Drone Strike

1

By the time Grease let Turk up, the gunfire had stopped and the barn was empty.

“All right, let’s go,” said Grease, pointing. “Through the window.”

Turk pushed the control unit back into its pack, took his rifle and followed Grease to the window. He went out first, waiting while Grease jumped through.

“What’s going on?” Turk asked.

“Don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough. Keep your gun ready. This way.”

Grease led him across the flat yard to a small outbuilding that the team had agreed earlier would be a first regrouping area if they were attacked. Grease checked around the building, then had Turk kneel next to him on the side farthest from the road.

“Uh, thanks for watching out for me,” said Turk as they waited.

Grease didn’t respond.

You have to be the coldest son of a bitch I’ve ever met, thought Turk.

Sergeant Major Curtis trotted toward them a few moments later, followed by Dome. The younger man was carrying an M-240 machine gun.

“We’re clear,” said Curtis. “We move out as soon as the captain gives the signal.” He looked at Turk. “You OK, Pilot?”

“I’m good.”

“Careful with that rifle, all right? Especially if that safety is off.”

Turk realized he was pointing it at Curtis. “Sorry.”

“Someone told me you were a good shot.” Curtis smiled. “So you don’t need to prove it.”

Dome laughed.

“I’m all right,” said Turk defensively. “Not as good as you guys, I’m sure.”

“Don’t worry. Your job isn’t to shoot,” said Curtis mildly. “Wait for the truck.”

Curtis and Dome left, circling around behind the house as they checked the perimeter. Two troopers were moving near the front of the barn; Turk asked Grease what they were doing.

“Dunno. Probably hiding the bodies.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”

“Relax, Pilot. We’ll get you where you got to go.”

They waited in silence until the truck emerged from the barn a few minutes later. Then Grease wordlessly nudged Turk into motion, trotting alongside him as the truck moved up to the front of the house. The others were waiting there in a semicircle, standing by a Toyota sedan.

“In,” said Grease, pointing to the truck.

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll find out when they tell us.”

2

Danny Freah paused for a second, waiting for the computerized security system to recognize him by his biometrics, then continued through the large, empty basement space surrounding the “Cube”—Whiplash’s secure command center on the CIA headquarters campus in McLean, Virginia. He walked directly toward a black wall, which grew foggy as he approached. The wall was actually a sophisticated energy field, which allowed him through as soon as he touched it and was recognized by the security system.

He went down the hallway — these walls were “real”—to the central command center, where Breanna Stockard, Jonathon Reid, and six specialists were monitoring the Iran operation in a small, theaterlike room. Three rows of curved console tables, arranged on descending levels, sat in front of large screen. The floor, chairs, and tables moved, allowing the room to be reconfigured in a half-dozen ways, including a bowl-like arrangement that reminded Danny of a baseball stadium. While the designers had hailed the flexibility, it turned out the room was almost exclusively used as it was now, in a traditional “mission control” layout.

Paul Smith looked up at Danny from the back bench. Smith was a military mission coordinator “borrowed” by Whiplash from the Air Force’s Space Reconnaissance Command. He’d worked as the liaison with Dreamland on the nano-UAVs, and was now the primary communications link to the command center with Turk and the ground team. Like the others in the room, he generally handled a variety of tasks, often all at once.

“He’s in-country,” Smith told Danny.

“Any trouble?”

“Not with the jump. They had to move, though. One of the owners came to the house where the Delta team had hidden. Just one of those things. Murphy’s Law.”

“Were they compromised?” Danny asked.

Smith shook his head. He wore civilian clothes to fit in with the rest of the team; only Danny was in uniform. “Bad luck for them.”

Smith meant for the people who had undoubtedly been killed, though Danny didn’t ask.

Luck, good or otherwise, was the wildcard of life. It was also the one ingredient of every operation, covert or conventional, that could never be fully factored in. Things happened or didn’t happen; you planned for as many contingencies as possible, then thought on your feet.

As it happened, the team’s presence at the farm was already part of a contingency plan — they’d moved from what had been an abandoned warehouse complex when workmen showed up suddenly to start tearing down the place. But then the entire operation was a cascading series of contingencies, revamped on the run.

“They have another site about two miles farther north,” added Smith. “They have two guys there who’ve been watching it from a hide nearby. They should be OK there.”

“Danny, do you have a minute?” asked Breanna, rising from her seat at the front. She came up the stairs slowly, obviously tired. Danny guessed that she hadn’t slept the night before. “Just in my office. Coffee?”

“No thanks. Too much on the plane.”

Danny followed Breanna as she detoured into the complex’s kitchenette. The smell of freshly brewed coffee tempted him.

“How was he?” she asked.

“He looked good. He nearly beat one of the trainers to a pulp.”

“There’s yogurt in the fridge,” she told him, going over to the coffeepot. “Good for your allergies.”

“Haven’t been bothering me lately. Desert helped.”

“How was Ray?”

“A sphinx, as usual.”

A smile flickered across Breanna’s face as she brought the coffee to one of the two small tables and sat down. She put both hands around her coffee cup, funneling the warm vapors toward her face.

“Cold?” asked Danny.

“A little,” she confessed. “It’s sitting in one place, I think. What did Sergeant Ransom say?”

“Sergeant Ransom knows his duty,” Danny told her.

“I wish we could have trained someone else for the mission. The timetable just made it impossible. It wasn’t what we planned.”

“I think it’ll be better this way. Easier to train Turk to get along with the snake eaters than to have one of them try and figure out the aircraft.”

“But—”

“They’ll make it out,” Danny told her, reading the concern on her face. “I would have preferred it if it were our team,” he admitted, “but they were already there. They’ll do fine.”

“God, I hope you’re right.” Breanna’s whole body seemed to heave as she sighed; she looked as if she were carrying an immense weight. “The second orbiter will be launched tomorrow night. Once it’s in place so we have full backup, we’ll proceed. Assuming nothing happens between now and then.”

“Sounds good,” said Danny.

Breanna rose. “I don’t think it will be necessary. I think they’ll make it out.”

“So do I,” answered Danny. “I’m sure of it.”

3

The new hiding place was a collection of crags at the back end of what had been a farm in the foothills. It hadn’t been tilled in years, and the two men who’d been watching it reported that they hadn’t seen anyone nearby since they’d arrived some forty-eight hours before.

“We’re near a road the Quds Force uses to truck arms from the capital to the Taliban in western Afghanistan,” said the captain, leading Turk and Grease to a shallow cave where they could rest. “That’s good and bad — good, because we’re likely to be left alone. Bad, because if someone spots us, they’re likely to be armed. And there’ll be a bunch of them.”

“We’ll be ready, Cap,” said Grease.

“Probably never come. Pilot, you should get some rest.” The captain took a quick look around. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to go. You got about eight, nine hours.”

Turk set the control pack down against the back wall of the cave, then leaned against it. There were no blankets or sleeping bags — they would have been dead weight on the mission.

Better bullets than a pillow.

One of the trainers had said that in Arizona. Not Grease. But who? And when? The sessions, so intense at the time, were now blurred in his memory. Everything was blurred.

He should sleep. He needed to be alert.

“What’d they do with the car?” he asked Grease.

“They’ll get rid of it somewhere.”

“Were they civilians? The people who came to the house. It was a civilian car.”

“I don’t know who they were. Would it matter, though?” added Grease. “We have to do this. We have to succeed. If we don’t do it, a lot more people are going to die. A lot.”

Turk didn’t disagree. And yet he was disturbed by the idea that they had killed the civilians.

“Rest easy, Pilot,” said Dome, checking on them. “You got a busy night ahead of you.”

“Is that my nickname now?” Turk asked.

“Could be. There’s a lot worse.”

Turk shifted around against the backpack, trying to get to sleep. As his head drifted, Turk remembered falling asleep with Li the night before he left. He relived it in his mind, hoping it would help him nod off, or at least shift his mind into neutral.

4

“I’ve never smoked in my life.” President Todd rose from the chair, defiant, angry, ready to do battle. “Never.”

