Drone Strike

1

Captain Vahid flew over the wreckage of the farm truck one last time, making sure nothing was moving. The vehicle had been split into five different pieces by the MiG’s cannon. Only one, a segment that included part of the cab, was still on fire.

The pickup truck and then the white car he’d seen had passed by quickly. The pilot wondered at that: he could understand the pickup, but why the car, which he assumed belonged to a government or perhaps a Guard official. Wouldn’t they have been curious?

They must have been afraid. People seemed to have an unnatural ability to shut everything else out when they felt themselves in danger.

Did they think they were next?

And really, why wouldn’t they? As far as they knew, he had just destroyed a civilian truck, a poor man’s vehicle at that.

Vahid banked, aiming for another pass over the highway.

“One, I am at bingo fuel,” said Lieutenant Kayvan.

“Acknowledged, Two. Set course for base.”

As Vahid clicked off his mike, another transmission came, this one from Colonel Khorasani, asking what their status was.

“The truck has been destroyed.”

“Are there confederates? Are there other vehicles?”

“It doesn’t appear so.”

Vahid slowed, edging toward stall speed, so he could get another look at the truck. While he’d splashed some targets in training, he had never blown up a “real” truck before, certainly not one that was moving.

At the moment he fired he felt joy — that was the word for it, joy—but already his feelings were complex. There was great satisfaction at having achieved his objective, but there was something empty about it as well.

He flew past the lingering black curl of smoke, accelerating before climbing out. Vahid felt a flush of anger — he should hit the car. The men were cowards to go by without stopping to help.

How would he explain?

Easily — Khorasani had just given him an excuse. The men were compatriots. They’d been close to the truck when he blew it up.

Kayvan radioed to ask if they were leaving.

“Go ahead, Two. Return to base.”

“I’m staying with you, Lead,” said the wingman.

Strike the government vehicle? But they would find out eventually that it wasn’t connected. And there would be repercussions.

It was not his job to punish cowards.

Vahid radioed the Pasdaran commander. “The truck is a complete wreck. No survivors. We are low on fuel. We need to return to base.”

“Go. One of my units will be at the site in a few minutes.”

He thought of giving the colonel a sarcastic answer to the effect that he was welcome for the assistance — the colonel hadn’t so much as thanked him. But he thought better of it. With the Pasdaran, it was always better to keep your mouth shut.

2

Breanna sat stoically as Turk recounted their situation. Gorud’s arm had been injured but he was all right to drive. Grease was fine, as was Turk.

The rest of the team, including the Israeli spy, had been killed. Turk and the others were traveling toward Hoz-e-Soltan Lake and the vast, empty salt desert north of Qom and east of their target. He estimated they would be at the hiding place in two more hours.

Breanna had read the translated Iranian communications relating to the strike soon after the truck was destroyed. Captured by a U.S. elint satellite and forwarded by the NSA after translation, the script was succinct and depressing: the Iranian air force officer, though clearly concerned he was firing on civilians, nonetheless followed orders and killed them.

Breanna knew from the locator data that Turk was still moving. But she suspected from the description that the truck was theirs. And even if it hadn’t been, the savagery of the decision was chilling.

She glanced to the end of the table where Reid was sitting. His face was pale, as if the long night had bled the blood from his body. There were times when he looked ancient, and other times beyond age. This was one of the former. Reid’s eyes darted from the map screen to the blank transmission screen — there was only audio, no visual. The rest of his body remained stone still, as if he were a projection.

Breanna leaned forward in her chair. “Turk, I want to ask you a question. I need a candid answer. Do you feel you can carry out the mission?”

“Yes.” He said it quickly, without hesitation.

“You’re going to have difficulty getting out of the country.”

“It’ll be no harder then than now.”

“We’re confident you will succeed,” Reid told him.

“Yes,” said Breanna, trying to inject enthusiasm into her voice. “Check in when you reach the cave.”

“Yup.”

He signed off. Breanna rose. Reid remained sitting, staring at the map, his thoughts obviously far off.

“Coffee?” Breanna asked him.

“The SEAL element that was coming down from the Caspian,” Reid said. “They’ve run into resistance. They are going to have to withdraw.”

Reid continued to stare at the map. One of the suspected sites was five miles northeast of Fordow, the other a few miles west. The area was near a Guard base established at a former Iranian air force installation. It would be heavily patrolled, especially now.

“It makes no sense to get them out,” said Reid finally. “Even to try will be suicidal, and possibly expose the operation.”

“Of course it makes sense.” Breanna felt her face flushing. “Gorud is there, too — what are you saying?”

Reid didn’t answer.

“I’m not ordering Sergeant Ransom to kill him after the attack,” said Breanna.

“He’s already under orders, Breanna.”

“We need a backup if the SEAL team has to withdraw. We need Kronos.”

“It’s too late to revive Kronos,” said Reid. “And it was vetoed for a reason.”

“I understand that. But—”

“Kronos calls for assassination.”

“Escape or assassination. And I think he can get them out. I’ve always thought that.”

“We may end up losing him as well.”

Now it was Breanna’s turn to be silent.

“Very well,” conceded Reid. “We had best attempt to move it forward. Do you want to talk to Colonel Freah, or should I?”

3

The smell of death stung Colonel Khorasani’s nose as he got out of the Kaviran. It was metallic, with the slightest hint of salt.

He disliked it. He disliked death completely. How ironic, then, that it had become so intimately entwined with his profession.

“We count six bodies, Colonel.” Sergeant Karim made a sweeping gesture toward the truck. “An entire team of Mossad.”

Khorasani said nothing, continuing across the soft ground to the burned out farm truck. The charred remains of automatic weapons had been discovered in the back, but that hardly meant that the occupants were Mossad, or even foreign agents. Khorasani in fact worried that they were Pasdaran — some of the local units had not yet reported to their commanders, and this could easily be a group of men who’d been on the way to their barracks.

He could deal with that, if it turned out to be the case. It would be far easier to explain than letting saboteurs get away.

The colonel continued his circuit around the vehicle. He’d been on his way to the destroyed lab when the report of the stolen school bus was relayed to him. Khorasani had decided to follow a hunch, joining the investigation personally. It was risky on many counts. But it did allow him to say he was pursuing his leads with vigor.

And vigor was the word he would have to use for the pilot: he had followed his orders well. The vehicle had been utterly demolished.

Good, perhaps, if there were questions.

“A phone,” said Private Navid, pulling at a brick of melted plastic and metal that had melted to one of the bodies. “Or a radio.”

It was tangled with other material — cloth and hair, skin and a bone that snapped as easily as if it had been a brittle twig. Navid handed it to him.

The phone would have fit easily in Khorasani’s hand, but the debris that had melted to it was two or three times as large. Khorasani turned it over, unable to discern anything from it.

A satellite phone, maybe? An Israeli would have one.

Or a cell phone, which a member of the Guard would have. The remains were too mangled to tell.

“Colonel, the ayatollah wishes to speak.” Khorasani’s communications aide had walked up unobtrusively. He handed him the secure sat phone.

It was twice the size of the one in the wreck. Khorasani handed the melted mess back to Navid and told him to put it in his staff car.

“Reverence,” he said, putting the phone to his ear.

“What progress have you made?” asked the ayatollah.

“We have found the men who stole the bus. They are dead.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, your excellency.”

“They were responsible for the explosion?”

Khorasani hesitated. Saying yes would simplify things for him, but it could also come back to haunt him as well.

“I have no evidence yet. The Israelis are very clever and would do much to disguise themselves.”

“But you are sure they were responsible.”

Khorasani considered what to say.

“Be honest,” the ayatollah reminded him before he made up his mind.

“I have no indication that any outsides were near the facility,” confessed Khorasani. “I am only starting my investigation. This seemed like a good lead, but to be frank, I see nothing at the moment that connects it. And my aides — the preliminary inquiries would suggest an accident. Everything we have seen suggests no one was aboveground when the explosion occurred.”

“You are saying it could have been a quake.”

“I’ve been told that is… unlikely.”

The ayatollah, who was a member of the ruling council, had undoubtedly been told the same. He let the matter drop. “Have you spoken to the pilot who shot down the plane?” he asked instead. “Find out what he saw. Perhaps it was a B-2.”

“That is on my agenda, your excellency.” The wreckage had been recovered; it was a light plane, flown by a man tentatively identified as an Iranian. Perhaps he was a spy, but more likely an unfortunate smuggler bound for Iraq. Considerable money could be earned ferrying certain people and items from the country. But pointing that out would not be useful at the moment.

“Report to me. Speak to no one else.”

The line went dead. Khorasani handed the phone back to his aide. “Tell Major Milanian that I wish to speak to him as quickly as possible. He will need to investigate this site. It would be best if he could get here before it is much darker.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“The pilot — the one who shot the plane down last night. Find out where he is stationed. I wish to speak to him.”

“I believe it is the same squadron that responded to the vehicle,” said the aide.

“Really?”

“They were given responsibility for this area.”

“Excellent. Find his name,” said Khorasani, walking to his vehicle.

4

“Senator, he insists it’s personal. He’s not here for funding, or legislation. He really emphasized that.”

Zen frowned at the intercom. It was his own fault, though; wanting to get Rodriguez off the phone when he’d been at the baseball game, he invited him to come in person whenever he wanted.

Even that would have been acceptable had the Nationals not proceeded to give up six runs in the top of the first.

“All right. Send him in.” Zen wheeled out from behind the desk. By the time Cheryl knocked and opened the door, he was sitting a few feet from the door.

“Senator.” Rodriguez, visibly nervous, extended his hand.

“Gerry. How are you?” Zen shook his hand. The night before, he thought he vaguely remembered Rodriguez. Now he couldn’t place him at all. “It’s been too long.”

He nearly bit his tongue. He hated being a BS artist — it was the normal political crap: beentoolong, howareya, goodtaseeya, wereallymustgettogethermoreoften.

Trivial phrases, meaningless, expected, but using them made him feel like a phony.

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” said Rodriguez.

“I don’t,” admitted Zen. “Not well, anyway. Dreamland seems like a million years ago.”

“I know. It was, um, well, the experiments didn’t go that well. So, um… I guess I’ve changed quite a lot.”

Rodriguez — the friendly junior doctor who’d worked out with him pre-experiment?

Yes.

“Sure — you jogged with me while I used my chair, right? Or maybe it was a fast walk.”

“Definitely a jog,” said the scientist. “If not a run.”

“You’ve gained a little weight, Jersey,” said Zen, suddenly remembering Rodriguez’s nickname. “You’re not running anymore, I’m guessing.”

“I do, but a lot less than I should. And, uh, a hernia operation a couple of years ago slowed me down.” He gently patted his stomach. “Put on about twenty pounds I haven’t been able to get rid of.”

More like thirty or forty, thought Zen, but now that he knew who Rodriguez was, he felt more comfortable. “So what have you been up to?”

“Well, I left Nevada for a few years, to work at Stanford. Then I came back with the Spinal Cell Clinic. I, uh, well, I helped start it. I’m one of the partners.” Rodriguez shifted in the chair. “I — we’ve been doing very interesting, very important work over the past few years. I guess, well maybe you saw the piece on 60 Minutes the other night on Mark Huntington.” Rodriguez sat.

“He was one of your cases?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. As you saw, he can walk now.”

“I met him,” said Zen. “I met him right after his accident at the bowl game. And I saw him again a few weeks ago. You’re right. He can walk. It’s a phenomenal story.”

“There’s a lot of hope for the procedure.”

Zen glanced quickly at his watch. It wasn’t a dodge; the Iranian “earthquake” had greatly complicated his schedule. “Doc, I have a lot of things I have to do today, including getting down to the floor in ten minutes. You’ve sold me. You have my backing. Tell Cheryl what you need. To the extent that I can help—”

“I’m not looking for backing. Or money. We’re funded through the next decade. And, to be honest, the patents — we may actually, um, stand to make a considerable amount of money.”

“Well, why are you here?”

“We want to try the process on someone who was injured at least ten years ago. Someone in good shape, willing to put the time in. Someone we already had a lot of baseline information on. You’d be the perfect candidate.”

5

Once upon a time, Mark Stoner had been a CIA paramilitary officer. He had been a good one. Even exceptional. Paras, as they were often called, were all highly accomplished, but Stoner stood out as a man of great skill, courage, and flexibility. He had worked with some of the best operators in the Agency’s clandestine service, and in other agencies as well, including the secret Air Force units that operated out of Dreamland.

Stoner had no memory of any of that. He had seen all of the records of his missions, scant as they were; none were familiar. On the bad days he could feel the echo of long-ago wounds he’d suffered. But he could make no link between the aches and pains and whatever had caused them.

His mind was a blank when it came to his past. He had no retained memory of anything beyond the past few months. He couldn’t remember his elementary school days, his high school years, college. He didn’t know the names of his teachers or the faces of his best friends. He could close his eyes and think of his childhood home and it wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t remember the faces of his mother and father — long dead, he was told — not even with the help of photographs.

The doctors who treated him sometimes said it would be better that way.

Stoner had been through an extremely rough time. Captured after a horrendous crash in Eastern Europe, he had become a human experiment. Designer drugs and steroids were pumped into his body to rebuild his muscles and erase his will. He’d been made into an assassin, controlled by a criminal organization in the dark recesses of the old Soviet empire.

Better not to know, said the doctors. Even his friend Zen Stockard agreed.

Stoner didn’t have an opinion, particularly. Opinions belonged to a realm beyond him, housed in a metaphysical building some towns away. The only thing he cared about now were his present surroundings — a gym on a quiet campus of a federal prison. Stoner wasn’t a prisoner, exactly; he just had no other place to go, at least not where the government could keep an eye on him.

For his own protection, the doctors said.

Stoner looked at the boxing gloves on his hands, checking the tape. Then he began hitting the weighted bag. It gave slightly with each punch, though never so much that he felt as if he were a superman.

Jab-jab-punch. He danced left, jabbed some more, then moved right. He wasn’t a boxer. He could box, but he wasn’t a boxer. He just hit the bag for something to do.

“Hey, Mark. How’s it going?”

Stoner stopped in mid-jab and looked behind him. Danny Freah was standing near the door next to two of Stoner’s doctors — Dr. Peralso and Dr. Rosen. Rosen was the case doctor; Peralso was the head of the psychiatric section responsible for him.

Both men were afraid of Stoner. It was obvious from the way their eyes darted when he approached.

Danny wasn’t afraid. He was a friend. But his eyes betrayed a different emotion: pity.

Stoner greatly preferred fear.

“Danny, hi.” He turned back and began pounding the bag again.

As he continued to wail away, he heard the three men walking across the large gymnasium floor toward him. His senses of hearing and sight were greatly improved, thanks to the ordeal he couldn’t remember. Or so the doctors said.

