zoomed it back in.

Cooke gasped. Two bodies were lying side by side on the hilltop, moving slightly, the smaller of the pair clearly aiming a weapon. “Why did they go back?” she asked, incredulous. Run, Jon! she wanted to scream at the television, make him hear her by force of will. Her sense of duty took hold. She could not lose her composure in front of the troops.

“Good question,” Drescher replied. “Our best guess is that they left some gear on the hill and went back for it. If that’s the case, we’re not sure why we still can’t contact them. Our other theory is that they learned about the Venezuelan bug-out and went to run surveillance. But we’ve got no way to know until they call us. The cellular network is down countrywide and they’re not answering on the LST-5.”

“We have to reach them,” Cooke said, panic creeping into her voice.

Drescher heard it. “What’s up?” he asked quietly.

Cooke looked sideways at her friend, leaned in close to him, and spoke, her voice as low as she could make it. “POTUS has ordered an air strike. They’re going to put a MOP down on the site in less than two hours.”

Drescher’s eyes went wide, the first time she could recall ever seeing the old curmudgeon surprised. He’d worked the Ops Center long enough to see it all. “I’ll call the assistant director for military affairs. He’ll plug us into the National Military Command Center,” Drescher advised. He lowered his own voice a bit. “Ma’am, Jon and Kyra are a half-mile away and up a hillside on high ground—”

“You think that’s far enough?” Cooke asked, doubtful.

“I don’t know,” Drescher replied.

“Any chance they’ll hear the bomber coming and run for it?”

“What kind of bomber is making the run?” Drescher asked.

“A B-2.”

“Then no,” Drescher told her. “I went to an air show at Joint Base Andrews a few years back. A B-2 did a flyover from behind the crowd, just a few hundred feet off the ground. I was looking sideways at one of the helos on the tarmac and saw it coming out of the corner of my eye. But I never heard it coming until it was over us. Northrop Grumman did some kind of crazy acoustical engineering… you can’t hear it if you’re in front of it. I thought the beast was gliding in unpowered.” He nodded at the screen. “The first time anyone there will know it’s inbound is when the bomb goes off.”

Cooke felt her legs starting to go weak. She sat on the edge of the table and clenched her fists.

“Clear the room,” Drescher ordered the group. They didn’t need to see this. “Report to the Ops Center. Whatever you’re doing, stop, and figure out how to contact those officers on the hill. I want updates every ten minutes. Somebody get the ADCIA for military affairs to call over to DoD and get us a live feed to the bomber. You have two hours.”

“There it is,” Jon said. The SEBIN soldiers had backed a new truck up to the loading dock and dropped the tailgate. The forklift was carrying a large metal crate and inching forward, like the driver was afraid he would go too fast and the crate would slide off the front if he braked. The worker bees were standing back and all other action around the area had stopped as everyone watched.

“No way for headquarters to see that,” Kyra said. There was a roof over the loading dock that would prevent satellites from seeing the cargo.

She took the rifle from him and watched the scene. “They’re terrified of the thing.”

Jon grunted. He’d missed that detail. “They probably are. After seeing those roasted dockworkers, they probably think the nuke would do the same thing to them if they stood too close,” Jon suggested. “How long before the radio’s got a decent charge?”

Kyra looked over. “We’re up to one percent on the battery.”

The minutes were crawling and racing at the same time and Cooke couldn’t keep her eyes from moving between the monitor and the digital clock on the far wall above it. “I should have pulled them out,” she muttered. “Screw that, I should never have sent them.”

“Based on the information you had at the time, you made the right decisions,” Drescher told her. He picked up the remote control to the monitor and adjusted the volume on the feed from the B-2.

“Feet dry,” one of the pilots announced. The B-2 had just slipped across the northern coast.

“They’re not going to make it, are they?” Cooke asked. I’m sorry, Jon. The tears were swimming in the corners of her eyes and she fought to keep them from streaming out, refusing to lift her hands.

Drescher just stared at her, then picked up the phone and dialed the task force downstairs. “This is Drescher. Give me some good news.” Cooke looked at him, hopeful. His expression didn’t change.

The CAVIM site was less than five minutes from the coast. The plane was automated to the point that it was practically a drone, so there was little for the pilots to do. The computers noted that the bomber had reached the appropriate coordinates and the bomb-bay doors rolled open, breaking up the aircraft’s silhouette and degrading its stealth capabilities enough that the Venezuela air-defense radars finally were able to see it for the first time. It wasn’t going to matter. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator slipped out of its cradle into the sky and the doors closed up again, having been open for less than five seconds. Its stealth profile restored, the B-2 disappeared from the Venezuelans’ screens without warning and the plane banked left, beginning the turn that would put it back on the landing strip at Whiteman before nightfall.

The MOP had its own GPS guidance system. Free of the plane, the bomb took stock of its location, calculated the optimal path to its target, and began shifting its tail fins, adjusting its trajectory as the high Venezuelan winds tried to push it away from its destination. It would have taken a hurricane to move it. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator weighed over fifteen tons.

The last of the SEBIN soldiers clambered aboard the cargo trucks and closed the tailgate. Satisfied, Carreño walked to the waiting town car and climbed in, seating himself in the front passenger seat. Ahmadi and Elham were waiting inside.

“Everything is secure,” he told the others. Carreño picked up the Motorola radio sitting on the dash. “Move the convoy out,” he ordered. “Stop for nothing. I want to be in Caracas before dark.”

“Sí, señor,” the lead driver replied. Carreño saw dark smoke spew from the trucks’ exhaust stacks and the first of the five-ton transports began to roll forward.

“There they go,” Kyra said. “I hope somebody up there is watching.” She waved at the sky, then saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up. “Jon?”

He saw her staring up and scanned the sky until he saw it.

GBU? It had to be. A Tomahawk cruise missile wouldn’t be arcing down in a vertical line and the object was moving too slowly to be any kind of ballistic missile. That meant a bomber had deployed it within the last minute. Jon stared beyond the falling weapon but couldn’t discern the plane that had loosed it. Too high to make it out, he thought. B-2 and B-52s both could reach fifty thousand feet, ten miles up, but he’d heard B-52s flying at altitude and now he’d heard nothing — a B-2, then.

The only question was what kind of ordnance the U.S. Air Force had just chosen to put on target. He’d seen smart bombs used in Iraq when his unit had called in air strikes on the occasional building filled with stubborn insurgents determined not to come outside. This one seemed larger than any Jon was familiar with, given the size and distance, and B-2s could carry anything in the U.S. arsenal, including nuclear weapons. He doubted it was one of those… hoped, really. They were done if it was nuclear.

It would hit in fifteen seconds or so by his estimate, and it was going to hit close. He wasn’t surprised. There was only one target worth hitting. He stared at the weapon as it hurtled downward, seeming to come straight toward them.

Five seconds later, he finally figured out the weapon type. “Get down!” he yelled. Jon turned and heaved himself toward Kyra.

Drescher zoomed the picture out. The image of Jon and Kyra on the hilltop was overlaid in a separate box on the lower right. The entire convoy had moved out of the picture now.

Cooke stared at the monitor, hands over her face, her eyes fixed on the separate feed of Jon and Kyra. She saw one of the thermal figures lunge toward the other. I’m sorry, Jon, I’m sorry, I’m—

The image of the CAVIM building went completely white.

The trip to the ground took a little over fifty seconds. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator ripped into the chemical factory’s roof at terminal velocity.

As big as a large van, the MOP was designed to penetrate two hundred feet into hardened concrete bunkers. The CAVIM plant didn’t offer nearly so much resistance and the bomb smashed through every floor in less than a tenth of a second, crushing more than one technician on its way to the subbasement. The falling weapon cratered through the building’s foundation, then burrowed into the earth and traveled almost two hundred feet farther through the dirt and rock before its onboard computer decided it had gone far enough.

The MOP’s payload detonated, fifty-three hundred pounds of high explosive igniting in a fraction of a second. The shock wave went supersonic, compressing everything in its path to the density of steel, and traveling back up through the solid earth around it.

The entire building came off the ground as the earth rose up underneath it, rippling outward in a circle like an earthquake driving upward and out from a fault line. The shock wave broke through and the building pancaked from bottom up, smashing it all to gravel, the walls disintegrating into particles small enough to vaporize in the fireball that followed an instant later. Smaller outbuildings around the plant disappeared, crushed between the writhing earth, the solid wall of air hardened by the shock wave, and the fireball that trailed behind. A mushroom cloud erupted out of the earth where the MOP had burrowed, sucking air and dirt into the sky higher than the foothills.

The cargo trucks were five hundred feet away from the point of impact, well inside the blast radius. The artificial earthquake reached the first cargo truck and lifted all five tons of it off the ground, flipping it end over end. The shock wave struck it faster than the speed of sound, stripping away the tires and metal sides, twisting the frame like rubber, and shattering the bones of the soldiers in the cargo bed before their brains could recognize that anything had happened at all. The second truck followed the first, slamming into what remained of its brother. All of the trucks took flight in a fraction of a second, the soldiers inside killed before the heat of the now-dying fireball ever touched them. The entire convoy came to rest hundreds of feet from where the shock wave had touched them, the trucks twisted and crumpled, lying on their sides.

Carreño’s car was another three hundred feet ahead — just far enough to spare its passengers. The shock wave hit the vehicle, shattering the windows and driving the air at a few hundred miles an hour, sucking the oxygen from the occupants’ lungs. The town car flipped over onto its side, end over end, until it came to rest on its right side, all four passengers unconscious and bleeding from their noses and ears.

Kyra saw the shock wave for a fraction of a second, barely enough time for her mind to register the sight before it reached her position. It was a perfect circle of distorted air expanding out as it vaporized everything it touched. It passed over the security shack she had penetrated, then the fence, which disappeared into shards smaller than nails. The new shrapnel flew into the woods and cut into the trees microseconds before the shock wave touched them, shredding the smaller ones into splinters and bending the larger ones over until their trunks finally exploded, sending them tumbling into the hillside.

Behind it, the ground rolled like an ocean wave, a perfect circle of moving earth expanding outward until the flash from the explosion forced Kyra to shut her eyes.

The shock wave was dying now, slowing down and losing force from the moment of its birth. It expanded into the trees, ripping branches loose into the air. Still it pushed out, spending its energy to rise up the slope. Kyra yelled as she felt it hit, like a giant fist punching her over the entire surface of her body, knocking Jon off her and sending him rolling through the high grass. Her cry was lost in the screaming air, the loudest sound she’d ever heard. She could feel her eardrums vibrate inside her head and without a thought her hands covered her ears, trying to save her hearing. The earth rumbled and the solid wave rolled underneath her, throwing her and Jon into the air.

Cooke stifled a cry of her own as she saw the MOP explode and the screen wash out. She turned away from the monitor, covering her face with her hands. Drescher said nothing, didn’t move.

They’re dead, she realized. They must be dead. It was the only thought she could keep in her head.

“Kathy,” Drescher said after a short eternity. He’d never called her by her first name. She looked up. The Ops Center watch officer was pointing at the monitor.

On the screen, in the separate window in the lower right, Cooke saw two thermal figures, bodies, lying prone on the ground, still.

Then they started to move and Cooke couldn’t restrain a small cry of hope.

“Jon?” Kyra couldn’t hear her voice over the ringing in her ears. Her balance was shot. The world spun around her and she stumbled forward as she tried to rise, falling onto her hands and knees.