“I know.” Amanda Ross raised her gaze just enough to fix the President’s eyes. Dr. Ross had been Todd’s personal physician for nearly twenty years, dating to Todd’s first stay in Washington as a freshman congresswoman. “I’m sorry. Very sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Todd folded her arms and tried to temper her voice. They were in the President’s Sitting Room on the second floor of the White House, used by Todd as a private, after-hours office, a place she could duck into late at night while her husband slept in the bedroom next door. Now it was two o’clock in the afternoon, and with the exception of the Secret Service detail just outside the door, the floor was empty, but Todd didn’t want to broadcast her condition to even her most trusted aides. “Just give me the details plainly.”

“It’s a relatively… well not rare, but lesser, um…” The doctor stumbled for words.

“Lung cancer,” said Todd, a little sharper than she wished. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Chris. Madam President.”

“Chris is fine. We’ve known each other long enough for that.” Todd reached her hand to the doctor’s arm and patted it. “I do want to know everything. And I’m not blaming you.”

“I know.”

Todd squeezed the doctor’s arm, then sat back down in the chair. “Tell me everything you know about large cell undifferentiated carcinoma. I won’t interrupt until you’re done.”

“I’m not resigning.” President Todd pointed her finger at her husband. For just a moment he was the enemy, he was the cancer.

“Resectioning your lung, followed by chemo? Chris-tine.”

The way he said her name, dragging it out so that it was a piece of music — it took her back in time to a dozen different occasions, all difficult and yet somehow happily nostalgic now. She loved him dearly — but if she didn’t stay hard, if she didn’t stay angry, she would crumple.

“I did not take my oath only to give up two years into my term.”

“Three, I think.” He looked over his reading glasses. He was sitting up in bed, reading his latest mystery novel, as was his bedtime habit for all the years she’d known him. “And don’t think I haven’t counted the days.”

“In any event, I’m not giving up.”

“Jesus, it’s not giving up, Christine.”

“I have a responsibility to the people who elected me. To the country.”

“Not to yourself?”

“The office comes first.”

“Well maybe you should think about the sort of job you’ll be doing when you’re vomiting twenty-four/seven from the chemo.”

Her lip began to quaver. She felt her toughness start to fade. “You’re so cruel.”

Daniel Todd put the book down and got out of bed. He glided across the room, forty years of wear and tear vanishing in an eye-blink. He reached down to the chair and pulled her up, folding her gently in his grasp. He put his cheek next to hers. She smelled the faint sweetness of the bourbon he’d drunk earlier in the evening lingering in his breath.

“I love you, Chris. I’ll stand by you, whatever you decide. But honestly, love, just for once, could you please think about yourself? Your health. The Republic will survive.”

“I know it will, Dan.”

The President bent her face toward his shoulder, wiping away the single tear that had slipped from her eye.

And then she was over it, back in control.

“I get to the point where I can’t carry out my duties, then, yes, yes, then I will resign. But the doctor assures me—”

“Now listen—”

“The doctor assures me that it is at an early stage. There’s hope. A lot of hope. And a plan to deal with it.”

“I know there’s hope.”

Todd rested against her husband’s arms for another few seconds, then gently pushed him away. She took his hands, and together they went and sat on the edge of the bed.

“When are you going to go public?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“You can’t keep it a secret.”

“I realize that. But there’s a lot going on at the moment.”

“Chris-tine. There is always a lot going on.”

“I think what I’ll do is announce it right before the surgery. That’s the most appropriate time.”

“Says you.”

“Yes, but I’m paid to make that decision.” She smiled at him; Reid was always telling her the same thing. “Besides, there’s no sense worrying people beforehand.”

“You won’t tell your staff?”

“I will. But doing that is almost a sure guarantee that it will go public.”

“What about your reelection campaign?”

“That — That is a problem.”

“You’re not running for reelection.”

“No. I agree.” Todd had given it a great deal of thought. Even if things did work out right — and she was sure they would — she didn’t think the public would vote for someone who’d had lung cancer. True, attitudes about cancer were changing, but they weren’t changing that much. Todd herself wasn’t sure whether she would give someone a job knowing he or she had cancer that would require aggressive treatment. So the best thing to do would be not to run. She’d been on the fence anyway; this just pushed her off.

“I’ll avoid the issue for a while,” she told her husband. “If I make myself a lame duck, Congress will be even more of a pain.”

“Avoid the issue, or put off a decision?” asked her husband.

“The decision is made, love.” She let go of his hand and patted it, then moved back on the bed. Her nightgown snagged a little; she rearranged it neatly.

“They’ll hound you until you say something, once the news about the cancer is out.”

“True. But I’m used to that. The big problem is lining up a successor.”

“You’re going to line up a successor?”

“If I can, yes.”

“How?”

“With my support. I have my ways.”

“Not Mantis?” He meant Jay Mantis, the vice president.

“Don’t even think it.” Privately, Todd called him the Preying Mantis, and it was anything but a compliment. He was the most duplicitous person she had ever met in politics, and that was saying a great deal.

“Who then?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve made up my mind.”

“I have some ideas.”

“I’ll bet you do.” She pulled back the covers and pushed her feet under. “I have more immediate problems to worry about over the next few days.”

“Chris.”

“Don’t be a mother hen.”

“A father hen.”

Todd let her head sink into the pillow. Her health would wait; she had to deal with the Iranian mess first. Which meant a few hours nap, then back to work.

“Feel like going to sleep?” she asked her husband.

“To bed, yes. Sleep no.”

“That sounds a lot like what I was thinking. Let me turn off the light.”

5

By nine o’clock Turk had given up all attempts at sleeping and lay on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the cave they were huddled in. He was ready for the mission, ready to succeed. But time moved as if it were a man crawling across the desert inch by inch.

He got up and left Grease sleeping to see what the others were doing outside. Dread, the medic who had looked him over, was pulling a radio watch, manning the communications gear with Gorud, the CIA officer.

“How we doing?” Turk asked Dread. The main com gear was a surprisingly small handheld satellite radio-phone that allowed the team to communicate with Whiplash and its parent command. Dread also had a separate device to talk to other team members who were working in Iran, including two-man teams watching the target. There was a backup radio, much larger, in a pack.

“We’re all good,” answered Dread. “I thought you were sleeping.”

“Can’t.”

“I have some sleeping pills. Like Ambien, but stronger.”

“I heard that stuff will make you sleepwalk.”

“Not this. Puts you down and out.”

“Then I might not get up. You got any coffee?”

Dread shook his head. “Can’t cook here. Might see the smoke or the flame. Or maybe smell the coffee. If we had any.”

“None?”

“Got something that’s basically Red Bull. You want it?”

“No, maybe not.”

“Caffeine pills?”

“Maybe I’ll try to sleep again in a little while.” Turk sat down next to him, legs crossed on the ground. “Any sign that we were followed?”

“No. That house hadn’t been lived in for at least three months,” added Dread. “Don’t know what they were up to. Came to buy it or maybe have sex. Two guys, though.”

“Weird, being in somebody else’s country.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just — nothing. They don’t seem to know it’s a war.”

“It’s not a war. We don’t want one. That’s why we’re here, right?”

“Are you ready to do your job?” asked Gorud. His voice sounded hoarse.

“Yeah,” answered Turk.

“Then worry about that.”

“I don’t have to worry about that. I can do it,” added Turk, feeling challenged.

Turk stayed away as the Delta team traded shifts. Around noon he had something to eat — a cold MRE — then tried once more to sleep. This time he was successful; nodding off after nearly an hour, he slid into a dull blackness.

The next thing he knew, Grease was shaking his leg back and forth.

“Time to get up,” said the sergeant.

Turk rolled over from his back and pushed up to his knees. His neck was stiff.

“We’re leaving in five,” said Grease.

“Got it.”

“We’ll get food at the airport.”

“OK.” Turk unzipped the control backpack and checked it, more out of superstition than fear that it had been taken or compromised. Satisfied, he secured the pack and put it on his back.

It was three o’clock. He wished it was much later.

“Car’s here,” said someone outside.

Turk was surprised to see the civilian Toyota from the night before making its way up the rock-strewn trail. He thought they’d gotten rid of it.

“The three of us will use the car to get to the airport,” said Grease. “We’ll be less conspicuous. The rest of the team will be in the troop truck a short distance away. Put the backpack in the trunk.”

“I don’t want the control unit out of my sight.”

“You’re not going to leave the car.”

“It stays with me.” Turk’s only concession was to take it off his back and put it on the floor between his legs.