Stoner slammed his fists against the thick canvas. It didn’t really feel good, but it didn’t feel bad. It just was.

Finally, he turned toward Danny.

“Business?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Danny nodded. “A couple of weeks ago you told me you wanted something to do. Well I have something. It’s not easy. Actually, the odds are against success.”

Stoner shrugged. “Sounds good.”

Danny followed Stoner and the doctors down the long hallway. His friend’s reaction was exactly what he had expected. There’d be no joy or disappointment, no excitement, and no fear. He wondered if Stoner really understood.

The doctors, though they didn’t know the actual outlines of the mission, clearly suspected it was suicidal, because they began peppering Stoner with objections from the moment he agreed. They were still at it now, talking about “treatment modalities” and “long-term rest.”

Stoner ignored them, continuing to his room. He pressed his index finger against the reader at the lock, then raised his head so the laser reader embedded above the door could measure his face. The biometric check took only a few seconds. The door snapped open as the security system recognized him.

The room was as spare as a Buddhist monk’s. A bed covered with a single sheet sat in the middle of the room. There were no blankets, no pillows. An orange vinyl chair sat in the corner. Stoner’s clothes, the few he had, were closeted behind a set of folding doors opposite the bed. Having removed his gloves while walking down the hall, he pulled the last bit of tape from them and dropped it in a nearby wastepaper basket. He put the gloves on one of the shelves, then started to change.

“Do you want privacy?” Danny asked.

“Why?”

Danny backed out of the room anyway. The doctors stayed. He guessed they were continuing to argue with Stoner about not going.

Danny didn’t mind. Part of him agreed with them.

Stoner emerged from the room, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt.

“Is that all you’re taking?” Danny asked.

“Do I need anything else?”

“No. I guess not.”

Stoner glanced at the two doctors, who had fallen silent.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he told them.

They walked together to Danny’s car, neither man talking. Danny got in, but hesitated before turning the key to the ignition.

“This may be a suicide mission,” he said, staring straight out the front window. “Assuming it’s authorized, you’ll be dropped into Iran. It’s doubtful they’d keep you alive if you are captured.”

“OK.”

“You have to locate someone,” added Danny. “An American. He may be in custody by the time the mission is approved. If so, the mission will continue.”

“OK.”

“He can’t be allowed to tell the Iranians anything.”

“OK.”

Danny turned to look at Stoner. The former CIA officer was looking straight ahead, as if he were watching a movie. It would have to be a boring movie, as his face was expressionless.

“You’ll have to leave promptly.”

“Sure.”

“Immediately.”

“Yes.”

“You can say no,” Danny told him.

“Understood. Let’s go.”

6

They hid the car about three miles from the cave that would be their sanctuary, parking it behind a ramshackle cottage off Highway 81 that the advance team had scouted a few weeks before. Grease arranged some threads on the seat as markers to tell them if it had been disturbed — the last of their surveillance devices had been destroyed with the truck — and then ran to join Turk and Gorud in the pickup. Grease suggested he’d drive, but Gorud insisted on staying at the wheel. He was better with the language.

Turk, exhausted, slumped in the middle, giving way to fatigue. He drifted into a vague sleep. Li was there, walking with him, talking. They were in Sicily, though not anywhere that he could remember being, even though it felt very familiar.

The beach was made of rocks rather than sand. Surf frothed up, running over their shoes and pants — he was in his dress uniform; Li was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that clung between her breasts.

A truck careened down on the beach. It was the military vehicle the team had been driving when they first met.

Dread was at the wheel, eyes fixed on some destination beyond them, in the water. When the truck drew near, Grease leapt from the back. The truck burst into flames as it reached the water’s edge.

It exploded. Li ran. Turk turned and saw Grease coming at him, an AK-47 aimed at his skull—

“Hey, come on. You’re too damn heavy to carry.”

Turk bolted from the dream back into reality. Grease was standing outside the truck, leaning in and shaking him. They were in the cave.

Turk shook his head, as if that might shake off the horrible image that lingered.

“You’re drooling,” said Grease. “I hope she was worth it.”

Turk wiped his mouth as he got out. There was a faint bluish glow to his right. He walked toward it, cautious at first, worried that he was still in the dream.

He found a turn and was nearly blinded by the flood of late afternoon sun. Gorud, an AK-47 cradled in his arms, knelt on one knee behind some rocks ahead. The mouth of the cave was another fifty feet away, up a gentle slope.

“How long did I sleep?” Turk asked the CIA officer.

“A bit.”

“I don’t remember getting here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This place is bigger than I thought it would be.”

Gorud said nothing. A pair of binoculars sat on the rock right in front of him.

“Mind if I take a look?” asked Turk, reaching for them. Gorud didn’t stop him.

From their vantage point they had a good view of the countryside, speckled with more green than the area they were in the day before. A wide expanse of concrete sat in the distance; he focused the binoculars, moved them around, then finally satisfied himself that he was looking at a runway. He couldn’t see any planes, except for the glowing white carcasses of two old trainers — Texans, he thought, though from this distance it was impossible to tell.

“That’s an airport?” he asked Gorud.

“Was. They only use it to fly equipment and VIPs in and out now,” said the CIA officer.

“We could use it to get out.”

“There are no planes there. The standing orders direct that any air force plane attempting to land there be shot down. If the pilot survives, he’s to be shot summarily. We thought of using it,” added Gorud. “Too risky getting in with anything smaller than two full companies. Didn’t work.”

Turk nodded, though he continued to stare at the runway. It was long, in perfect shape except for a patched wedge at one side.

“How are you feeling?” Gorud asked.

“I’m good.”

“You should get some sleep,” Grease said from the shadows behind them. Even after all this time, the fact that he was hovering nearby surprised Turk.

“I just slept. You go.” He looked at Gorud. “Where are we?”

“Within ten miles of both possible targets,” said Gorud. “Site Two is that way. One is a little farther away, on the left, down.”

Turk looked in the direction of the second site. “There’s a village.”

“It’s about a mile farther on.”

“People.” He couldn’t see past the village. The uneven ground blocked his view. “It’s probably not the right one.”

“They say it’s more likely.”

“What kind of idiots would put a plant so close to people?”

Grease snorted in derision; to him the answer was obvious: that was exactly where they would put it to make the Americans less likely to attack.

Turk put the glasses down and walked back into the cave to the pickup. The space was about three times as wide as the vehicle was long, though it narrowed the deeper he went. The top and the side on his right were jagged, but straight lines ran down the wall on the left. He guessed they were left from drilling and explosives; the cave had clearly been widened before it was abandoned.

If that was so, he soon found a possible reason: he could hear the sound of water dripping in the distance. He walked toward it, gradually losing the light until he had to reach to the wall to make sure of where he was.

“Careful,” said Grease when he stumbled. The Delta sergeant flicked on a small light. “There’s a pool of water ahead.”

The beam caught the edge.

“Salty in here,” said Turk. “Like being at the sea.”

“Must’ve been part of the ocean a couple of million years ago.” Grease shone the light to the right. “There’s a passage up around the water. Come on.”

He led Turk to a narrow, slippery ledge. As they started to walk, Turk slipped. Grease grabbed him and pushed him hard against the rocks to keep him from falling in.

“Easy,” said Turk. “I can swim.”

“We’re not sure how deep it is,” said Grease. “But it’s more than a hundred feet.”

“Really?”

“This was originally cut for a bunker.”

Sobered, Turk clung to the wall but kept going. The path extended another thirty feet or so. After that, the ledge became more of a walkway, wide enough for two people. Twenty feet farther, it widened into a large hall. Grease led Turk to a pile of rocks, playing the light on it. There were packs and boxes just beyond them.

“Backup gear,” he said. “MREs, ammo, more guns. Spare radios.”

“Damn, I forgot to check in,” said Turk.

“I did it.”

“You did it?”

“You were sleeping. I didn’t want them worrying.”

“You should’ve woken me up. Did they say anything?”

Grease shook his head.

“Did you ask about extraction?” asked Turk.

“No.”

“Did they say anything?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“They’re not going to come for us. The reaction team. The SEALs were pulled back.” Grease knew as much. Turk was just telling himself, needed to state reality so it was clear to him. “If something screws up, they’re not going to come for us. We’re on our own.”

“Something did screw up,” said Grease. “The mission changed. Come on with me this way. I’ll show you the back exit. There are some rocks that have to be taken out of the way so it can be used.”

7

Tired after his long sortie, Vahid skipped dinner and headed straight for his quarters, a room on the second floor of the squadron dormitory. He lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling; within moments he was asleep.

The next thing he knew, someone was banging on his door.

“Go away,” he muttered. “Go.”

“Up,” said a stern voice next to him.

Vahid opened his eyes and saw two soldiers. One was pointing a rifle in his face.

“How did you get in?” he demanded.

“Captain, it is not a good idea to make Colonel Khorasani wait,” said a sergeant near the door. “Get dressed and come with us. You should not be sleeping.”

“I was flying. The mission was long and trying.”

“That is immaterial. The three of us have worked around the clock to deal with this situation. No one should rest while the Revolution’s enemies are free.”

Ten minutes later Vahid sat in the small room where General Shirazi had found him the day after the attack. He recognized the name of the man he was supposed to see, Colonel Khorasani. It was the investigator who had ordered him to blow up the truck.

While he didn’t like the fact that he had been woken from a sound sleep, he did want to talk to the colonel — he wanted to make sure the men he had killed in the truck were in fact enemy commandos, and not simply Iranian farmers.

But the colonel hadn’t come to talk about the truck. After he strode in alone, he got right to the point: “When you saw the airplane the night of the earthquake, what did you think it was doing?”

“I didn’t see very much at all,” Vahid said, rising. “Is that why you’ve come?”

“Answer the question fully. What was it doing?”

“I don’t know. It was flying south at first, then turned eastward. Maybe it had been off course. I never got very close. I had a brief shadow on radar, then later my IR detected it. I could see there was something there.”

“You radioed him?”

“I attempted contact, but there was no answer. By the time I closed in, I was already under orders.”

Vahid began describing how the radar would have been blocked by the ground clutter, or even the peaks between them. Khorasani held up his hand.

“It was a civilian plane that you shot down? A Cessna?”

“I believe so.”

“The air force has Cessnas?”

“We have a few,” admitted Vahid. “But they would have answered the radio or we would have known about it, the command would have known.”

“If it wasn’t the air force, it must have been flown by a spy. Or it was the air force, and it was a traitor. It may have very well been the air force, since all of the civilian planes in the area have been accounted for.”

Khorasani stepped closer to Vahid. He was not a tall man; in fact, he was several centimeters shorter than Vahid, who himself was not very tall. He wore a brown sport coat and an open white shirt, with gray trousers that strained slightly at the waist. He was in his thirties, with a soft face and large hands, and his fingernails were at least a week from a good clipping. But intensity was the colonel’s defining characteristic: he leaned forward, his body coiled as he fired his questions, his mouth a cannon more potent than the one on Vahid’s MiG. “How would this plane be fitted with a bomb?”

“It wouldn’t,” said Vahid.

“How would it be done, Captain?”

“You can’t put a bomb on a Cessna, or any light plane,” said Vahid. “I mean — you couldn’t put much of a bomb on it.”

“Why not?”

“It can’t carry much. A five hundred pound bomb — that would be as much weight as the plane could carry, depending on the weight of the passengers and fuel it needed. And a five hundred pound bomb would do nothing to Natanz.”

“How do you know how much damage would be done?”

“You’re trying to trick me,” snapped Vahid.

“How do you know the target was Natanz?”

“I don’t know anything. There was an earthquake near Natanz. Or an accident. That’s what I know. Why is the Pasdaran interested?”

That was a foolish question; nuclear program aside, the Guard felt entitled to know about everything that affected Iran in the slightest way.

“How about your plane, Captain?” asked Khorasani. “Could you attack the laboratories near Natanz?”

“How? By bombing them?”

“You tell me.”

“They’re impervious to attack. And — who would bomb their own country? It was an accident, and you don’t want to admit it. You don’t want to admit failure.”

The colonel said nothing. Vahid stared into his face; Khorasani stared back. Only when Vahid looked down toward the floor did Khorasani turn and leave the room.

The theory had not formed itself until he was speaking with the pilot, but now Khorasani wondered if that was what really happened: had the air force sabotaged the program themselves?

They were extremely clever. Rather than setting things up to point the finger at the Israelis or the Americans, they had gone about things subtly — a private plane in the vicinity, stolen vehicles. They made it seem as if there were saboteurs on the loose. The clues were a false trail, something for himself and the other investigators to chase. In the meantime the air force said nothing.

And the decoy truck: what a lucky break to be ordered to destroy it. They had provided the perfect villains, unable to defend themselves from any accusation. The destruction had been complete, with no clues to their identities.

Captain Vahid had been the same pilot involved in both incidents. That was too much luck for one man.

Or proof that it wasn’t a plot. Because no one would have been so obvious.

Khorasani worked the problem over in his head as he walked down the corridor. If the air force was involved — he reminded himself he must keep it theoretical, it was just a wild theory — then General Ari Shirazi, the air force chief, would surely be behind it.

The motives were simple: the air force was jealous of the Pasdaran, and had been from the very beginning of the Revolution.

Would they go so far as to destroy the bomb? That seemed unlikely.

Sergeant Karim met him in the hall.

“Colonel, I have compiled the data we have gathered, including the interviews with the people in Jandagh and at the junkyard. I believe there was a car involved that may have gotten away. I have a description. I’ve issued an alert to all police departments.”

“Good.”

“An air search might be useful as well. Even if it were abandoned, the vehicle might have evidence.”

“True.”

“The squadron commander volunteered earlier that he would help you.”

“No. I don’t want their help. No one from the air force. The spotter planes that we used yesterday. Are those still available?”

The planes belonged to the Basiij Resistance Force — the Guard-sponsored militia. They were ancient, but the men could be relied on.

“I believe I can arrange it.”

“Do so.”

“Jets—”

“Move quickly.”

Sergeant Karim knew better than to question his commander further. Still, his raised eyebrow betrayed him.

“It is nothing more than routine security,” said Khorasani. “Just routine.”

“I’ll send the order immediately.”

8

Ray Rubeo closed his eyes and lowered his head, resting his brows on the tips of his fingers. Numbers and equations spun through his brain, percentages, statistics, possibilities.

In sum: chance—the great enemy of necessity.

“Both sites must be attacked,” he announced. “Both sites. There simply is no other solution.”

He opened his eyes and looked up. The others — Breanna, Reid, Smith, Armaz, the two Air Force analysts, Reid’s nuclear expert, three planners detailed from the Air Force chief of staff’s office — all stared at him.