He was in the high grass behind her, twenty feet away, dragging himself to his feet. He made his way to her side, no small feat. He lifted her to her feet again and she fell against him, unable to keep her balance. He caught her, put her arm around his shoulders, and held her upright.

They turned and looked at the valley.

The CAVIM site was gone, erased from the ground, a mushroom cloud reaching into the sky to a height Kyra couldn’t begin to guess. The chemical factory was a crater in the earth, the outbuildings vaporized, the security hub missing, with only a small corner of one charred foundation to mark its previous location. Smaller craters in the ordnance field marked where the shock wave and the fireball had detonated the unexploded ordnance that had littered the ground.

“There,” she said, pointing, almost having to yell so he could hear her over the ringing in his ears. The convoy was scattered out beyond the crater, Carreño’s town car another football field’s length beyond them. The trucks were on their sides or backs, clearly wrecked beyond repair. “You think it survived?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Trucks weren’t vaporized… nuclear… nuclear transport caskets can take serious punishment.” He was still trying to catch his breath. “If they put it in one of those… might be intact.”

“Have to find out.” Kyra pushed away from Jon and stumbled forward, her balance returning more slowly than she wanted. She searched through the grass and found the HK, still in working order. The Barrett was the heavier rifle and had traveled less distance in the same direction.

“Radio’s intact,” she heard Jon call out behind her. She turned his way. The LST-5 had just missed landing on a large rock after being thrown into the air, and Kyra realized for the first time how lucky she and Jon were not to have come down to earth that way. Either of them could have, maybe should have broken backs or bones.

She reached into her pocket and checked her smartphone. It was still in one piece, courtesy of the MIL-SPEC case holding it. Breathing was coming easier now. “We finish this. We make sure it’s dead, then we get out of here.”

Jon pointed at the mushroom cloud. “They can see that all the way to Puerto Cabello.” Another pause, another deep breath. “The SEBIN will be coming. If you see anyone down there, run for the truck.”

“I’ll try. But if we get separated, take the truck and head for some town that’s not on fire. Try to find a way to reach Mari or HQ.”

“I’ll be watching,” he said.

Kyra began to make her way down the hillside, still unsteady on her feet.

Jon exhaled, then reached down and picked up the Barrett. It was heavy in his hands.

“What are they doing?” Cooke asked. One of the thermal figures on the screen — Kyra, she guessed, judging by the smaller size — was walking away from the other. Jon laid himself prone on the ground.

“Going down to check out the blast site?” Drescher guessed. He panned the satellite image away from the blast crater until he found the wrecked convoy trucks. “The nuke might’ve survived.”

Don’t get killed. Don’t get caught. Bring home the intel. The words ran through her mind, a cruel reminder that she had put the two officers in harm’s way. Now Kyra was trying to bring home the intel and Jon wasn’t trying to stop her. He must think the nuke survived too, Cooke told herself.

“Get me the SecDef,” she ordered. It took Drescher five minutes to comply with the order.

“I’m a little busy, Kathy,” the SecDef replied.

“We think the nuke might have survived,” she told him. “I assume you’re watching the live feed?”

“We are.”

“One of our officers is approaching the crash site from the northwest. I know both members of the team personally. She wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t both think there was a chance the warhead is intact,” she advised.

“If that’s true, we might have to bomb the site again,” the SecDef told her. “Truman can hit the site within the hour.”

“The SEBIN will probably have people on-site within a few minutes. If you do that, there will be casualties.”

“There were already casualties,” the SecDef replied. “I don’t think that’ll stop the president. But I’ll see if we can get some boots on the ground instead… secure the perimeter and maybe retrieve any nuclear material. Not likely, so don’t get your hopes up.”

“I want those personnel retrieval assets ASAP.”

“Has Rostow approved?”

“No. But if my people find out whether the bomb is dead, that’ll tell you whether you have to hit the site again.”

“Works for me,” the SecDef conceded. “Okay, it’s a go. I’ll get permission later. But your people have to pull back to some other checkpoint. I’ll order Vicksburg to launch as soon as that happens.”

“I’ll let you know,” Cooke said. She hung up the phone. They’re coming, Jon.

Her balance was better, the ringing in her ears quieter now, and Kyra began to jog down the hill, then run as she felt more steady on her feet. She reached the bottom and sprinted as hard as she could to the edge of the site where the fence had once stood. There was no building to provide cover, but she supposed the same was true for any survivors, and she saw none. She moved forward, walking into the compound, the HK raised to her shoulder.

Charred earth crunched under her boots and she saw little fires everywhere, the surviving debris burning where it fell. The smoke was settling, creating a fog that limited her vision to a few dozen feet. She made her way past the broken foundation of the security hub and walked east, stepping over the blackened gravel that lay in clumps on the ground. A quarter mile to the north, she reached the edge of the crater where the chemical factory had stood. The bowl in the earth was at least thirty feet deep to the bottom and she couldn’t judge the distance across… well over a hundred feet at least. She prayed that the fireball had eaten whatever chemicals had been stored inside the building, or that any surviving nuclear material was now a thousand feet above her head and getting blown out to sea.

I hope that reprocessing center was somewhere else.

Kyra made her way around the rim to the opposite side and raised the rifle to her shoulder.

She finally saw the convoy through the smoke. Kyra ran as quickly as she could without destroying her aim. She saw no motion, no movement, no survivors. She reached the first truck, which was resting on its back, tires missing and burning fluids spread around the crushed front. She moved around to the back, looked under the metal floor that had become the ceiling of the cargo bed. There were soldiers inside and she tried to suppress the urge to vomit that surged up from her stomach. This time she failed and she spewed her breakfast onto the ground.

Do the job, she ordered herself. Kyra forced her mouth closed and moved to the next truck.

This one had fared no better than the first. Its frame was twisted and the cab rested on its side at an oblique angle to the bed. Kyra raised her rifle again, her hands shaky, and she stepped around the front. She saw the driver inside through the shattered windshield. He was a bloody mass, his head resting on the passenger door.

The canvas cover over the back was shredded open. Inside were the crushed bodies of a dozen men, twisted at angles her mind refused to believe.

Of course it’ll be in the last one, she thought. It made sense that it would be in the truck closest to Carreño’s car.

Elham opened his eyes and still couldn’t see. The blood from the gash on his head was running over his eyes and he reached up and wiped it away with his hand. Still blurry, he looked around.

The car was on its side, driver’s side pointing to the sky. Ahmadi was beneath him, still belted in, unconscious. In the front, neither Carreño nor the driver was moving and he couldn’t tell from this angle whether they were living or dead. The front windshield was entirely opaque, the glass spiderwebbed from a thousand fractures. The side windows were gone and the soldier felt a slight breeze run down into the cab, carrying the smell of smoke and dust with it.

Nothing felt broken, though most of his body felt bruised, so Elham reached down and unlocked the seat belt, grabbing the leather handle to stop himself from falling on Ahmadi. He climbed out of the shattered window, his body quietly protesting, and he pulled himself out and dropped to the ground. He smelled gasoline. The fuel tank was certainly ruptured. One bit of flaming debris falling from the sky could turn the car into a pyre with everyone inside.

He couldn’t see the CAVIM site behind him for the smoke and dirt in the air. The convoy was a series of shattered wrecks. Fires were burning everywhere and all of the outbuildings were gone. He uttered a silent prayer that was as much a plea as an accusation leveled against Allah. His men had been in the back of one of the cargo trucks. His entire unit… dead now, surely. All good men who had deserved better than to die at the hands of some pilot whom they’d never had the chance to fight.

What did the Americans hit us with? he wondered. Not a nuclear weapon. They wouldn’t have survived that. He’d heard about some of the larger thermobaric bombs the Americans had, the Mother Of All Bombs and such monsters as that. They’d used one of those, surely.

Then Elham saw movement. His eyes didn’t want to focus, but he forced them, and he saw her… a woman in cargo pants and a T-shirt, with a rifle raised to her shoulder, moving behind the nearest five-ton cargo truck.

The truck that had carried the warhead.

Elham stumbled around to the back of the car. The trunk was crumpled and hanging partially open a few inches. The car’s frame had bent, cracking the trunk’s door loose. He grabbed it, pulled, and grunted as it moved a few inches. He pulled again, then looked.

The Steyr’s case was there, still in one piece, but too large to pull through the narrow opening. Elham put his boot against the rear bumper, braced himself, then pulled on the trunk door again. It slid a few more inches in the dirt.

The scene at the last truck was little different from the others except that some of the bodies of the SEBIN soldiers had been thrown out of the vehicle onto the ground. She stepped around them, looking at the bodies. There were no survivors. The convoy had been too close to the point of impact.

The last truck was lying on its side. There were no bodies inside this one, to her relief. She stepped inside the back, her foot coming down on the canvas cover that had been the roof and was now the floor. She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out the Maglite, and turned it on.

The metal crate was four feet square, intact, but dented on all sides with holes punched through it in several places from debris or sharp corners of the truck bed as far as she could tell. Kyra pointed the light inside the largest gouge in the metal she could find and looked in.

The light played over a large green cone, still secured inside its thick metal box.

Kyra stared at the device. How many kilotons? she wondered. A hundred? Five hundred? A megaton or more? Fission or fusion? Uranium or plutonium core? What design?

It survived, she thought. That was what mattered.

The enemy still had a warhead.

The crate was far too large and too heavy for her to move by hand and the cargo truck was destroyed.

Then she heard the first sounds in the distance, the rumbling of vehicles. She checked her watch. It had been almost thirty minutes since the bombing. The SEBIN in Puerto Cabello had seen the mushroom cloud, maybe even heard the explosion. They had tried to call the factory and gotten no answer. Now they were coming. They would secure the warhead, load it onto another truck, drive it away, and the United States would never find it again until Avila or Ahmadi was ready to reveal it.

Can’t let them just have it, she thought. She needed to buy time. Jon could hold the SEBIN off with the Barrett for a while, but they’d eventually find him, flank him, and that would be that.

Kyra stared at the crate as she heard the truck getting closer. Then she reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and checked the battery charge… 72 percent. She set the HK down, reached into the crate, and wedged the phone inside behind some of the foam padding lining the edges, out of sight. She shined the light inside and looked for it. Satisfied that it wouldn’t be easily spotted, she turned off the Maglite and put it back in her pocket, then grabbed the HK and backed out of the truck.

The bullet hit the truck’s metal bumper, missing her head by six inches and Kyra heard the supersonic crack as it passed by her ear. She jerked away from the sound, her heart hammering in her ribs. She dove behind the truck again, rolled to a crouch, and raised the HK. There was no second shot. She looked up at the bumper.

The bullet had passed through it, tearing a hole and splaying the thin metal skin open like the peel of an orange. She stared at it, eyes wide, then swept the rifle over the space in front of her, every sense hyperactive, looking for the threat. Whatever caliber the weapon that had fired that shot, it was too large to be a sidearm or a carbine. It was big… Sniper rifle? Like the Barrett.

Elham muttered and slid the Steyr’s bolt forward. It should’ve been an easy kill, the distance to the target less than a hundred meters, but the world was still spinning too much and he’d missed the shot. Now the target had taken cover and was aware that she was being observed. That always made the second shot harder. He chambered the second round and put his eye behind the scope again.

The smoke was covering the field of fire and Jon couldn’t see much. The breeze was picking up and starting to blow some of the dark cloud away, creating holes in the smog, and he could see parts of the wrecked convoy.