“If we are stopped at a checkpoint, you are Russians,” said Gorud after Turk and Grease climbed into the backseat. Gorud was at the wheel and a Delta soldier named Silver took the front passenger seat; his accent was old New York, so thick it could have been a put on.

“We are all Russians,” repeated Gorud, making sure they knew their cover. “We are looking for new oil fields and business opportunities.”

“Right,” said Turk.

“You all speak Russian,” answered Gorud.

“Da,” said Silver.

“Yeah,” said Grease, who then added a phrase that translated to the effect that Gorud could perform several unnatural acts if he had any question of the sergeant’s abilities.

Gorud scowled but turned to Turk. “Captain?”

“Ya govoryu na russkim dostatochno khorosho?” answered Turk.

“Tell me that you’re an engineer.”

“I don’t know the word.”

“Inzhenr.”

Gorud worked him through a few different phrases. Turk couldn’t remember much — it had been years since he’d spoken much Russian, and then it was mixed with English as he spoke with his aunt and grandmother. But any Iranians they met were very unlikely to speak any themselves, and in any event, the CIA officer had told him he shouldn’t talk at all.

“For once we agree,” said Turk.

“Use a Ruuushan accent with your Enggg-lish,” said Gorud, demonstrating. “You speak like this.”

“I’ll try.”

“Say ‘I will’ instead of ‘I’ll.’ Do not use slang. You are not a native speaker. You don’t use so many contrac-shuns. Draw some syllables out. Like Russian.”

Turk imagined he heard the voices of his relatives and their friends speaking in another room, then tried to emulate them. “I will try to remember this,” he said.

“Hmmph,” answered Gorud, still disappointed.

Turk folded his arms, leaning back in the seat. The CIA officer passed out passports and other papers that identified them as Russians, along with visas that declared they had been in the country for three days, having landed in Tehran. Among his other documents was a letter from a high ranking official in the Revolutionary Guard, directing that he be admitted to an oil field for inspection; the letter of course was bogus and the oil field far away, but it would undoubtedly impress any low ranking police officer or soldier who was “accidentally” given it to read.

The euros they were all carrying would impress him even more. Or so Turk believed.

He felt the vaguest sense of panic as a car approached from the opposite lane. It eased slightly as the car passed, then snuck back despite the open road ahead. It was hours before dusk; Gorud was vague about how long it would take to get to the airport, and not knowing bothered Turk.

Gorud’s attitude bothered him more — the CIA operative ought by all rights to be treating him with respect, and as a coequal: without him, there was no mission.

A pair of white pickup trucks sparked Turk’s anxiety; similar trucks were used throughout the Middle East and much of Africa by armies and militias. But these were simply pickups, with a single driver in each. Turk closed his eyes after they were gone.

“Just get me to the damn helicopter,” he muttered.

“What?” asked Grease.

“I just want to get on with it. You know?”

“It’ll be here soon enough. Don’t wish yourself into trouble.”

The rugged terrain around them was mostly empty, though occasionally a small orchard or farm sat in a sheltered arm of a hill along the highway. They passed a small village to the west, then passed through a larger collection of battered buildings, metal and masonry. Sand blew across the lot, furling and then collapsing on a line of concrete barriers, which were half covered in sand dunes.

“Old military barracks,” said Silver. “Abandoned a couple of years ago.”

“Glad they’re empty,” said Turk.

Gorud raised his head and stared out the window as they came around a curve at a high pass in the hills. The city lay ahead, but he was looking to his left, past the driver. Turk followed his gaze. He could see a rail line in the distance and tracks in the rumpled sand. What looked like several revetments lay a little farther up the hills. A large dump truck sat in the distance, the setting sun turning its yellow skin white. There were more beyond it.

“What’s going on here?” Silver asked.

“Good question,” said Gorud. “There are mines — but…” His voice trailed off.

“But?”

“Missiles, maybe,” he said. “Or something else.”

A reminder, thought Turk, that the problem they were dealing with was vast, and might not — would not — end with this operation.

The airport appeared ahead, a crooked T of tarmac in the light red dirt and lighter sand. They turned with the road, skimming around an empty traffic circle and then toward the terminal complex, driving down an access road four lanes wide. It was as empty as the highway they’d come down on. An unmanned gate stood ahead, its long arm raised forlornly. They passed through quickly.

The troop truck with the rest of their team continued on the highway, driving around to the south of the airport. They were on their own now; any contingency would have to be handled by Gorud, by Silver, by Grease, by himself — he touched the butt of his rifle under the front seat with the toe of his boot, reassuring himself that he was ready.

Immediately past the gate the road narrowed. Tall, thin green trees rose on either side; beyond them were rows of green plants, studded between sprinkler pipes. Two white vans sat in front of the parking lot in front of a cluster of administrative buildings. The buildings themselves looked empty, and there was no traffic on the access road that continued past the largest building and went south. Just beyond the building, they turned and drove through the lot to another road that ran around the perimeter of the airstrips. This took them past a truck parking area on the outside of the complex, beyond a tall chain-link fence. Turk caught a glimpse of their truck moving on the highway, shadowing them.

The access road took them to the front of the civilian passenger terminal, dark and seemingly forgotten. They turned left and drove around the building, directly onto the apron where the aircraft gates were located.

“Nothing here,” said Silver as they turned. “No plane.”

“I see.” Gorud looked left and right.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Keep going.”

“Onto the runway?”

“No. Onto the construction road at the far end. We’ll take it back around.”

“If it’s sand we may get stuck.”

“Chance it. We don’t want to look like we took a wrong turn if we’re being watched. We’re examining the airport — we would fly equipment in through here. We’re all Russian. Remember that.”

“Problem?” asked Grease.

“The Israeli and the helicopter should have been at the terminal,” said Gorud. “I don’t see it.”

“What Israeli?” said Turk. “Is that who is bringing the helicopter?”

Gorud said nothing. He didn’t have to; the expression on his face shouted disdain. Belatedly, Turk realized that “the Israeli” could only be their contact. He also guessed that the man was likely a Mossad agent or officer; the Israeli spy unit would have numerous agents studded around the country, and they would surely cooperate with the U.S. on a mission like this.

But it was also quite possible the man wasn’t Mossad at all. Everything was subterfuge — they were Russian, they were Iranian, they didn’t even exist.

“Place looks abandoned,” said Grease.

“It is,” replied Gorud. “More or less. Most airports outside Tehran look like this with the sanctions. Even if they have an air force unit, which this one doesn’t.”

“There was an aircraft on the left across from the terminal as we came in,” Turk said. “I didn’t get much of a look. Maybe that was it.”

“Was it an Mi-8?”

“I don’t think so. It looked a little small for an Mi-8.”

“We’ll go back.”

“Can you call your contact?” Grease asked.

Gorud shook his head. Turk guessed that he was afraid the missed connection meant that the man on the other end had been apprehended. Calling would only make things worse — for them.

“We can do it by ground if we have to,” Turk said. “If we have to.”

Silver took them across the dirt roads at the side of the terminal. A half-dozen excavations dotted the surrounding fields; all were overrun with dirt and sand that had drifted in. There were construction trucks on the other side of the entrance area, parked neatly in rows. As they drove closer, Turk saw that they were covered with a thick layer of grit. They’d been parked in the unfinished lot for months; work had stalled for a variety of reasons, most likely chief among them the Western economic boycott.

They had just turned back toward the administrative buildings when Turk spotted a light in the sky beyond the main runway.

“Something coming in,” he said.

“Take the right ahead, bring us back to the edge of the terminal apron,” Gorud told Silver.

Turk craned his head to see out the window as they turned and the aircraft approached.

“It’s not a helicopter,” he told them. “Light plane — looks like a Cessna or something similar. No lights.”

“What should I do?” asked Silver.

“Keep going, as I said,” snapped Gorud.

They parked at the edge of the terminal road, across from the gates and close enough to see the runway. The plane was a high-winged civilian aircraft, a Cessna 182 or something similar. The aircraft taxied to the end of the runway, then turned around quickly and came over to the terminal apron.

“Wait here,” said Gorud, getting out.

“Something is fucked up,” muttered Silver as the CIA officer trotted toward the plane.