“Consider this. Even if we worked the numbers so that the probability is 99.9 percent in favor of Site Two rather than One,” Rubeo explained, “the penalty for being wrong is too catastrophic. And we can’t get the probability even close to that.”

The analysts began making arguments about how good a job they’d done assessing the various indicators, which pointed to Site Two with an eighty-three percent confidence level.

“If you were that good,” said Rubeo finally, his tone acid. “You wouldn’t have missed the sites in the first place.”

Rubeo did not share the others’ optimism about the B-2 strikes. His people had conducted a preliminary analysis of the first attack, and concluded that the “flaw” that caused the bunker’s upper stages to collapse was not a flaw at all, but rather a fail-safe intended to preserve the material far below. Had it worked, the Iranians would have had to spend six months to a year digging out — but their material, and the bomb they had built, would have survived.

There were additional political concerns, which he didn’t give a whit for, though others did. Clearly, the Hydra strike was by far the best alternative, and to guarantee success, they must hit both sites.

Reid put up his hand as the discussion continued.

“I think Dr. Rubeo’s analysis is on point,” he said. “Even if we do destroy one of those two facilities, we still won’t know precisely what is going on in the other. We’ll never be given access to determine whether some material remains or not. The second site would have to be hit at some point in any event.”

“But you’re reducing the probability of success to thirty-seven percent at each site,” said Armaz, “which gives us well under fifty percent chance of taking out both. The odds almost guarantee failure.”

“I believe that we can use the delay to increase the probability of success to a minimum of eighty-five percent,” said Rubeo, “which is essentially where we are now. And possibly more, assuming we still have a human pilot in the loop to make one critical call during the attack.”

“Stoner’s ready,” Danny told Breanna. “He’ll be at Vandenberg within the hour. They can launch as soon as you give final approval.”

“Very good.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“Colonel?”

“I want to move the Whiplash unit into Iraq so we can support them if necessary.”

Breanna studied Danny’s face. He knew, as she knew, that Stoner’s mission was almost surely one-way — the odds of getting Turk out alive were infinitesimally low, and Stoner’s briefing documents made that clear.

“Your team is still on leave,” said Breanna. “You’re not in position and this has been a Delta show from the beginning.”

“It’s not Delta anymore,” said Danny. He ducked his head, looking down at his uniform shoes. “I should have been there.”

“No, Danny, we discussed this. The mission was not and has not been a Whiplash mission. You’ve done exactly as you should have.”

“You think?” He looked back at her. She knew exactly what he was thinking: He should have been there.

“Put the team into Iraq,” she said. “But—”

“I know,” said Danny. “We’ll get there, just in case.”

Under Rubeo’s plan, human “intervention” was important at several points. The swarm would make a staggered, piecemeal attack against each site, progressing past each critical part of the installation with just enough units to clear the way. Once the path was open, the final attack would be launched. The controller — Turk — would have to supply some last minute guidance on each attack.

Not only that, but Rubeo’s team would have to modify the memory system used by the units, removing some of the basic embedded programs that weren’t needed to add mission data. He calculated that they had just enough time to do that. No one openly questioned the scientist’s assessment, but Breanna noticed that Sara Rheingold’s eyebrows rose significantly when he mentioned what he had in mind.

Breanna studied the large projection of the area around the sites. Turk would have to go very close to a Pasdaran stronghold to get into position to strike both plants. And he’d have to wait there — the ideal orbit for Rubeo’s plan wouldn’t bring the X45 into position until just past 5:00 A.M. The attack wouldn’t be over until six-thirty — a half hour past sunrise.

“It is a problem,” conceded Reid. “But overall, this is the best plan. There will be a lot of confusion on the ground, and hopefully Turk can take advantage of it. He has proven quite resourceful to this point.”

“I think it’s more than a small problem,” said Breanna.

“Can you think of an alternative?”

She looked around at the others. With the exception of Rubeo, they were pretending to focus on something else.

Rubeo stared directly at her. As usual, his expression was void of any emotion.

“I can’t think of an alternative,” Breanna admitted. “I agree, it is our best course.”

9

They heard the first aircraft around noon. It was low enough and close enough that it woke Turk. He sat up, hugging the blanket to his chest. The plane rumbled above, passing within a hundred yards of the cave. It passed again, this time a little farther away.

“They must be looking for us,” said Grease.

“No. They can’t have traced us,” replied Gorud.

“Why not?”

“It is a general search. Nothing more.”

Turk got up and went to the mouth of the cave. He could see the plane in the distance, circling to the north.

“You’re too close to the mouth of the cave,” said Gorud, grabbing his arm and pulling him away.

“He’s definitely looking at something,” said Turk.

“How do you know?” asked Gorud.

“It’s obvious. He’s circling.”

“Is he looking at us?” asked Grease.

“I don’t think so. It could be that village to the west. Or maybe the car.”

Turk and Gorud studied the map, but it was impossible to say for certain what the plane was focusing on. It made a dozen more circular sweeps, then moved on.

No one slept after that. They kept their shift watches — Grease was up next — but that was just a formality. All three men stayed close to the bend in the cave, back far enough from the entrance to avoid being seen, but close enough to catch a glimpse of anyone coming from the road.

A little after noon Grease went to the supply cache and got lunch. One by one he inserted rations in a flameless ration heater and added water. The heater was actually a bag that contained iron, magnesium, and sodium. A chemical reaction started by the water heated the food.

“Cheese tortellini,” said Grease as he handed out the food.

Turk’s tongue felt numb. He seemed to have lost the sense of taste, though the aroma of the food that wafted up from the bag was strong enough to provoke memories of his middle school cafeteria. He ate quickly and scraped the side of the bag when he was finished.

“More?” asked Grease.

“Nah.”

“Good, huh?” His tone was mocking.

“It was fine.”

“You Air Force guys aren’t used to eating out of bags, huh?”

“No,” admitted Turk.

“How about you?” Grease asked Gorud.

The CIA officer turned to them. “I’ve eaten out of a lot of things,” he said solemnly. “Including a human skull.”

No one spoke for quite a while after that.

Eventually Turk’s legs grew stiff from sitting. He got up and walked around the cave. Grease had given him a small LED flashlight from the gear stash, but Turk left it off; the darkness somehow felt more comforting.

Creeping to the edge of the interior lake, he sat and listened to the nearly silent but resonant hush that filled the space. Every so often something would drop from the ceiling. The plunks echoed throughout the cave.

He thought about how he would escape, and worried about having to swim in the Caspian. He wasn’t a bad swimmer, but in his vision now he saw the waves surrounding him. Suddenly, he felt claustrophobic in the dark. Hand shaking, he reached into his pocket for the LED flashlight and lit it. Then, heart pounding, he backed away from the edge of the water.

He collided with Grease and fell. A shudder of fear ran through him, dissipating only after the trooper hauled him to his feet.

“Shit,” Turk muttered. “I thought you were on watch.”

“Gorud’s there. I was making sure you didn’t try swimming.”

“I feel claustrophobic,” he told him, without explaining why. To his surprise, Grease told him that he did, too.

“I don’t know what it is,” added Grease. “Adrenaline builds and then it runs away. It leaves you empty, and you start focusing on stupid things, things that might kill you, but won’t in a million years. It’s related to tension I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Turk.

“You feel that when you’re flying?”

“Not too much.”

“But sometimes.”

“A few times,” admitted Turk. “Mostly, you’re too busy to think about it.”

“I know what you mean.”

Around 3:00 P.M. they heard heavy trucks in the distance. Turk crawled to the entrance where Grease was keeping watch and peered out at the highway a half mile to the west. The road was empty, but a cloud of dust rose another mile beyond it, near the outskirts of the small village.

“Be nice to have a UAV over us,” said Turk.

“It would show them where to look,” answered Grease.

“There is that.”

Grease handed over the binoculars. There were three military trucks driving on a desert road near the hamlet, coming up from the south. Two troop trucks and a command vehicle — a patrol of some sort.

“You think they’re looking for us?” Turk asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You got any evidence that they are?”

“No.”

“That’s your answer.”

“I’d love to hear something more reassuring.”

“Me, too.”

10

Colonel Khorasani got out of his command vehicle slowly. The old building reminded him of his mother’s parents’ house in Gezir.

Lovely days. Parties every evening with the neighbors and relatives. Iran was a different place. Some of the neighbors were Sunni, and there would occasionally be long arguments about religion, but with no one thinking of taking some sort of revenge or turning the others in.

“The truck is in the back, Colonel,” said Sergeant Karim.

“The place is abandoned?” asked Khorasani as he walked with his sergeant.

“For years now. We are checking the local records.”

The four-door Toyota had been tucked close to the house, invisible from the road and much of the surrounding area, though not from the air. The pilot who had spotted it had been over the area the morning after the “earthquake,” and swore he had not seen the vehicle.

A very similar pickup was seen on the road near the farm truck that had been destroyed; it was clear in the video from the aircraft. That truck had a dent in the top rail; this one had an identical mark. The first character in the registration plate — all that could be seen — was identical.

But this was entirely the wrong place for the pickup truck to be located. It was closer to the lab, not farther away.

Maybe they were tasked with seeing what had happened. The colonel turned south, gazing in the direction of Fordow, which had a high security plant. There were dozens of others scattered between there and Qom farther south. The precincts were off limits to all but the workers and scientists involved in the bomb’s development. Khorasani himself didn’t even know the location of all of them.

But perhaps the most obvious explanation for the truck was that it wasn’t related at all. Smugglers would use a house such as this to stash their wares. It was empty, but perhaps the airplane had driven them off.

The structure had been abandoned years ago. Part of the wall was missing. Khorasani stepped through, entering what was once a bedroom. All of the furniture was long gone, but there were old photographs tacked to the wall: a family picnic lost now to memory.

The colonel walked through the rooms. Dust was thick everywhere.

Khorasani stood in the middle of what had been the kitchen and stared at the weathered pipes in the wall. He had no other leads. The more work he and his investigators did, the more he came to believe that the “incident,” as he called it, was actually an accidental blast caused by the scientists themselves.

That was unlikely to be admitted.

The truck must be linked somehow. Parking here — maybe they were smugglers, but what if they were spies? What if there were more commandos, eyeing another attack?

Khorasani strode outside. Sergeant Karim was waiting.

“Colonel, it is the captain coordinating the Twelfth Guard unit,” said the sergeant, holding the satellite phone out. “He wishes to take his men off alert. They’re worried about their families.”

“They can worry later,” Khorasani snapped. “Tell him the entire area is to stay on alert. Tell him — tell him we are looking for commandos who stole this truck.”

“Uh—”

“Sergeant Karim, follow orders,” he said, returning to his command vehicle.

11

Turk had to stand near the entrance to the cave for the sat phone to work. He was just punching the quick-dial to connect with Breanna when he heard a plane approaching from the north.

“I may have to cut this short,” he said as soon as the connection went through. “There’s a plane nearby.”

“Turk, are you OK?” asked Breanna. He heard concern, even fear, in her voice.

“I’m good. I don’t want to take the chance of being seen. The Iranians have been sending airplanes through the region.” He leaned back against the side of the cave. The plane wasn’t getting any closer. “It should be dark soon. Do we have a target?”

“We have two.”

“You still have two? I thought—”

“I have a coordinate for the area we think is safest for you to operate from,” she said, cutting him off. “The procedure you’re going to have to follow is different than the first strike.”

“How different?”

“They’re still working on things. It’ll be more hands on and you may be making the attack in the morning, near or after sunrise.”

“In the day?”

“Possibly. Probably, I should say.”

Turk looked out across the valley in front of him, letting the words sink in. They were still figuring out exactly what to do — that wasn’t a good sign.

“Turk?”

“Yeah, OK. Those coordinates?”

“I’m sending them via the text system now.”

His satcom beeped, signaling that the information had been sent.

“Call when you’ve arrived. We need you in place by 2200 hours,” Breanna added, using the military term for 10:00 P.M. “So we can download everything to your unit before clearing the launch. We’re going to use the first orbiter as a relay station; some of your programming has to be changed. There’s only a small window to do the download.”

“Understood.”

“They’re insane if they want us to get to this point.” Gorud shook his head. “We’ll have to pass two barracks and an antiaircraft site. They’re crazy. God.”

The CIA officer got up and started pacing. He folded his arms over his chest and began scratching his left bicep frenetically, as if he wanted to tear through the cloth and dig past the skin to the muscle and bones.

Grease glanced at Turk and gave him a look that said, He’s losing it. Then he took out the paper map of the area that had been stored there and examined it. Turk looked over his shoulder.

The topo map showed a trail they could take from the road toward a narrow hillside ledge, but it ended about a half mile before reaching that point. The topo lines squeezed together, showing a sharp rise. It would be a difficult climb.

Grease studied the area.

“If we could go through this air base, we’d have an easy time,” he said, pointing at the map. “Otherwise the nearest road is ten miles here. Then we have to go out this way and back.”

“Unless we go through the desert,” said Turk.

“We can’t — this is the salt lake. It’s water out here. There may be patrols on the road.”

“There’ll be patrols inside the base.”

“Not as many as you’d think. Remember the place we hit the other day? Security is something you do at the perimeter, if there.”

“Those are barbed-wire fences, I’ll bet.” Turk pointed to the parallel fence line on the map. “And they’re not going to let us through the gate.”

“We can cut through the fences. That’s not a problem.” Grease studied the map some more. “We’d have to scout it, obviously. A satellite image would be convenient.”

“Yeah,” said Turk. They weren’t likely to get one; the data download was due to take place after they arrived.

“We could take one of their trucks and get right out the front gate. Be less likely to attract attention than ours.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Gorud. “What the hell are you thinking?”

The CIA officer started waving his good arm in the air. He seemed dangerously close to losing control — maybe he already had.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “They’ve given us a suicide mission—”

He stopped speaking. Turk stared at him for another second, then looked at the map again. Grease had already turned his attention back to it.

“We can leave the truck about a mile away and walk through this ravine,” Grease told Turk. “We get past the fence here, then it’s a straight jog to the administrative buildings.”

“What if there are no vehicles?” asked Turk.

“It’ll work, don’t worry,” said Grease. “Worst case, we go back. But we won’t have to.”

“You’re crazy!” shouted Gorud. “Both of you! Crazy! We have to leave now! We have to leave now — now! We have to get out!”

Gorud turned and ran toward the deep black of the cave’s interior. Frozen for a moment, Turk finally got moving only after Grease jumped to his feet.

They caught the CIA officer at the edge of the underground lake. Turk, whose eyes seemed to have adjusted better to the dark than Grease’s, grabbed the back of his shirt and started to pull. Gorud swung around, trying to hit him. Instead they both fell. Grease leapt on Gorud, pinning him to the damp, uneven floor.

