Cold Shot

DAY FIVE

Feldman dropped prints of Kyra’s photos on the Resolute desk. “There’s your connection. Ahmadi is at the CAVIM site. Whatever he brought is in there.”

Rostow didn’t bother to pick up the pictures. He leaned over and gave them a cursory glance, then looked up. “I want pictures of the cargo, not more of the guy who brought it there.”

“Not going to let Cooke off that easy?”

“Not a chance,” Rostow replied.

Drescher caught up with the CIA director as she stepped out of her office. “You talked to the White House?” he asked.

“I did,” she confirmed. “The CAVIM photos bought us zero currency with them.”

Drescher grimaced and stepped in behind her as they walked down the short, narrow hall to the conference room. “That’s not unexpected, I guess.”

Cooke nodded, pushed the door open to her conference room and stepped inside. It was full this time, every seat at the table taken except for her own. Two dozen computers were now mounted on the desk and around the walls, with cables snaking over the floor in secured bundles. Stacks of papers sat by each workstation with several legal boxes in the table’s center.

Drescher took a seat by the door without being asked, ready to drive the computer. “Good morning,” Cooke announced to the room. A dozen quiet replies came back, repeating her words. “There is no time for pleasantries on this and I will not repeat myself or answer questions. Your office directors chose each of you here at my request to support an ongoing operation that has been ordered personally by the president. You are all senior officers. There’s not a person in this room under a GS-14 who hasn’t been on the job at least a decade, so this is possibly the most experienced team you will ever be part of during your career in this building. Until further notice, your office is either here or the Ops Center. The operation is compartmentalized, so you will either sign the paperwork in front of you in the next thirty seconds or you will leave this room and not return. Understood?”

Every man and woman in the room signed the papers. “Thank you,” Cooke said. “Thirty-six hours ago, an agency officer operating out of Caracas station in Venezuela tracked an Iranian cargo ship to the Puerto Cabello dockyards. We don’t know what cargo she was carrying, but our officer entered a warehouse in the dockyard and recorded the following video.”

Drescher darkened the room and played the footage on the monitor on the front. The room remained silent except for a single quiet gasp when the soldiers fired into the container. Ahmadi’s face appeared on the screen and Drescher froze the movie on that frame.

“That man, as some of you know, is Hossein Ahmadi. The officer who recorded this video tracked Dr. Ahmadi and, we hope, his cargo to the CAVIM explosives facility in Morón, twenty-two kilometers west of Puerto Cabello.” Drescher advanced the presentation to an overhead satellite photo of the area. “At this moment, the officer is sitting on a nearby hilltop overlooking the facility, conducting surveillance,” Cooke finished. “Lights.”

The room brightened and all heads turned back toward the director. “Dr. Ahmadi is, as of this moment, the most serious nuclear proliferator in the world. You will find his bio in the file in front of you and all of the intelligence the Counterproliferation Center has ever accumulated on him and his network is now available to you. Because of Ahmadi’s known activities, the president is concerned that his cargo could be nuclear in nature. We believe it is inside the main chemical production facility at CAVIM. The president has given us thirty-six hours to determine what that cargo is.”

This drew protests that she stifled with a look. “I understand your concerns and I sympathize. We have our orders and it’s not your place to question them. It is your job to help us carry them out and determine how we can take Ahmadi off the board. So I want you to find a way to penetrate that building. I want the layout analyzed and the security system dissected. I want to know if there’s a hole, a weakness, a malfunctioning camera, a way to hack into the computers there, anything. I want you to review every Venezuelan asset Caracas station ever worked going back to the founding of this Agency to see if anyone still living might know a way in or if any past asset might work there now. If you find something, you are authorized to run, not walk, down that hallway to my office. My secretary has standing orders to admit you no matter what I’m doing or who I’m meeting with. Understood?”

Heads nodded. “I realize that this is an exceptionally difficult assignment,” Cooke said, finally relenting from her hard line. “It might not even be possible, but we will not fail because we did not try. Thank you for your service. Get started.”

Everyone rose and the legal boxes were open with papers coming out before her hand reached for the door.

“It is a direct order from the president of the United States,” Marisa noted.

“It’s a stupid order,” Jon said. “Either he’s a complete idiot, he thinks the Agency has some invisible ninjas, or he’s intentionally setting us up to fail. None of those speaks well of him. The only way into that place would be for DoD to invade the facility and take it over.”

“We’ve seen that happen before, haven’t we?” she asked. “Arrowhead?”

“I’m here.” Kyra’s voice came through the table speaker, the encryption stripping it of its natural timbre.

“You’re the one on-site. Opinion?”

Kyra stared at the headquarters cable on her iPad screen in disbelief. Forty-eight hours? She looked at the time stamp — more than a quarter of the time was gone. This is politics, Kyra realized… but Cooke knew how to play political games. The young officer had seen that.

“He’s right. It’s stupid. I’ve been staring at the place all night,” she continued. “There’s no covert in-and-out into the main building. At a minimum we’d need an asset who could get us the security layout, if not just do the whole job for us with some tech ops support. I’m assuming we don’t have that?”

“You assume correctly,” Marisa confirmed.

“Then I’ve only got one other option,” Kyra said.

“Explain,” Marisa ordered. She looked down at Jon, who had straightened his back and was making no effort to hide his disbelief.

“Do you have an overhead of the site?” Kyra asked.

Jon brought one up on the wall monitor. “Roger that.”

“Southwest corner, quarter mile east of the trucks, where the fence butts up against the open field,” Kyra said.

The base was a mile long at its widest point and it took Jon several seconds to find and focus the image on the location and increase the magnification. “What about it?” Marisa asked.

“There’s no way into the actual building, but we’re the Red Cell so I figured we should start looking outside the box. It took me two hours, but I noticed a pattern. Patrols run along the fence line north and south, but not to the west through the field. There’s no human security there, no road, and I think I know why. Do you see it?” In her hidden blind, Kyra focused the telephoto lens on the camera at the field west of the fence.

Jon and Marisa stared at the field. It was enormous, brown and patchy with large round clumps of foliage missing from the high grass, like some large animal had scooped out handfuls of vegetation. “Oh, there is no way—” Jon started.

“I don’t see it,” Marisa admitted. She squinted at the screen, wondering whether there was some minute detail Jon had found—

“Arrowhead, there is no way you are going through that field,” Jon ordered.

“Why not?” Marisa asked.

“Because it’s an ammunition test range,” Jon told her. “These”—he drew circles around the missing foliage with his finger—“are blast craters, probably mortar strikes judging from the size. And there’s probably unexploded ordnance in there. That’s why SEBIN doesn’t patrol it. They don’t want their own men blown up and those unexploded shells are security enough. It’s like a minefield.”

“I hate mortars,” the chief of station said.

“Right there with you,” Jon said. Marisa looked at him again, smiling. She was surprised to see him nod at her, a brief acknowledgment of that moment the decade before when they had come so close—

“I wouldn’t have to traverse the full length of the field,” Kyra advised. “See that camera on the southwest corner post?”

“Yeah,” Marisa assured her.

“It’s pointed into the tree line and hasn’t moved all night. I don’t know if it’s jammed or just not built for it. But judging by the angle, I’d bet it can’t see into the field more than twenty-five yards off axis, right about where that tree fell into the field along the edge. I could move through the woods to that point and enter the field and crawl along the perimeter. I’d bet there won’t be any ordnance that close to the edge or to the fence. Assuming the fence isn’t electrified, I could go over or cut through,” Kyra said.

“That’s not bad,” Marisa said quietly.