Turk continued sketching an alternative plan in his head. In some ways it would be easier to work from the ground, he thought. His part would be easier: there’d be no possibility of losing a connection, and he wouldn’t have to worry about the distraction of working in a small aircraft. It’d be harder to escape, of course, but that was what he had the others for.

The key would be getting there. It was a long way off.

Gorud ran back to the car.

“It’s our plane,” he said. “Only two of us will fit. Come on, Captain.”

Grease put his hand on Turk’s shoulder. “I go where he goes.”

“You won’t fit in the aircraft,” said Gorud.

“Then you stay on the ground,” said Grease.

Turk pushed out of the car, leaving Gorud and Grease to sort out the situation themselves. The man in the right front seat of the aircraft — the copilot’s seat — got out to help him. He pushed his seat up and nudged Turk into the plane.

“What happened to the helicopter?” Turk asked as he got in.

The pilot shook his head.

“You speak English?” Turk asked.

Another head shake. The cockpit smelled like a locker room after an intense basketball game: sweat, and a lot of it. Perspiration ran thick on the back of the pilot’s neck. His shirt was drenched.

Grease slipped in next to him.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said the Delta sergeant. “Come on.”

The man who’d gotten out of the plane climbed back in. Turk assumed he was the Israeli.

“What happened to the helicopter?” asked Turk again.

“Contingency,” said the man. “This will have to do. Gorud is not coming?”

“Not unless he sits on your lap,” said Grease.

“Too much weight anyway,” the man said as he slammed and secured the plane door. The plane moved fitfully back toward the runway.

“I’m Turk,” said Turk, reaching toward the front.

“No names,” said the Israeli.

Turk slipped back and looked at Grease. “At least I know now I’m on the right plane,” he muttered.

The faintest of smiles appeared on Grease’s lips.

6

“Spacecraft Two is sixty seconds to target area,” said Colonel Schaffer, the Air Force liaison tracking the X-37B. “They need a final go to launch.”

Breanna glanced at Jonathon Reid, then back at the screen showing where Turk was. The pilot was wearing a small ring that allowed the Whiplash network to locate him at all times.

“Has Gorud sent the signal?” she asked Reid.

“Still waiting,” he replied, his voice so soft she could barely hear it over the whisper of the air conditioner. It was a habit of his — the more tense he felt, the quieter he made his voice. Undoubtedly it had served the old CIA hand very well when he was in the field.

Gorud was supposed to signal that the operation was proceeding by calling a prearranged number in Egypt that they were monitoring. The number belonged to an Iranian who spied on the West, a nice little piece of misdirection cooked up by Gorud himself. They expected the call when they boarded the helicopter, but though Turk was clearly aboard and moving, there had been no signal.

Breanna stared at the screen, watching as Turk moved away from the airport. They didn’t have real-time visual of the operation, having decided that even a stealthy UAV might give them away if something went wrong. Iran, using Russian technology, had already demonstrated the ability to track American drones.

There was something wrong about the way the aircraft was moving — it didn’t seem like a helicopter.

“Is the X-37 close enough to Birjand to pick up that aircraft?” Breanna asked Schaffer.

“Negative. Not even close. Is there a problem?”

“Turk’s supposed to be in a helicopter.”

“What’s wrong, Breanna?” asked Reid.

“I’m pretty sure Turk’s in a plane, not a helicopter as planned.”

“Maybe they had to change their arrangement,” said Reid. “Will he be able to control the UAVs?”

“He should. The question is whether they can stay in the area, and do so without attracting too much attention.”

“Maybe Gorud thought the plane would be less noticeable,” said Reid.

At one of the original briefing sessions on the planning, someone had mentioned that there were often helicopter flights in the area; she remembered quite clearly because she’d asked a question about it.

“I’m not trying to second-guess their operation,” she told Reid. “I am concerned because we haven’t confirmed that it is our aircraft. Gorud hasn’t checked in.”

“Understood.”

“Ma’am.” Schaffer cleared his throat. “If you want a launch, you need to authorize. The window on this pass is only forty-five seconds.”

If she authorized the launch and Turk wasn’t in a position to “catch” the UAVs, the mission would be aborted and the aircraft lost. The operation would have to wait another twenty-four hours, and the margin of error would be cut in half.

Breanna looked again at the screen plotting Turk’s location. He might be heading for the target. Or he might be going to Tehran — the logical place to bring a prisoner.

Something her father had told her years before popped into her head: There are always reasons to put off a mission, Bree. A lot of them, and they’re always good ones. Going ahead is always the lonelier way. But it’s almost always the better choice.

“Launch,” she told Schaffer.

7

Turk braced himself as the Cessna banked sharply. It turned nearly 270 degrees in what felt like a half second, dropping at the same time. His stomach felt as if it had hopped up to his eyeballs.

“What the hell are we doing?” he demanded as the pilot leveled off.

“We have to avoid being detected,” said the man in the right front seat. While Turk labeled him the Israeli because of what Gorud had said earlier, his accent sounded Eastern European. But then those two things were not necessarily a contradiction.

“You haven’t told me what happened to the helicopter.”

“This will have to do,” said the Israeli.

“What happened?” snapped Turk.

“It’s immaterial,” said the Israeli. “This is what we have. Do the job.”

“Listen—”

Grease patted him twice on his leg, silently trying to calm him. The pilot started speaking quickly in Farsi.

“Let’s all relax,” said Grease, first in English, then Farsi. He turned to Turk. “You OK?”

“He’s going to have to stay very close to the site,” Turk said. The plane dipped sharply. “And he’s going to have to fly a hell of a lot better than he’s flying.”

“He’s a good pilot,” said the Israeli.

“And I’m a good truck driver.”

They leveled off, the plane steadying. They were flying fast and low, and it was possible that the pilot was just jittery because he was a little nervous — the Israeli didn’t exactly put people at ease. Even a light plane, if unfamiliar, could be a handful. Turk tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, leaning back in his seat and recalculating the mission in his head, rearranging what he would have to do.

As long as they stayed in the general area, they’d be OK. He’d have the Cessna fly a long, continuous circuit as close to the target as the pilot dared. Once he acquired the UAVs, things would happen pretty fast.

Turk checked his watch. They were four hours from the rendezvous time. The mission plan had called for the helicopter to take about two hours getting to the refuel site; the target area was another hour and a half away.

“Are we stopping to refuel?” Turk asked.

“Nonstop,” said the Israeli. “Straight line.”

Turk leaned forward, checking the gauges. The pilot had the throttle at max; they were pushing 140 knots.

“Set your speed to 110 knots,” Turk said, calculating their flight time. “One hundred and ten knots.”

The pilot made no move to comply.

“Tell him to drop his speed to 110 knots,” Turk told the Israeli. “Or I’ll strangle him.”

Grease glanced at Turk, then took out his pistol.

The Israeli said something to the pilot. The pilot disagreed, and they started to argue.

“Look, we don’t want to get there too soon,” said Turk. “If 110 knots is too slow for the aircraft, then we’ll have to change course and fly around a bit. But he’s heading straight for the target area. I don’t know what you’ve told him, or what you think we’re doing, but we don’t want to get there too soon. Do you understand? This isn’t a race. We have to be there in a precise window of time.”

“He says we have to maintain speed,” said the Israeli harshly.

“The pilot does exactly what the captain says,” Grease announced, raising the Iranian-made Sig and nudging it against the edge of the pilot’s neck, “or he dies.”

The pilot glanced back nervously. The plane edged with him, reacting to his hand on the yoke.

“Don’t be a fool,” hissed the Israeli. “You’ll kill us all.”

“He’s going too fast,” said Turk. “Tell him to relax. Tell him I’m a pilot, too. I know what I’m talking about.”

“He knows where he has to go and when to get there,” said the Israeli, only slightly less antagonistic. “He wants a cushion.”

“We can’t afford a cushion. This isn’t a transport. Tell him there’s a penalty for getting there too soon.”

The Israeli frowned.

“Does he know what we’re doing?” Turk asked. “Do you?”

“He knows the very minimum he needs to know. As do I.”

The pilot said something. His voice was high-pitched, jittery. A thick ribbon of sweat poured down the side of his face. Turk thought of finding a place for them to land and taking over flying the plane. But he couldn’t do that and guide the UAVs.