Gorud yelled and screamed in pain. Grease leaned against his neck with his forearm while pulling the flashlight from his pocket as the other man squirmed harder.

“Get him a styrette,” said Grease. “Morphine.”

“God, he’s burning up,” said Turk. “He’s hotter than hell. He’s got some sort of fever. His wound must be infected.”

“Get the morphine.”

Turk stumbled back to the medical kit for one of the morphine setups. When he returned, Grease had spun Gorud over on his stomach and was holding him down with his knee. The CIA officer continued to scream until the moment Turk touched the morphine needle to his rump. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, Gorud looked at him with large, puzzled eyes, shuddered, and began to breathe calmly.

Turk pushed the plunger home.

“I’m going to give you an antibiotic,” he said. “And aspirin. You have a fever.”

Gorud said nothing. Turk took that as an assent and went back for the drugs. Gorud didn’t talk as he plunged the second needle home. He swallowed the aspirin wordlessly, without taking the water Turk offered.

“Don’t give us any more trouble, spook,” Grease told Gorud before letting him go.

Gorud curled up defensively.

“It’s all right,” Turk said, reaching to help him up. “We’ll get out of here.”

Gorud stared but didn’t take his hand.

“We need to get back to the mouth of the cave,” said Grease. “And we have to be quiet.” He spun the flashlight around. “Come on. You, too, Gorud. Let’s go. And don’t do anything weird.”

Turk reached out to help Gorud, but he refused to be touched. He got up on his own.

“We’ll be OK,” Turk told him. “We’ll be OK.”

12

About a half hour before they planned to leave, an Iranian military vehicle drove down the hard-packed road near the cave. It was a Neynava, a new vehicle with a squared cab in front of a panel-sided open bed, the local equivalent of a U.S. Army Light Military Tactical Vehicle, or M1078.

The sun had just gone down, but there was still plenty of light, more than enough to see the lingering dust cloud after the vehicle passed. The rear was empty; the man in the driver’s seat concentrated on the road.

A few minutes later it came back up, moving a little slower this time. Turk decided it must have gone to the small hamlet about a mile south and then returned for some reason. It wasn’t until the truck came down the road again, this time moving at a snail’s pace, that he became concerned. He called Grease over from the pickup, which he’d been loading.

“He’s gone back and forth twice now,” he said. “The back of the bed is empty.”

“Mmmm,” said Grease. “Probably moving troops around.”

“I don’t see any.”

“Not yet.”

Grease took the binoculars. Turk checked the AK-47, making sure it was ready to fire. He had an extra magazine taped to the one in the gun, and two more in easy reach. Suddenly, they didn’t feel like enough.

“If they come up at us,” he said to Grease, “do we fight, or try to sneak out the back?”

“I don’t know. Depends.”

“On?”

“How many there are?” Grease continued to survey the area below. “I see two guys patrolling. They’re just walking, though. Heads down. They don’t have anything definite.” Grease crouched down and moved to his right, angling for a better view. “They’re just assigned to check the road. BS stuff, that’s what they’re thinking… It’d be best to sneak out, but then we have to walk. It’s a long way.”

He didn’t say that they’d have to leave Gorud, but Turk knew they would.

“We can wait a while,” said Turk.

“Yeah.”

Grease moved away, toward the mouth of the cave. Turk stayed near Gorud, who was propped against the cave wall, sleeping.

Leaving Gorud would condemn him to death, he was sure. But maybe he was already doomed.

Leaving him alive here was too risky, Turk realized. They’d have to kill him.

He knew he faced death himself. He didn’t think about it, didn’t even consider the many times he had, to one degree or another, cheated it. But killing someone else, someone on your side, to complete a mission — that was very different.

“I saw two more guys coming down the road,” said Grease, returning. “The truck went back up.”

“What do you think?”

“I think they’re just looking along the road for anything out of place, then they’ll leave.”

“Are they going to come up this far?”

“The mouth of the cave blends into the rocks. They can’t see it. These guys don’t look too ambitious.”

“So we chance it.”

“I guess.”

They waited another half hour. Night had fallen by then; Turk heard insects but no vehicles.

“We’re going to have go down and see if they’ve left,” said Grease finally. “Otherwise we won’t know if it’s safe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“One of us has to stay with Gorud. I’ll be fine. You’re the better scout.”

Grease said nothing.

“I’ll be OK,” Turk insisted. “You don’t have to look over my shoulder the whole time.”

“It’s my job.”

“One of us scouting is less likely to be seen,” said Turk. “And it makes sense that you’re the one to do it. You’re going to have to trust me.”

“It’s not a matter of trust.”

“I haven’t done anything stupid yet,” said Turk. “Except get involved in this.”

Grease helped Turk put Gorud into the cab of the pickup. The CIA operative was still running a fever, though he didn’t feel quite as hot as he had before. It was dark in the cave now, too dark for Turk to see anything more than Grease’s shadow as he backed out of the truck and closed the door.

“Stay by the mouth of the cave,” Grease told him. “Just stay there. No matter what happens.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll come back and we’ll drive out. Or we’ll go the back way.”

“Got it.”

It was hard waiting. The darkness made it impossible to see. Turk was anxious. For the first time since the mission began he felt very alone — more alone than he had ever felt in his life.

He started thinking about what he would do if Grease didn’t come back.

He heard a vehicle in the distance, driving in his direction. He waited, saw the faint arc of the headlamps.

They disappeared. The night fell quiet again.

Ten minutes later he heard someone scrambling across the rocks to his right. He went down on his right knee, brought the rifle up and moved his finger to the trigger, ready to shoot.

“Me,” hissed Grease, still unseen outside.

“Come.”

“There’s a patrol down there,” said Grease when he was closer. “They have a checkpoint on the road. My guess is there’s another one on the north side that we can’t see.”

“Can we take them?”

“Going Rambo’s not going to help us complete our mission.” Grease moved past him to the pickup.

“What are you doing?”

“Watch the mouth of the cave.”

Turk hesitated for a moment, then started after him. He didn’t catch up to Grease until he’d reached the truck.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Grease ignored him, working inside the pickup. Turk peered over his back as he jabbed Gorud’s side.

“What are you doing?” said Turk again. “Hey.”

“Shut up,” snapped Grease.

Turk tried pulling him away, but the sergeant was built like a bear and wouldn’t be moved. He jabbed twice more.

“Grease, what the hell?” he demanded.

“He’s not going to make it.”

“You’re giving him morphine? Why?”

Grease remained in the truck. Turk pulled at him.

“Just get back,” said Grease, voice shaky. He turned and shoved Turk with his free hand. Caught off guard, Turk stumbled back and fell down. He felt powerless for a moment, then gathered his energy and leapt back to his feet.

There was a muffled gunshot. Grease closed the pickup door.

“Get your stuff,” he told Turk. “We gotta walk.”

13

Colonel Khorasani studied the map. He had made the mistake of reporting the vehicle to General Arfa, the political commander who in ordinary times was his boss. Arfa had immediately seized on the theory that it belonged to saboteurs — defectors, rather than commandos or smugglers — and demanded that Khorasani find them. Khorasani knew he had only himself to blame.

“It is getting rather dark,” said Sergeant Karim.

“I’m quite aware of the time, Sergeant,” said Khorasani.

“Every house and farm within five kilometers has been searched. The roads are being patrolled. But some of the troops—”

“What about this block here?” asked Khorasani. “These mines. Were they checked?”

“The search area didn’t go down that low. And, the map says—”

“I know what it says.” The legend declared the hills a special reserve area — in other words, a place owned by the nuclear research projects, though as far as Khorasani knew, there were no labs there.

Mines would be a good place to hide.

“Get Captain Jalol back on the radio. Tell him to have his men begin searching the hills north of the Exclusion Zone, in this area here. There are old mines — check each one. Look for caves in the hills. Each one to be checked. No excuses! And I want a house-by-house search in Saveh. And it’s to start now, no waiting for morning. If there are questions, have them speak to me.”

“There’ll be no questions, Colonel,” said the aide, gesturing to the communications man.

14

Moving the rocks that blocked the back entrance of the cave was easier than Turk expected, and within minutes they were outside, walking along a narrow ridge and trying not to fall off the side or start a small avalanche of dirt.

Turk was tense and tired, his nerves raw. He felt as if his colon had twisted itself into a rat’s tail of knots on both sides of his abdomen. The fresh air, though, was a relief, a blast of oxygen blowing away a hangover.

They were on the far side of the hills, away from the patrol. As the path widened the walking got easy. Turk felt as if they had escaped into a different country, free of the men who would kill them on sight. But he soon heard more troop trucks.

They’d made the right decision, even though he hated it with all his soul.

The gentle slope they walked out to had been farmed many years before, and in the twilight provided by the sliver of moon and the twinkling stars, he could see not only the outlines of a dirt road but a network of drainage ditches long since filled in by blowing dirt and neglect. The land here must surely be among the most difficult in the country to cultivate, excepting the absolute desert, and yet people had tried, apparently with quite an effort.

“Don’t lag,” said Grease.

“I’m moving.”

“We have two hours to go eight miles,” said Grease. “Come on.”

Past the ridge, they were about three-quarters of a mile from the paved road they needed to take south. They angled westward as they walked, gradually getting closer. Turk saw the lights of one of the checkpoints: headlights from a truck, and a barrel filled with burning wood or other material. Shadows flickered in front. Turk counted two men; Grease said there were three.

Rather than taking the road, they walked along a very shallow ravine that paralleled it. Roughly a quarter mile from the road, the ravine had been formed ages ago by downpours during the rainy months. It was wide and easy to walk along, and at first Turk felt his pace quicken. But gradually the weight of the control pack seemed to grow, and he slowed against his will. Grease at first adjusted his pace, then fell into a pattern of walking ahead and waiting. He was carrying his own ruck, filled with ammunition and medical gear, water, and some odds and ends they might need. They’d changed back into fatigues similar to those the Iranian Guard used, and decided not to take spare clothes. Even so, Grease’s pack was heavier than Turk’s, and though he offered to take the control unit, Turk refused.

“Pick up the pace, then,” muttered Grease. He repeated that every few minutes, and it became a mantra; before long Turk was saying it himself, almost humming it as he trudged. His knees ached and his left calf muscle began to cramp. He pushed on.

After they had walked for about an hour, Turk heard the sound of an aircraft in the distance.

“Jet,” he said, without bothering to look.

“Will they see us?” Grease asked.

“Nah. They don’t have the gear.”

Turk listened as they trudged onward. The plane was low — no more than 2,500 feet above the ground.

“You sure he couldn’t see us?” asked Grease after it passed.

“Nah,” insisted Turk, though he was no longer sure. How good were Iranian infrared sensors? He didn’t remember — had he ever even known?

After about fifteen minutes Grease spotted some buildings that hadn’t been on the map. Making sure of their position with the GPS unit, they walked into the open field to the east of the settlement. The area looked to Turk as if it had been soil-mined; mounds of dirt sat on a long, gradual slope southward. They reached the western end and climbed up an uncut hill, then walked along the edge and continued south for about a half mile.

Something glowed in the distance: lights at the shuttered airfield and military base they were aiming for.

“Down,” hissed Grease suddenly, punctuating the command with a tug on Turk’s shoulder that nearly threw him to the ground.

A set of headlights swept up on the left. They were closer to the highway than they’d thought.

After the vehicle passed, Grease took out his GPS. “That’s the base.”

“That’s good.”

“We’re behind schedule. It’s almost 2100 hours. We’ll have to hustle to make the rendezvous point by 2200. If there’s no vehicle here, we won’t.”

“We’ll try.”

Grease propped himself up on his elbows and looked in the direction of the glow with his binoculars. He studied it for so long that Turk decided he’d given up on that plan and was trying to think of an alternative. Finally, Grease handed the glasses to him.

“There’s a dark spot on the far side there,” he said, pointing. “We can get past the gate there, get across the runway and then get the vehicle.”

“All right.”

“It’s going to take a while. You better check in.”

15

“Answer,” said Breanna crisply, ordering the computerized assistant to put the call through. It was from the duty officer at the Whiplash situation room, reporting on Turk. The call had been routed through the Whiplash system to her Pentagon phone. The background noise on the phone changed ever so slightly — from the vague but steady hint of static to one vaguer and intermittent — and Breanna knew the connection had gone through. “This is Bree. What’s going on?”

“Turk just checked in,” said Sandra Mullen, one of the duty officers borrowed from the CIA to help monitor the operation.

Breanna glanced at her watch, though she knew the time. “He’s a half hour early. What’s wrong?”

“They’re heading toward a patch where they have to go silent com,” Sandy told her. “He wanted to check in.”

Breanna slid her chair closer to her desk. She’d come to the Pentagon to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; she was due in his office in ten minutes. “You’re sure he was OK?”

“Safe words and everything,” said Sandy, indicating she’d quizzed Turk herself to make sure. “Gorud’s dead.”

“What?”

“He’d been wounded — they had to leave his body to get out without being caught.”

“Oh, God. Does Jonathon know?”

“Yes. There’s a possibility they won’t make the control point in time for the download.”

“They won’t make it in time, or not at all?”

“They’ll get there, but they may be late. They had to walk out of the cave. They’re still pretty far away.”

Breanna had already worked out an alternative with Rubeo that would allow them to send the information just before the strike. But that assumed, of course, they did eventually make it.

“What about Kronos?” said Breanna, asking about the plan to send Mark Stoner to Iran.

“The aircraft is in the air and about fifteen minutes from release. Danny Freah is still gathering his team. They’ll be in Iran in forty-eight hours.”

“Very good.”

Sandy continued, filling in little details.

Breanna had an alternative plan for getting the data downloaded, but to utilize it, she’d have to commit to launching the UAVs no later than 2300. If Turk wasn’t in position by then, she would have to scratch the mission.

“I know I’m not supposed to second-guess them,” said Sandy, her words breaking into Breanna’s wandering train of thought. “But — it may be a stretch for them. They’re stealing a vehicle from a Revolutionary Guard camp. And even if they get it, to drive that far — it’s going to be tight.”

Breanna leaned her forehead down toward her desk, cradling her head in her hand. But she managed to keep her doubts to herself.

“It’s all right, Sandra,” she said. “Let’s let them make the moves they think they have to make. Just keep me informed of his progress.”

She sat like that for a while, face in her hand, wanting to collapse on the desk and sleep. Not give up; just sleep. She knew she couldn’t.

There are always moments of doubt in command. The trick is not to let them stop you. Push on.

That was her father’s advice. She played it over in her head, knowing it was good, it was solid, it was what she had to do.

Keep moving forward.