“The failure mode on that plan is ugly, but even if you manage it, what’s the point?” Jon asked. “You still can’t get inside the plant.”

“Look at that shack fifty yards north of the fence corner,” Kyra ordered. She swung her camera left and focused on the small building.

“We see it,” Marisa replied through her earpiece.

“There’s a junction box on the building’s south wall. Cables from all of the security cameras on the western fence run to it, and there’s an air-conditioning unit on the west side, too big for a building that size, so it could be there to cool some computer equipment on the inside,” Kyra reported. “Nobody’s come in or out all day. I’d bet that’s a security junction for this end of the base. If I can get in there with some gear, I might be able to tap the security camera feeds and see what else is going on, maybe even inside some of the buildings. We might get lucky.”

“Give us a minute, Arrowhead,” Jon told her.

He hit the speaker mute. “There’s no way,” Jon said. “Risk the patrols, crawl through a minefield, and ‘we might get lucky’? You can’t approve that.”

“We’ve got nothing else,” Marisa told him.

“Then we push back against the order,” he protested. “You at least have to call headquarters—”

“Jon, the orders were twelve hours old when we got them,” Marisa advised him.

“Screw the deadline!”

“I can’t just refuse to follow an order from the president of the United States!” Marisa said, her voice rising.

“Disobeying stupid orders—”

“You don’t get to decide when the president of the United States is being an idiot! If you want to do that, quit the Agency and start a blog!” Marisa managed to refrain from yelling, but only just. “And even if he is stupid or malicious, he’s not wrong! Jon, if Ahmadi is smuggling nuclear material into this half of the world, we have to know. When was the last time anyone tried that?”

Jon glared at her. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

“Darn right, nineteen sixty-two. And the world almost ended. The only reason it didn’t is because the Russians are rational. The mullahs in Tehran, maybe not so much,” she reminded him. She reached out her hand and put it on his. He didn’t pull his away, but he didn’t look at her. “We have to know before they move that cargo even if we have to risk some people.”

“This isn’t ‘some people,’” he protested. “She’s not some random warm body out there who you never have to talk to—”

“I know she’s your friend and I wish I didn’t have to recommend the option to the director, but I think I do,” Marisa broke in.

“You’re going to get her killed.”

“I truly hope not.” Marisa pressed the button again, turning on the microphone. “Arrowhead, this is Quiver. If approved, when can you proceed?”

Kyra’s heart hammered against her ribs. “I’d have to return to the truck, grab some gear. And I couldn’t move before nightfall anyway.” She checked her watch. “Three hours?”

“Copy that, Z — minus three hours,” Marisa came back. “Get your gear, check in when you get back. I’ll give you the green light or not.”

“Roger that.” Kyra shut down the phone and stared at her watch again. Three hours. The risks in her plan suddenly felt so much larger than they had just a few minutes before.

Kyra grabbed the HK, then crawled out of the blind and started to run down the back side of the mountain. Two miles to the truck, two miles back.

Marisa touched the speakerphone and shut it down, then dipped her head, trying to catch Jon’s eye. “I am sorry,” she said. She couldn’t tell whether he believed her. “We’ve got three hours. I’ll call the director. If the task force can come up with a better option, we can still call it off—”

“They won’t,” Jon said. “Kathy will have to approve it and Kyra will run down that mountain straight at the enemy like she always does.”

Marisa was afraid to answer. There was no question that Jon knew both women better than she did and the station chief desperately wanted to know how. But the man refused to open up and she couldn’t ask him all of the questions that had been backing up in her mind for a decade now. “I’m sorry I don’t have anyone to send her for backup—”

“Yes, you do,” Jon told her. He threw down the headset.

She wasn’t used to seeing the room like this. The conference room was usually clean, the space swept by security after every meeting to make sure that none of the Agency’s most sensitive information could ever leak to the next guest, who could be a reporter, a Hollywood actor, even a foreign intelligence chief. Now Drescher’s task force had taken over the room and papers were everywhere. The map of the CAVIM facility on the table was so large that Cooke wondered where they’d found a printer big enough to run it off. Smaller maps were pinned up, photographs and intelligence reports scattered around the rectangular hardwood table, and the conversations were a chaotic mass of overlapping arguments that quieted only a little when she entered.

Drescher saw the director enter through the rear door and he broke loose from the small group he’d been directing to make his way to meet her.

“I heard you got a call from the station,” Cooke said.

“Ten minutes ago,” Drescher confirmed. “Somebody down there came up with a plan. They’ll be sending us a cable in an hour or so, but for now we’ve just got a verbal brief. It’s bold.”

“Show me,” Cooke ordered.

“Jon!” Marisa was practically yelling at him as he ran down the stairwell. “Jon, stop!”

He ignored her orders, then finally obeyed once he reached the bottom of the stairwell, turning and shoving his finger in her face. “Don’t you tell me that it’s too dangerous to go. Not after you practically gave her the green light.”

“You’re not a field officer.”

“You know I can handle myself.”

She couldn’t deny it. “It’s dumb to put you both at risk,” she said.

“If it’s too risky for both then it’s too risky for one,” he said. “If you really believe that, call her and pull her back.” He pushed the door to the garage hard enough to slam it open against the concrete wall and stomped toward the equipment alcove.

“Jon, at least wait until we hear from Headquarters! The director might not even approve the plan—”

“If she does and I’m still here, there won’t be time for me to get out there before Kyra goes in.”

“And what if Cooke tells you to stay?”

“I don’t plan on being here when you finish talking to her.”

“This is insubordination!” Marisa told him, fuming.

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t care which,” Jon told her. He grabbed a backpack and turned to the gun locker.

“That’s not bold, it’s crazy,” Cooke announced. She stared down at the hand-drawn lines marking boundaries, fences, and buildings on the map. The rest of the room had finally gone quiet when Drescher started briefing the director. “Does anybody think it will work?” she asked the room.

Drescher shrugged. “All the real security is a half mile north around the chemical plant itself. That’s the place with all the heavy patrols and cameras pointing every which way. It doesn’t look like they’re too worried about somebody getting through the fence that far from the main building. We don’t know the specs of the security cameras along the fence line so we can’t calculate their field of vision, but the point of entry into the ordnance field is as good a guess as any. Assuming she doesn’t get blown up, the real question is whether she can tap the feeds coming off the rest of the camera network from inside that shack. Not to mention the feeds could be encrypted. Still a lot of variables that we can’t control inside the president’s time frame.”

“Is anyone going to come up with anything better?” Cooke asked.

“Not likely,” someone called out, a face and voice that Cooke didn’t know.

“We’ve got more intelligence gaps on this factory than a sieve has holes,” another analyst agreed. “We can’t begin to plan anything because every possible option has so many failure modes that we can’t get past the first step. We just don’t know that much about the place. We might as well be calling this Operation Flail.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Drescher agreed. “Give us a year and we’ll tell you everything about that place down to the brand name on the toilets. Give us one day and this plan is probably the best you’re going to get. There’s no way we could have come up with it. Station could because they’ve got eyes on the target.”

“Any way we can help her out?” Cooke asked.

“Track the patrols using thermal imaging,” another person suggested, this one a case officer who’d run a few field ops of her own. “Call them out if they start moving on that sector. That’s about it.”

Cooke nodded silently. “You’re with me,” she told Drescher.

“Yes, ma’am,” Drescher replied. “Keep working,” he told the room. “I want this place torn apart. You miss nothing. You overlook nothing. We’ve got an officer on a mountain ready to go into that place and if she gets killed or captured, it will not happen because we missed a better option. You get me?” The room muttered angry assent as Drescher and Cooke walked out the door.