“Tell him I know that he’s nervous, but I trust that he can fly the plane,” said Turk. “Tell him I’m a test pilot. And I like his skills. Tell him to relax, just relax and fly. He’s a good pilot. A very good pilot.”

The last bit was a lie — a rather large one — but Turk’s goal was to get the man to trust him, and accurately evaluating how he was flying would not do that.

The pilot nodded, though there was no sign that he relaxed.

“Tell him that we’ll be flying a low figure eight when we get to the area,” said Turk. “Even if we get there when planned, we’ll have to do that for more than a half hour. That’s a long time. We don’t want to be detected. The longer we’re there, the more chance of that — that’s why we want to slow down. And it’ll conserve fuel.”

“I want him to know the minimum necessary,” answered the Israeli. “Telling him he has to orbit for a half hour isn’t going to calm him down.”

“Tell him whatever the hell you want,” said Grease, “but make him do what Turk says.”

“I think we should all calm down,” said the Israeli. “There’s no need for excitement.”

“Then let’s follow the captain’s game plan. To the letter,” said Grease.

8

“The call has been made,” said Reid, rising. “That’s their plane.”

Relieved, Breanna looked at the large area map of Iran projected on the front wall. They had hours to go; she knew from experience the time would alternately drag and race, as if her perceptions were split in two.

“Breanna, could we speak?” said Reid, touching her elbow.

“Sure.”

Breanna got up and led Reid down the hall to her office. The lights flipped on as she entered. She saw the small clock on the credenza at the back, thought of her daughter, and wondered what subject she would be studying now.

Just starting English. They always did that before lunch at eleven.

Breanna stopped in front of her desk, standing at the side of the room. She’d been sitting too long; she felt like standing.

“Gorud made a call from the airport,” said Reid. He stood as well. The gray-haired CIA veteran seemed a little more tired than normal, but there was good reason for that. “After the plane took off.”

“Plane?”

“There was a problem and they had to substitute. There wasn’t enough space in the aircraft. Gorud opted to stay on the ground. It was either him or Grease.”

“I see.”

“He decided it was important enough to break the planned protocol. That’s why it took so long. I just wanted you to know. I’ve got to go back over to the big building,” Reid added, using his slang for the Agency’s administrative headquarters across the way. “I have to run back for a quick meeting. I’ll be here again in time for the actual show.”

“OK.”

“You’ll alert the President?” said Reid.

“Of course. I better get back inside. The WB-57 will be launching from Afghanistan soon.”

9

Turk ran through all the tests a third time, receiving one more confirmation that everything was in top order and ready. The main screen on the controller, which resembled a laptop, was currently displaying a situation map, with their location plotted against a satellite image. He tapped the window to the left, expanding it and then selecting the preselect for the target area. The image that appeared looked at first glance like a sepia-toned photo of capillaries crisscrossing a human heart. Only after he zoomed the image did it start to look something like it was: a synthesized image of the target bunker, taken in real time.

The image was being provided by a WB-57, flying at high altitude just over the border from Iraq. Owned by NASA but currently being flown by an Air Force pilot, the WB-57 was a greatly modified Cold War era B-57 Canberra. Originally designed as a bomber, the high-flying, ultrastable plane had proven adept at reconnaissance from the earliest days of its career. After their retirement from the bomber fleet, the planes continued to do yeoman’s service during the Cold War, snapping photos of missile sites and other installations. When no longer useful to the Air Force, a handful of planes were taken in by NASA, which made them into high-flying scientific platforms, gathering data for a number of scientific projects.

This WB-57 had been borrowed from NASA for a more ominous assignment. Inside its belly was an earth-penetrating system that could map deep-underground bunkers in real time. The gear would be used to monitor the nano-UAVs as they penetrated the target.

Related to the technology developed for the HAARP program, the complex monitoring system used the auroral electrojet — a charged-particle stream in the ionosphere high above the earth — to send a burst of dispersed ELF, or extremely low frequency waves, into the bunker. The WB-57 tracked the waves, using them to draw pictures of what was happening beneath the earth’s surface. The angle and direction of the waves meant the WB-57 could stay a considerable distance away from the bunker.

Even at 60,000 feet the plane was vulnerable to all manner of defenses, from Iran’s recently acquired Russian S-200s and even older Hawk missiles left from the Shah’s era. And while it could provide detailed images of what was underground, its sophisticated equipment could not provide even the fuzziest picture of the ground’s surface. For that Turk knew he would have to look at the video provided by the Hydras as they approached the target.

He fiddled back and forth with the screen configuration, trying to decide how much priority to give the optical view of the lead UAVs. He tried his favored arrangement for the Sabre UAVs, dividing the screen into two unequal parts, the right side about three times as large as the left. He then created a pair of panels on the right, with an area plot at the bottom and the larger, forward video feed at the top. The left panels were split into four equal boxes, each to receive a feed from a different UAV. That would make it easier to switch as the mission progressed.

The control unit bounced on Turk’s knees as the Cessna jerked upward. They were flying in a mountain range, at roughly 8,000 feet, which left a hundred feet and sometimes far less between their wings and the nearby mountaintops. The pilot was even more nervous than he’d been when they took off, and on top of that appeared physically exhausted. He kept glancing to his right as he flew, checking on the Israeli in the right seat but rarely saying a word.

The Israeli said even less. His attitude made the severe Gorud look like a carnival clown high on laughing gas. Turk had begun thinking of him as the Grim Reaper, but grim barely described his demeanor.

“This shows where we are, right?” Grease asked, pointing at the lower map on the control unit.

“Not exactly,” answered Turk. “It shows where the target area is. Then when I add this, we get a GPS indicator to show that we’re in it. But I don’t want to query too often, on the off chance that the Iranians will monitor the signal.”

“Is that likely?”

Turk shrugged. It wasn’t, but at this point the fewer chances the better.

“So we’re close?”

“We’re a little ahead of schedule.”

“That’s not good?” Grease said, reading Turk’s frown.

“We’ll have to keep flying around. I’m afraid of being seen. There are radars all along this area, and a major antiaircraft site here at Natanz. Not that they’d need much to shoot us down.”

The antiaircraft sites had all been marked on a special map in the briefing files, which were destroyed when Grease torched the pad computer. But in truth the location was immaterial — the Cessna was already well within their range. The success of the plan hinged on staying low, near the mountaintops. As long as they did, the radars associated with the missile batteries were unlikely to see them.

“You’re going to have to hold the plane a lot steadier once we reach the target area,” Turk told the pilot as the aircraft bucked. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The pilot didn’t answer.

“Tell him,” Turk told the Israeli.

“He knows.”

“Tell him anyway.”

He did. The pilot replied curtly, apparently not agreeing with whatever the man said.

“He suggested I fly the plane myself,” said the Israeli.

Turk laughed. It was the first time the man actually sounded like a pilot.

He reached forward and patted the man on the shoulder. Then he took the folded map on the board clipped to the instrument panel.

“This is where we have to stay,” he said, drawing the safe area within five miles of the target. He showed it to the pilot and then to the Israeli. “We fly a steady figure eight and hold altitude. We’re on the west side of the mountains. We have to stay steady until I say we go home. It’ll be a while.”

The Israeli explained. The pilot nodded.

“When he comes over the peak ahead, tell him to bank southward,” Turk told the Israeli. “Take it south gently, and stay in the area I’ve outlined.”

As bright as the stars were, the ground was pitch-black, with no lights visible anywhere nearby. The city of Badroud lay some twenty miles beyond the peak, off their left wing. Turk expected to see a yellow glow in that direction as they turned. When he didn’t, he checked their position again. The GPS locator in the control unit had them exactly twenty-two miles from Badroud, as did his handheld unit. They were precisely on the course.

Early, though — the UAVs wouldn’t be in range for twenty-two more minutes.

“We’re looking very good,” he announced, deciding to look on the positive side. “Just keep flying the way we planned, and everything will be fine.”

10

Captain Parsa Vahid took his helmet in the crook of his arm as he got out of the Khodro pickup truck, balancing the rest of his gear in his right hand as he reached for his briefcase with his left. Then he spun and kicked the door closed, walking toward the front of the ready hangar. The nose of his MiG-29 sat just inside the open archway. The aircraft was armed and fueled, sitting on ready-standby in the special hangar.