He heard the deep, low snap of the rifle shot. That wasn’t an AK, he knew. Someone in the valley had a bigger rifle than that. He held the scope on the wreckage, looking for a target. The wind shifted the smoke and he finally saw Kyra crouched behind the farthest truck. He swept the Barrett left and saw the dim outline of the town car another hundred yards away.

“C’mon,” he muttered. He couldn’t see a target.

Kyra stuck her head out just far enough to see, then pulled it back, and another rifle shot struck the cargo truck, hitting metal somewhere she couldn’t identify. “What kind of moron shoots at a nuclear weapon?” she muttered.

Elham heard the approaching vehicles behind him. He didn’t need to hit the target now, he just needed to pin her down until the SEBIN arrived. They would flank her and either flush her out for him to shoot, or they would shoot her themselves. Probably the latter. He didn’t care now.

He saw the woman stick her head out for an instant and he rushed the shot. He knew it wouldn’t hit her from the moment he jerked the trigger. But she would hear it and stay in place. Time was her enemy now, not his.

The wind finally pushed enough of the smoke aside just as Jon heard the second shot. He saw the man standing at the corner of the town car, a large rifle resting on the upended trunk—

— and the memory of al-Yusufiah came roaring back into his head. He saw the insurgent on the roof standing by the mortar, ready to drop a shell down the tube when Jon’s own bullet had opened his chest to the sunlight behind. The emotions of the moment came back a second later, the shock and the shame that had taken so very long to suppress broke through, clenching in his gut. It had always been there, right at the edge of his thoughts and he’d fought it down every day.

And if he shot this man, the new memory would pile onto the old one and he would have two animals he would have to keep in the cage of his mind. He didn’t know if he had the strength to do it.

And then he heard the low rumble of the other trucks in the distance. In another minute, Kyra would be outnumbered and the SEBIN would kill her.

Jon closed his eyes and sucked in a lungful of air, then let it go—

— and held his breath as he felt the wind on his face, blowing right to left, and he shifted the Barrett. He felt calm. Then he pulled on the trigger until the Barrett roared.

The .50-caliber round hit the town car and Elham felt the rush of air push against his chest as the slug punched through the side of the trunk, then the lid and the metal scratched his abdomen as it splayed outward. He fell backward, then scrambled forward, grabbing his Steyr and diving behind the car for cover.

He looked at the holes in the trunk and saw the downward angle between the two.

The sniper was back in the hills, hiding in an elevated position. The Iranian soldier had limited cover, only the car, while the American gunman, who had an entire forest, now had the range.

The odds had just shifted to the other side. Elham didn’t even know where to shoot.

The front and rear windows of the cargo truck both had shattered and Kyra leaned around the warhead crate to look through. She saw the man fall backward, then grab his rifle and throw himself behind the town car. Jon had taken the shot from a half mile away and come within inches of hitting the target. You missed your calling, Jon.

Kyra heaved herself out of the truck bed, leaned around the corner, raised her HK, and emptied half her magazine at the town car just to let the sniper know she was closer to him than Jon. Then she turned and ran for the next wrecked truck in the convoy.

Jon saw Kyra make her move. Good girl. She ran out of his sight picture and he kept the scope on the man behind the town car. The sniper leaned out, trying to see his own target, and Jon pulled the trigger again. The bullet took a little less than a second to cover the distance before gouging the dirt by the car and the sniper pulled back. Just stay down.

Kyra threw herself behind the last truck and took a second to catch her breath. The vehicles were much closer now. She had less than a minute before the first SEBIN reinforcements would be on-site. The smoke wasn’t as dense now as it had been on her first approach, but it was still heavy enough to obscure her view of the car.

She pushed herself back onto her feet and sprinted out into the open, running toward the crater. She reached the edge, made her way around it as fast as her tired legs would move, and then ran straight for the tree line.

Jon saw Kyra enter the woods. Time to be going, he thought. He jumped to his feet and slung the Barrett over his shoulder. He stuffed the LST-5 into his pack and then ran down the hill for what he prayed was the last time.

Cooke exhaled hard. “They made it out.”

“They’re in the woods but they’re not out. That entire stretch of country is about to get overrun,” Drescher replied. He unfolded a National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Evasion Chart on the table. “They’re here,” he said, putting his finger down northeast of Morón. “Everything in all four directions is a mess of hills covered by forest. That’ll make a helo extraction problematic… but not impossible. But the countryside goes flat and empty east of Morón. If they can get that far a lot of the variables just go away, but they’d have to get through the town to make it happen. The military is probably going to lock that place down.”

Cooke nodded. They can make it. Someone in the Ops Center was panning the feed, keeping it on Kyra’s thermal image as the woman ran through the forest. “Approved. Get the coordinates for an extraction site ready to deliver. And get the SecDef on the line.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kyra stumbled and went down in the dirt. She pushed herself up and got her legs moving at full speed again. She had no idea where Jon was or how far it was to the truck. They’d left the truck three miles away. Forty-five minutes if I don’t stop. She wasn’t sure she could keep that up.

The SEBIN would kill her if they caught her now.

Kyra ignored the pain in her legs and her lungs, and she ran.

“What’s the word, Kathy?” the SecDef asked. The encryption on the secure line created a slight hiss in between his words.

“My people were at the site but the MOP didn’t get them. They’re on the move. I need Vicksburg on standby to execute that personnel recovery mission.”

“Yeah, we saw one of them recon the blast site. If she can confirm whether we got the nuke, she’ll be my new best friend. I’ve cut the orders to Vicksburg. Captain Riley has a helo on standby. All he needs is the extraction site.”

“My people have a nice spot all picked out, but we don’t have a way to contact our officers and give them the coordinates. If we make contact, we’ll direct them to the location, but if not, your people might have to make this up as they go.”

“Get me out of here,” Ahmadi ordered. His voice was shaking.

“Are you hurt?” Elham asked.

“Nothing serious, I think.”

The troop transports rumbled in through the dust clouds, kicking up some dust of their own, and slid to a stop in the loose dirt. Soldiers began to disembark, jumping from the back, and discipline died as they saw the crater for the first time. Curses and prayers to God Almighty went up until Elham cut them off. “Get over here,” he ordered, ignoring the fact that he had no authority over the locals. “We have casualties.”

The soldiers slung their weapons and pushed the car back onto its tires, drawing groans from the occupants. Elham opened the doors and a medic moved in to check the men over. “Is the weapon intact?” Ahmadi asked weakly.

“I don’t know,” Elham said. “I haven’t checked it. The truck that was carrying it is destroyed, but the transport crate is durable. There is a chance.”

“Good. Inspect it, then have it loaded in another one of these trucks as soon as possible. We have to move it before the Americans try again,” Ahmadi ordered, then began coughing hard. “I heard shooting?”

“The American spy, the woman, came down from the hills to see their work. She reached the back of the weapon transport by the time I was able to get out of the car,” Elham told him. “I tried to stop her, but the sniper was in the hills again and gave her cover. She fled on foot, that way.” He pointed north.

“How long since she ran?” Carreño asked. His sense of time was sketchy.

“Four or five minutes. Not long,” Elham said.

Carreño pulled himself out of the car and turned to the gawking soldiers, still staring at the burning crater. “Find them!”

“Permission to come on the bridge,” Marisa announced.

Riley frowned at the voice, turned, and recognized the speaker. “Granted,” he said. The station chief stepped through the hatch and approached the captain, who was standing over the Electronic Chart Display. He offered her a piece of paper as she came near. Marisa took it and skimmed it over.

“Orders straight from the SecDef. You just got your helo, Miss Mills,” Riley said. “We’re at Ready Thirty right now. Pilots will be briefed on the mission in ten minutes if you want to be there.”

“I want to go,” Marisa told him.

“I figured you would. So did your director. The orders allow it, so get suited up. Just stay out of the crew’s way.”

It was only her dignity that kept Marisa from running off the bridge.

Elham had seen other men frightened like Ahmadi was now. The Americans called it the “thousand-yard stare,” the blank face of a man who had faced death for the first time and realized that he was no one special, that he could die today as easily as anyone else. Men like him were accustomed to the soft life with all the amenities they could want. Such men gave no thought to their own mortality. Now the Americans had come within meters of killing him and Ahmadi’s mind was refusing to process the event.

Elham had no sympathy for the man at all. The law of the harvest, he thought. You have always made men like me reap what you have sown. Now the Americans are making you reap your own works.

“Señor!” he heard one of the SEBIN soldiers yell. Elham turned and saw the uniformed officer run up to Carreño. “As you ordered, we are setting up roadblocks on all the nearby highways, ten-kilometer radius. They will be in place in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” Carreño repeated with disgust.

“How long since the woman fled?” Ahmadi asked. The fear in his voice had vanished now, replaced by fury.

Elham checked his watch. “Almost forty minutes.”

Kyra dragged herself over the last ridge. Her legs had forced her to slow down almost ten minutes before and were finally starting to give out. She had heard no dogs, no soldiers behind her. Helicopters had overflown the forest at a low altitude, each one sending a new shot of adrenaline through her system, but there was no way they could see through the dense canopy overhead. But she couldn’t push herself much farther and even the adrenaline wasn’t enough to keep her going now.

She jumped down the leeward side of the ridge, letting gravity pull her through the dirt and loose leaves on the forest floor. The truck was at the bottom. She came to rest by the front bumper and let herself lie on her back for a minute, sucking air into her lungs.

The foliage she and Jon had put up to cover the vehicle had been removed and Kyra felt panic rise in her throat, thinking the SEBIN had found the truck. Then she saw Jon standing by the driver’s-side door. She couldn’t speak, her lungs still heaving too hard and fast.

“Good to see you too,” he said, tossing her own words back at her. Jon reached down and helped Kyra to her feet. She leaned on him until she was able to crawl into the truck. Jon took his place in the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and the rear tires spewed dirt.

Cooke kept her eyes on the imagery feed and watched Kyra reach the truck and Jon help her in. They weren’t even close to safe, but they were no longer on foot and hope began to rise in her heart.

“Cell network still down?” she asked.

“Yes,” Drescher said. “I don’t think Avila is going to do us any favors. The Pentagon is watching this too. They’ll have to guide the helo in once our people stop moving.”

The roads through the hills were all unpaved, barely depressions in the underbrush. Jon kept the truck going as fast as he dared, but the trails were narrow and uneven.

“Think we can make it to Highway Three?” Kyra asked. “Head north and we could put some road between us and Morón.”

“I’d bet money the SEBIN are throwing up roadblocks everywhere,” he said.

“Jon, I left my smartphone with the warhead,” Kyra told him.

He reeled at that bit of news. “So they can track it… smart.”

“So where do we go now?”

“Someplace high,” Jon said. “These PRC handhelds only have a four-mile range, and without the antenna, the LST-5 is only good for line of sight. So we need to find someplace high up where we can get power and splice an antenna.”

“Where?”

“Good question,” he said.

Sargento Javier Oliveira leaned against the jeep and shifted his rifle so he could scratch his face. The humidity was making his neck itch and the asphalt under his boots and his green uniform were both soaking up the sunlight, making it impossible for him and the other five men in his unit to stay cool. He wouldn’t have had patience for this duty even if it had been cool with an Atlantic breeze running past. The ocean was only a few kilometers to the north. A week ago the women had been coming out in numbers, but the riots had forced the beaches to close, leaving Oliveira and his unit to swelter in the barracks on base when they weren’t out on the streets, trying to keep the rioters and looters from running free. The ones protesting Presidente Avila were bad enough. The ones supporting the presidente were worse, thinking themselves agents of the law and free to do Oliveira’s job for him and pummel anyone they thought was an enemy of the state.