“President’s a flamin’ idiot,” someone muttered.

“I used to be able to change your mind,” Marisa told him. “When did that change?”

“When I couldn’t change yours when it counted,” Jon told her. He zipped up the pack, scanned the garage, and set his course for a Toyota 4Runner. “I wanted you to stay.”

“I thought about it,” she told him, hopeful that it might make a difference.

“I don’t care what you thought about. I care what you actually did,” he told her. “Intentions count for nothing.”

“Things have a bad habit of going sideways whenever we’re together,” Marisa protested.

“They’ve always gone sideways for me even when you weren’t around. But we’re not together so you don’t have to worry about that,” he said. Jon threw his pack inside the truck.

“I’m the station chief, Jon. It’s my job to worry about it.”

“Just keep feeding me the intel until I get back with her.”

“Jon, wait.” Something in her voice stopped him… quiet surrender. He’d heard that from her a few times, not often, years before.

Marisa held her face in a rigid mask as she walked over to a tall cabinet, opened it with a key, and pulled out a long black case and a PRC-148 radio. “You should take these.” She gave him the radio, then laid the case on the workbench. She flipped the locks and lifted the lid.

Jon stared down. “I thought you said they took all of the good stuff,” he told her.

Marisa shrugged. “I didn’t let them have everything. And if you’re determined to run back out into the field, I figured you could do something useful with it.”

“I don’t know if I can use it. I haven’t used one since al-Yusufiyah.”

“Please don’t go.”

Jon turned his head far enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. Marisa had never surrendered easily to him but he knew it when he saw it. She looked at him, her head bent low, trying to catch his gaze.

“Jon, you didn’t used to be mean. I don’t like it. But I saw it coming. That’s why I left. I couldn’t stand to watch that happen to you.”

“You couldn’t stop it. Nobody could,” he said. He closed the lid on the black case.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Jon looked sideways at her, sucked in a nervous breath, and she could tell he was deciding whether to talk. She didn’t give him the chance. “Jon, don’t do this. I don’t want you to go through it again—”

“I don’t have time for this.” He suddenly lifted the long case and put it into the truck behind the seat, then threw himself into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in. “Mari, if this op goes south and Kyra and I have to run, there still might be an opportunity to turn all of this to our advantage,” he offered.

“How so?” she asked, both sad and grateful for a reason to talk business.

“I assume the SEBIN monitor cell-phone calls?” he asked.

“Yeah, they do. They can’t break the encrypted ones but anything in the clear gets heard,” she assured him.

“Just be ready to call me on an open line if she gets blown. Then get ready to start watching some overhead imagery.” Marisa looked at him, suspicious. “Just trust me.”

“You’re thinking three moves ahead again, aren’t you?” she asked him.

“It’s my thing.”

“I hate your thing, Jon,” she told him.

He finally smiled, that small half grin she remembered. She walked to the far wall, pressed a button, and the garage door rolled up. Jon pulled out, stomping on the gas as the truck touched the asphalt outside. She followed him out, and watched him go until the truck passed through the embassy gates and rolled out into the Valle Arriba.

Kyra kept her distance from the truck, watching for a half hour, then closing her eyes and listening for another five minutes. She saw no signs of movement, heard no sounds, and crept down the hillside slowly. There was nothing, no signs that anyone had disturbed the truck. She finally shifted some of the camouflage she’d erected and let herself in. The tech ops bag was behind the driver’s seat. She closed the door, replaced the foliage, and sprinted back into the woods.

She reached the summit this time in an hour. Kyra wished that she could take the HK but had to settle for the Glock. For this she would have to travel light and quiet. She applied camo paint to her face, an act that would mark her as a spy every bit as much as the sidearm or her other gear. She was beyond cover stories now. There would be no talking if this went badly, only gunfire and a mad race through the hills that she would probably lose.

There was a large, flat rock ten yards from the blind. It was almost beyond her strength to move it, but she managed to shift it a few feet. She dug out a hole large enough for her radio minus the antenna, placed it inside, and moved the rock back over it, leaving a small space open underneath facing the valley. The antenna she left on the ground. She covered the opening with some netting and biomass that she scrounged from the hillside, then stood back and looked at the work. It wasn’t perfect, a little too obvious to her eye, but she knew what to look for. If someone stumbled across the antenna, they could trace the cable to the pit under the rock, but the odds were against that in the dark. It was more important that no light from LST-5’s LEDs leaked out through the makeshift cover. That job was done and the covered hole would serve well enough.

The PRC-148 that Kyra strapped to her vest only had a four mile range, so she programmed it to talk to the LST-5, which would transmit it back to the embassy. That done, she secured the headset, wisps of her dirty-blond hair falling back over it. Finally ready, Kyra sat under the thin clouds and looked up at the sky until the sun had vanished and the Milky Way was stretched out across the sky. Time to go…

In a moment, her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it against her ribs and her breathing had picked up, her lungs pumping air at a furious rate. Adrenaline surged through her system, hitting her so hard that she could feel the drug driving her to the edge of panic.

Kyra tried to detach herself from it all and pushed the memories aside of that moment aboard the Lincoln. She sat herself on the ground, legs crossed, arms folded, and focused her mind on the quiet scene above her. There was no Battle of the Taiwan Strait here, no Phalanx guns ripping the air apart as they tore antiship missiles from the sky. No shrapnel pinging against the hull armor or tearing through sailors on the deck.

Her breathing slowed, her heart less so, but after long minutes it finally began to obey.

Kyra opened her eyes. She turned on the PRC-148. “Quiver, this is Arrowhead,” she said.

“This is Quiver,” Marisa said.

“I’m ready. Do we have a green light?”

“Affirmative.”

“Moving out,” Kyra said.

She stood and marched down the hill, careful and deliberate.

There were no trails here, just trees and undergrowth thick enough to slow her progress to a crawl. It wasn’t so different from the Farm, but she couldn’t just hack through it. The growing dark was her friend but noise was her enemy now, so she moved slowly, choosing her steps. Kyra took an hour to reach the tree line. She was moving in a crouch by the time she arrived, trying not to disturb the small trees or the weeds. The sentry lights mounted above the factory’s security fence were throwing sharp shadows along the forest edge and movement would attract the eye.

She had misjudged the distance to the fence. Crouching behind the broken stump where the trunk had fallen out of the forest into the ordnance field, she saw that she was still a hundred yards from the fence but the security camera was pointed into the woods, as she’d thought.

The only thing that might see her coming from this angle would be human eyes. She spent another half hour watching in order to judge that risk and saw the occasional guard wander through the western end of the facility, more to smoke and relieve themselves than to watch for threats.

The sun was finally down, the moon taking its place, large on the horizon. It wasn’t going to get any darker than this. As good a time as any. She touched her small earpiece. “Quiver, Arrowhead. In position.” She kept her voice to a whisper. The radio strapped to her chest reached out to the antenna back on the hill, and the signal went out to some satellite orbiting above.

“This is Quiver.” Long pause. “Can you hold?”

Kyra kept the curse to herself. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it. “Why?”

Another long pause. “You have a friendly inbound.”

Kyra frowned. “Who?” Did Langley send someone after all?

Marisa stared at the wall ahead, her mind twisted in knots. We didn’t assign Jon a code name. The radios were encrypted and the chances were excellent that the Venezuelans couldn’t break the cipher and listen in… but the Iranians were in town and she didn’t know their capabilities.

“A friendly,” Marisa repeated.

Okay, so you don’t want to tell me. “ETA?” Kyra asked.

“Sometime in the next two hours.”