Breanna glanced at the wall, where she had hung a photo of her dad receiving the Medal of Honor from the President. He had a smile on his face, but it was an uncomfortable smile. He didn’t appreciate the fuss, and he didn’t think he deserved the medal.

He surely did, that one and many more. But in many ways Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian was a man out of his time, a throwback to the generation that did heroic things and called them their duty.

The phone on the desk buzzed. Her secretary was reminding her that she was due for the private briefing with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Breanna grabbed the thumb drive from her computer, fixed her lipstick, and set off.

16

The first fence was easy.

Either some of the men stationed there or black marketeers doing business with them had bent a portion of the bottom away from the ground almost exactly at the spot Grease was aiming. Turk pushed the ruck ahead of him and crawled into the no-man’s-land between the two fences. The ground was dry but its scent was salty. His nose itched and he felt as if he were going to sneeze.

Grease crawled through behind him. “Let’s go,” he said, jumping up and starting to run. “Move.”

Turk did his best to keep up. The sergeant led him to the left, crossing from the spot of inky darkness into the outer edge of a dim semicircle of gray shadow. Grease had spotted another bent-up fence here and trusted that the locals knew the safest route.

Turk squeezed the ruck through once again. His shirt snagged as he went under and he had to back up to get loose. He moved forward and snagged again, the edge of the fence digging into his skin. Suppressing a curse, he twisted sideways, then fought his way free.

A truck or a jeep was headed their way. He looked over at Grease, just coming through behind him.

“Yeah, I see it,” said the Delta sergeant. “Come on, come on.”

They ran for an area of low scrub about fifty yards away. Turk’s heart pounded in his chest, and by the time he threw himself down next to Grease, his thighs had cramped. He slipped off his pack and pushed low into the dirt, trying in vain to ignore the pain in his legs.

Headlights appeared to their right, swinging around from the direction of the runway.

“All right. Come on,” hissed Grease, rising to a crouch.

He started running straight ahead. Turk grabbed the ruck and followed, thinking they were going to stop behind a second clump of bushes about ten yards away. But Grease continued past it.

In seconds Turk lost sight of him in the darkness.

“Grease?” he hissed.

Not hearing an answer, he dropped on his belly. The jeep was near the perimeter of the fence, to his right. He crawled forward, moving in the direction Grease had taken.

“Here!” hissed Grease a few seconds later.

He was ahead, sitting in a defensive position — a foxhole, dug into the inner ring of defenses. He was pointing his rifle toward the jeep.

“Do they see us?” asked Turk.

“Back to us. I doubt it.”

It was a tight fit in the foxhole. Turk shifted himself around, then reached for his pack.

“What are you doing?” asked Grease.

“I’m getting my gun.” It was packed into the ruck next to the control unit, the stock folded up.

“Just relax, huh?”

Oh yeah, really, thought Turk, taking it out. Relax.

Two men got out of the jeep and walked in front of the headlights. Turk stared at the haze around them, not sure if he should hope they came toward them — kill them and the truck would be easy to take.

Grease must have read his mind. “We let them go for now. If we shoot them, someone will hear. If there’s one vehicle here, there’s bound to be two.”

Turk hunkered lower to the ground. The shadows of the men grew more distinct. They walked back to the vehicle, got in, and continued around the interior circuit of the base.

Grease started to move almost as soon as they put it in gear.

“Let’s go,” he said, reaching down to help him up.

They ran toward the hangar buildings just south of the end of the runway. Turk ran as fast as he could, legs growing rubbery; by the time he reached the back of the building where Grease was crouched, he felt barely able to stand.

“Just a little more,” said Grease. “Catch your breath.”

“OK.”

Turk slumped against the wall, trying to will his heart rate back to something close to normal. Grease crawled out from the corner of the building, observing the barracks and administrative areas about fifty yards away.

“It’s gonna be easier than I thought,” said Grease when he returned. “Two trucks, parked near the fence. We get up over it and take one, disable the other.”

“We’re going to stop and disable it? How?”

“You’re going to get under the hood and pull the wires off. I’ll get the other truck going. Pull off anything you can,” said Grease. “Ready?”

“Which way and which one?”

Grease made a little diagram with his finger as if they were running a football play. There was a fence; he’d have to climb it as quickly as he could.

“What about the other jeep we saw?”

“We shoot them if we have to. I don’t think we’ll need to. They went up near the big building. They’re probably the night guard or something along those lines. Come on.”

Turk managed to keep up all the way to the fence, threw himself against it and began to climb. He couldn’t get his boots into the links well. He pulled himself up but his fingers slipped.

He told himself it was the obstacle course where he’d first started training with the Delta boys. He pushed harder, remembering the snarls of his trainers. After what seemed an eternity he managed to get to the top and slid his foot over.

By the time he got back to the ground, Grease had the hood open on one of the vehicles.

“Get the other one,” he hissed. “Open the hood. Pull the wires. Every wire you see.”

Turk went to the second truck. It was a Kaviran; up close it looked to him like a cartoon version of a Land Rover, its metal squared and thin. He hunted for the release to the hood.

The other truck revved. Turk pulled the hood on his up, then reached in and began pulling wires. When he had pulled everything he could find, he let go of the hood, expecting it to slam, but it was held up by hydraulic arms at the back. He reached up and slammed it down, louder than he should have, then grabbed his pack and gun and walked to the other truck.

“Fucker’s a standard,” said Grease.

“Can you drive?”

“I got it.”

Grease got it moving but had to hunt for second gear, revving the engine too soon as the gears ground and then nearly stalling it. They drove out around the back of the barracks and headed left, turning and driving toward the perimeter fence. Turk stayed quiet, his heart pounding in his chest. They passed a small guard building, its exterior dark, and headed toward the front gate.

“Slide down a little bit in the seat,” Grease told Turk. “You look too white.”

Turk did as he was told. His fingers curled around the body of the gun as they turned toward the front gate. He tried to slow his breathing, knowing he was gulping air.

“Here we go,” said Grease, the truck gathering speed.

As they breezed out the open gate, the Delta sergeant raised his arm in a half salute to obscure his face.

“They left only a skeleton crew,” he said as he turned onto the main road. “If that. I bet they’re out looking for us. Those assholes we saw up near the cave came right out of this barracks. Funny, huh?”

“Oh yeah. I’m just about dying of laughter.”

“We should have gone inside and stolen new uniforms,” said Grease. He glanced at Turk. “You got crap all over your face.”

“I thought you said I look too white.”

“Where there isn’t any dirt, sure.”

Turk rolled down the window. The breeze felt nice, cooling the sweat at the side of his face and the back of his neck. His shirt was soaked with perspiration.

“All downhill from here, Turk.” Grease seemed happier than Turk remembered ever seeing him. “They think we’re outside. We’re inside. The one place they won’t look. All downhill from here.”

17

The news that one of the Pasdaran teams had found a pickup truck in a cave filled Colonel Khorasani with pride touching on smugness; his hunches had led to the breakthrough. But that quickly dissipated as the next report indicated only one man had been found, and he was dead, shot in the head, undoubtedly by a compatriot.

The man’s body was still warm. He looked Iranian, and had papers identifying him as such. That, of course, meant nothing — a smuggler or an Israeli spy could easily have obtained forgeries or hired a local with the promise of enough gold. But Colonel Khorasani felt confident; he was going to solve this mystery. He ordered the units in the region to deploy around the cave, racing men up from the south, where they had been concentrated. And he called the air force to ask for search planes.

As usual, they were uncooperative. The heathens should be shot with the infidels. The local squadron commander refused to take his call; Khorasani finally called General Shirazi himself, invoking the ayatollah’s name in a gambit to get what he wanted.

“I need patrols in the area north of Qom,” he told the head of the air force. “We believe we may have found saboteurs.”

“You are still chasing ghosts? I heard you had a farm vehicle shot up and killed members of the Guard.”

“The occupants were spies,” insisted Khorasani. The wreckage had been so decimated by the attack that it was impossible to say who the men were, but admitting this wouldn’t help him in the least. “I am tracking their accomplices. We have found a truck. I need air surveillance.”

“We don’t have the capacity for night searches.”

“Your planes can’t see vehicles?” Khorasani paused. “What good are they?”

“We do our best with what the government allots us,” snarled the general.

“I hear aircraft above. What about them?”

“We are patrolling in case the Americans attack. They won’t come by ground.”

“Can I tell that to the ayatollah?”

The general didn’t answer. Khorasani decided to take a different tack — the general had political ambitions beyond the air force; perhaps those would work in his favor.

“We are all Iranians,” said Khorasani, softening his tone. “And cooperation will help us all, no matter the outcome. Evidence that you worked violently against commandos — this would surely be positive in the ayatollah’s eyes, and in everyone’s.”

It took only a moment for General Shirazi to respond. “You will have more patrols. They will be up in two hours.”

“I want good men.”

“I don’t have any who aren’t,” snapped Shirazi.

“The pilots who shot up the truck. They were skilled.” More importantly, they had proven they could follow his orders. But Khorasani didn’t mention that. “Get them.”

“If they are available, they will fly,” agreed the general. “But I expect full cooperation in all things. Now and in the future.”

“Certainly,” said Khorasani, deciding an alliance with an ambitious general might not be a bad thing.

18

“Another truck,” said Grease as the headlights swept along the highway, moving up the pavement toward them.

Turk slid down in the passenger seat and tried not to stare at the lights as they came close. He saw the vehicle from the corner of his eye as it passed; it was another Kaviran, filled with soldiers.

“Check the GPS,” said Grease. “We should be real close to that turn.”

“Another mile,” said Turk. “It’ll be on the left.”

Grease found the dried up streambed without any problem. The truck’s springs groaned as they left road and navigated past a tumble of rocks, but they found solid, easy ground to drive on before they’d gone more than thirty yards. The ground had been worn down to bare rock; it was slippery in spots, but they were able to move quickly.

“Look for a good place to stash the truck,” said Grease.

Turk scanned the silvery landscape. It seemed something like a scene in a movie, lit for impending horror. Grease turned off the headlamps, but the reflected light from the moon filled the air with phosphorescence.

“What’s behind those rocks?” he asked, pointing ahead.

Turk stuck himself halfway out the window to see. “Just dirt.”

“Too much of a slope,” said Grease as they got close.

“It’s hilly everyplace.”

“Yeah.”

The ground became pebbly and loose; the wheels started to slip. Grease put the truck in its lowest gear.

“Those bushes,” he said, angling toward a low clump of gnarled shrubs about thirty yards away. “If we can make it.”

He stopped just below them, cranked the wheel, then attempted to back up the Kaviran so its nose would point down the hill. Even with the lowest gear and all wheels engaged, they couldn’t quite pull the truck entirely behind the brush, but it didn’t make much difference — the bushes barely came to the top of wheel well and would not completely hide the truck.

Grease stopped the engine by stalling it, his foot hard on the brake while the clutch was still engaged. He pulled the emergency brake so hard Turk thought he would snap the handle.

“Maybe we get to use it again, maybe not,” he said.

Limbs suddenly stiff, Turk got out of the truck and shouldered the ruck. He checked the AK and kept it in his hands as he started to climb behind Grease. It was 2250.

19

Breanna perched herself at the edge of the seat, one hand on the seat belt buckle as the helicopter swept down toward the lawn behind the building Whiplash used as its command center. She rarely used a helicopter to get around Washington, but time was of the essence.

The private briefing for the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gone as well as could be expected. Maximillian Fresco was not a big supporter of the Whiplash concept — he was uncomfortable not with the technology, but with the relationship with the CIA — and it seemed clear to Breanna that he had already concluded the operation would fail. That was ironic, given that she had been against using bombers in the first place. But she decided that knowing the President insisted the atomic program be stopped, Fresco had decided war with Iran was inevitable and should be relentlessly pursued.

War might come even if their operation succeeded. It would be pointless and stupid — Iran would certainly be punished severely. But there would surely be a price to pay for all.

Breanna leapt out as the Jet Ranger steadied itself on the ground. As she ran across the lot, two members of the Agency security detail trotted behind her; the escort was more ritual than necessity, as it would have been extremely difficult for a terrorist or other criminal to get onto the CIA campus, let alone near the small facility Whiplash used. Pausing at the entrance to the building, she turned and waved at the men, dismissing them. Then she put her hand on the identity panel, where all five of her fingerprints were scanned, and the door automatically opened. Inside, she gave her password as she entered the elevator; the hidden systems analyzed her biometrics and she was whisked downstairs.

Jonathon Reid was waiting at the door of the secure conference center. The room was empty. The only light came from the glow of the near wall, which was filled with the blank static of the secure video connection to the White House.

“Two minutes to spare,” he said. “How did the meeting go?”

“Better that you weren’t there,” she said.

Reid, a scarred veteran of the political infighting between the DoD and the CIA, gave her a wry smile. Breanna followed him inside. The pitcher of water on the table was draped with perspiration, as if even the inanimate objects understood the gravity of the situation.

“Are you ready for the President?” intoned the deep voice of a White House staff member.

“We are ready,” said Reid.

“Ready.”

Breanna sat down, wishing she had been able to grab a cup of coffee. She glanced at Reid, who shook his head — Turk had not checked in.

Still waiting for the President to appear on-screen, Breanna tapped a small rectangle on the table. As soon as it glowed green, she spread her hand. A computer screen appeared. After placing her hand flat so the computer could read her prints, she tapped the corner and a menu appeared. She selected the status map; a map of Iran appeared. She zoomed until she found Turk’s marker. He was moving in the direction of the rendezvous point, but even without asking the computer to calculate, she knew it was excruciatingly slow.

She switched the underlying image from map to satellite. An image appeared. It was several hours old, taken during the day as a satellite passed, but it was an accurate depiction of the terrain. They were climbing up a rock slide.

President Todd’s image flashed on the screen. She was in the White House situation room, sitting at the head of the conference table. Two aides were behind her, leaning against the wall; Breanna knew the room would be filled with NSC staffers and other advisors.

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff will be with us in a second,” said the President. “Before they come on, I wanted to speak to you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Breanna, her voice a bare whisper. She reached for Reid’s water and took a sip.

“We’ve taken a lot of casualties,” said the President. Her voice was dispassionate, empty of emotion. Reading her expression, Breanna thought she was struggling to remain neutral. “Can we complete the mission?”

“Absolutely,” said Breanna.

“And you’ve taken care of all contingencies following the attack?”

“The SEAL unit had to withdraw. We have another backup plan in place.”

The President turned her head, listening to someone else in the room. She frowned and turned back. “Jonathon? Will we succeed?”

“I’m confident we have a good chance of success,” said Reid. “But I can’t make any guarantees.”

“Understood.” Todd nodded.

Breanna glanced at the screen on the table. Turk was still some distance from the control point.

“I understand you have to give the final authorization for the attack within ten minutes,” said Todd, turning her head back in Breanna’s direction.