Then the Americans had bombed that explosives factory to dust. Oliveira had seen the mushroom cloud from the base and for a few moments had thought the United States had used a nuclear weapon against his country. He’d crossed himself and started to say his final prayers, but he realized after a few seconds that there had been no flash of light and no electromagnetic pulse. Whatever bomb they’d dropped had been enormous, but it wasn’t nuclear and Oliveira knew he would live.

Then the orders had come to establish roadblocks and detain any Caucasians who approached. Rumors had been spreading among the other troops for days that there were CIA spies hiding in the hills. Oliveira hadn’t believed it until the bombing.

He gritted his teeth and spit. They wouldn’t come by this station. There were no cars on the highway now, no doubt the result of the other roadblocks in both directions cutting off any traffic that would otherwise pass through. This intersection was the connection where the Avenida Falcón met the single paved road that ran into the now-destroyed factory complex and any Americans surely wouldn’t be coming down that street. Oliveira wasn’t the smartest of soldiers but he understood maps and math. These hills were hundreds of miles square. The chances that they would pass by here—

Oliveira cocked his head as he heard the vehicle for the first time. It was a large engine, running fast, like someone had the accelerator mashed to the floor, and it was getting louder. He looked down the road and saw nothing, then checked behind him. Avenida Falcón was empty, the entrance road to the destroyed factory was empty. The other men scanned the roads and checked their rifles as they muttered to themselves. Then where—?

The truck screamed out of the woods, coming off some small trail through the trees that they hadn’t been able to see from their station. Its tires hit the asphalt a hundred meters away and the driver cranked the wheel hard, turning south, and immediately accelerated in a straight line away from the roadblock. Two of the other men raised their rifles and fired a few rounds, but hit nothing.

Oliveira ran for the cab of his jeep and turned on the radio.

“Six men, two jeeps.” Kyra turned her head back and looked at Jon. “The turnoff to Highway One is a half mile down on the left.”

Jon shook his head. “There’ll be more of those jeeps on the big roads.” He looked left into the town. Black smoke was rising in columns from three points in the town. The riots had reached Morón.

“If we stop, we might not be able to get moving again,” Kyra warned. “Someone spots us when we’re on foot and we’re done.”

“Maybe,” Jon conceded. “But we won’t last long out here on the roads. We can outrun some jeeps but we can’t outrun their radios. They’ll coordinate on us and drive us until we run out of gas or road.” He turned left onto the first side street into Morón.

The forklift had finally arrived but couldn’t reach the warhead crate inside the wrecked cargo truck where it had settled. Elham had stood by watching as five soldiers managed to drag it out, with Carreño cursing their incompetence from start to finish. When it was finally in the open, the forklift driver got the metal tines underneath and the soldiers had strapped it on. Loading it onto one of the new trucks was going slowly.

“Malditos!” Carreño muttered under his breath. “We should have been gone twenty minutes ago. The Americans could put another bomb down on us anytime now.”

You should have been in the truck when they hit us the first time, Elham thought.

A soldier came running up to Carreño, radio in hand. “Señor!”

“What is it?” he demanded.

“The Americans just ran a roadblock southeast of our position here. They were seen turning east into Morón on Highway One.”

“I want that town cordoned off!” Carreño ordered. “Pull men off riot control if you need reinforcement. I don’t care if the entire place burns. Do you understand me?”

“We’ve already alerted all of our units.”

The soldiers locked the tailgate as the men inside finished strapping the warhead’s transport crate to the truck’s bed. “¡Terminado!” one of them yelled. Finished.

“We leave, now.” Carreño looked up at the sky, afraid of what might appear overhead. “¡Vámanos!” he ordered. The soldiers clambered aboard the jeeps and trucks and the convoy finally started to move.

Jon sent the Toyota through the streets fast enough to alarm Kyra, but the neighborhood seemed empty, the occupants either out rioting in another part of Morón or hiding in their homes. Jon scanned the buildings, muttering to himself as he rejected one edifice after another. Kyra looked right as they hurtled through another intersection—

— the riot in the next street over filled the gap one block down, a few hundred people at least gathered in one of the town centros, with a line of soldiers trying to subdue them all. People were running in two directions, either toward the fight or away from it. Some civilians held signs aloft, uniformed men were swinging nightsticks, a man caught one in the head—

— and then the scene was cut off by the next row of buildings as Jon kept the truck moving. The road passed under a freeway, probably Highway 1, she thought, which cut the small town in half running east — west. A line of jeeps filled with soldiers rumbled by on the overpass.

“I think half the army is coming together here,” Kyra said.

“There,” Jon said finally after another thirty seconds. Kyra followed his finger and saw an apartment building, ten stories of nondescript concrete with terraces protruding at every floor on all sides.

“Your call,” Kyra said. Jon accelerated, covered the last six blocks, and stopped the truck in a narrow alley across the street from the apartments he had chosen. Both analysts climbed out and went for the equipment in the back, then sprinted to the end of the narrow space.

The sign at the intersection to the left announced that the street was CALLE 10. Kyra checked the thoroughfare, in both directions. “Empty.” She led off, rifle raised, and sprinted across the street to the nearest door, a dirty wooden entryway smeared with old graffiti. It was unlocked and they entered, closing it behind them.

The stairwell ended in a small shack on the rooftop, with a television antenna rising off the top. Kyra crouched down behind it, dropped her pack, and pulled out the LST-5 and the tool kit. “I’ll get this going.”

“You going to be able to splice into that thing?” he asked, nodding at the antenna.

“I think so, but it’ll destroy the cable and be a crap connection,” Kyra said. “How far do we need to broadcast to reach the blockade line?” she asked.

“No idea,” Jon said. “The ships will be just outside the international boundary if we’re lucky. If all we’ve got is line-of-sight, those mountains could be a problem.”

“I need five minutes,” she told him.

“I’ll sweep the perimeter and find the approaches.” Jon hefted the Barrett and jogged to the northern edge of the roof.

The radio declared that it had 10 percent power when she turned it on. She programmed it to the emergency frequency, checked the encryption, then took the phone handset. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Arrowhead, Sherlock, GPS coords one zero point four eight two four minus six eight point two zero one six six…”

Marisa got lost on the way to the communications room and made one wrong turn, which led to two more and a request for directions. She finally reached the right hatch more than a minute after she’d been summoned. Master Chief LeJeune stood inside, leaning over the shoulder of some junior officer whose rank Marisa didn’t bother to identify. He waved her in. “Looks like your friends finally decided to call.”

Marisa grabbed a headset before the communications specialist could ask another question. “Arrowhead, Quiver. Report your status.”

“All present and accounted for, no casualties,” Kyra replied. “We could use some good news.” The signal was poor and static played with her voice.

“Good to hear you. Our friends here on the water have a green light to come get you and a ‘green deck’ for launch.”

“You’ve got our coords. We’re squatting on the roof of the tallest building we could find. You come into town and we’ll pop smoke. I don’t think you’ll miss us.”

“Copy that, Arrowhead. Hold tight and we’ll be there soon—”

“Quiver,” Kyra said, cutting her off. “I inspected the package before we had to bug out. The crate was damaged but the package was intact, repeat, it was intact. I hid my smartphone inside the crate. It’s got GPS but the cellular network is down and we’ve only got a few hours before the battery runs dry.”

LeJeune did the Navy proud with the profanities he quietly wove together at that piece of news. “I’ll tell HQ and DoD. They’ve got AWACs, Prowlers, and half the drones under heaven right off the coast. One of them will find the signal,” Marisa advised. “Hunker down. We’re coming for you.” She turned to the communications officer, made a slashing motion across her throat, and he ended the transmission. “Can you get a message to Langley for me?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Marisa dictated the message, then ripped off the headset and ran for the hatch.

“That’s it, they’re coming,” Kyra said.

“So are the bad guys,” Jon observed. He pointed back toward Highway 1. Kyra grabbed her HK and followed him to the edge of the roof.

The convoy had just turned onto Highway 1 when the radio chattered at them. “Two hostiles spotted on a rooftop, Calle Diez. All units converge.”

“Driver! Take us there!” Carreño ordered. “I want to be there when we take the Americans into custody. Tell the cargo truck to keep going. We’ll catch up to it shortly.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Ahmadi seethed. “The cargo is more important than the Americans. We should stay with it.”

“Are you afraid, señor?” Carreño asked. “There are only two of them. We’ll have them in custody and we’ll arrive in Caracas with the cargo and a pair of estadounidense spies captured on our soil. The Americans will have to back off then. We are about to win this game.”

The driver turned the wheel and the jeep turned off Highway 1 into Morón.

Drescher came through the door. “Message from Mills out on the Vicksburg,” he said as he put the printout on Cooke’s desk.

“They’re in Morón?” Cooke asked, shocked. “What are they thinking going into a populated area?”

“Might not have had a choice,” Drescher said. “Imagery shows the locals have thrown up roadblocks everywhere. They might have been funneled in.”

Cooke nodded, staring blankly at the page. “Call the White House,” she said, handing the paper back to Drescher.

Marisa was climbing out of her skin in the back of the Seahawk. The helicopter lifted off from the Vicksburg’s deck less than five minutes after Jon’s call. The Seahawk hugged the Atlantic, moving almost 170 miles per hour and still not going fast enough. The crew was professional and she was trying to keep her composure. Staying calm had always been trouble for her when Jon was involved.

The door gunner double-checked his harness. Marisa stared at him, saw he was a young kid, nervous, probably his first time going into combat. She leaned over and laid a hand on the GAU-17/A minigun the young soldier was rechecking. “You know how to use that thing?” she yelled so he could hear her over the rotors.

The soldier grinned. Where did the CIA find women who looked this good and knew how to handle guns? “Hoo-yah, ma’am! Looking to give my girl a proper workout!” he answered.

Marisa smiled. Giving a young man a chance to show off for a woman always took their minds off what was really going on.

“Sherlock, Quiver,” Marisa said into her head mic. “Seahawk en route your position, ETA…” She looked to the airborne tactical officer sitting in the copilot seat. He held up both hands, all fingers extended, then one hand with two fingers up. “Twelve minutes.”

“Copy that, Quiver,” Kyra called back. “Sooner would be better. We have hostiles inbound.”

“Can you hold?”

“We’ll let you know in two minutes.”

Jon put a new clip in the Barrett and loaded the first round, then set the bipod mount on the edge of the roof and put his head down and his eye to the Leupold scope.

The Venezuelan vehicles were still a half mile away, perhaps thirty seconds from his and Kyra’s position judging by the number of cross streets and their rate of speed. The convoy had three jeeps, four men each, and a troop transport carrying probably three times that many in the back — that unit alone could overwhelm his position. The truck first, then.

Jon took a breath of air into his lungs, let it out slowly, then stopped his breathing lest the rise and fall of his chest throw off the aim.

He put the crosshairs on the grille of the large transport and raised them slightly to compensate for the bullet drop over the distance. Jon put his finger to the trigger and pulled back, taking up the slack. The trigger pulled easily, then resisted. He kept his pull smooth, more force behind it now. The exact moment of the shot was a surprise—

The world was moving in slow motion and the .50 round seemed to rumble out of the barrel, kicking up the dust on the roof in a small hurricane that it pulled along behind in a spinning vortex and filling his sight with a brown haze. The muzzle brake blew hot gases out to the sides in a small storm that whipped Kyra’s face, forcing her to close her eyes and turn her head away.