That doesn’t work. “If I’m not clear to go, I should withdraw from this position and try again tomorrow,” Kyra advised. “I don’t know how long I’ll need to reach the destination and I have maximum time to proceed now.”

Hiding behind the stump, she felt like time was stretched out and the answer took too long to come back, though it was only a few seconds. “Godspeed,” Quiver said. “I’m on the line.”

Kyra laid herself on her stomach in the dirt. Her heart was a hammer again, pounding hard enough that she could feel it in her stomach.

She pulled the Leatherman from the pocket on her sleeve, extended the blade, and began to move forward behind the tree, crawling in the dirt.

Jon’s smartphone rang. “What?”

“She’s on her way in. Already at the field and moving. Where are you?” Marisa told him.

“I just passed Maracay, near someplace called Mariara.”

Marisa stared at the highway map on the wall. Still ninety kilometers away. “You’re at least an hour out, not counting your time running uphill. You still in shape, old man?”

“Good enough,” he said.

“Hey, Jon? Nobody ever gets pulled over in this country for speeding. Ever.” Marisa hung up. Jon dropped the phone in the seat, put both hands on the wheel, and let the truck have all the gas it wanted.

Kyra reached the top of the fallen tree. She was well out into the field now, at least fifty feet in, and only moving a few feet per minute. She probed the dirt gently, but didn’t expect to find anything. This wasn’t a minefield after all, or so she hoped, and she expected any unexploded ordnance to be sticking out of the ground where she could see it.

Unto the breach, as Jon would have said. No, that wasn’t right. Jon would’ve been yelling at her to turn around. Sorry, Jon. Kyra took another breath, then slowly pushed herself out into the high grass.

A small crater appeared just to the left. A mortar shell had hit the dirt here. If there’s a hole, it means the shell went off, right? She fought down the fight-or-flight response that rose up in her mind, crawled carefully down into the hole, then up the shallow side.

Seventy-five yards to the fence.

The field was missing chunks of grass, whether from the ordnance or some toxic chemicals scattered over its surface she didn’t know, but it gave her a twisting path forward. Kyra pulled her body through another narrow channel in the grass, careful not to brush it with her legs or boots, lest it wave to any guards standing at the fence. The little trail turned left, Kyra twisted her body to follow the bend—

An 81mm mortar shell stood out of the ground, less than a foot from her face.

Kyra stared at the metal tube. It was green, an oblong teardrop that narrowed at the tail to a set of fins, with rust growing on the skin.

Cooke entered the room. It was silent now, all eyes on the wall monitor. Fifteen people sat around the room and no one dared speak. The screen was streaming a live satellite feed, a thermal image of someone crawling on their stomach toward a compound of buildings and lampposts.

The director moved behind Drescher, who didn’t look up. “How’s she doing?” she asked.

“Fifty yards to the fence, give or take. No patrol in the area,” he said, not taking his eyes away from the picture. “She just backed up and reversed course. I guess she saw something she didn’t like.”

“Ordnance?” Cooke asked.

Drescher shrugged. “Could be.”

“Any idea if there’s a patron saint of spies?” she asked quietly.

“Saint Joshua,” Drescher advised. “One of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore Canaan. He’s also the patron saint of literature and reading.”

“How do you know that? You’re a Mormon. Mormons don’t have patron saints.”

“I was a missionary in Italy back in the day. Two years on the ground in Liguria,” Drescher said. “The Catholics kept trying to convert me, God bless ’em. They didn’t get the message that’s what I was supposed to be doing to them.”

The secure line phone in the corner rang. He picked up the receiver. “Drescher.”

Marisa enlarged the satellite picture, looking at the larger compound. A vehicle was coming down the northern fence line. “Arrowhead, hold your position. Security patrol incoming, northern road. ETA one minute.” Hurry up, Jon, she thought.

Kyra slid past another intact mortar shell to her right when Marisa’s warning sounded in her ear. She turned her head and saw the incoming vehicle’s headlights streaming between the trees and shacks ahead to her left. Another blast crater was directly in front of her, within arm’s reach. She probed the dirt, found nothing, and pulled herself forward, her body descending into the shallow depression. It wasn’t deep enough to completely swallow her, but she hoped it would lower her profile in case anyone looked into the field.

The truck rolled past and curved off onto some side road. The sound of the engine dropped in pitch as it moved away from the field.

“All clear,” Marisa’s voice said in Kyra’s ear.

Kyra clawed at the dirt to pull herself out of the low crater, then pushed herself forward, multitool in hand, stabbing the dirt gently every few inches. The closer she moved toward the fence, the fewer unexploded artillery shells there should be, right? She wasn’t convinced that any logic applied here. She stopped as her tool touched something metal in the loam. Shrapnel from one of the shells that had actually worked? She moved forward a few inches, and then she saw it… a grenade, half buried in the dirt. Couldn’t we have just stuck with the mortars? she thought. Mortar shells were easy to see. Grenades might as well be mines.

She looked up through the grass and tried to gauge the remaining terrain between her and the fence. Twenty-five yards? Kyra pushed herself to the right, away from the grenade, and started probing the ground again.

Drescher uttered something Cooke had never heard come out of a Mormon’s mouth, some strange variation of a curse that rhymed with the real thing but still qualified as family-friendly. He spun around, grabbed for a television remote, and brought up one of the cable news networks in the back of the room, the volume set low. He wanted the task force watching the operation on the big screen, not some pompous politician on the small one.

A news anchor was talking. Cooke knew the journalist, had met most of the big ones in fact. The networks had climbed over each other two years before to score the early interviews with the first female CIA director in U.S. history. In the end, Cooke had given time to most of them, at least the ones from reputable outlets. More than a few of the interviewers barely had the brains to read their teleprompters, but this one, a late thirtysomething blonde owned dual degrees in journalism and law from Princeton and was smarter than most. She also had a reputation for being able to score interviews with Rostow almost at will, which said as much about the president’s libido as the anchor’s ambition.

“… We warn our viewers that this video contains graphic footage. Viewer discretion is advised.” The camera cut away from the anchor… to the inside of the Puerto Cabello dockyard.

“Oh, no,” Cooke said quietly.

Almost there. Marisa looked up at the clock. Kyra had been moving through the field now for almost an hour, pushing herself ahead, one agonizing foot after another. Kyra’s path through the field had been a torturous series of turns, not a straight line more than five feet at any point. The girl couldn’t possibly have memorized the route. Any run back would be an exercise in desperation, prayer, and luck.

Kyra reached out to touch the fence, then thought better of it. Was it electrified? She’d bypassed four mortar shells and a dozen grenades to get here and it wouldn’t do to grab a charged fence now.

There was no telltale buzz. She looked for posted signs, though she didn’t trust the Venezuelans to bother with such niceties, then realized the signs would be facing into the compound, not out. Moron, she thought.

She scanned the fence line at ground level as far as she could see. Ten feet to her right, there was a depression directly underneath the metal where some rodent had dug its way in, and the tiny invader was nowhere to be seen. Not electrified, she thought. But she had reached the barrier too far to the south. A cut here might get noticed the next time some soldier walked out to relieve himself.

The first of the small corner shacks was maybe a dozen yards to her left. She pushed off again, crawling in its direction, probing the ground as she went. Kyra didn’t expect to find anything dangerous this close in, but stabbed carefully at the dirt anyway.

She reached the fence span just a few feet from the corner where the fence turned north again. She looked up and saw the camera atop its post, looking placidly out into the woods. You just keep looking that way, she muttered inside her head. She pulled out the wire cutter in her pack.