“It’s slightly more complicated than that,” said Breanna. “But yes, ma’am, that’s the gist.”

“Your ground team is not yet in place?”

“They’re en route.”

“Will they be there by the time you launch?”

“Probably not,” admitted Breanna. “They will be there in time for the assault.”

“Can the mission be completed without them?” Todd asked.

“It would be difficult,” admitted Reid. “Without a good bit of luck.”

“Ms. Stockard?”

“Madam President, they will be in place,” said Breanna. “This mission will succeed.”

Breanna expected a nod, or some other sign of acknowledgment. Instead, Todd’s expression turned even more grim, her lips pursing together.

“Bring the chiefs on-line, please,” the President told her communications aide.

Several rooms away in the Whiplash bunker, Ray Rubeo stared at a screenful of numbers. Technically, they described a parabola, a line following the plane section of a cone. In this case, they described one movement in the flight path the last nano-UAV would have to take to breach the final research chamber at Site One. The flight path was trivial for the computer. The problem was fitting the instruction into the limited memory of the small aircraft. Rubeo’s team had been working for hours on what at first seemed a trivial problem. But math was an unyielding master, and in the end the numbers simply would not yield. There was not enough space in the onboard memory to fit the instructions.

The only possible solution was to have the pilot take over and fly the last leg.

To the people down the hall, Breanna and Reid included, it would seem a trivial matter: the pilot was there precisely to guide the aircraft. But to Rubeo the difference was immense — he would fly the last few planes, not tell the computer how to fly them.

Human error would greatly distort the probability equation.

But there was no choice. The scientist sighed, then clicked the screen to review the instructions he would give.

Breanna glanced at her watch. She had to authorize the launch in exactly three minutes.

If the President decided to abort the mission, what would she do?

Tell Turk to get the hell out of there; a war was about to erupt.

He was as good as dead already. They’d never make it to the border without being detected, and Sergeant Ransom was under orders to kill him if they were in danger of being captured.

If the mission hadn’t changed, if they had only gone for the one site and left, maybe he’d be in the Caspian by now.

“All right, gentlemen and ladies.” President Todd looked around her room, then back at the video camera projecting her image to the Pentagon and Whiplash. “We will proceed with the Whiplash plan as outlined. The bombers will be on standby. If the mission fails, they will proceed on my order. On my order only,” she repeated.

There were murmurs of assent. The chief of staff’s face, which was centered in the feed from the Pentagon, reddened as he nodded.

“Let’s get to work,” said Todd, and the feed died.

Breanna rose, glancing at her watch. She had exactly sixty seconds to authorize the launch. She strode from the room, moving toward the command center down the hall. The entire team was there, waiting.

So was Ray Rubeo.

“Problem solved?” she asked.

“We have a solution,” said Rubeo tersely.

There wasn’t time to ask him to elaborate. “I am authorizing launch,” she announced. “We may have to go with Plan B on the download, but we’re moving ahead with the attack.”

20

The rocks got smaller and easier to get over, but the slope steepened. Turk wondered if they couldn’t simply stop. He didn’t have to be in line of sight to get the download or guide the aircraft. But with Grease pushing ahead, he couldn’t give up. He kept climbing, finally resorting to all fours, moving up slowly under the growing weight of the ruck.

“Just a little bit,” said Grease every few feet. “Keep coming.”

“Man, you’re inhuman,” said Turk finally. “You’re a machine.”

“No, but I ain’t giving up.”

“Neither am I.”

Grease had to stop and wait for him every few moments. Finally he scrambled ahead, disappearing into the darkness.

Hell of a place to die, Turk thought. Somehow, he’d never believed he would collapse from a heart attack; going down in a fireball seemed much more likely.

And somehow more hospitable. He kept pushing, practically crawling now.

Why the hell didn’t you eat?

When was the last time you had water?

It was Breanna’s voice, upbraiding him. The real problem was sleep — he needed it. His mind was starting to float away from his body, swimming in some sort of disjointed consciousness.

When this was done, he was sleeping. No matter what. Let the damn Iranians kill him; he didn’t care.

Sleep.

Something started to lift him.

“What the hell?” he said, spinning around to sit up.

“I’ll take the pack,” said Grease. “It’s only about fifty feet to the ledge.”

Turk held his arms up, as if in surrender. Grease lifted the pack, slung it on his shoulder, then reached his hand down. Turk took it and heaved himself to his feet.

“You think we’ll make it after all this?” Turk asked.

“Damn straight,” said Grease. “We’ve put too much into this now to fail.”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

21

Parsa Vahid pointed the nose of his MiG upward as he left the runway, feeling the press of gravity against his chest. No matter how many times he flew, what he flew, or why he flew, the initial boost off the runway still gave him a thrill.

When his wingman Lieutenant Kayvan checked in — he’d taken off right behind him — Vahid told the control tower they were heading north. He banked slightly, coming to the proper course, then checked in with the controller. He needed special permission to fly in the Exclusion Zone; this had already been granted, and he was handed off to the special zone’s controller, who used a reserved and scrambled frequency for even the most routine communications. The officer informed him there was one other flight already working the area, a small plane that Vahid knew would be practically useless in a night search. The controller gave him the flight’s contact information; Vahid dialed in and hailed the pilot, who was currently near Qom.

“We’ll go north of that,” said Vahid. “We’re available for support.”

The other pilot thanked him. He sounded like an amicable sort; Vahid guessed from his voice that he was an older man, probably pressed into service for the Guard.

“God is great,” said the man.

Vahid echoed him and signed off.

A few minutes later the controller told him to stand by for a communication from Colonel Khorasani. The colonel came on the radio within seconds of Vahid’s acknowledgment.

“One of our units has had an incident,” said Khorasani without any preliminaries. “A truck has been stolen. The unit is approximately nine kilometers south of the cave where the truck was discovered. It is headquartered at Kushke Nosrat Airport.”

“Manzariyeh,” said Vahid, almost in wonder — that was the military name for the airport. Once an air force base, it was now directly controlled by the Pasdaran. It was an open secret that it played a critical role as a transport hub for the nuclear program in the area. No planes were kept there, a calculated tactic to keep it from being targeted by the West. But there were healthy antiair missile defenses in the vicinity, and even though it was in the zone he’d been cleared to patrol, Vahid decided he could take no chances.

“Colonel, you’ll have to alert the forces there that I’m in the vicinity,” he said. “Or they will shoot me down.”

“That’s being taken care of. The unit whose vehicle was stolen is conducting a thorough search, as are other units. The controller will be in constant communication with you.”

“Understood.”

“Captain, there is one other matter that you should be aware of. Five minutes ago we received word from one of our sources that an American bomber was taking off from Incirlik, Turkey. We do not have it on radar, and we may not have them on radar until a critical point.”

“How many planes?”

“One is reported.”

“They’ve done that before,” said Vahid. One would be far less than the number needed for an attack.

“Yes, the other night, before the incident occurred. Be prepared for anything.”

22

Turk lay on his back, drifting. If they’d climbed Mount Everest, he wouldn’t have felt as if he’d accomplished more.

But they were hours from their mission, and then days from getting out.

Maybe two days, he thought. Even less. They’d take the truck, go north, hopefully hook up with a new reaction force.

“Aren’t you supposed to check in?” asked Grease.

“Oh shit. Yeah.” Turk’s chest muscles groaned as he got up. These pains were new; at least his body was trying to be original.

He took the satcom from his pocket. They were on a ledge facing south; the ridge rose several hundred feet above the road they’d left, but it was far from the highest point in the area; even in the dark he saw higher peaks to his left and right. The ledge itself was about the width of three bowling alleys, and maybe twice as long. The back end, which faced west, formed an irregular wall from three to five feet high as it ran north. There was a path down the east side that they hadn’t seen in the satellite image, or at least not recognized; Grease had scoured the area for signs of someone else but found none.

“This is Tiger, checking in.”

Breanna answered. “Go ahead, Tiger.”

“We’re ready for the download.”

“We missed the 2300 mark,” she said.

Not by too much, he thought, but she continued before he could protest.

“It’s all right. We understand all your difficulties. We have a new arrangement. We’re going to connect two hours before the attack. It’ll be a longer download, but it will be fine. You won’t need to do anything, as long as you’re in position and the unit is on.”

“Good,” Turk told her.

“The parameters — your instructions for the attack are going to be a little more complicated than originally planned. You’re going to do more flying than we thought.”

“Hey,” said Turk, suddenly perking to life. “Complication is my middle name.”

“Good. Whiplash, off.”

Turk looked over at Grease, standing with his arms crossed over his rifle.

“Complication’s your middle name, huh?” said the sergeant. “Now what the hell are they throwing at us?”

“I don’t know. It has to do with flying, though. I can handle it.”

In fact, it would be welcome.

The hours passed slowly. The moon disappeared. Turk completed the download without a problem. They still had a little over two hours to go before the attack would start. Until then his biggest concern was keeping his fingers from turning numb with the cold.

Grease continued to scan the ground below with his glasses. Turk secured the control unit, making sure it was ready before it went into standby state.

“Do your legs cramp?” he asked Grease when he was done.

“Say what?”

“Your legs. Don’t they get tired? Cramp?”

“No. I’m used to using them.”

“So am I, but climbing and everything.”

“Yeah, I guess. We train pretty hard.”

“So I saw.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Turk went to Grease’s pack and took out one of the water bottles. “Were you trying to get me to quit?”

“We were trying to toughen you up.”

“Quitting wasn’t an option,” said Turk.

“Good,” said Grease, unmoved. “Don’t drink too much of that water. Hard to say when we’ll get more.”

There were three more bottles in the pack, but Turk didn’t argue.

“Lot of traffic out there.” Grease gestured. “They’re moving units around.”

“They must be looking for us.”

A stupid thing to say.

“They didn’t tell me I was blowing up nukes,” Turk added, more to change the subject than to impart information. “They only said we were blowing up equipment.”

“Maybe they didn’t know.” Grease continued to gaze into the distance.

“No. They didn’t tell me because, if we were captured, they didn’t want the Iranians to know what they knew. It all makes sense now. I mean, we were expendable, right?”

“Always are.”

“Even now, I imagine they won’t say everything.”

Turk stared south. Qom, the holy city, lay somewhere in the distance; he thought it was the glow of light at about ten o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The Iranians had deliberately set their program up near the holy site to make America hesitate before attacking it.

The city would survive. From what he’d seen of the first attack, only the immediate area aboveground was affected; belowground might be a different story, though he had no way of knowing.

Still, to risk not only your own population — a million people lived in Qom — but a shrine holy to your religion — what sort of people did that? What religious leader could, in good conscience, approve such an idea?

The same kind of leader, perhaps, that would dream of wiping out another people because their God was not his God. Turk couldn’t begin to comprehend the hatred, the evil, it involved.

“Trucks down there,” said Grease, pointing. “See them?”

Turk went over and looked. The vehicles were driving northward in roughly the area where they had left the road. For a moment they appeared to stop, but it was an optical illusion, or some trick with his mind: the vehicles were still moving.

“I don’t think they’ll look for us up here,” he said. “We’re pretty far from the labs. Five miles — that’s pretty far.”

“Yeah.”

“Once we hit them, they’ll be so confused we’ll have an easy time getting away,” said Turk. “It’ll be like the other day.”

“You think that was easy?”

“Wasn’t it?” Turk knew he was just rambling, trying to find something that would reassure himself, not Grease. He felt a need to talk, to do something, but at the moment all he could do was wait for the download to complete.

“Airplane,” said Grease.

Turk heard it, too. It was coming from the south. He listened for a moment.

“Jet,” he told Grease. “They’ll never see us.”

23

“Aircraft are away. Aircraft are tracking,” declared Teddy Armaz, the head of the nano-UAV team. “Exactly sixty minutes to ground acquisition at my mark… Mark.”

The screen at the front of the room showed the swarm’s position over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, southeast of the Bay of Bengal. They were gliding bricks at the moment, hurtling toward the earth at about Mach 5. In about twenty minutes the swarm would split into several subgroups. From that point they would fly a set of helixlike paths toward the target area, following the elaborate plan Rubeo’s people had worked out to optimize the attack on the two sites.

When Breanna first saw the rendering of the flight paths, she had trouble making sense of it. The composite diagram looked like a piece of multicolored steel wool, pulled out at the top and twirled to a point at the bottom. Several of the individual loops looked like the path hailstones took in a storm cloud.

The complexity worried her greatly. What Rubeo saw as a set of mathematical equations, Breanna viewed as a collection of potential disasters. If just one of the aircraft deviated from its course at the wrong moment, it might collide with two others; the trouble would quickly mushroom. While the systems had been checked and rechecked, there was always some bit of random, unforeseeable chance, some oddity of fate that could interfere and throw everything into a mucked-up tangle in the blink of an eye.

Rubeo, standing at the back of the room, arms folded, didn’t believe in chance or luck, at least not in that way. Breanna glanced back toward him, watching for a moment as he stared at the progress screen at the front of the room. He didn’t move; he didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood ramrod straight, observing.

“Flight indicators are all in the green,” said Armaz.

“Very good,” Breanna told him.

“Turk is checking in,” said Paul Smith, the team liaison handling communications. “You want to talk to him?”

Breanna touched the small earbud hooked into her right ear. It contained a microphone as well as a speaker.

“Channel B,” she said, and the computer connected her into the line. She listened as Turk finished describing their situation to the controller. They were camped on a ridge almost exactly five miles from each of the targets. The sun had just risen.

“Turk, how are you doing?” she asked when he finished.

“We’re good,” he said. His voice sounded faint and tired.

“You’re doing a good job.”

“Yup.”

Shouldn’t she say something more? Shouldn’t there be a pep talk?

The words didn’t come to her. “Good luck,” was all she could think of as the silence grew.

“Same to you,” said Turk. Then he was off.

“NASA asset is airborne and on course,” reported Armaz.

“We have a heat indication in Aircraft 5,” said Bob Stevenson, monitoring the swarm’s systems. “The system is moving to compensate.”

“Please isolate the image,” Breanna said.

The tangle of flight lines on the screen disappeared, leaving one blue line near the center. The line was evenly divided between solid — where the aircraft had gone — and dotted, where the plane would fly. A new line, thicker, but in the same color, appeared on the screen. This showed the actual flight, making it easy to see the variance between what had been originally programmed and what the flight system aboard the nano-UAV was now doing to compensate for the high heat.

“Can we override that?” asked Rubeo from the back.

“Still in a plasma blackout,” said Armaz. The aircraft had, in effect, a speed-and-friction-generated shield around it that prevented communication.

“You should add the general flight-flow vector to your image,” said Rubeo.

“Go ahead,” said Breanna.