The transport hit a small pothole a fraction of a second after the Barrett fired. The slug closed the distance while the truck’s cab dipped down slightly, angling into the shallow ditch enough that the bullet passed above the grille. It struck the hood and tore a furrow into the metal until it punched through and hit the engine block. The two-inch round shattered the metal, throwing shrapnel into the piston assembly and shredding hoses, hot fluids spewing out in small gushers. Crushed and misshapen, the slug tumbled end over end until it hit an iron slab too thick to penetrate. The bullet angled up and punched its way back through the hood, then through the windshield. It hit the driver’s right arm above the elbow, spraying blood, shattering the bone into a thousand splinters, and ripping out enough flesh and muscle to leave the lower arm hanging from the upper by only a few bits of skin. The driver screamed in shock and twisted the wheel with his good arm as he convulsed in terror. He would have been hard-pressed to keep the truck under control as the front bumper hit the low rise of the concrete sidewalk even had he not been thrashing in his seat.

The driver, delirious in his agony, hit the wheel, spinning the truck as he tried to avoid the concrete wall. The transport made a sharp turn and the men in the back yelled and cursed as they felt the machine roll at an unnatural angle under their feet. Its center of gravity too high for the turn, the truck rolled onto its left tires and the transport pitched over onto its side, throwing men out of the back. Half of the soldiers broke bones as they hit the ground, their bodies rolling along for a few dozen feet until they stopped, lying in crumpled heaps, bloody, several with compound fractures. Two more were crushed under the truck bed as it slid along the ground for almost twenty feet until it finally came to rest. The few men who were still able to move dragged themselves back to the toppled machine, its rear right wheels spinning on their axles.

Kyra let out a cry. “Nice!”

“I’ll take it,” Jon agreed. “How many in the jeeps?”

Kyra scanned the approaching fleet of vehicles. “I count twelve. Still too many for me to handle with this—” She patted her machine gun. “They’ll put shooters in the other buildings and flank us, easy.”

“Time?”

She checked her watch. “Helo is still ten minutes out. You want some smoke? It would give us some cover.”

“Save it,” Jon ordered. “It won’t last long enough and it’ll just keep me from seeing downrange. Don’t want those boys moving up on us.”

Carreño’s jeep hit a deep pothole, throwing him toward the roof until his seat belt dug into his shoulder and lap. Ahmadi hadn’t bothered to fasten his and struck the metal top, bending his neck. The man muttered an oath in his native tongue after gravity brought him back down to his seat.

Elham looked back to check his condition, but found his eyes drawn to the scene behind them. “We lost the truck,” he said. The other two soldiers in the back twisted in their seats and looked. “Miserable driver—” one started to say…

Jon moved the rifle again. The closest jeep was maybe a third of a mile away now, twenty seconds from their position, maybe a bit more. He put crosshairs on the engine and went through the mental checklist that his father had burned into his memory, never to forget.

Breathe.

Relax.

Aim.

Slack.

Squeeze.

The Barrett rumbled again and the jeep’s engine died a violent death, steam and fluids spewing from the grille. The vehicle rolled to a stop more than five hundred feet away. The men inside would need long minutes to cover the ground, but they would have entire side streets and no shortage of cover from Jon’s rifle.

“Two to go,” Kyra said.

Jon said nothing. She wasn’t sure he’d even heard her. Her partner was staring downrange, his entire world defined by the image in his scope.

“Side street! Turn off—” Elham started to yell. Steam and hydraulics erupted, blinding him to the high-rise that was still more than seven hundred feet away. He heard the engine tear itself apart, sounds of grinding metal that seemed to be screaming and cursing at the men who had driven the vehicle to its death.

The jeep to their right swerved around them, its driver gunning the engine in a mad effort to close the distance. One of his passengers leaned outside the window to fire his rifle, at what target Elham couldn’t imagine, but the fool didn’t get off a single round before that vehicle’s engine too erupted in smoke as black as the oil spilling out of it.

Elham twisted in his seat and saw the wrecked troop transport and a sister jeep both disabled, the former more than two hundred feet behind him. He looked forward again and judged the distance between the dead cargo truck and the roof of the apartment building — something over a half-kilometer, but not too far.

But why were they holding position here? Carreño had men coming from all directions. They would surround the building, establish firing positions, and keep the Americans from shooting off the roof’s edge until a team could take the stairs—

This is their extraction point, he realized.

The American military would be here soon, maybe with helicopter gunships, and Elham did not want to get caught in narrow, walled streets when those machines came over the skyline.

Elham kicked open his door and ran for the back of the jeep. He could have huddled in the front seat, the destroyed engine between him and the Americans, but he could do no good there. The jeep doors themselves were useless as cover… any gun that could break an engine from that distance could punch a bullet through the doors. “Get out of the jeep!” he ordered the others. They scrambled to follow and tossed themselves onto the street behind the vehicle, Ahmadi almost crawling underneath it.

The last jeep crashed to a stop with black smoke rising out of the hood before the Barrett’s echo died. The men scrambled out of the vehicle, afraid the engine was going to catch fire and the jeep burn with them inside. They hunkered down behind it, then came out running for the cover of Ahmadi’s jeep while one of their company fired his rifle in Jon and Kyra’s direction.

Neither analyst bothered to duck. The man was shooting from the hip and couldn’t have hit them at half the distance handling his weapon like that. Jon put a round at his feet and the man twisted to run so suddenly that he fell on the asphalt. The Venezuelan dragged himself back up and ran after his comrades.

“You know, you haven’t actually hit anybody with that thing,” Kyra noted.

“Not trying to,” Jon replied.

She checked her watch. “Nine minutes.” Four vehicles in less than a minute, she thought. We might live through this.

Jon swept the field, looking for men trying to move up. A head stuck out, then pulled back behind one of the dead cars. Jon didn’t waste a shot. The soldiers were staying put and none of them seemed confident enough of their skills to try a rifle shot at this distance with open sights.

“Eight minutes.”

Jon saw movement behind the second jeep he’d taken out. The engine on that one had broken out in flames and he held the scope on the burning wreck. The soldiers were pulling something from the back.

Elham saw the soldiers pulling out a large crate. Idiots. He pointed violently at the intersection ten feet away. “Move up on the side streets,” he yelled. But the men refused to listen. At least the fools would serve as a distraction. The Iranian threw open the cargo door to his own dead car and pulled out his rifle case. He dropped it on the ground, threw the locks, and raised the lid.

The Americans weren’t the only ones who could hit a target at this range.

“You see that?” Kyra asked.

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Jon assured her. He lined up the crosshairs where the soldier seemed likely to stand.

The Venezuelan soldier stepped out from cover, the RPG-7 launcher on his shoulder. It would be a thousand-foot shot, well within the effective range of the weapon if he had the time to fire. Jon refused to give it to him. He pulled the Barrett trigger and the bullet tore a large chunk out of the concrete wall behind the man. He dropped the RPG and fled for cover.

Jon ejected the Barrett’s empty clip and reached for his satchel to pull out another—

Elham locked the bipod on the Steyr and set it on the side of the jeep. The angle on the Americans’ position was poor. The shooter was in an elevated position, giving him a low profile. Elham would get one shot at best and that would be hurried. His opponent would see him, line up, and Elham would have to get his shot off first.

He reached for a bullet tucked into his vest, this one an armor-piercing round. He slid the black-tipped slug into the ejection port and pushed the bolt forward. A regular round would probably have done the job, but he saw no point in being stingy. He pulled the cap off the Leupold Ultra M3A scope mounted on the rail above the Steyr barrel.

“Jon! One o’clock!”

He moved the rifle to the position Kyra had called out and saw the soldier lining them up with a long-barreled rifle. Sniper, Jon thought. That’s no good. “Back! Get back!” he yelled. He needed two more seconds to reload the Barrett and he didn’t have them.

The Steyr’s barrel spewed fire. The Iranian’s .50 round hit the roof just below the edge where the American rifleman was crouched. The bullet blew through the concrete with a hideous crunching sound that Kyra had never heard before.

Elham swore. He’d never fired at an elevated angle so steep and had underestimated the drop rate of the bullet. He looked through the scope… he hadn’t hit the Americans, of course, but they were out of firing position. He pulled back on the bolt, ejected the spent casing, and loaded another round.

Jon pushed the Barrett clip into the rifle and loaded the first round. “You got him?” he called to Kyra.

“Yeah, I saw where he’s set up.”

“You think you can get his attention with that thing?” He nodded at her HK.

“How far is it?”

“Seven hundred feet?” John guessed.

“At that range, getting his attention is about all I can do with this,” she said. “She’s not a long-range gun.”

“Don’t need you to hit him,” Jon told her. “Wait until he shoots again, then put a few in the asphalt close enough to make him think about it.”

One of the Americans turkey-peeked over the edge. Elham’s shoulder took the hit as the Steyr sounded again, and the round punched into the lip of the roof for a second time. He waved the Venezuelans forward. A few refused, two others nodded and began to run.

Elham turned back, put his eye to the scope — one of the Americans, the woman, was firing in his direction. He heard metal rounds hit the jeep over the noise of Ahmadi yelling in fear, heard sharp pops as the slugs buried themselves in the frame, and he saw a few puffs of dust kick up from the building walls nearby, nothing too close. Seven hundred feet was a difficult shot under these conditions for anything other than a long-range gun with a good optic mounted on the rail. Still, given the range, the woman had done as well as her weapon would allow—

The jeep’s rear tire blew out and the exploding rubber that decompressed less than five feet from Elham’s head sounded for all the world like a mortar shell to his ears. His eyes shut involuntarily against the blast of dirty, stale air that struck his face, blinding him. On pure instinct, he grabbed the Steyr and rolled back to his right. Two degrees farther left and the American’s shot would’ve ripped his brain out of his skull. Praise Allah. Still, the American had him targeted, while Elham’s own sight picture had been destroyed. By the time he could line up again, the CIA officer would put the next round through his head.

“You shoulda blown his stinkin’ head off,” Kyra observed. Jon wasn’t shooting to kill and she knew why. She prayed that shooting to scare would be enough.

“No thanks,” he said. “Check the side streets and get ready to pop smoke,” he ordered. Kyra ran to the north side of the roof and saw a dozen Venezuelan soldiers running up the street toward them. She knelt down, raised the HK, and pulled the trigger. Three rounds of fifteen hit the lead soldier, one in the hip, two in the legs, and he tumbled onto the street.

Jon heard her firing. “How we doing?” he yelled.

Kyra shook her head and ran for the roof’s east end.

Marisa covered the microphone with her hand. “How long?” she asked. The pilot held up three fingers.

“Arrowhead, Quiver. We are ETA three minutes. Can you hold?” Marisa asked, trying not to yell into her mic.

“Quiver, Arrowhead. LZ is not secure, repeat, not secure. We have a convoy of hostiles pinned down to the west, but there are more coming from the other three directions. Our position is about to be surrounded and we cannot retreat.”

“Say again, you have a convoy pinned down?” Marisa asked.

“Roger that, Quiver.”

Go Jon, go, Marisa thought. The pilot turned back to her and covered his mic with a glove. “How many on your team?” he called back.