“Hostile inbound, fifty yards north,” one of the analysts commented. He didn’t need to say it. Everyone saw the infrared shape wandering south from one of the larger buildings near the top of the screen.

Cooke ignored the quiet banter going on at the conference table. The video had finished playing and the anchor was now interviewing a talking head from the Brookings Institution, an expert on arms control and proliferation.

“… Well, Jenny, one of the men in the video appears to be Dr. Hossein Ahmadi, long regarded by the CIA and other spy agencies as a key figure in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Our analysts here at the Brookings Institution also believe one of the other men could be Andrés Carreño, the head of Venezuela’s SEBIN intelligence service,” the man said. “To see those men together at the scene of a massacre like that one could have truly disturbing implications.”

“Like what?” the blond anchor asked, trying to project gravitas. The woman clearly didn’t know Hossein Ahmadi from Adam.

“It could mean that Venezuela is complicit with Iran’s attempt to develop a complete nuclear fuel cycle, and possibly nuclear weapons. Both Iran and Venezuela signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and ratified it in 1970. And despite its revolution and change in government in 1979, Iran has never withdrawn from the treaty, but over the last two decades, Iran has repeatedly refused to comply with its treaty obligations. It has constructed nuclear facilities that it declared to the IAEA only after their existence was revealed by other means—”

“You mean after the U.S. intelligence community found them,” the anchor said, cutting in.

“Hostile inbound,” Marisa warned.

I see him, Kyra thought. The man was in uniform and carried no rifle, but there was a pistol hanging from a holster on his belt. He reached the fence but made no move to unzip his fly. Instead, after a few seconds of stargazing, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one with his teeth, then lit up.

Motion always attracted the eye. There was tall grass between her and the soldier, not enough to completely hide her but enough to break up her outline. A lamppost towered above the shack to her immediate north, casting a shadow that fell on her and stretched out into the field another five yards.

The man took a long drag, then turned when he heard feet shuffle through the gravel that passed for the road between the small cluster of buildings. A friend wandered his way.

Great. It’s a party.

“Right. This could be confirmation of old rumors that the Iranians are mining uranium from Venezuela’s Roraima Basin and shipping it home for enrichment, which would violate several UN sanctions,” the Brookings analyst replied. “Another possibility, one I think we all hope wouldn’t be the case, could be that Iran is now trying to smuggle illegal nuclear materials into the western hemisphere.”

The room exploded.

“Get me the NCS director now!” someone yelled. Hands fought for the few secure phones in the room while keyboards started to clatter. Drescher was on his feet, barking orders and dispensing with pleasantries as he did so.

“Stop!” Cooke yelled. The room went dead silent as fast as it had descended into chaos moments before. “We have an officer in harm’s way right now,” she said, pointing at the monitor on the wall. “Our first priority is to get her out. If the SEBIN are watching the news, security is going to lock that facility down at any time. You work that problem first.”

Behind them, on the larger screen, two men stood by the CAVIM fence line talking, animated, their cigarettes glowing more brightly on the infrared image every time they sucked in the smoke, giving the burning tobacco a fresh infusion of oxygen. Kyra’s thermal outline was maybe thirty feet to the left of the pair.

They were standing almost where she had first reached the fence. If she had stayed there, they would certainly have seen her.

Go back to work, she mentally ordered the men. It took fifteen minutes for them to finally obey Kyra’s command. They finished their first cigarettes and consumed a second while talking about the vulgar things they had done on their last leave, then threw their smoked-out butts onto the gravel road and walked slowly north again, passing out of her sight. The sound of their boots crunching on the small rocks finally died.

“Charlie Mike, Arrowhead,” Marisa said quietly into her ear. Continue mission.

Kyra cut into the fence, snipping one link after another in a perfectly vertical line. When she judged that the height of the broken line was right, she set to work cutting metal at ground level, a foot on either side of the vertical gash she’d just made. It only took a few cuts. She evaluated her work, an inverted T, then pushed herself forward on the ground. Quiet now, she thought as she pushed the severed fence to the sides.

Then she was through.

Kyra drew her Glock and sidestepped to the edge of the shack, the gun in both hands pointing down, and she looked around the corner.

The next shack up the road was… twenty feet? “All clear?” she whispered.

“Two hostiles one hundred yards north of your position and still walking away. The same ones who had a party by the fence while you were lounging around. Anyone else in the area must be inside a building.”

Kyra took a deep breath, then pushed off and ran, moving as quietly as her boots would allow. The cover of the second shack seemed to arrive slowly. She reached it after a few seconds, then crouched, her back against the metal wall, and she closed her eyes to listen.

Nothing.

She realized she hadn’t heard Jon’s voice over her earpiece during the entire op. Where are you?

Andrés Carreño walked out the front door past the SEBIN guards standing their posts. Seeing them standing at attention, he held his tongue and swallowed his curses at Avila for assigning him this duty. Words spoken in anger could last long in this country and travel to the most inconvenient places.

He hated the chemical plant. The smell always lingered in his nose for days, killing his sense of smell and affecting the taste of his food. It seemed especially noxious tonight. The Venezuelan spy chief pulled the tobacco roll from his pocket, lit it with the torch, and sucked in as much smoke as the small tube would give up in three puffs. He exhaled, looked up at the stars, then started to walk south.

“Señor Presidente!” The pounding on the door was insistent, almost panicked. Avila dragged himself from his bed, leaving behind the young lady, not his wife, who was sharing it this evening. He stumbled over, pulling on a shirt and pants, then opened it.

A staffer stood in the hall, a young man whose name Avila had never bothered to learn. “What is it?” The functionary thrust a piece of paper at the head of state, which Avila took. His eyes refused to make sense of the blurred words and he had to force them to function.

What—? Avila cursed and shoved the paper back at the staffer. “Where is Carreño?”

“We don’t know, Señor Presidente. No one can reach him. He was at the Morón facility within the last hour but no one can find him now,” the younger man said, afraid to be the messenger of that particular piece of news.

“And Ahmadi?”

“At his hotel in Valencia.”

“He must be moved,” Avila said. “That location is no longer secure. Set the television in my office to this foreign news network, then call the defense minister. I want him here within the half hour … and find Carreño!”

The young man ran off, trying to balance his dignity against the president’s anger.

The door to the security hub faced the road, east, and there were no windows on the south or west side that Kyra could see. She leaned out from behind the shack, giving her cover just far enough to see that there was a padlock on the door, ten yards away. No one inside. There was a camera on the roof corner closest to her position, but it was pointed at the road. As long as she stayed close to the fence, Kyra guessed, she’d be able to stay behind, then under its field of vision. There was a series of toolsheds twenty-five yards to the north but she could see they were empty. The closest building that could have occupants was a hundred feet away, with no window looking south.

She took a breath, expelled a prayer, and ran for the security annex, staying in the grass. There were no yells, no shots, and then Kyra was behind the building. Keep going. She crept around the south side, keeping the building between her and the two soldiers who were, doubtless, far out of earshot now, but they would be able to see farther than they could hear. She moved under the camera, staying close to the east wall, and finally stood in front of the door.

“Quiver, Arrowhead. Door is padlocked. Trying to open it now.”

She inserted the torsion rod, then the pick, and started to work the tumblers.

On the monitor’s thermal image, several guards ran out from the CAVIM factory.

“Oh, there we go,” Drescher said. “Someone was watching the news.”

Cooke looked at Drescher, murder on her face. “You want me to call the White House?” he asked

She took five seconds to answer. “Not yet,” she finally said. “But soon. We have more immediate priorities.” Cooke looked toward the screen. “Call Jon and Mills.”

