Countdown to Midnight

Nineteen

Route 71 was a divided highway that ran from Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf coast all the way north through the holy city of Qom and on to Tehran, nearly eight hundred road miles inland. Just a little over forty miles north of Bandar Abbas, it passed through a small valley occupied by the tiny village of Gohreh. Small fields and groves of fruit and nut trees lined the highway for a few hundred yards. The little cluster of sand-colored buildings that made up Gohreh occupied the higher, less fertile ground east of the road. Craggy, boulder-strewn heights rose on all sides, separated by heavily eroded defiles. Formed millions of years ago by the collision of two massive tectonic plates, these steep ridges were an extension of the southern Zagros Mountains. They ran east and west like waves frozen in a tempest-tossed sea of stone.

Half a mile north of the village itself, Nick Flynn lay in wait on the forward slope of a gentle rise, an offshoot of the much higher ground climbing to the east. This hill overlooked Route 71. A few clumps of shrubs and dwarf trees paralleled the highway and climbed a little way up its barren slopes. He was prone in a shallow trench he’d scraped out by hand in the softer soil under the low-hanging branches of one of those dwarf trees. To help screen his hiding place from the road, he’d arranged tufts of dried brush along the lip of the trench, with gaps just big enough to see through.

His Austrian-made motorbike was laid carefully on its side close to his hide. He’d covered it over with a tan bedsheet bought for an exorbitant price in Bandar Abbas. Rocks held down the four corners of this cotton cloth, and he’d heaped dirt and more bits of brush across it as added camouflage.

Flynn raised his head above the edge of his shallow trench and peered down the slope. Ahead, in the west, the sun was sinking fast behind a sheer-sided ridge that climbed nearly three thousand feet above the valley floor. It would be dark in less than an hour. The heights behind him were already fading into shadow — still fully touched by light only at their very highest points. He’d finished digging himself into concealment a little over an hour ago, working in fits and starts to avoid being spotted by any of the occasional vehicles driving by along the highway. Since then, not a single car or truck had come north or south — which probably meant the Iranians had started blocking traffic to clear the way for their convoy from Shahrud.

To make sure he was ready, he powered on his phone and checked its battery level and camera settings. Everything still looked good. He settled back down again. Now to see if he and Daneshvar had guessed right.

Suddenly, a helicopter painted in desert camouflage clattered south down the valley. It flew low down the other side of the road and swirls of dust kicked up by its rotors drifted away downwind. The gunner manning its door-mounted machine gun swiveled his weapon from side to side, scanning the ground below. Flynn ducked his head and froze in place. Well, that answered his question. That helicopter scouting ahead indicated the truck convoy was on its way. Its presence also showed the Iranians weren’t taking any chances with their security, he realized coldly.

Not long after the helicopter disappeared behind a fold of higher ground, the first vehicles came into view — rumbling down the highway at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. Several wheeled armored personnel carriers were in the lead. They were followed by a group of smaller, open-topped vehicles with passengers filling every seat, some of them soldiers, the others obviously civilians. Three large flatbed trucks and a big rig hauling a freight container came next.

Flynn held his phone up just over the edge of his scraped-out hole and started snapping pictures of the tarpaulin-shrouded cargo carried by those flatbed trailers. Even under canvas covers, the fin-studded shapes of three separate rocket stages — two larger and perfectly cylindrical, and a third that was smaller, with a rounded nose — were unmistakable.

His shoulders tightened. Daneshvar had been right to be afraid. The Iranians were moving a missile of some kind to the Bandar Abbas shipyards — one they obviously intended to conceal aboard the Gulf Venture. Judging by the size of those stages, he guessed the rocket would stand at least eighty feet tall when it was fully assembled. While that might seem small compared to something like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle, Flynn knew it was still significantly bigger than America’s Minuteman III ICBMs. And you could throw a good-sized payload one hell of a long way with a missile of that size, he thought grimly.

He lowered his phone as the last truck rolled past and disappeared around a bend in the road. A few more armored vehicles followed closely behind, bringing up the rear of the convoy. When they also vanished around the same curve, he let out a small sigh of relief. None of the convoy escorts had spotted his concealed position. Quickly, he turned off the phone and stowed it safely away in his jacket pocket. Now all he had to do, Flynn hoped, was to wait patiently for full darkness and then make his way to the extraction point.

And then another helicopter clattered into view from the north, skimming low across the valley.