“Two,” Marisa replied. The pilot uttered a curse of approval and awe.

“Arrowhead, do you want us to clean up the LZ a bit before we set down? We’ve got some presents ready for your hosts.”

“Negative, Quiver. Bad guys will be coming up inside the building by the time you show up—” Marisa heard the line go dead.

“Arrowhead? Arrowhead?!” Hurry up!

“Feet dry,” the pilot announced. Marisa looked down and saw the blue water of the Atlantic meet the sand of a Venezuelan beach.

Jon picked up the Barrett and moved away from the edge of the roof. There was no point in sniping now. He ran to the radio and checked the display as Kyra ran back and joined him by the stairwell entrance. “They’re inside,” he told her. “And I saw a few running into some other buildings. They get on those roofs and we aren’t going to have any cover.”

“Radio’s dead,” Kyra told him. “Out of power. Helo is two minutes out.”

“You keep them from coming up the stairs,” Jon ordered. “I’ll cover the other rooftops if anyone comes out.”

Kyra stepped inside the tiny shack, looked down over the railing, and heard boots on metal. The stairwell wrapped around in a circular fashion, leaving a hole in the center all the way to the bottom. She could see movement, bits of dark uniforms five stories down. She held the HK over the rails and sent the rest of her clip down the stairs. Men yelled and she heard the rhythm of heavy feet on the steps turn to a clatter of men diving for cover. Someone returned fire and Kyra jerked back as the bullets buried themselves in the shack’s plaster ceiling. She swapped out the empty clip for a full one, racked the slide, then pointed her gun down again and let the soldier know she was still there.

Outside, Jon reached into his pack and pulled out two M18 smoke grenades, olive drab with bright red tops. “Kyra!” he yelled. She stuck her head out and he tossed one to her. He pulled the pin on the other, released the spoon, and tossed the device toward the center of the roof. Red smoke began to pour out in a thick cloud.

Inside, Kyra did the same and dropped the grenade down the stairwell’s center hole. It fell four stories before finally hitting a railing, metal on metal, green smoke rolling out and shrouding the narrow climb in a dark fog within a few seconds. Kyra followed the grenade with more rounds from the HK.

“LZ in sight,” the pilot said. Marisa looked ahead of the Seahawk and saw the red cloud growing on a building rooftop. On the street below, soldiers were moving through the streets toward the apartment complex.

The door gunner saw the dead trucks and jeeps littering one of the streets to the west. “Your people do good work, ma’am!” he yelled.

Marisa grinned back at the young man, sending a thrill up his spine.

“There!” Jon pointed north. Kyra followed his arm and saw the Seahawk boring straight for the building faster than she had thought a helo could go. She turned back to the stairs. The smoke had filled the entire stairwell now down to the floor, but the sound of the boots on the metal steps were closer, maybe three stories below. She fired the HK over the railing again until it ran dry, trying to buy a few more seconds, and the men below scattered again.

The Seahawk pilot pulled up the nose and dumped speed so fast that Marisa felt her stomach throw itself against her ribs. The helo dipped, then swung sideways and came down on the roof, landing hard, the rotors blowing the smoke away in a whirlwind, the door gunner facing the stairwell entrance.

Kyra didn’t wait for the order. She turned and ran for the helicopter, Jon behind her by two steps. She reached the door—

— and found Marisa’s outstretched hand. The woman pulled her in onto the metal floor. Jon pulled himself aboard behind her, tossing the Barrett onto the floor.

Bullets struck the steel door behind the older woman… someone was firing up at the helicopter from the ground. “Go! Go! Go!” the door gunner yelled.

The pilot pulled back on the collective, then forward on the stick before the Seahawk was ten feet off the roof. The helicopter surged forward and began a turn back north—

“RPG!” the door gunner called out. Kyra looked out the open door as she fumbled with her seat harness and saw the contrail rising up from behind one of the trucks Jon had killed. The helo lurched hard as the pilot dove underneath the rocket-propelled grenade and it sailed over their heads, missing the metal bird by a dozen feet. The pilot pressed the stick forward hard, diving between a pair of higher buildings. The Seahawk was running a hundred miles an hour and accelerating when it cleared them.

“You okay?” Jon yelled at Kyra. The young woman nodded. He turned to Marisa. “It’s about time—” He stopped midsentence.

Marisa was on her knees, blood staining her T-shirt in a spreading pool on her left side. “Jon—? I’m sorry…” She toppled forward into his arms.

He stared down at her in shock. “Get me a blowout bag! NOW!”

Elham lowered the Steyr and watched the American helicopter race off into the northern sky. He gotten off one shot at the moving Seahawk and hit it too high. “So much for catching your spies,” he told Carreño.

The Venezuelan cursed in disgust. “Someone get me a jeep!”

“It survived?” Rostow practically yelled the question at his national security adviser.

“Yes, sir, it did,” Cooke confirmed. “The MOP took out the entire CAVIM site, the convoy, and everyone inside the blast radius, but the nuke was in some kind of hardened transport crate already being moved out.” She didn’t point out that the MOP had almost taken out Jon and Kyra. She was sure that Rostow had never been worried about that. “One of our officers managed to get in close enough after detonation to confirm visually that the warhead survived.”

The DNI’s jaw dropped. “She was that close?” Marshall asked.

Cooke nodded. “She got inside the back of the cargo truck that was transporting it. She says the transport crate had been cracked open but there was no way to recover the warhead before reinforcements were going to arrive. Carreño’s people have since loaded it into another truck and it’s on the move.”

“Great. Just great,” Rostow groused. “We’ve lost it.”

“No, sir, we haven’t,” Cooke said. “Our officer hid a phone inside the transport crate. Once she was able to tell us that, we started tracking it. The signal is intermittent and not terribly precise. We think the crate is interfering, but we do know that the warhead is on its way back to Caracas. But we’ll lose the signal for good once the battery dies.”

“How long?” Feldman asked. The national security adviser sounded desperate.

“Eight hours if we’re very lucky,” Cooke estimated. “Probably less.”

“We’ve got to kill it,” Rostow said. “Gerry, call the SecDef. I want another air strike—”

“Mr. President, I don’t think we can target the warhead precisely enough for an air strike,” Cooke told him. “It would be a very messy operation—”

“I don’t care about the mess!” Rostow yelled. “I’m not going to tell the American people that we had a chance to take out a nuclear warhead in our hemisphere and missed!”

“Dan, wait a second,” Feldman said, his voice surprisingly quiet to Cooke’s ears. “She’s probably right—”

“What, you’re listening to her now?” Rostow demanded.

“Yeah, I am,” Feldman said. “This whole thing has been a mess from the start and Kathy’s the one who’s been keeping this disaster from falling completely apart with duct tape and prayer. If she’s got an idea of how to get out of this a little more gracefully than using an F-35 to turn a nuke into a dirty bomb in the middle of Caracas, I think we should hear her out.”

Rostow looked at his adviser, then to the DNI, who nodded. “Fine,” the president said, clearly not thinking so. “What do you suggest?”

“Sir, this is Marcus Holland,” Cooke said, extending her hand toward the analyst. Holland had been sitting in the row of chairs along the Situation Room wall, desperately trying not to be noticed. “He’s one of the analysts who’s been working on our task force since this all began. I think you should take five minutes and listen to what he has to say.”

The president glowered at the young man and Holland tried very hard not to shrink into his chair. “Well?”

Vicksburg had turned to put the wind twenty degrees on the port bow, making the Seahawk pilot’s life a little easier. He hovered the helicopter over the flight deck, the wind minimized to prevent the rotors from producing more lift, and he pushed down on the collective as fast as he dared. Kyra felt the helo’s rubber tires touch down, the pilot killed the engine, and she saw a small group of sailors in coveralls and helmets shuffle out, bent over to keep their heads well below the spinning rotors. They secured the Seahawk, rolled open the doors, and the medical team ran out.

Marisa was stretched out on the helo’s metal floor, Jon leaning over her, his bloody hand pressed against the bloody stain on her shirt. “Gunshot wound to the chest, upper right quadrant,” he yelled as they climbed in and lifted her onto the stretcher. “We treated with Celox for bleeding. She developed a tension pneumothorax and we aspirated with a fourteen-gauge needle and applied a HALO chest seal…”

“You treated for shock?” one of the corpsmen yelled.

“Yes!” Jon replied.

The corpsmen lifted the stretcher board and started to run as fast as they could together, two men on either side of her.

Kyra jumped out of the Seahawk, her boots set down on metal and she closed her eyes, tried to suck in a deep breath of Atlantic air, and tasted jet fuel in the small hurricane whipped up by the rotor wash. Jon was running behind the medics and Kyra chased them down.

The corpsmen were yelling at the sailors in the passageways, who flattened themselves against the bulkheads to make room. Kyra lost track of the minutes it took to reach sick bay. Jon tried to follow but one of the corpsmen put a hand to his chest and backed him out. “Out here, sir.”

“No, I—”

“In the passageway or in the brig, sir. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Jon stood still, saying nothing as the corpsman closed the hatch. Kyra looked at her partner but didn’t speak until the metallic echo created by the metal door closing faded into silence. “Is she going to make it?” Kyra asked.

“Blood loss and tension pneumothorax are the primary causes of ninety-three percent of all battlefield deaths,” he said, his voice flat. “I treated those. So it depends on what kind of damage the shot did inside her chest cavity.” He stared at the closed hatch.

“Jon, if you want to stay here until—” Kyra started.

“Mills!” The CIA officers turned their heads to the master chief, who was making his way toward them.

“She was injured during the operation,” Kyra yelled.

“Then who’s your senior officer?”

“That would be me,” Jon said. There was no emotion in his voice.

“You’ve got a message from Langley,” LeJeune yelled back. “Looks like you might be getting back in the air pretty quick.”

Avila had never tasted better rum. His predecessor gave him the bottle of Black 33 after choosing him for the presidency. With the Bolivarians counting the votes, the election had been a formality staged for the benefit of foreign observers. Avila had always intended to break open this particular bottle on his last day in office and share it with whomever he chose to follow him. Now that seemed more unlikely by the hour.

He looked past his desk at the far window. Light smoke was wafting up past the gates and for a minute he wondered whether the mushroom cloud from Morón hadn’t reached Caracas. Idiot, he called himself. He had enough reasons to worry without making up stupidities like that. The mobs were clashing outside, held back only by each other and the army now. He’d given the order to open fire on the masses if they came over the fence to Miraflores, but he didn’t know whether the soldiers outside would obey. Other men in his position had learned that military loyalty had its limits and Avila realized that he didn’t know exactly what those limits were. He had never been a soldier, not like Comandante Chávez or Bolívar himself. Avila didn’t know how these soldiers thought, not really, but he did know that every coup in his country’s history had come from the army. He couldn’t trust his protectors any more than he could trust the rioters outside. His only consolation was that the army wouldn’t execute him on sight. If they turned, they would need him to make public statements to preserve order once the government fell. Avila was the government. His closer associates were just functionaries whose loyalty he was sure extended only so far as the benefits he could provide them. That had been a mistake, to surround himself with so many bootlickers. Dissent was not to be tolerated in the end, but letting his subordinates actually speak their minds on occasion might have earned him a bit of real loyalty to be tapped when he needed it.

Too late now for it. God was cruel that way sometimes, letting His favored children learn lessons only after those lessons would have been useful. Avila poured another shot and set the glass on the desk.