The padlock dropped open. Kyra lifted it, swung the latch out, then replaced the lock. The doorknob turned easily in her hand and she moved inside and closed the door in a single movement. No yells. No shots. She’d made it inside. Getting back out to the fence would be no easier—

One thing at a time.

The darkness was broken by the system status lights on a series of rack-mounted servers and other gear. It was cooler here than outside, with the air suffering from the processed smell of air-conditioning. The small building had no windows, but light could still leak out from under the door. She pulled the Maglite from her pouch, turned it on, and swept the room with the red light.

“I’m in,” she said.

The only furniture was a chair parked in front of a desk with a monitor sitting on it, which connected to a CPU underneath. The desk sat next to the rack, which stood taller than Kyra’s head and was full of single mounted servers and other equipment, not all of which she could immediately identify. She swept the south wall—

There you are.

The video cables reached to the floor from a junction box on the wall. She leaned in, trying to squeeze herself into the space, and found the box where the wires connected in the rack.

Kyra dropped to one knee, pulled her satchel over her head, set it on the floor, then unzipped the top and pulled out the iPad, a set of cables, and a tool kit. Then she extracted the little black box.

Carreño walked slowly. The cigarro reached the end of its short life; he dropped it, reached for one of its brothers, then decided against it. His supply here was limited and he didn’t want to burn through them all in a single night.

He passed a pair of SEBIN soldiers walking north, who saluted him as he passed. He returned the salute, sloppy and hardly caring. He saw the southern fence a few hundred feet down the gravel road. He’d go that far, maybe then smoke another cigarro, and return. A half hour’s walk total. Maybe longer if he moved slowly.

Kyra pushed the cable head into the iPad port, then launched the app. The room lit up from the new picture, causing her to suck in a nervous breath.

The iPad screen split into eight boxes, each showing the feed from a different camera. She swiped the screen and the eight boxes scrolled off, replaced by eight more. Then again and again. Kyra had access to the take from at least thirty-two different cameras through the facility, some inside buildings, which ones she didn’t know.

She pressed a button on the screen and started recording.

Marisa watched as the heat signature in the shape of a man entered the frame, walking south at a slow pace. She checked the clock. Ten minutes since entry. “Arrowhead, Quiver,” she announced. “One hostile moving your way. He’s in no hurry. You’ve got maybe five minutes until he reaches your position. Time to start packing up.”

“Roger that.”

The secure phone on Marisa’s desk began to ring. She let it go to voice mail. It rang again. Finally she picked up the receiver. “This is Mills.”

She’d only been recording the camera network feed for ten minutes, but a quick check showed that the tablet’s storage was filling up fast. Thirty-two cameras… ten minutes per camera… three hundred twenty minutes… five hours twenty minutes of total footage. She wouldn’t be able to record more than a few minutes more before the computer ran out of space to store the feed.

Kyra waited another three minutes, then closed down the recording app, unplugged the cable, and began to retrieve her gear.

The southern fence and the signs warning of unexploded ordnance were less than a hundred feet away now. Carreño wondered whether anyone had ever been so foolish as to ignore the warnings and climb the fence. Bored men did like to drink after all. Booze and machismo were a bad combination.

The work sheds were behind him now. The only buildings between here and the end were a storage shack that held nothing important and the small security annex, little more than a relay point for the camera network.

He looked over at the security building, squinting.

The padlock hung from the latch. Was it open? He couldn’t tell from this distance. Carreño frowned and moved toward the building.

Marisa looked at the telephone receiver in her hand in disbelief. She grabbed the mouse, zoomed the picture on her screen out, widening the angle of the satellite feed. Soldiers were rushing out of the CAVIM chemical factory, more from other buildings, running for trucks, jeeps, any vehicle that would move. “Oh, no…” Then she saw movement near the facility’s southern end. She narrowed the picture again. One man was walking directly to the security hub.

Her gear was packed. Kyra slipped the satchel strap over her head.

“Arrowhead, Quiver. Hostile inbound on your front door, ETA ten seconds, and you’re going to have a lot more behind him in two minutes. Do you have another exit?”

“Negative,” Kyra advised.

“You have to get out now,” Marisa ordered. “When you do, run for the fence.”

“What’s—”

“Don’t ask, just do it.”

“Roger that.”

The padlock was open. He looked at the base of the door… no light streamed out. Someone had left the door unsecured after leaving. Incompetents, Carreño thought. He pulled the padlock out of the latch, ready to secure the door again.

Best to be sure, he thought after a moment.

He tossed his cigarro onto the gravel, replaced the padlock, and pushed the door open. It swung into darkness; he stepped inside and went blind, his eyes seeing only the dark until the lights from the server rack began to focus. He touched the light switch on the wall to his right. The room went bright, blinding him again just as he saw something in the corner of his eye—

The elbow hit Carreño hard enough that he spewed blood on the wall as his head snapped to the right. He stumbled off balance, then turned back toward his attacker. He swung wild, the vision in his left eye blurry from the strike. He missed, but the swing gave him time to pull the pistol from his belt holster under his coat. His attacker was an unfocused blur but at this distance he hardly had to aim—

Kyra’s own vision was taking too long to adjust to the light, was still blurry, but she saw the intruder go for his belt and then there was a gun in his right hand. She struck out with her left, hitting his gun with her palm and driving away from her body, then grabbing it with her hand to control the weapon. She leaned in, putting her weight behind her arm, driving the pistol toward the ground. She struck forward, driving her right forearm into the man’s throat, compressing his windpipe, and he began to gag. Then she dropped her arm, grabbing the rear of the pistol with both hands, and twisted it to the side.

Carreño felt the gun being torn from his fingers. Panicked, he pulled the trigger.

The gun jerked in Kyra’s hand, shooting off to her right, and she went deaf, her ears ringing from the shot. The man jumped back, trying to rip the gun away from her. Kyra ran forward with him and swung her hands to the right, moving the gun to the side. She kicked forward and caught him between the legs, giving him a blow to the testicles that threatened to lift him off the ground. She threw another punch, this one with her left hand that caught him square in the nose, drawing blood again and forcing his eyes to shut from the pain. Kyra twisted the gun hard, this time finally pulling the weapon from his hand before he could fire.

The Venezuelan threw his head up, catching Kyra just under the jaw with his skull and knocking her back. She couldn’t keep her hand on the gun. It hit the server rack, then the floor, but she couldn’t see it. The man charged forward, blind, hoping to knock her on her back. He was coming in low, trying to put his shoulder in her stomach and fold her in half. She’d have no leverage and he’d have her on the floor.

Kyra rolled backward under him. She grabbed his shirt with both hands as she went down and brought her legs up, putting her feet on his stomach. He was out of control now. He’d thought to tackle her, but now he was flying forward with Kyra fully underneath him. She pushed up with her legs; the man went airborne over her, and smashed into the wall behind.

Kyra twisted on the ground, pushing herself back to her feet. The SEBIN officer behind her made it onto his feet a second after she did. The second was all she needed.

Carreño forced his eyes open as he dragged himself to his feet. His vision was sharper now. His attacker—

— was a woman. He was getting thrashed by a woman.

No puede ser.

The woman’s boot caught him in his stomach, compressing it into his spine, and the air rushed out of him. Carreño tried to suck in a breath as he fell backward onto the wall. His knees buckled and he slid to the floor. His diaphragm refused to move and he felt like he was choking. He clutched at his abdomen, trying to protect it, helpless.

Kyra drew her Glock and pointed at his head. The man held out his hand, pure instinct, trying to put anything between him and the gun. “No, por favor,” he gasped, looking at her face.