The pilot who’d been on watch until now was standing on the tarmac outside the building. He shook his head as Vahid approached.

“You’re late, Parsa,” said the pilot.

“Five minutes,” insisted Vahid. “I needed to eat.”

“You’re so busy in the day that you couldn’t eat earlier?”

Vahid shrugged. “If there had been a call before now, it would have been yours.”

“Phhhh. A call. The dead will rise before we fly in combat,” said the other pilot disgustedly, starting for the pickup truck. “The Israelis are cowards.”

“And the Americans, too?”

“Worse.”

“Good evening, Captain,” said Sergeant Hami, the night crew chief. “We are ready to fly tonight?”

“Ready, Chief. My plane?”

“Ho-ho,” said Hami, his jowls shaking back and forth. “We are in top shape and ready to fly when the signal comes.”

“So it’s tonight, then?”

“With God’s will.”

Vahid walked over and put his gear down on a table at the side of the hangar. A pair of metal chairs flanked the table; he and Hami would customarily play cards there for most of the watch. But first he would inspect the aircraft.

“A nice night to fly,” said Sergeant Hami, waiting as he set down his helmet and personal gear. His accent was thick with Tehran, reminding Vahid of the city’s many charms. “You will shoot down some Americans, yes?”

“If I have the chance.”

The nights were always like this: bravado and enthusiasm at first, then dull boredom as the hours dragged on. The first night, Vahid had sat in the cockpit, waiting to take off in an instant. Even the base commander now realized that was foolish. The U.S. forces in the Gulf were paper ghosts, strong in theory but never present. They kept well away from Iranian borders.

Of course, the same might be said of the Iranian air force, even Vahid’s squadron. The four MiG-29s, the most advanced in the Iranian air force, had been moved to Omidiyeh air base six weeks before. The base had been largely abandoned in the years following the Iran-Iraq war; while still theoretically open for commercial traffic, the only civilians Vahid had seen were the members of a glider club, who inspected but did not fly their planes the first week of the squadron’s arrival. Since then the base had been empty, except for military personnel.

He began his walk-around at the MiG’s nose, touching her chin for good luck — a superstition handed down to him by his first flight instructor. The instructor had flown in the Iran-Iraq war, where he had served briefly as a wingman to Jalil Zandi, the legendary ace of the Iranian air force.

Even without the connection to greatness, Vahid would have venerated the instructor, Colonel One Eye. (The nickname was not literally accurate, but came from his habit of closing one eye while shooting on a rifle range.) The colonel could fly everything the Iranian air force possessed, from F-86 Sabres, now long retired, to MiG-29s. Like Zandi, One Eye had flown Tomcats during the war against Iraq, recording a kill against an Iraqi Mirage.

Vahid stopped to admire the plane. The curved cowl at the wing root gave it a sleek, athletic look; for the pilot, it evoked the look of a tiger, springing to the kill. The export-version MiG was one of thirty acquired by Iran in the mid-1990s; the air force now had just over a dozen in flying condition.

A siren sounded in the distance. Vahid froze.

A fire?

No.

No!

“The alert!” yelled Sergeant Hami. “The alert!”

Vahid grabbed his helmet from the table, then ran to the ladder at the side of the plane. As he climbed upward, a van with the rest of the ground crew raced across the concrete apron, jerking to a stop in front of the hangar. Hami helped Vahid into the cockpit, while the arriving crewmen began pulling the stops away from the plane and opening the rear door of the hangar.

Two nights before, a false alert had gotten Vahid out of the hangar, but he was called back before reaching the runway, some 1,000 meters away: the radars had picked up an Iranian passenger flight in the Gulf and, briefly, mistaken it for an American spy plane. He expected this was something along the same lines. Still expecting the flashing light at the top of the hangar to snap off, he powered up the MiG, turning over one engine and then quickly ramping the other. Hami, back on the ground, shook his fist at him, giving him a thumbs-up.

Vahid began rolling forward. The tower barked at him, demanding he get airborne. Ignoring them for a moment, he took stock of his controls. Then, at the signal from Sergeant Hami, he went heavy on his engines. The plane strained against her brakes. The gauges pegged with perfect reads. The MiG wanted to fly.

“Shahin One to Tower, request permission to move to runway,” said Vahid calmly.

“Go! Go!” answered the controller.

The MiG jerked forward, overanxious. At the other end of the base three pilots were running from the ready room. Their planes would be a few minutes behind. It was Vahid’s job to sort things out before they were committed to the battle.

“Cleared for immediate takeoff,” said the controller.

Vahid didn’t bother to pause as he came to the end of the runway — there were no other flights here, and it was clear he was under orders to get airborne immediately. Selecting full military power, he started the MiG down the runway. The screech of the engines built to a fierce whine. He felt himself starting to lift.

Airborne, he made a quick check of his readouts, then cleaned his landing gear into the aircraft. The MiG leapt forward, rocketing into the night.

Moments later the local air commander came over the radio, giving him his instructions directly.

“You are to fly north by northeast,” said the general, “in the direction of Natanz. There are reports of a low-flying airplane near the Naeen train station. We will turn you over to Major Javadpour for a vector.”

“Acknowledged.”

Vahid had to look at his paper map to find Naeen. It was a dot in the mountains north of the city of Nain, a small town camped at the intersection of several highways that transcribed the Iranian wilderness. He was some five hundred kilometers away.

Major Javadpour directed Vahid to the west of the sighting — he wanted him to fly close to Natanz, one of the country’s main nuclear research sites.

Gravity pushed Vahid against the seat as he goosed his afterburners. At full speed he was just over ten minutes away.

“We have no radar contacts at this time,” said Javadpour.

“No contacts?”

“We have two eyewitnesses who saw and heard planes. But no radar.”

“What sort of aircraft did they see?” asked Vahid.

The controller didn’t answer right away, apparently gathering information. Vahid pictured a flight of American B-2 Stealth Bombers, flying low over the terrain. They would pop up before the attack.

He might be too late to stop them. But he would surely destroy them. He had two R-27 air-to-air medium-range missiles and six R-73s, all Russian made, under his wings. The R-27s were radar missiles; he had been told they would have trouble finding B-2s unless he was relatively close, but this didn’t bother him at all. The B-2 was slower than his plane, and far less maneuverable. As for the R-73s, they were heat-seekers, very dependable when fired in a rear-quarter attack.

They might have escorts. If so, he would ignore them — the bombers were the far more important target.

Vahid continued to climb and accelerate.

“We still have no contacts at this time. Negative,” said Javadpour, coming back on the line. “The eyewitnesses describe a small plane, possibly a drone, very low to the ground.”

“A small plane?”

“Single engine. It may be civilian. That’s all the information I have at this time,” added the controller. “Maintain your course. I show you reaching the area in six minutes.”

Damn, thought Vahid, another false alarm.

11

Turk watched the train of triangles as they flowed steadily from the northwest. They were two minutes from the target, traveling at nearly Mach 4, gliding with the momentum of the ship they’d launched from.

He looked up. Grease was sitting stone-faced next to him. The Israeli and the pilot in the front were silent, staring straight into the darkness. They were just over three hundred feet above the nearby slope, with the target area six miles away off the right wing.

“Keep the plane steady,” Turk said softly, picking up the small headset. “The words I say will have nothing to do with us, unless I address Grease directly. Grease, if you need me, tap on my leg. But don’t need me.”

He turned his attention back to the screen, hunching his head down to isolate himself from the others. He was used to distractions, used to splitting himself away from his immediate surroundings to concentrate, but this was a challenge even for him.

The small plane tucked up and down as it came across the mountain slope, buffeted by the wind and twitching with the pilot’s nervous hand. A light beep sounded in the headset.

“Ten seconds to acquisition range,” the computer told him.

A quick kick of doubt tweaked Turk’s stomach: You can’t do this. You haven’t trained properly. You will fail.

You are a failure.

Red letters flashed on the screen before him.

“Establish link,” Turk told the computer calmly.

Doubt and fear vanished with the words. The UAVs, still moving with the momentum of their initial launch and the gravity that pulled them to earth, came into his control in quick succession.

It wasn’t exactly control. It was more like strong influence. He could stop them or turn them away, goose them ahead or push them down, but for the most part now he was watching as the thirty-six aircraft, each the size of the sat phone sitting in his pocket, plummeted toward the air exchanger hidden in the cluster of rocks on the hillside.