The door to the office opened and his secretary stepped inside. “Señor Presidente, there is a call for you—” the aide started.

“I’m not taking any calls!” Avila yelled.

“I think you should take this one, sir,” the aide persisted.

Avila looked up at the functionary, surprised at the young man’s insistence. He was unused to his subordinates countering anything he had to say. “And why is that?”

The aide looked terrified, whether of Avila’s response or the caller’s identity, the presidente couldn’t tell. “It’s the president of the United States.”

Avila gaped at the man for a moment. His hand snaked out from under the desk, hesitated, then he touched the speaker button. “This is Presidente Diego Avila of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” he announced.

“President Avila, this is President Daniel Rostow of the United States of America,” came the reply. Some unseen translator on the other end repeated the words in Spanish.

Pleasantries seemed pointless. “You have committed an act of war against my country, President Rostow—” Avila started.

“True,” Rostow replied, which left the Venezuelan surprised. “But the Almirante Brión fired on the USS Vicksburg before that. And you violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean before that. So why don’t we just forgo any little games of trying to prove who provoked who, shall we?”

“What do you want, Mr. President?” Avila replied, trying to control his tone. The alcohol was making it difficult not to slur his words.

“As you are aware, I ordered the destruction of the explosives factory at CAVIM. I am also prepared to order the destruction of the other sites involved in your proliferation program at Ciudad Bolívar, at Aragua, and Monagas. B-2 bombers carrying similar ordnance that you cannot detect with your air-defense network are already en route to those sites with orders to attack if I don’t recall them in the next few hours.” Avila hoped that was an outright lie but had no way of knowing. “We also know that the warhead you’ve been developing is en route to Caracas as we speak. I’m prepared to destroy it by any means necessary in the next few minutes if you don’t agree to terms.”

“You estadounidenses have dictated terms to South America long enough!” Avila yelled into the phone. “You will not give me orders like a dog sitting at your table—”

“Listen to me very carefully, sir.” Rostow cut him off again. “There is no scenario in which you keep your nuclear facilities and that warhead. You are close enough to my country that the U.S. Navy can continue the blockade of your country indefinitely and I have the United Nations’ blessing to do so. Your neighbors have sealed their borders. If this continues, I will seek sanctions against your economy. The only thing that will enter your ports will be food and medicine. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, will be allowed to come back out. We will strangle you. North Korea will look like an open freeway compared to how much cargo will be allowed to transit your country. Your own people are rioting against you. I doubt they’ll love you more when your economy implodes and your country has a history of coups and revolutions. Do you really think that you’re immune?”

Rostow stopped for a moment and let the threat sink in before continuing. “But you can avoid all of that. Agree to terms and none of that will happen. I won’t try to topple your government. You could probably even blame this mess on your predecessors and I might be persuaded to say a few good words about how cooperative you’ve been in coming clean about the illegal programs that started before you came to office.”

Avila took several deep breaths, then fell back in his chair, considering Rostow’s words. He sipped at the rum, thinking, then shifted the phone, pressing it against his shoulder with his head as he took up the bottle and began to screw the cap back on. “And what are your terms?” he asked carefully.

“I have only three,” Rostow told him. “First, you open up your nuclear sites to the International Atomic Energy Agency for inspection and dismantling. Second, you deliver the warhead in the next three hours to a site that I will designate and give it up to a U.S. Special Forces team.”

“And number three?”

Rostow told him.

Avila set the rum on the desk and pushed it away a few inches. “I do these things and you end your blockade immediately?”

“Your coasts will be cleared within twenty-four hours.”

Avila frowned. “My friends will not like this.”

“You’ll still be in Miraflores to hear their complaints. Are we agreed?”

“Sí.”

“Thank you for your cooperation, Señor Presidente,” Rostow said. “I look forward to an amicable resolution of this matter. And if you choose to deviate from this plan in the least degree, I promise you will regret it.” The line went dead.

Avila hung up the phone, stared at the last dregs in his glass, and swallowed them. Perhaps Comandante Chávez was still pleading his case in heaven after all. He looked up. The secretary was still there, almost trying to hide behind the door. “Please bring me a radio. I need to talk to Señor Ahmadi.”

Rostow cradled the phone. “That felt good,” he said.

“Nice job,” the DNI agreed. “Your voice had just the right tone of nasty.”

“Cooke’s idea plays to my strengths,” Rostow said.

“Is he with you?” Avila asked without preamble.

“Sí,” Carreño said.

“Where are you?!” Avila demanded.

Carreño shifted the radio handset away from his ear slightly to save his hearing. “We have just passed north of Maracay. We will be in Caracas in ninety minutes, maybe less if you can clear the roads.”

“And you are with the cargo?”

“No,” Carreño admitted. His driver had been killing the jeep trying to catch up with the convoy after the fiasco in Morón and still hadn’t managed to close the distance. “The truck driver reports that his convoy is just east of La Victoria. I’ve told them not to stop and expect to rejoin them within the hour.” He looked out of the passenger window at Maracay. The sun was setting behind the jeep and darkness had settled over the city enough that he could see fires burning in the centros. They’re rioting here too, he realized. Was there any part of the country that this madness hadn’t touched?

“Good. I want you to take the cargo and our friends directly to the airport,” Avila said. “If they ask any questions, tell them that we will be flying them out of the country after they arrive.”

Carreño rocked back in his seat at that news. What are you playing at? Fly them where? he thought. The Americans had established a no-fly zone, cutting off the north and east. The Colombians were denying overflight to the west, the Brazilians to the south. Guyana? he thought. “You’re certain that’s wise?” he asked carefully.

“You understand what we must do?”

“I’m not certain what options you are considering,” Carreño said after a moment’s thought. He pressed the handset against his ear to keep Avila’s voice from leaking out. Ahmadi and Elham were in the backseat and he was sure he didn’t want them to hear whatever the presidente was about to say. He wasn’t certain how much Spanish they understood.

“I received a call from the American president. They know everything, Diego,” Avila said. “They know where the warhead is now—”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but they do. The security of this operation has been destroyed and we cannot allow a war with the United States. They would topple us and give the country back to the capitalists. It would destroy the Bolivarian revolution,” Avila said.

“I can’t disagree with that. We have always been playing a dangerous game,” Carreño agreed.

“I had hoped that if you could catch the American spies that we could trade them for our survival. But now they’re gone, we are left with two choices, and using the warhead would mean war. You understand this?”

Carreño had to force himself not to look to the backseat. “Yes.”

“Good. You are with Señor Ahmadi?”

“Sí.”

“Let me talk to him,” Avila ordered.

Ahmadi saw Carreño swivel in his seat and offer the handset. He frowned, took it, and held it to his ear. “What?”

“I’m very pleased to hear that you are unharmed, my friend,” Avila said.

Anger erupted from inside him and Ahmadi made no attempt to contain it. “We were very nearly killed, my friend,” he said, the sarcasm in his voice countering the title. “Our facility at Morón is gone—”

“I am aware,” Avila replied, trying to calm him down. “Diego told me everything earlier. It is a great loss for both our countries, but that is a problem to be solved in the future. At this minute, we must deal with our immediate problems as they stand. Once we do that, we can find a new way forward. You and the cargo are the two most important assets that remain, so what matters now is your safety,” Avila assured him. “We have your aircraft waiting for you at the airport with a full tank of fuel and I have arranged for a secure destination. I don’t want to share its location on this line, but you will be safe. You have my word before God Himself.”

Something is wrong, Ahmadi thought. “And you will meet us at the airport?” is what he finally said.

“I don’t think that would be wise. Without question, the Americans are trying to track my movements. I wouldn’t want to lead them to you and endanger your safety any further.”

He won’t come, Ahmadi thought. “Very well. Be well until I see you again. Asr be kheyr.” Good night.

He passed the phone back to Carreño. “They are setting us up, I think,” he said to Elham in quiet Farsi. He was sure that the SEBIN director couldn’t understand their native tongue.

“Why do you say that?” Elham replied, following the civilian’s lead in the choice of language and keeping his own voice low.

“Avila has always been an obsequious twit but this is different. He has always flattered me to get what he wanted. Now he flatters me to get me to do what he wants. There is a difference,” Ahmadi said.

You would know, Elham thought. You understand flattery from both sides, don’t you? “What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking that we are pariahs now. These men want to give us up to the Americans for their own benefit.”

We? You are the pariah. The Americans probably have no idea who I am. “It’s possible,” Elham conceded. “They lost all of their cards to play when the American spies escaped. Now we two and the warhead are their cards.”

“What can we do?”

Now you listen to counsel? Elham wanted to scoff. You plunge the world into chaos and then expect others to save you from your own stupidity. Still, Ahmadi was an important man with secrets that could hurt their homeland if they ever came to light. The government might not be excited to have him come back at the moment, but neither could the soldier just let the Americans have him.

Elham considered the options, then he spoke. “You must start thinking like a soldier… think of strategy and tactics. We do nothing for now,” he told Ahmadi. “We have no leverage as long as we are separated from the warhead. That is our only asset. The Venezuelans won’t use it on their own soil and the Americans know it. We have no such inhibitions, so once we load it on the plane, what the Venezuelans think won’t matter and the Americans will bargain directly with us. They will perceive us to be very dangerous people. So we do nothing until we reach the plane, and then we act.”

“Very good, I agree,” Ahmadi told him.

You would have agreed with anything, I told you, wouldn’t you? Elham thought. Ahmadi was intelligent, devious in his own way, but he was not cunning. That failing was going to be the end of him, Elham was sure, and maybe sooner rather than later, depending on the next few hours.

“This is stupid,” Jon said, holding out the cable from Langley. Kyra had watched him as he’d read it through, which had taken him three tries. Her partner was distracted.

Kyra took the paper and read it. “They seriously think the Venezuelans are going to cooperate?” she asked.

“Kathy says we’ve got their word,” Jon responded.

“Because we’ve been able to trust that so much for the last twenty years,” Kyra scoffed. “This is not a good idea.”

“It’s that or the president starts bombing things again. And orders are orders,” Jon said. “How long until we move out, Master Chief?”

“We’re at Ready Fifteen, right now,” Master Chief LeJeune responded. “Captain has already called for flight quarters and the pilots have a ‘green deck’ as soon as the Seahawk gets topped off.”

“How’s our station chief?” Kyra asked.

“She’s in surgery,” LeJeune responded. “Doc Winter is good but we’re not exactly a full-service hospital, if you get me. She’s critical. He’s trying to keep her stabilized so we can evac her out to Harry Truman on the other Seahawk.”

“Jon, I can take care of this if you want to stay with her,” Kyra offered.

“No,” he replied, anger in his voice. “We’ll need to visit your armory,” he said to the sailor. “A Barrett’s no good at close range and we’ll need something bigger than Glock 17s.”

“I’ll ask the captain, but I’m sure we can accommodate,” LeJeune advised.

“Jon, go down there,” Kyra said. “She needs you—”

“She’s unconscious. There’s nothing I can do for her,” he said. “And we have our orders.” He walked out, leaving Kyra staring at him as he went.

Carreño’s driver turned the jeep onto the airport access road and pulled through the gates that led to the hangars beyond the landing strips. The convoy of cargo trucks pulled aside to park, one excepted, that continued on behind the SEBIN director’s jeep.