“Oh, crap,” Flynn muttered in dismay. The Iranians had a second aerial scout flying cover behind their convoy. And this one was headed straight down his side of the highway. He buried his face in the dirt just as the twin-engine helicopter roared right over his hiding place. Sand and dust and bits of brush were kicked up by the powerful downdraft from its spinning rotors. He closed his eyes tight against the stinging debris.

Beside him, the rotor wash whipped at the tan sheet concealing his motorbike. One end tore free from the rocks holding it down. It flapped crazily, caught in the grip of nearly hurricane-force winds.

Aboard the Agusta Bell 212 helicopter, Revolutionary Guard Lieutenant Hassan Noorian held on to an overhead strap and leaned out through its open left side door. He stared back along their line of flight. What had he just seen, he wondered? Was that bit of cloth fluttering so wildly a camouflage cover of some kind? Or just a bit of trash littering the side of the road?

Reacting swiftly, he whirled around and tapped the pilot on his shoulder. “Come around for another slow pass next to the highway,” he ordered, motioning back behind them.

Obeying, the pilot yanked his cyclic stick to the left. The helicopter banked sharply, swinging through a 180-degee turn.

As they swooped low, heading north only a few meters above the slope, Noorian leaned out through the helicopter’s side door again, searching the ground flashing by below their landing skids. This time when they thundered overhead, the brown cloth sheet he’d first noticed ripped free and went tumbling away across the hillside. His eyes widened. The sheet had concealed a small motorcycle lying on its side… right where no vehicle of any kind should be.

That wasn’t simply a broken-down piece of junk, he realized excitedly. No villager would abandon so valuable a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Not while a single spare part or tire could be scavenged. No, he thought, it was far more likely that hidden motorbike belonged to someone who shouldn’t be there — someone who’d been spying on their truck convoy and its vital cargo. Almost stammering in his hurry, he yelled into his headset mike. “Command, this is High Guard Two. Contact. Repeat, contact. We’ve just overflown a probable snooper north of Gohreh.”

“Copy that, High Guard,” the IRGC colonel commanding the convoy escort radioed back, sounding surprised. Until now, their 1,200-kilometer-long trek had been entirely uneventful. “Investigate immediately and report back.”

The helicopter’s door gunner patted his 7.62mm PKT machine gun. “I could hose that whole area down if we make another pass, sir,” he suggested.

Noorian shook his head. “No, Sergeant, hold your fire,” he snapped. “If it’s at all possible, we want to take this spy alive. Remember, a dead man can’t answer our questions.” He leaned forward to shout at the pilot again. “Take us back around one more time,” he commanded.

With a curt nod, the pilot banked his helicopter into another tight turn.

The young Revolutionary Guard lieutenant crouched lower, studying the terrain ahead of them through the Bell 212’s dust-streaked windshield. The place where he’d spotted this spy’s concealed motorbike was on the forward slope of a little hill overlooking the highway. No more than sixty meters high, this elevation was almost the perfect vantage point, he realized. But there were others in this valley and it was already growing dark. If the enemy agent they were now hunting had been clever enough to conceal himself somewhere farther away, landing at the base of the little hill might give him just enough of a lead to vanish into the gathering gloom. That was especially true since Noorian only had a half squad of four enlisted men aboard the helicopter with him. Until reinforcements from the truck convoy escort could double back, his small force was the only one available to make a search.

He grimaced. “When in doubt, take the high ground,” was a mantra that had been drummed into him by his tactics instructors as an officer cadet. It was sound advice, he decided. Possession of the hill would give his handful of men excellent fields of fire if the spy made a break for it. It would also help block his most likely escape route, a dirt track heading east from the highway toward several other small villages in an adjoining valley. He pointed toward the summit of the gentle rise. “Set us down there,” he told the pilot urgently. “Right on top of the hill.”

The helicopter climbed slightly to clear the crest, came to a hover over a patch of level ground at the summit, and then settled slowly onto its skids with its rotors still turning. Noorian jumped out the moment they touched down, with the rest of his troops right on his heels. His urgent hand signals spread them out in a skirmish line across the slope, with roughly ten meters between each man.

With their Russian-made AK-103 combat rifles held ready, the Guard soldiers began moving downhill toward small clumps of trees and high brush that bordered the highway. Hassan Noorian followed them with his own Browning Hi-Power pistol out and cocked. His eyes darted back and forth across the hillside ahead, probing for the slightest signs of any movement.