Turk tapped his screen, bringing up the status window where he quickly checked the roster of aircraft. Two were flashing red — the monitors had detected problems. He tapped the names, opening windows with the details. The computer highlighted the difficulties. Both had abnormal heat sensors, suggesting their shields had failed. That would likely degrade the solid Teflon propellant, though with the engines not yet ignited, it was impossible to tell what the actual effect would be.

The most likely effect was incomplete propulsion — they’d lose power too soon to complete the full mission.

“Aircraft 8 and Aircraft 23 forward,” Turk said. “Eight and 23 to lead.”

“Calculating. Confirmed. Complying.”

Turk watched the Hydras shuffle. Moving the problematic aircraft to the front would give them the role of blowing through the grill in the air exchange; their engines wouldn’t matter, since they wouldn’t be used.

Until this moment the UAVs had been barely guided missiles, with steering vanes rather than wings. Now the computer popped the vanes into wings, extending them and banking the robot planes in a series of circles, separating them into mission clusters and slowing them to a more controllable and maneuverable speed.

More red on the screen. Aircraft 5 was not responding.

Lost. Turk mentally wrote it off. The UAV would dive into the hills, exploding on impact.

Tapping the target area on the sitmap, he looked at the image of the bunker provided by the NASA plane. A small flag appeared at the side; he tapped the flag, and was presented with a three-dimensional wire-frame drawing in the center of the screen. He enlarged it with his index finger.

“Compare infrastructure to known. State deviations,” he told the computer.

“Congruency, one hundred percent.”

Nothing had changed since the mission was drawn up. They were good to go.

The computer provided an assortment of data on the bunker. One set of numbers in particular caught his eye: there were 387 people in the facility.

Turk hadn’t expected that many; the briefing had indicated a skeleton crew of guards, at best, given the hour. The number seemed very high, but there was no time to double-check it.

The UAVs dropped in twos and threes from the oval path they’d been flying, diving for the air exchanger opening. They were subsonic but still moving incredibly fast, just over 550 knots on average. He saw them in his mind’s eye falling above his shoulder, shooting stars on a fateful mission.

“Proximity warning,” buzzed the computer. “Control unit moving out of range.”

Turk jerked his head up and yelled. “Pilot, get the plane back into the right parameters. Put us where I told you. Now!”

12

Captain Vahid checked the long distance radar scan on his MiG-29 a second time, making sure it was clean before contacting his controller.

“No contacts reported,” he said. “I am zero-two minutes from Natanz.”

“Copy, Shahin One. You have no contacts reported.”

It took a moment to process the controller’s simple acknowledgment. Obviously excited, his Farsi had a heavy southeastern accent, and the words jumbled together with the static in Vahid’s headset.

Natanz was under blackout conditions and the pilot couldn’t see the faintest shadow of the facility to his left as he approached. Nor could he see any sign of its several satellites, or the support facilities arrayed around the region. Shrouded in literal darkness, the vast infrastructure of the country’s nuclear arms program Vahid was tasked to protect was as much a mystery to him as it was to most Iranians.

Vahid didn’t think much of the program. To him, it was a needless waste of resources — the air force could be greatly expanded with a hundredth of the funds, the navy could gain more submarines, the army strengthened. All would provide Iran with weapons that could actually be used, as opposed to the bomb no one would dare unleash, lest the retaliation result in the country’s death sentence.

And there would be money left over for food and gasoline, in chronic short supply these past few years.

Vahid was careful not to share these opinions. Even Jalil Zandi, the legendary ace and great war hero, had been jailed twice for saying things that contradicted the ayatollahs.

The controller called back with further instructions, alerting Vahid that he was sending two of the other three MiGs that had scrambled after him farther north. The third would patrol around Natanz.

So it was definitely a wild-goose chase, Vahid thought. But at least he was flying. The MiG felt especially responsive tonight, as if anxious to prove her worth.

“You are to proceed east in the direction of the original sighting,” added the controller. “Other aircraft are being scrambled. Await further instructions.”

Acknowledging, Vahid shifted to the new course. The air force was using a lot of its monthly allotment of jet fuel tonight, he thought; they’d pay for it in the coming weeks.

Banking toward Nain, his long range radar picked up a contact. It appeared only momentarily, the radar confused by the scattered returns of the hills. Vahid changed modes but couldn’t get it back.

Still, there had to be something there: very possibly the light plane he had been scrambled to find. He altered course slightly and readjusted the MiG’s radar to wide search. Reaching for the mike button, he was about to tell the controller that he’d had a contact then thought better of it. Send out a false alarm and he would be quizzed for hours about why he failed to turn anything up. Better to wait until he had something more substantial than a momentary blip.

13

The proximity warning stayed on as the first nano-UAV hit the mesh screen, the Cessna’s pilot fighting a rogue air current in the foothills to get back in the proper position. But Turk didn’t need to take over the swarm: the Hydra struck within two millimeters of the programmed crosshair, exploding perfectly and blowing a hole through the outer filter assembly. Two seconds later the second UAV hit the large grate positioned three meters deep in the shaft. The thick blades of steel crumbled, leaving the way clear for the rest of the swarm.

The proximity warning cut off a second later. By then the control unit had switched the video feed to UAV 1 inside the airshaft. Turk saw the seams whip by like lines on a highway pavement, the aircraft dipping down the five-hundred-meter tube that led to a Z-turn and the air exchanges.

There was no way Turk could have piloted the craft through the turn, even though its speed had slowed considerably. The computer puffed the nano-UAV’s wings, fired the maneuvering rocket, and spun the Hydra through the Z. Two more aircraft followed, forming an arrow-shaped wedge that hit the interior fan assembly like a linebacker barreling into an ill-protected quarterback. They blew a hole through the exchange mechanism large enough for a bus to squeeze through.

Unfortunately, they did their job a little too well: there was a hairline fissure in the wall directly below the fan assembly. Weakened by the shock of the explosion, the wall began to collapse within seconds.

Ten UAVs made it through, though two were damaged by debris. And now Turk went to work. He managed to save two Hydras that had not yet entered the complex. The rest were caught in the landslide as the upper portions of the bunker began to implode.

By the time he turned his attention back to the lead aircraft, it was within seconds of the targeted chamber in the basement of the complex. Maneuvers and air friction had slowed the aircraft below ninety knots, but that was still incredibly fast. Finishing a straight run nearly two miles into the heart of the complex, the lead Hydra slammed into the grill of an air vent and exploded, opening the way to a hallway in the cellar of the complex. This time there were no fatal flaws in the workmanship, and no debris to stop the nine aircraft that followed. Turk caught a glimpse of something on the ground as the next feed snapped in — an Iranian scientist or engineer had been close to the vent when it exploded; blood was pouring from his head onto his white lab coat.

There were people in the hall — he saw heads as the UAVs dashed down the corridor into an open space. There was metalwork ahead, the large, circular gridwork he’d memorized as the sign that they had reached the target room. The target itself was the cluster machinery below.

The UAVs orbited above, forming another wedge to strike.

And then there was nothing, the feed switching back to the two aircraft above.

Nothing?

God. We’ve failed, he thought. I failed — I lost it right at the end. Damn. Damn!

And then, trying to think what he would do next, how he might retrieve the situation somehow with only two aircraft and a blocked passage, he saw a puff of smoke in the right corner of the feed from Hydra 35. He grabbed the joystick and took control of the aircraft. As he did, the smoke blossomed into a vast cloud and then ocean. The ground in the distance shook. The earth seemed to drop, imploding with a vast underground explosion.

They hadn’t failed. They had succeeded beyond calculation. The bunker exploded and the ground swelled, then collapsed with a tremendous explosion.

Turk forced himself to concentrate. The mission wasn’t finished — he had two more aircraft to take care of.

“Thirty-six, trail leader 35,” he said, then put his hand over the microphone. “We’re done,” he told Grease. “We’re good. We’re good.”

A warning blared in his ear. An aircraft near UAV 36 was using its radar.

A Russian air-to-air radar. The nano-UAV’s radar detector identified the signal tentatively as coming from a Russian N-O19 unit, meaning it could be anything from an ancient MiG-23 to a much more capable MiG-29. But that really didn’t matter — anything the Iranians had would be more than a match for the unarmed Cessna.