It was full dark now, the moon hanging low in the sky just above the flat Atlantic horizon. Ahmadi saw no aircraft on the runways, which he supposed was the fault of the Americans and their no-fly zone. It was a perverse irony that it actually helped the Iranians now. No flights meant passengers and airport workers had no reason to be here, leaving the airport and the tarmacs empty.

“There.” Carreño pointed at one of the hangars. A group of soldiers, at least a small company, stood in a formation in front of the metal building. “The building is secured, as promised.”

Ahmadi grunted, felt Elham poke him gently in the ribs. He looked down. The soldier passed him a pistol in the dark, below the level where Carreño’s driver could see the exchange in his rearview mirror. Ahmadi took the small gun and slipped it into his coat pocket.

The Venezuelan soldiers started to roll the hangar doors open. The interior lights were on and he could see a Boeing 727–200 parked inside. But the engines were silent, he realized, and the exterior lights unlit. He could see that from the tarmac more than a hundred yards away. The nav lights, the taxi lights, the strobes… all were dark.

Where’s the pilot? Ahmadi thought, panicked. He should’ve been aboard. The SEBIN were supposed to be guarding the plane but he’d hoped the pilot would’ve had the good sense to get aboard—

They didn’t bring the pilot, Ahmadi thought, angry. Or had the SEBIN detained him? The Iranian’s mind was racing now and he couldn’t slow it down. He tried to think about nothing, to calm his shaking hands. Focus on the plane. Elham was right. If they could make it to the plane—

But the SEBIN cordon stood between him and the Boeing… at least three dozen uniformed soldiers, every man armed with an assault rifle, any one with enough firepower to butcher him like a pig, to do to him what he’d told Elham to do to those Somali pirates.

Calm yourself! he thought. Avila wouldn’t bring him to the airport for an execution. If the Venezuelan wanted him dead, he could have ordered the convoy to stop at any point. There had been a few dozen men in the trucks. They could have pulled him and Elham from the jeep, shot them both, and left them to rot in the woods at a million different places. No, to bring them to this point just to kill them made no sense. Avila wanted the Iranians off his country’s soil, not dead, surely. But Avila was playing the game, trying to benefit himself. Ahmadi understood that, so he understood Avila, no? He knew what he would do in Avila’s place and this possibility was frightening.

The armed soldiers finished opening the hangar door and Carreño’s driver started to move the jeep forward again. The uniformed guards stared as they approached and Ahmadi was sure there was murder in their eyes. He curled his hand around his gun as the truck approached the line and he started to pull it out—

Elham put his hand on Ahmadi’s and shoved it roughly back down. “Don’t be stupid,” he said in Farsi. “They outnumber us. Don’t give them any excuse. I will talk to them, then join you inside.”

The driver pulled the jeep into the hangar, turned right, and parked it under the far end of the Boeing’s left wing.

Ahmadi sucked in a breath and quietly praised the God he rarely obeyed.

Someone had pulled the rolling stairs into place and opened the Boeing’s door. Ahmadi reached the top and put his hand inside his pocket, getting a grip on the pistol as he put his foot down on the carpet. He turned the corner and looked into the cockpit. There was no pilot, no copilot, and Ahmadi cursed. He turned back—

Two men stood in first class. One was a sailor, U.S. Navy by the uniform. The other was grubby, dressed in cargo pants, tan boots, his clothes dirty and face unshaven and unwashed, with a handgun holstered in a thigh rig and an M4 carbine hanging from a shoulder sling.

“Hossein Ahmadi,” the uniformed man said. The American man in grubby clothes translated the sailor’s words into Farsi.

“I am he,” Ahmadi replied in English, contemptuous. “Why are you on my plane?”

“Mr. Ahmadi, my name is Captain Albert Riley of the USS Vicksburg. On behalf of the president of the Unites States of America and acting with the authority of the UN Security Council, I am here to accept your surrender.”

“My surrender?” Ahmadi said, almost sneering at the man. “You have no authority here. We are in Venezuela and this plane is Iranian territory—”

“I beg to differ, sir,” Riley told him. “You have no diplomatic credentials and this plane is not a registered diplomatic aircraft.”

“We are still in Venezuela,” he argued.

“True enough,” Jon said. “Presidente Avila and President Rostow have reached terms of agreement regarding your custody. Technically speaking, you’re being arrested by members of the Venezuelan police, who are standing outside this aircraft, and being transferred to U.S. custody for transport to the USS Harry Truman until such time as we can arrange an extradition flight to the United States of America. We’re just going to skip past the step where they arrest you and go straight to the part where you get transferred to our custody.”

Carreño stood by the base of the stairs, listening as one of the SEBIN soldiers whispered in his ear. The director looked up at the plane door in amazement. “And we’re to cooperate?” he asked. The soldier nodded. “Who is their representative?” he asked.

The soldier pointed behind his superior. Carreño turned—

— the woman who had beaten him within an inch of his life was standing within two meters of him. “You,” he said bitterly.

“Yes, me,” Kyra said in Spanish. “Keep your hands out of your pockets or I’ll finish what you started.”

“What I started—?”

“You remember the bridge over the Guaire?”

Carreño’s mouth fell open. “That was you.”

“That was me. How’s the nose?”

“You won’t touch me again,” Carreño sneered. “You’re not here for that now.”

“Nobody said I couldn’t take on a little side mission,” she replied.

“Touch me and I’ll have you shot.”

“No, you won’t. Gentlemen?” she yelled.

Several squads of U.S. Marines marched around the side of the hanger. Where they had been hiding in the dark, Carreño had no idea. “Let’s not start anything ugly,” the woman said.

An Iranian soldier approached. “You are the American in charge?” he asked in good English.

“Out here, yes,” Kyra replied.

“My name is Sargord Heidar Elham of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.”

“I’d be happy to call Presidente Avila,” the Navy captain said. “He can explain—”

“Don’t bother,” Ahmadi growled. “I don’t want to speak to that kosskesh—”

At that moment Elham passed through the plane’s door, followed by Carreño and a woman dressed in cargo pants and a T-shirt, armed with her own pistol and M4.

Ahmadi turned his glare to his countryman. “You know what they’re doing?”

“I’ve been told,” Elham replied.

“Are you going to stand by and let them do this?”

“Yes,” the soldier told him.

“What?” The blood drained from Ahmadi’s face. “You said now was the time to act—”

“And I am acting. I kept you pacified until we reached the airport,” Elham told him.

“You knew?!”

“I suspected,” Elham said. “As I said, they lost all of their cards to play when the American spies escaped. But it was not entirely true that we were their only cards. The warhead is no card at all for them as long as it sits on their soil, which left you as their only card. I am nobody, a nonentity to the Americans, and that makes me of no worth at all. It also means that I have little to fear so long as they get you.”

“You betray me!”

Elham exploded, grabbing Ahmadi by the shirt and slamming him against the bulkhead. Jon and Kyra raised their carbines, fingers on the triggers. Carreño jerked in surprise and the younger woman thrust her M4 at him, the end of the barrel not a meter from his face and the SEBIN director lost control of his bladder. Jon carefully raised a hand, put it on the young woman’s gun, and gently lowered her weapon.

“You’re a coward and a fool,” Elham hissed at his superior. “I’ve dealt with you death merchants before. You never fight yourselves. You build weapons that men like me have to use, soaking ourselves in blood while you sit at home drinking and whoring. And you tell everyone how wonderful it would be if you could build and fire the ultimate weapons that would kill thousands upon thousands. Then you start mewling because someone dares to point a weapon at you.”

“But we have the warhead! We can—”

“Look out the window, you idiot!” Elham ordered him. He released Ahmadi so the man could turn his head.

Ahmadi leaned over the seats and raised one of the window covers. Across the hangar, American Marines were unloading the warhead crate from the back of the cargo truck. Venezuelan and Iranian soldiers were standing around, making no move to stop them… were, in fact, holding their formation outside the hangar. If they aren’t stopping them, they’re cooperating, Ahmadi thought. “Who are they?” he asked.

“Those are U.S. Marines,” Jon replied.

“It is over,” Elham told him. “Now give me the pistol in your pocket.”

Ahmadi gritted his teeth, hissing through them, and pulled the gun. The armed Americans shifted their rifles. He glared at them sideways, then thrust the pistol against Elham’s chest. “I should kill you.”

“That would be very difficult without a clip in the gun,” Elham said.

“What—?” Ahmadi twisted the pistol and checked the grip — empty. “Why give it to me—?”

“I gave you what you wanted so that you would do what I wanted, which was to sit down, do nothing, and be silent,” Elham said. He pulled the gun from Ahmadi’s hand. “And so you did.”

“You are a traitor,” Ahmadi said, his voice cold. He turned back to Jon and Riley. “I presume that you would grant me asylum in exchange for information—”

Faster than Jon’s eyes could follow, Elham dropped the empty pistol while pulling a second Sig Sauer P-229 from the small of his back. He raised the gun to Ahmadi’s head and pulled the trigger. The 9mm round punched through Ahmadi’s skull and buried itself in the bulkhead, spewing blood and viscera in its wake.

Ahmadi crumpled to the floor, the carpet underneath turning dark red.

“Put it down!” Jon yelled, his carbine less than a foot from Elham’s chest. Pulling the trigger would gut the soldier at that range.

Elham obeyed, kneeling and setting the pistol on the floor next to Ahmadi’s shattered head, then stood and raised his hands where Jon could see them. “You have nothing more to fear from me,” he told him. “Ahmadi was a fool, but I could not let you have him. He was a dead man from the moment he set foot on this plane.”

Jon stared at the Iranian soldier, then waved him off the plane. “Surrender to the Marines on the tarmac.” Elham nodded and walked out through the hatch.

Kyra stepped in behind him, then stopped and faced Carreño. “Your people shot me in the arm,” she told him. “That night on the bridge.”

“We all do our duty.”

Kyra smashed his face with the butt of the M4, dropping him to the floor by Ahmadi’s corpse. Then she walked down the rolling stairs.

Jon stood on the tarmac and watched as the Marines finished securing the warhead in the CH-46E Sea Knight helo. Kyra moved in next to him, her carbine hanging loose from its harness. He looked up at the Boeing and watched the SEBIN soldiers lowering Carreño’s prone form on a stretcher. “They weren’t very happy when you cracked him in the head again.”

“I wanted to shoot him in the arm,” Kyra said. “It would’ve been fair.”

“Maybe,” Jon said.

“The president’s not going to be happy about Ahmadi taking one in the head. We could’ve ripped Iran’s entire nuclear program open with him in custody,” Kyra said.

Jon nodded, exhaled, then finally asked the question he’d been wanting to avoid. “Have you contacted Vicksburg?”

“Just got off the radio with them,” she said. “Jon… Marisa died. The doctor said that the shrapnel he pulled out of her chest looked like a fragment from a .50 round. The bullet must’ve hit the Seahawk and splintered. The piece that hit Marisa nicked one of the arteries leading to her heart and tore up her lung. She never woke up.”

Jon just nodded slowly and said nothing. “The Venezuelan military doesn’t have any .50 rifles in their inventory. Their snipers use Dragunov rifles… they shoot a 7.62-millimeter round. But the Iranians have Steyr rifles. Those shoot .50 millimeter rounds.” He looked over at Elham, sitting next to Ahmadi’s wrapped corpse in the Sea Knight, hands bound with zip ties.

“You think he did it,” Kyra said, following the direction of his eyes.

“It doesn’t change anything whether I’m right or wrong.”

“Yes, Jon, it does,” she said. “All the time.”