The line showed the overall pattern of the swarm, ghosting it over the screen. The errant UAV, being tracked by radar aboard the ship that had launched her, moved parallel to the lower line, getting neither closer nor farther.

“What’s going on?” Breanna asked Rubeo.

“The indicator malfunctioned, not the aircraft,” said Rubeo. “The computer tried to compensate, but it still got the incorrect signal. It’s still trying to compensate, and still being told it’s not working.”

“What’s going to happen to it?” Breanna asked.

“I’d have to work the math,” said the scientist. He touched his ear, a tic Breanna knew meant he was suppressing nervousness — she guessed he had already run the numbers in his head. “But my guess is that it will end up well to the south of the target area by the time the plasma effect dissipates. At that point it will attempt to recorrect. It will be late to the party, if it doesn’t self-destruct.”

“Can we still accomplish the mission?”

“You can lose two more,” said Rubeo. “If they’re the right ones. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.”

24

Turk rubbed the temples on both sides of his head. The download had finally finished and he was reviewing the plan to strike the sites. It was incredibly complex.

“I can’t decipher some of these flight patterns,” he told Sara Rheingold, who was going over the procedure with him from Whiplash. “I just can’t.”

“You don’t have to, not until that very last set.”

“I have to know that they’re moving correctly.”

“If there’s a problem, you select the alternatives, based on what you’ve seen.” She paused, then came back on the line. “Stand by for Dr. Rubeo.”

“Captain Mako, you have reviewed the overall plan?”

“Yeah, but—”

“The procedure until the final attack is no more difficult than the first attack you rehearsed. When the time comes for manual control, the final speed of the aircraft will be well under one hundred knots. You will have an easy time guiding them.”

“Well—”

“The flight control computer aboard the aircraft can slow their speed down to twenty-one knots if necessary. That’s the last command stored. You will have an easy time taking them over. You fly them in stages. The other aircraft have been programmed to orbit or stand by in a way that preserves their flight energy until given an order to proceed. Each XP-38 UAV will be ready for you when you need it.”

“Unless something goes wrong.”

“Captain, may I suggest that you spend the next thirty-eight minutes going through whatever points you are confused about with my staff, and review the diagrams of the target sites. You really don’t have much time to waste fretting over things you can’t control.”

25

Vahid turned the MiG northward, moving in the general direction of the ground team that had just contacted him. He’d crisscrossed the area so many times in the past hour that he had lost track. Both he and Lieutenant Kayvan, his wingman, had landed once and refueled “hot”—waiting on the runway as fuel was pumped into their planes so they lost little time. They were once more getting close to their reserves, without any tangible results.

“We’ll run into one of the mountains before we find anything,” said Kayvan.

“You better die if you do,” snapped Vahid.

“At least it’s getting light. Maybe I can see.”

Vahid nosed Shahin One through a thousand meters, looking for the ground unit he was supposed to be in contact with.

The unit had responded after another driver reported seeing a truck on the hillside. The report was vague and the location and descriptions haphazard at best. The ground troops as well as the MiGs had looked over dozens of hillsides without results. Granted, it was dark and the terrain rugged, but the MiG’s radar — reverse engineered from Russian equipment by the Iranians themselves — could detect a ground target the size of a truck or tank at some thirty kilometers. Nothing had appeared all night.

It didn’t help that he had never trained to perform a night search. His wingman had barely practiced ground attack at all, and Vahid wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to find that Kayvan couldn’t effectively handle the radar. He was hardly a gifted pilot; he’d gotten his spot in the air force solely because he was the son of a member of parliament.

Vahid scanned outside the cockpit, peering down at the bluish earth. The terrain looked like a blanket slung over a child’s bed. Here and there small tufts of black — rocks and bushes — poked from the fabric.

A narrow crevice appeared in the blanket. It widened slightly, spreading north.

“Ground Two, I am over the road,” he radioed. “Can you hear my engine?”

“Negative.”

“I am flying right over the road,” he said.

“We do not have a visual. Sorry.”

“Repeat your position.”

Vahid climbed, trying to locate the ground unit. He was at the coordinates they had given him; obviously, they were mistaken.

Idiots.

They were some fifty kilometers from Qom; the Tehran-Qom Highway was on his left as he came south.

Maybe the jerk was reading the coordinates backward, giving what should be the second set first. Vahid made the mental correction and changed course. Before he could resume his search, the radio bleeped with a call from the Pasdaran colonel, Khorasani. Vahid gave him as diplomatic a report as possible, before adding that he and his wingmate were very low on fuel.

“You are to stay in the area as long as the ground unit needs you,” said the colonel.

“I may need a divert field.”

“What does that mean?”

“A place nearby to land.”

“The closed air base — will that be suitable?”

“At Manzariyeh?”

“Yes.”

“That would be fine.”

“We’ll make the arrangements.” The colonel snapped off the radio.

“Shahin One, are you still with us?” asked the ground team. It was headed by a lieutenant whose voice seemed to crack with every other word. Usually the Pasdaran units were led by older men; this one seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. “We have been ordered to proceed immediately.”

“We are here but cannot find you,” said Vahid. “You’re going to have to fire a flare.”

“The enemy may see us.”

“If the enemy is there, that is true,” said Vahid. “But then I and my wingmate will know where you are and will be able to help you.”

When he finally persuaded the lieutenant to fire the signal flare, it was Kayvan who spotted it — several kilometers east of even the reversed coordinates, and nowhere near the location the lieutenant had given him earlier.

“Idiot doesn’t know his east from his west,” complained Kayvan.

Though inclined to agree, Vahid said nothing. He corrected his course, then finally spotted the two trucks by the side of the road. They were about seven kilometers south of the former Manzariyeh air base, alternately known as Kushke Nosrat Airport. The field was off limits except to certain aircraft connected with the nuclear program.

“The vehicle up the hill,” said the lieutenant. “Do you see it?”

“We’re still too far,” said Vahid. “It should be in sight shortly.”

“Can you bomb it?”

“Are there enemy soldiers there?” asked Vahid.

“Unknown at this time.”

“Are our soldiers there?”

“I’m sure this vehicle must be the one stolen by the enemy,” said the lieutenant. “We need you to attack it.”

“Stand by. We have to locate it first.”

“Complete idiots,” grumbled Kayvan. “We’re probably blowing up the jackass’s father-in-law.”

26

Turk saw the flare just as the nano-UAVs came under his control.

One more thing to worry about, except he couldn’t — he had to focus on the Hydras.

Site Two, the more likely bunker to hold the bomb, was first up. The entry point was an air exchanger unit shaped like an upside down U that sat on a concrete pad at one end of an agricultural field. The exchanger was housed in a large metal unit that sat next to an irrigation pump; the property over the bunker entrance had been turned into a working farm to help camouflage the facility.

Screens guarded the air scoop to keep birds and large insects out. The first UAV to arrive blew them both, extending its winglets like fingers to drag much of the screen with it. Two nano-UAVs flew right behind, swooping down, then taking a sharp right into a long air tunnel. They were moving at a hundred knots, considerably slower than the aircraft in the first attack but still beyond Turk’s ability to physically control them in the twisting tunnel.

He didn’t have to, at least not yet. The first aircraft blew a small hole in one of the filtration units; the second shot through, scouting the tunnel for the rest of the swarm. Turk glanced quickly at the performance stats. The computer recorded no problems. Then he clicked the main screen over to the swarm attacking Site One.

The plan was to enter through a straight pipe that had been identified as a utility exhaust at the southern end of the facility, one of several pipes clustered amid rusting machinery behind a shed attached to a cemetery. The facility had been built under the cemetery; the main entrance was through a large mausoleum set at the back of the property, with a secondary entrance in a storage shed near the road. Though deeper than Site Two, the facility was smaller and considered less likely to hold “the treasure,” as the briefers referred to the atomic bomb material.

The initial entry was easy, but the UAVs had to execute an extreme turn west, plunge again, and take another turn to get into the shaft that led to the bunker’s work area. Turk could not have flown the UAVs through the maneuvers except at extremely low speed, which would have robbed the planes of the momentum needed to strike the target. The computer handled them perfectly, and the lead Hydra blew itself up as it reached the interior exhaust turbine, making a perfect hole for the rest.

So far, so good. Turk switched his view back to Site Two. A trio of UAVs had entered the long utility chamber that ran to the main elevator shaft. The first UAV blasted a hole through it; the next group descended the shaft to the main level.

A warning flashed on the screen; the elevator had started up. The two UAVs reversed course, but it was too late for the leader; it was caught by the gondola as it rose and exploded.

The power to the elevator should have been shut by the earlier explosion; that would have sent the elevator automatically to the bottom.

It didn’t. The intelligence was incorrect, or at least lacking. What else was wrong?

The explosion had minimal effect on the elevator, which continued to rise up the long shaft. Turk had to intervene.

“UAV 6, strike Power Nodule Two,” he told the computer. The small craft, now traveling barely faster than the elevator, continued upward to a panel near the cable and gear mechanism. “Detonate,” said Turk as it arrived.

He switched over to the feed from the NASA spy plane for a sitrep visual. The explosion had worked: the elevator was moving downward at a good rate.

Turk clicked the master control and slowed the next group, adding ten seconds to their flight plan.

“How we doing?” asked Grease from the edge of the ravine.

“Getting there.” Turk lowered his head closer to the screen. He needed to concentrate.

“We got some trucks moving around down there. You hear those planes?”

“No,” Turk said. “I gotta focus.”

The unplanned destruction of the two UAVs meant he had to change the priorities slightly for the remaining eight in the swarm. One had carried an infrared sensor, another a highly sensitive gamma measuring tool.

According to the plan, the UAV with the infrared sensor would have led the way into a dark utility tunnel that emptied into the elevator shaft. After detecting a spot in the shaft where water pipes cut through a hole, the aircraft would enter the pipe chamber and fly about twenty feet, where it would blow a hole through a thin wall into a ceiling space above the main laboratory chamber. The UAV carrying the gamma detector would then check the entrances at the far end of the lab, selecting the one with the highest residual radiation; presumably the corridor containing the room with bomb material. The rest of the swarm would follow, using the positioning coordinates radioed by the lead UAVs for their maneuvers. The next two had optical sensors that would inspect the area with the material. The swarm’s distributed intelligence network would attempt to spot certain key images indicating as much. The rest of the drones would then destroy either the bomb or, if there was no bomb, the machinery or gear in the laboratory chamber, massing their explosions to cause a cave-in and further damage.

Turk faced a quandary. If he used the next two — UAVs 7 and 8, both equipped with optical sensors — in the slots where 5 and 6 were to have been, he’d be short an aircraft with visual sensors to make the final confirmation. That would mean taking a unit from the swarm meant to strike the other site, or possibly attacking blind.

He checked the location of the rest of the swarm. The nearest Hydra, UAV 9, was thirty seconds from entering the facility.

He slid it ahead in the next mission slot and directed the computer to reduce flight speed to the slowest possible. The computer warned that the command would reduce their flight energy to dangerous levels. Turk ignored it, zooming the image being projected from the NASA aircraft and focusing on the location of the two drones. He superimposed the schematic, looking for the weak spot.

He couldn’t see the spot itself but knew it must be near where the pipes came out into the elevator shaft. He took direct control of UAV 7, and told it to strike the plotted position on the map.

He barely had time to select the IR feed from the aircraft before it blew up.

The computer flew UAV 8 through the hole into the main laboratory area, a large, irregularly shaped room over 6,000 square feet. Rather than allowing it to fly on its preprogrammed route, Turk instead used the bulk of the microengine’s fuel to boost speed to fifty knots. He placed the aircraft in an orbit at the ceiling, flying parallel to the walls.

The room was lit; at least he had that.

He also had activity in it, which was unexpected.

The last six UAVs had already started downshaft.

Turk now had to locate the entrance to the test chamber. While the images were being analyzed, he spotted a room with a red door and a number of warnings in Arabic and, surprisingly, English.

That had to be it.

There were four or five people in the main lab, and he saw one pointing at the aircraft as it swung around.

“Unit 8, Destroy Door ID 2–3,” he told the computer. The screen view changed, blurring to red, then a cloud of gray, then black.

An infrared image of the shaft above replaced the feed automatically as the control unit shifted the lead view to UAV 9. Turk had the swarm orbit the main lab room, then selected UAV 10, the aircraft with the gamma detector, and sent it and UAV 9 into the room behind the destroyed red door, a triangular-shaped chamber nearly 350 feet long and about fifty wide.

There was no indication from the detector. Aside from a few crates, the room appeared empty.

Fortunately, it was big enough for the UAVs to orbit in a holding pattern. Turk gave that command, then directed UAV 11, another infrared sensor robot, to destroy the other door, back in the main lab, this one green. He returned UAVs 9 and 10 back to the main room. As UAV 10 entered the room with the green door, it picked up trace radiation.

Not enough for material. In fact, it was so low it could have been a trace residual — the lingering radioactivity of workers who’d been near a small amount of material.

The green-door chamber was a rectangle that sank about a hundred feet farther into the earth. The floor area was approximately two hundred by five hundred feet wide. At the center Turk saw a cluster of workbenches; a spiderweb of shelving lined the west wall. Catty-corner to these shelves were a set of laboratory hoods and what in the infrared looked like stacks of small ovens and television sets.

“Analyze,” he told the Whiplash computer, which was receiving a visual feed from his unit.

“Chemical mixing facilities, baking and shaping frames noted,” declared the computer a few seconds later. “Explosive manufacturing.”

The construction area for the explosive lens needed to construct a bomb?

“Calculate optimum explosion to destroy lab area Subbase 5-D,” he told the computer. “Execute.”

The swarm, which had been moving up and down in the room, suddenly retreated, flying back up into the main lab.

“What the hell?” yelled Turk, as if the control unit were human.

In the next second, he saw the lead nano-UAV darting toward a large round cylinder. Then the screen flashed white.

The feed from the NASA plane showed him what had happened — the UAVs had caused a massive explosion on a supply of bottled gas in the main lab area, which in turn caused secondary explosions throughout the rest of the facility. The pressure from the chamber where the explosives were manufactured ruptured one of the support girders above the lab, then the entire facility collapsed.

A perfect hit, except that they hadn’t found the nuclear material they were looking for.

27

Breanna watched the feed from the WB-57, which was focused on the area above the Iranian weapons lab known as Site Two. What looked like a puff of white smoke rose from the area where the UAVs had entered; it turned into a steady stream, something approximating a faucet. Two clouds appeared, at what had been the doorways to the facility. Then the ground between them cratered.

“Seismograph?” she asked.

“Not a nuke,” reported Teddy Armaz. “Site Two is completely destroyed. Attack on Site One is under way.”