Kyra stared down at him, finally able to stare at his face. Even with the blood gushing from his nose, she recognized him.

Andrés Carreño was lying at her feet.

Cold anger erupted inside her chest, a calm rage that took control of her.

Kyra kicked him in the ribs, knocking him backward. Then she was on him, beating him with the gun. It was stupid, she knew, to engage him again at close range on the floor… he could grab her, grab the gun, but she couldn’t control herself, like she was a spectator in her own mind. He tried to block one of her swinging arms, missed, and she caught him in the temple with cold steel. The nausea rose in his gut so fast he couldn’t hold it down. Carreño vomited onto the floor.

“Arrowhead! Arrowhead!” Kyra heard Marisa yelling in her ear. The sight and smell of Carreño’s bile on the floor cut through her fury and Kyra took control of herself, forcing her emotions down. She pulled back and scrambled to her feet, still covering the SEBIN director with her pistol.

“This is Arrowhead,” she said, trying to catch her breath. Her heart was pounding too fast.

“Status?”

“One… one hostile… incapacitated,” Kyra told her, her chest heaving. “It’s him.” The adrenaline was surging through her again, the panic attack starting to rise.

The station chief scrolled down the map on her screen. SEBIN soldiers were everywhere and spreading out in all four directions. At least twenty were moving south, only a few hundreds yards from the security hub.

“Understood. Leave him and get out immediately. Do you copy?”

Leave him? Carreño was in her sights and she was furious, angrier than she could ever remember being.

There was murder in her heart, Carreño’s quivering body seemed to fill her vision and the Glock was light in her hands, the tritium sights over the barrel glowing a faint white.

The panic was gone, displaced by a cold, dark calm.

“Arrowhead, do you copy?” Marisa asked again, her voice more urgent now.

Kyra stared at Carreño’s bleeding face through her sights. The anger was like a living animal, trying to rip control of her hands away from her and make her put a bullet through his brain.

It would be so easy to surrender.

She breathed in deep… then moved her finger off the trigger.

It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

It was a very long pause, one that seemed to stretch out time. “Roger that. Understood,” Kyra said, her voice calmer now.

Marisa looked at the screen. “Hostiles approaching your area, three hundred yards and closing on your position. You have ninety seconds. Fall back.”

Kyra kept the gun on Carreño as she moved to the only exit. She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. She took the padlock, threw the latch, and locked Carreño inside.

Her knees quivered, the rage inside her chest turning on her now, screaming at her for fighting it. She felt weak all over, her whole body shaking.

Then she heard the voices, all yelling in Spanish, orders and curses. She looked to her right, north, and saw the line of soldiers moving in her direction. Headlights broke over the low ridge behind the men and jeeps came tearing down the road, sliding side to side on the gravel as their drivers swerved to avoid hitting their own men.

Kyra ran for the fence.

The first bullets hit the ground to her left and she heard some ricochet off bricks and metal. She turned right and sprinted to put the shack between her and the soldiers. A few more rounds hit the building as she threw herself behind it. The adrenaline was making it hard to think now, and to keep her hands steady.

The jeeps were close now, less than fifty yards away. She could hear the engines growling as they approached, at least two of them. She looked around the corner, saw them approaching the security hub, four men in each jeep. She saw her inverted T-cut in the fence. It was ten feet away.

She was out of time. The soldiers were too close now. She’d never make it through.

She had three clips for the Glock, seventeen 9mm rounds each, with one in the chamber — fifty-two shots.

Dozens of soldiers were on foot, running to this position. The men in the jeeps were yelling into their radios, calling for dozens more, all with automatic weapons, thousands of rounds. She wouldn’t even be able to stop them from flanking her on either side.

Her mind went suddenly clear again and she felt a peaceful calm settle over her.

She closed her eyes, then set the Glock on the ground and prepared to step out from behind the shack, arms raised.

I guess I’m going to end up in Los Teques prison after all.

Kyra’s head jerked as she heard the supersonic crack of the .50mm round as it hit the lead jeep in the grille six inches above the bumper. The monstrous round tore a hole in the metal and steam and fluids blew out of the engine in a violent gush. The bullet ripped into the engine itself, cracking the block and throwing shrapnel in every direction under the hood. Only then did Kyra hear the deep boom of the gunshot as the sound wave finally caught up to the supersonic slug. The driver, blinded by the steam, stomped the brake pedal into the floor and the jeep’s last act was to crash to a halt.

The second .50 hit the trailing jeep a few inches below the line where the hood met the grille, killing it as dead as its brother, and Kyra heard that gunshot a moment later. Two more rounds hit the vehicle in quick succession. The passengers got the message, threw themselves out of the vehicle onto the ground and stumbled for cover in any direction they could find it. The other SEBIN officers all did the same, and Kyra heard the first yells of francotirador!

Sniper.

“Arrowhead, this is Sherlock,” Kyra heard over her headset. “Fall back. I’ll keep your friends occupied.” Another bullet hit the lamppost light to make the point, sending sparks and shattered glass into the grass below.

It was Jon’s voice.

Kyra grabbed her Glock off the ground and sprinted for the cut in the fence.

The room exploded in cheers and Cooke saw Drescher smiling, the first time she could ever recall the man looking pleased with anything.

“Do we have clearance to fire on the Venezuelans on this op?” he asked.

“No,” Cooke admitted. “But I’ll deal with the president if he has a problem with it.”

“He will,” Drescher said.

“Sherlock, this is Quiver. Don’t kill anyone if you can avoid it.”

“Quiver, Sherlock. Wasn’t planning on it. Please don’t tell the bad guys.”

“We’re the ones who broke into their facility. I think that makes us the bad guys,” Marisa said.

“Fine by me. Bad guys don’t have to feel guilty about property damage.” Jon pulled the trigger on the large rifle and sent another slug downrange.

He was lying prone in Kyra’s shelter, the Barrett sticking out from the crude woven roof she had lashed together. He kept his eye on the scope and swept the optic over the CAVIM fence line. Kyra had pulled herself through the T-cut and was dragging herself to her feet now. A SEBIN soldier swung his rifle over the tail end of his murdered jeep, trying to line up on the running girl. Jon pulled his own trigger, smooth but quick, and the Barrett yelled at the soldier in the valley below, tearing another hole in the jeep’s hood. The Venezuelan leaped back, throwing himself onto his back, wetting himself as he did. He scrambled behind the jeep, out of Jon’s line of sight.

Kyra ran to her right along the fence line for the edge of the forest. There was no sense running back through the ordnance field now. Five seconds and she was clear of the explosives range, then she turned and sprinted for the hill. She holstered her Glock and accelerated through the brush, ignoring the plants and small trees as they tore at her legs.

“Quiver, Sherlock,” Jon announced. “Arrowhead has cleared the facility. I need a readout on any other hostiles in our area.”

“They’re all headed your way,” Marisa told him. “Everyone is coming to the party. Evacuate the area as soon as practical.”

“Roger Wilco. By the way, now would be a good time for you to make that phone call.”

He pulled the Barrett’s trigger, this time shooting at no one in particular.

Phone call? Marisa asked. Then she remembered. What are you up to, Jon? She pulled a cell phone out of her desk and dialed his number.

“Arrowhead, Sherlock,” he called out over his headset. “Suggest you head straight for the truck. We need to evac this area now. I’ll meet you there. Over.”