“Get us out of here,” Turk told the pilot, looking up. “Get low and stay low. There’s a fighter in the air five miles west of us.”

14

The analog radar in the MiG was far from state of the art, but it was all Captain Vahid had ever known. The fact that his contact flickered on and off in the display didn’t alarm him, nor did he jump quickly to any conclusions about the unidentified aircraft he had on his screen. It was flying low and it was going very slow. The profile fit a small, civilian-type aircraft, but what would one be doing here and at night?

Most likely it was a drone, he thought, but there was also a (distant) possibility that it was a Stealth Fighter flying a very erratic pattern, its radar signal disguised.

He heard his breath in the oxygen mask. It was all in a rush; he must be close to hyperventilating.

Vahid slowed his breathing down, tried to conjure One Eye’s voice in his headset: Stay calm. Stay on your plan.

His eyes hunted for the enemy. It would be close, the return confused by the stealthy characteristics of the aircraft. A black shape floated by his right, about where the contact should be. Then there was another, and another — he was seeing and chasing shadows.

“Up! Up!” screamed the Israeli in English. the Cessna’s nose jerked almost ninety degrees, the wings jostling as the windscreen filled with shadows of black and brown. Wings fluttering, the light plane cleared the barely seen peak, just missing disaster.

Turk flew the UAVs toward the Cessna, looking for the fighter. The sky was dark, but both planes were equipped with infrared sensors as their viewers. He saw a ridgeline ahead of Hydra 35. A cross rose from the rocks, a good hundred feet above the tip.

The Cessna.

“You have to stay low!” said Turk as they continued to climb. “We’re being followed by a MiG.”

“Any lower we’ll be dead,” muttered the Israeli before translating.

Vahid’s radar found the aircraft only five miles away, rising through the mountain ridges on his left. He began a turn, planning to lock up the aircraft and fire one of his radar missiles. But the light plane disappeared from his radar, once more lost in the clutter of the reflected radar waves.

Vahid came level out of his turn, then reached to the armament panel and selected the heat-seekers. It would be easier to use the infrared system to take them down.

He found nothing for a few moments, then he realized what must have happened — he misinterpreted the other plane’s direction. It wasn’t flying toward Natanz at all; it was going east, flying away from the scientific site.

Unsure how to interpret this, he called the controller and reported the contact as he brought the MiG back to the point where he had first seen the other plane. The controller bombarded him with questions. Most of them were unanswerable.

“The contact has been extremely intermittent,” Vahid told the major. “I can’t get a good radar fix in the mountains — he’s very low.”

“Are you using your infrared?”

“Affirmative. Weapons are charged and ready. Do I have permission to fire?”

“Affirmative. You are cleared to fire. I thought I made that clear.”

“Affirmative. Do I need to visually identify it? If it’s a drone and—”

“Just shoot the damn thing down,” said the controller.

The little plane jerked ferociously as the pilot yanked at the yoke, once more missing the side of the mountain by a few feet. Turk knew their luck wasn’t going to hold much longer. If they couldn’t get the MiG off their backs, they would either pancake into the side of the sheer rocks all around them or be blasted out of the sky by an Iranian air-to-air missile.

As they had just demonstrated, the small UAVs could fly a precise, preprogrammed course. But freelancing was a different matter entirely. They generally relied on outside radar to guide them to a target. Without that he would have to rely on their native sensors — which meant they would have to stay close to the Cessna until the MiG showed up on the infrared.

By then it might be too late.

Turk hit on the idea of widening the search area by putting the two aircraft into a long trail — the first UAV, 36, could stay within four miles of the Cessna, and 37 could stay four miles away from 36. That way they’d see the MiG before it got too close to escape.

Hopefully.

Several minutes passed as the Hydras stretched out behind them. Their air speed was starting to become critical.

There was the MiG, two miles from UAV 36.

A MiG-29 Fulcrum. Iran’s best.

“Control,” said Turk, putting both hands on a control stick and flying the planes simultaneously. “Designate unidentified contact oh-one as target.”

The computer complied, marking the Iranian with that legend. The computer analyzed the aircraft, using the library in the control unit — essentially the same database used by the Sabres and Flighthawks. It ID’ed two R-27 air-to-air medium-range missiles and six short-range heat-seeking R-73s.

The MiG was moving south about 5,000 feet above them, only a mile to the west. Their direction, eastward, was almost exactly abeam of it. Apparently it couldn’t see them.

Yet. It was only a matter of time.

The nano-UAVs were at 10,000 feet. He pushed both noses downward.

“Show intercept,” he told the computer. “Fuel full use.”

The computer plotted the course. Turk nudged the trail plane to the right, but otherwise he was dead on.

“Intercept in thirty seconds,” predicted the computer as the speed of the small aircraft increased.

As the MiG turned left, the computer began recalculating. Turk altered course as well, then realized why the MiG had made that maneuver.

“He sees us!” yelled Turk, raising his head as he yelled at the pilot. “Turn west. Tell him to turn west!”

“OK, OK,” said the Israeli, starting to speak in Farsi.

Turk ducked back down. “Contact range critical,” the computer told Turk.

“Complete intercept,” Turk told the computer. “Autonomous.”

The Hydra engines slammed to life. As UAV 36 twisted toward the MiG, Turk saw two flares light under the MiG’s wings, then two more. They’d just been fired at.

“Two missiles launched. Repeat missiles launched,” Vahid told the controller. “I—”

He heard a sharp snap behind him. In the next moment the plane seemed to fall away from him, the left wing veering down. Vahid forgot about everything else — the aircraft he was pursuing, the nuclear research facility, the missiles he had just launched — and fought to recover the plane.

The dive sent him earthward so quickly that he felt light-headed. His breathing was shallow and sharp, reverberating in his head.

One Eye spoke to him from beyond the grave, advising him to roll out, to get his nose attitude right and keep his power up. He recovered from the unexpected roll as if he’d planned it all along, except of course he would never have planned to go down to just barely 2,000 feet, lower than most of the peaks around him. He turned back west and felt the plane thumping. There was something wrong, definitely wrong.

Vahid cut his speed and adjusted his trim. It wasn’t clear what the problem was. He craned his head upward, staring down the side of the aircraft. He saw only jagged shadows.

“I have a flight emergency,” he told the controller finally. “I need to return to base.”

“What happened to your target?”

“I–I’m not sure. I need to land immediately.”

The first missile missed spectacularly, flaring in the sky more than a mile away, its final arc a fiery, flamboyant semicircle above a nearby mountain.

They weren’t as lucky with the next.

The pilot turned sharply into a box valley as it approached. The missile continued straight, temporarily lost, then veered to follow. Either the maneuver caused a malfunction or the circuitry sensed a near miss and the warhead exploded, sending a small stream of shrapnel into the air.

Some of the spray hit the Cessna’s left wing, tearing jagged holes in the skin. Worse, bits of the shrapnel flew into the side of the fuselage. Two large pieces of metal struck the engine. A third barely grazed the windshield, etching a jagged line across a third of it, yet somehow leaving it intact.

Two more went through the pilot’s window, striking him in the head and neck. He slumped; as he did, his body hit the wheel and pushed the plane downward.

Half realizing what was happening as the plane tipped, Turk dropped the control unit and reached forward, grabbing the pilot’s shoulders and pulling him back against the seat.

“Hold him back, hold him back off the stick,” Turk told the Israeli. “Help me.”

As the other man pushed the pilot back, Turk tried leaning over him to grab the yoke. The plane was still nosing down, though not as dramatically. The ground closed in. This wasn’t going to work.

“Pull him out of my way,” said Turk, trying to squeeze into the seat as the Israeli pulled the pilot away.

Taking hold of the control yoke, Turk pulled back against the momentum of the plane as he struggled to get the nose level. The Cessna was not reluctant; she wanted to stay in the air, and finally pulled her chin up to comply with her new master’s commands. But the loss of the engine and closeness of the ground were a problem neither she nor Turk could fully solve. He struggled to keep the wings level as the plane continued. She was steady and tough; if there’d been a runway ahead, the approach would have been near perfect.

But there wasn’t a runway ahead.

“Brace!” yelled Turk. “Brace!”