Flynn had wriggled around to face the back end of his shallow hole. He peered uphill. Those Iranian troops tromping cautiously down the wide-open slope were headed right for him. So much for the subtle, thoroughly discreet scouting operation he’d originally planned. Br’er Fox would be justifiably pissed… assuming, of course, that he lived long enough to report what had gone wrong. Basically, he had just two choices left: fight or skedaddle. And shooting it out with several rifle-armed Revolutionary Guard soldiers from this little ditch only struck him as a way to reenact the Alamo on a one-man scale. He snorted. Proud Texan though he was, he figured some things were still better left to the history books.

His eyes narrowed to slits. With the light going flat, it was increasingly difficult to judge distances accurately, but doing so was crucial. This was a delicate equation, he knew. The farther those enemy soldiers were from their helicopter at the top of the hill when he made his break, the better his chances of getting clear. But if he let them get too close, they’d riddle him with bullets before he’d gone more than a few yards. Almost unconsciously, his mouth twisted upward in a crooked grin. Maybe, just maybe, he mused, it had been a big mistake to join the Quartet Directorate. Because at the moment, the whole concept of lone wolf, high-risk missions behind enemy lines was starting to look pretty doggone dumb to him. “Kinda late to figure that out,” he muttered to himself, still watching the enemy draw nearer.

Flynn tensed. The Iranian troops were less than two hundred yards away, about halfway down the hill. It was now or never, he decided.

Still staying flat on his stomach, he scooted sideways out of his shallow hiding place over to where he’d laid the motorbike. He heard a startled shout from up the slope. He’d been spotted.

“Damn,” Flynn growled. Rearing up, he heaved at the motorbike’s handlebars, straining to lever the machine off the ground. Small though it was, the KTM still weighed more than two hundred pounds. For a moment, it fought him and he had a split-second, nightmarish vision of the handlebars ripping loose from his grip and crashing back down to the dirt. Not going to happen, he told himself. He heaved again. This time, the motorbike came up, slowly at first and then faster. It rolled vertical and thumped back down onto its front and rear tires.

There were more yells from the enemy soldiers.

Flynn threw himself astride the bike and hit the ignition. The engine sputtered to life. From farther up the slope, he heard the pistol-armed Guard officer shout a command, “You there! Halt! Halt, or we’ll shoot!”

For about a millisecond, he thought seriously about flipping the Iranian off — but then decided that was just the sort of pointless bravado that would only get him killed… and make him look pretty damned stupid in the process. Instead, he bent low over the handlebars, put the motorbike in gear, and sped off north across the slope. Still accelerating, he leaned hard left and then back to the right, veering around trees and stands of brush.

The Iranians opened fire.

7.62mm rounds tore the air around him and shredded trees — sending bits of leaves, shattered bark, and broken branches pinwheeling away. Other near misses gouged the slope behind him, hurling dirt and shards of pulverized rock skyward. One bullet ricocheted up off the ground and smacked hard into the motorbike’s engine mount less than an inch from his right leg. Spent, it tumbled away in a shower of sparks. Flynn gritted his teeth and leaned over to the right to keep his balance. The sudden powerful impact had almost tipped him over.

He sped between more trees and clumps of chest-high brush and came out onto a narrow path running northeast, around the curve of the hill. Slewing hard in a spray of sand and gravel, he swung sharply onto the rough dirt track and took it at high speed. Abruptly, the ear-splitting crack-crack-crack of rapid rifle fire died away behind him.

Flynn risked a quick glance over his shoulder. The Iranian troops were out of sight, hidden from view by the slope and vegetation. He nodded tightly to himself and sped up. Now this was a race.

Lieutenant Hassan Noorian lowered his pistol in dismay. Around him, his men did the same with their own weapons. Hitting a crossing target moving at high speed required both skill and luck — and unfortunately all of their shots seemed to have missed. Only a faint haze of dust hanging in the air still marked the spy’s path. Apparently, he was headed around the hill, speeding toward the trail which ran east into the next valley.

There was still time to block his escape, the lieutenant realized suddenly. On foot, he and his troops couldn’t hope to catch that motorcycle. But by the same token, their fleeing foe couldn’t possibly outrun a helicopter. He shoved his Browning pistol back into his holster, and shouted an order. “Let’s go! Follow me!”

With his soldiers close behind him, Noorian turned and sprinted back toward the top of the hill.