“I copy, out,” Kyra said, gasping her response. He watched her turn through the scope, running in a horizontal line along the hill now away from his position. It would still take her another fifteen minutes to get to the vehicles if she could keep up her pace. Jon swung the rifle back to the base. The SEBIN soldiers were still cowering behind every building and car they could find. Jon emptied the Barrett’s clip at them as fast as it would fire.

There was no time to break down the antenna. He pulled the cable out of the satellite transceiver and shoved it under the rock, then threw the antenna into the trees. Then he slung the rifle over his back, drew his Glock, and ran down the hillside.

The tree branches clawed at her face. Kyra knocked them aside but they tore at her, slowed her down, as if they were trying to hold her for the SEBIN soldiers she could hear in the distance. They knew she couldn’t be far. Jon and the darkness were her only allies now.

Her lungs ached, her legs burned. Her boots felt heavy, getting heavier with each step. This wasn’t like racing through the Caracas streets as she’d done the year before. Then the ground had been hard, smooth pavement, and she’d been able to see every obstacle as the SEBIN had chased her. Now she could hardly see the next few feet, the ground was soft and soaking up what little energy she had left. She was close to the truck, another half mile to go, but the terrain was uneven and it would be like running twice that distance.

The soldiers sounded closer now, but it was impossible to judge distance by sound in these hills. She heard dogs barking and wondered if they were wild or if they were SEBIN themselves, tracking hounds that the Venezuelans had called out.

She forced herself up a small ridgeline, then down, around another, and finally she saw the road where she’d left the truck. She couldn’t make out the blind she’d built around the vehicle in the dark, and the moonlight wasn’t penetrating the tree cover well. She felt a second wind rush into her chest and she accelerated, reaching the wide gravel trail and leaving the brush behind.

Kyra turned right and ran down the road a hundred yards until she found the pile of brush and branches that she’d heaped on her ride. There was another truck there… the Toyota 4Runner from the embassy garage. Jon must have driven it here, she realized. She looked down and saw the skid marks on the road and the crushed plants that led to the tires. He’d slammed his brakes and slid the truck to its parking spot, then gotten out and run for the woods.

Hurry up, Jon. She fumbled for her keys, then started the hardest job of the night.

She sat in her truck, the engine off, waiting for her partner as she heard yells and barks from the forest, growing a little louder with every minute.

The smartphone finally rang in Jon’s pocket. “It’s me,” Mari announced.

“We’re compromised,” Jon said, telling her the obvious. She wasn’t the audience for this call. “Contact the other teams and tell them to fall back.” He ended the call and threw the phone into the woods as far as his arm could manage without causing him to break stride.

“Yes!” Cooke was practically yelling now.

“What other teams?” one of the analysts called out.

“He’s kicking the hornet’s nest, kid,” Drescher told him. “All of them at once.”

“You two!” Cooke pointed at a pair of analysts. “I want satellite coverage of every joint facility in-country that the Venezuelans and Iranians have ever set up, right now! Get NRO and NGA on the phone. If they have an issue with it, tell ’em they can call me.”

Jon finally came crashing through the trees. Kyra jumped out of the Ford as he ran for his truck, pulling his rifle over his head without breaking stride and setting it in the truck bed. “Got any M67s?” he asked, out of breath.

“Good to see you too.” Kyra turned back to the Ford, leaned the seat forward, and searched behind. She found the grenades hidden under her seat and tossed one to him. Jon tossed his keys in return, pulled a knife from his pants, flipped the blade and cut a strip of cloth from his shirt as he ran to his own truck. He pulled a small oil can from the back, opened it, and doused the cloth in motor oil, then tied the strip around the grenade, knotting it down hard and pinning the spoon to the body.

The yells of the soldiers and the barks of dogs were louder now.

Jon depressed the cigarette lighter in the truck’s dash, waited for it to heat, pulled it out, and touched it to the cloth band around the grenade. It took a few seconds for the flame to ignite, black smoke rolling into the air. Jon pulled the pin out of the grenade, tossed the burning load into the Ford, then he threw Kyra the keys and ran behind her for the other truck. Kyra crawled into the driver’s seat, brought the Toyota to life and put the gas to the floor before Jon’s door was closed. The SUV crawled up the low embankment and the tires dug into the gravel, spinning out for a few seconds, then found traction and the truck jumped, speeding as the wheels clawed against the small rocks. Kyra cranked the wheel hard left when they reached the main road, rubber on asphalt, and the truck started picking up real speed.

Jon turned his head and looked back.

The cloth strip wrapped around the explosive in the Ford burned through and broke. The spoon on the thermite grenade released, allowing the aluminum powder inside to mix with the iron-oxide filler. The chemicals ignited, heat erupting inside the small can and racing to four thousand degrees in seconds. Molten iron began to spill out and the burning aluminum oxide flashed, brighter than a flare, lighting up the night for hundreds of feet in every direction. The burning compounds ignited the upholstery and began burning through the seats, the floor, and then the truck body below. It took twenty seconds for the fire to hit flammable fuels and a small explosion burst out from under the vehicle, scorching the brush beneath.

“Nice,” Kyra said, seeing the pyre burning in her rearview mirror.

“It’ll draw the search parties,” Jon told her. “If they don’t figure out in the next few minutes that we had a second truck, they’ll assume we’re still on foot. That’ll let us put some distance between us and them.”

“We can hope,” Kyra said. “Where are we going?”

Jon shook his head. Kyra sighed and let out a long breath. She pressed the gas, sped up, and drove along the dark road, heading east.

They drove in the dark and silence for twenty kilometers until Kyra saw a cut in the woods that was lightly overgrown with brush. She pulled off onto the trail and found a string of decrepit concrete buildings a quarter mile off the road, shops abandoned by their owners, how long ago she couldn’t tell. The village was both too small and too far from Puerto Cabello to be properly called a suburb, but she could see the glow of that town’s lights above the trees, maybe ten kilometers distant and still bright enough to wash out the smaller stars above.

One of the cement shacks had a rusted garage door that Jon opened with difficulty and Kyra shuddered at the grinding sound as the door’s wheels ground against the metal tracks. She pulled the truck inside and killed the motor. Jon closed the door, easier this time with gravity’s help, and the quiet of the forest around them invaded the truck. There were no lights, no sounds of motors in pursuit.

“I think we’re clean,” Kyra offered.

“I think you’re right.” Jon ran his hands through his hair, then dropped his head back against the seat. “I guess I’ve slept in worse places.”

“Like either of us will be able to sleep after that,” Kyra said. She opened her door, stepped out, and reached for her pack in the truck bed.

“You’d be surprised. The body tends to collapse after intense stress is relieved.”

“I’m not there yet,” she told him. Her hands were shaking, whether from the stress or the adrenaline finally burning off, she didn’t know. “I got it, Jon. I was right. That building at the south end was a security shack. The video cameras connected to the base system there and I was able to tap the line and get video from the rest of the base. We’ve got to upload the file. It’s almost twenty gigabytes… almost filled up the iPad’s storage. It’s going to take a while to transmit.”

“I left your transceiver on the hill.”

Kyra stopped, then cursed. “You didn’t bring one?”

“Just a short range unit so I could talk to you. I was in a bit of a hurry going out the door. Can you get a cell signal out here?” he asked.

Kyra checked the iPad. “No.”

“We should keep our heads down tonight,” he suggested. “We can try to move into Puerto Cabello tomorrow… get close enough to get a call out.”

Kyra nodded, suddenly too tired to come up with another plan, much less argue with Jon’s. She leaned over. “Thanks for coming. Saved my tail.” And she kissed him on the cheek for the second time in three days.

“You got lucky,” Jon said.

“Better lucky than good any day.”

“Luck can’t outrun stupid forever,” he told her.