“It was only an explosives lab,” said Rubeo, standing next to Breanna. “They’ll rebuild it in a month.”

The surveillance aircraft shifted its flight pattern, extending its figure-eight orbit farther west. Breanna looked at the screen at her workstation, where the remaining UAVs were cataloged. All but the Hydra lost early on the mission were accounted for and in good shape.

Turk had done an excellent job improvising on Site Two; she felt confident he would do well with Site One. Some of the bands of tension that she’d felt tighten around her chest began to loosen. They were going to do this; he was going to get out.

“NASA asset has trouble,” said Armaz up front.

“What’s going on?” Breanna asked.

“RWR — stand by.”

RWR stood for “radar warning receiver”—the aircraft was being tracked by Iranian radars. That in itself didn’t mean anything, but it presaged Armaz’s next warning.

“System 300 tracking them — there’s a flight at long range. Two MiG-29s coming from the west.”

“They’re not in Iranian airspace.”

“They’re being challenged.”

The unarmed reconnaissance aircraft was out of the range of the System 300, a sophisticated Russian antiaircraft missile system that had been acquired with Croatia’s help. But the MiG-29s were another story. Though flying very high, the WB-57 was vulnerable to their radar missiles once they neared the border. The ground radar would direct the interceptors to its vicinity; once close, they would be able to fire.

“He’s going to have to get out of there,” added Armaz. “The MiGs are already looking for them — their attack radars are active and they are closing fast.”

Breanna glanced at Rubeo. Turk had relied on the feed from the WB-57 to improvise the attack on Site Two. The next attack was even more complicated — and that was if everything went right.

“Those MiGs are attempting to lock on,” said Armaz. “They’re only a few seconds away.”

“Get him out of there,” Breanna said. “Give me Turk.”

28

Turk glanced up, made sure Grease was still at the edge of the ledge, then turned his full attention back to the attack on Site One. Two UAVs had already blown through the preliminary barriers; he had fifteen left.

The plan required fourteen. One for good luck, he thought.

Something was wrong with the WB-57; a message declared the feed off-line.

“Turk, Ms. Stockard wants to speak to you,” said Paul Smith, who was handling communications back in Virginia.

“Go ahead.”

“Turk, we’re taking the radar plane off-line temporarily,” said Breanna. “He’s being attacked.”

“OK. All right.”

“We’re working on it.”

“OK. I need to go.” He switched off the coms and took stock of the UAV swarm. In addition to the fifteen now hurtling toward the facility, there was one more at the far edge of the screen, designated as UAV 18, not yet under his control. He wasn’t sure why it was so far behind, but he made a mental note and went back to the attack swarm.

The lead UAV descended through the air exhaust vent, plunging toward a chamber that had been identified as a cafeteria space earlier. Designated UAV 3, it hit the grill protecting the space, but did not explode; Rubeo’s people had calculated it could get by the grill without needing to do so. It zipped across the room at high speed, banking so it could enter a corridor that led to another passage downward. Here, it struck a machine that worked an air-conditioning zoning mechanism. As it exploded, the vents connected to the unit sprung open, clearing the way for the rest of the swarm to enter through a different passage just above the cafeteria space.

The UAVs shot downward, entering a utility space populated by wires and pipes. The fit was excruciatingly tight, with bare millimeters of clearance at two points, plus a pair of tricky turns that looked like V’s with an extra leg curving down at the end. Turk knew he could not have flown this himself, but the tiny aircraft navigated the passage with ease, emerging in a large, empty chamber apparently designed for ventilation and heating equipment, but not used.

The lead nano-UAV curled upward as it reached the end of the long space, exploding just before touching the top. The force pushed down a second UAV, which had followed, adding momentum to its attack on the thick metal access panel that formed the floor. The explosion blew a hole in the panel, but unfortunately, the hole was not quite large enough to allow the next UAV to pass. The aircraft tangled its wings against a shard at the edge. Before Turk could react, it had blown itself up, enlarging the passage.

That had been one of the trouble spots Rubeo had warned of, a place where he feared they might lose one of the designated aircraft and have to rely on the backups. Two more lay ahead.

UAV 5 was now in the lead, projecting its infrared image to Turk as it passed through an open doorway and started down a ramp area, passing someone walking up the ramp. The Hydra twisted on its axis, completing a hard turn to its right to enter a work area roughly the size of a football field.

The screen blinked. A new set of words appeared at the bottom of the image: UPDATE: PROCESSING AREA.

A small forest of silver cylinders that looked like stacked coffeemakers sat on the south side of the large room. They were centrifuges, used to refine weapons-grade uranium.

That was a significant find, but Turk had not been briefed on it.

The next area contained a large bath, built to hold fuel. The site they hit the first night had a similar area.

This was starting to look like the place.

The swarm moved into an orbit at the top of the lab room, slowing while they formed themselves into two groups for the next leg of the assault. Turk debated whether to override — he could use one of the UAVs to destroy the centrifuges — but decided not to. If the attack was successful, they would be destroyed in the explosion.

UAV 5 tucked toward the floor, blowing out a stamped metal plate that covered an emergency drain. Seconds later the rest began to descend in a single line — until UAV 11, which struck something over the pipe and exploded.

UAVs 12 and 13 were caught in the explosion; there was a secondary explosion, and gas began hissing into the space. Fire destroyed UAV 14, and then UAV 15, disoriented, crashed into a centrifuge assembly.

Meanwhile, UAVs 16 and 17 plunged down the drainpipe unscathed, dropping toward the large holding tank at the east side of the facility. The tank had been punctured by UAV 6, opening the way into another large work space, about three-quarters the size of the centrifuge and pond area. The plan called for the swarm to move down another corridor into a lab area and from there to a second room that might be an assembly area, but Turk temporarily suspended it, putting the aircraft into a quick orbit around the top.

He closed his eyes and bent his head back, stretching his neck in a gesture of both prayer and despair. He didn’t have enough UAVs to complete the mission, and he had no idea how to improvise around the problem.

29

Captain Vahid slowed his MiG down for a second run near the hillside. The ground unit was on his left, the vehicle somewhere on his right. He hadn’t seen it on the first pass, though the soldiers on the ground claimed he had gone right over it. The rocks it was parked near — assuming it was there — obscured it on the radar.

He stared at the silvery ground, but it was just a blur.

“Fire a flare at the vehicle on my signal,” he told the Pasdaran commander. “Copy?”

“They will know they have been located.”

If they don’t know that by now, they are true imbeciles, thought Vahid. He told the commander to do as he’d asked.

Banking the MiG, Vahid told his wingman what he was doing and then began his run.

“Fire,” he radioed. A finger of red shot from the scratch road where the Pasdaran unit had stopped, leaping up the hillside into the rocks. Vahid saw something there, boxy, not moving.

The truck.

“Are you sure you want me to bomb it?” he asked. “You are very close.”

Surely it would make more sense for them to go up the hill and inspect it themselves. But Vahid guessed that the commander wasn’t willing to take that risk. If the truck was destroyed, there would be no way for the Israelis — or whoever was near it — to escape. He could wait for morning.

That was undoubtedly the idiot’s logic. He didn’t seem to calculate that whoever had driven it there was undoubtedly long gone, since the Pasdaran unit had not come under attack.

“Affirmative.”

“Pull back, then,” Vahid told them. “Radio when you are a safe distance away.”

“A waste of bombs,” said his wingmate. “But good practice.”

30

Turk stared at the control screen. The six UAVs he had left were circling at high speed in the water overflow chamber, an unfilled water tank that was part of the cooling apparatus for a system designed to hold hot uranium rods. The gear was left over from an earlier, ultimately abandoned phase of the project’s experiments.

The UAVs were supposed to exit the massive tank through a small pipe, flying an intricate pattern through an emergency drain system and ventilation ducts before reaching the suite where the targeted lab was located. There, they would enter an air shaft, blast through a pair of ventilating fans, and invade the suite where the work chamber was located. It would take four UAVs to clear the way that far.

Once they had done their job, Turk would take direct control and fly the remaining UAVs to the target area. The chamber itself consisted of several small rooms. Turk would take the UAVs into a corridor through the opening in the ventilation shaft. He would then blast his way through a set of double doors and enter the targeted space. It would take three UAVs to clear the way. The last would strike the target at a point the Whiplash system calculated to do the most damage. Turk worried about this; even a slight delay from the computer as it relayed the information — or a problem with the link — might complicate the final task. Worst case, there might not be enough momentum left to initiate an explosion.

Unless the doors were open. If so, he could save several units and mass for the attack.

Turk hit the button at the bottom of the screen to bring up the view from the WB-57. The plane, under attack from the Iranian MiGs, was too far away to provide a live image. The screen warned that he was looking at a view frozen several minutes ago.

One door was open in the image, a technician passing through it.

Turk touched the screen and twisted his fingers, enabling a 3-D schematic view constructed from earlier radar penetrations. He moved it up and zoomed, looking at the area of the pipes.

The computer beeped at him, warning that the UAVs were getting close to the point where their flight momentum would no longer be enough to complete the mission.

Turk looked for another way into the final chamber. The ventilation shaft ran close to a utility closet at the end of the suite. It would take two UAVs to get there, then a third to get into the closet, and a fourth to blow out of the door.

Leaving two to get through three doors.

He moved the diagram, saw the utility closet at the base of a long chase of wires and pipes that ran up parallel to the chamber. If he blew into that chase, then had the UAVs descend, he’d use only five to get to the final target.

Why hadn’t the planners chosen that option? He zoomed the image of the chase. The passage was tight, with two elbow turns and a final V before the closet.

They must not have trusted him to guide them through the tight space. Not that he blamed them: the middle turn was ninety degrees. He’d never make it unless he was going very, very slow. And that wouldn’t leave enough flight energy to guarantee time to scout the final chamber.

But he only had to make it once. Or rather, he only had to make each stage once, then use the onboard follow function.

Turk aimed UAV 7 directly at the spot where the metal chase touched the wall of the tank. The explosion sent a shock wave bouncing through the chamber. The other aircraft fluttered but adjusted well, remaining in their pattern.

Turk next slowed UAV 8 and tucked into the chase. The speed dropped under thirty knots — slow for the craft but too fast to make the turn perfectly. He clipped the top right wing but managed to keep it intact and moving into the next elbow turn. By the time he was halfway through the elbow, his speed had dropped below stall speed, and the nano-UAV headed toward the bottom wall of the chase. Turk used his small microburst engine to propel it upward, past a twisted artery of wires and to the final V turn. He used his last bit of power to start the maneuver, then leveled off quickly to get into position to drop into the closet. But the wing had been damaged by the earlier bump, and the UAV started to spin. He managed to push the nose forward, sending the aircraft sideways toward the top of the closet wall. He pressed the self-destruct button as the right wing slapped against one of the steel members framing the door.

He wasn’t sure he had a hole. Worse, he couldn’t use the autofollow, since that would risk having the computer follow the crooked maneuver at the end. He’d have to try the maneuver again.

UAV 8 had optical sensors rather than IR. The chase was too dark for it. He selected UAV 9, circled several times to cut his speed to ten knots, then started through.

This wasn’t like flying an airplane, or even like commanding a normal UAV. This was flicking your wrist back and forth, reacting to little bits of light and dark that flashed before your eyes. This was remembering what you had seen. This was motor skill and intuition, putting everything out of your mind but the little dot of UAV that flicked behind the screen.

The image blurred from gray to gray to gray and then light, vigorous light — he was out in the corridor — and the door ahead was open.

Go. Go!

“Swarm, follow,” Turk commanded.

The swarm descended at high speed. In the meantime, he pushed UAV 9 up through the corridor with the last of its fuel, moving through the still-open door. The frightened face of a technician appeared, then disappeared as the aircraft sped to a door on the far side.

Closed.

The UAV exploded. But the rest of the swarm was now in the long hall outside the targeted chamber.

“Safe orbit,” he commanded.

Turk caught his breath. He had four UAVs left. He’d need one to blow out the door; the rest to get his target.

UAV 16 had a radiation detector. He selected the sensor panel. The radiation was at the high end of the gauge.

He was in the right place, at least.

He got a warning from the control unit — UAV 10 was overheating.

Turk took control of the tiny plane and smashed it through the door to the targeted chamber. The unit that followed flashed video from the room: massive gridwork filled the screen, silver and red.

They were cages, with tigers in each, snarling and turning to dragons.

It was an optical illusion, caused by the lingering effects of the explosion and the rush of light. But it was an illusion built on reality — there were two large sets of metal struts and scaffolds at the far end of the room, beyond three sets of low walls made of sandbags.

Two bombs, each in its own holster.

“Calculate explosion point.”

Seconds ticked by. They passed quicker than Turk expected — the solution, said the computer, was easy. It posted a crosshair between two pieces of metal on the assembly at the left, a tiny little spot big enough for one UAV only.

And that’s all that was needed, it declared.

Turk took UAV 16 and directed it into the assembly. “Target spot, ignite,” he said, directing the aircraft to ignite the explosive and detonate itself. He felt his body begin to relax as the aircraft zeroed in. The screen blanked with a flash of light.

Then the feed from UAV 9 replaced the image. That was impossible — the bomb explosion should have obliterated everything.

Except it hadn’t. The computer had miscalculated, or there was some sort of flaw in the Iranian design, or the UAV hadn’t struck it right, or any of a dozen different explanations that made absolutely no difference now.

The explosion had done something: part of the cradle holding the unfinished weapon up had fallen away. The bomb tipped over but remained intact, at least to the naked eye.

UAV 9 and UAV 15 were left, still orbiting at the top of the chamber though now at low speed, nearing their stall points. Lights flashed in the chamber — an alert.

Do something, Turk told himself. Do it.

But what?

Rubeo’s people had identified a bank of small acetylene gas tanks at the north side of the room that could be detonated if no bomb was found. This would cause a partial collapse of the chamber roof, which should set up a chain reaction from above. The result would bury the chamber.

But not destroy it.

Better than nothing. And he was running out of time, as the UAVs were running out of energy. Turk took UAV 9 over directly, locating the tanks, which looked like a set of lockers at the end of the room. He was about to put UAV 15 into follow mode when he got a better idea. He told the computer to hit the acetylene with UAV 9, then steered UAV 15 toward the bomb he hadn’t struck, aiming for the wired mechanism similar to the one he remembered from the other day. There was no time to calculate any more; he had to aim it himself.

UAV 9 struck the gas tanks. Fire flashed through the room, catching in the oxygen-enhanced atmosphere in a flash. UAV 15 wavered. He pushed hard on the flight stick, picking its nose up and plowing into the bomb assembly as his control unit’s visual screen went blank.

A second later he felt the ground shaking beneath him, a gentle roll that quickly blossomed into a harsh jerk up and down.

He had ignited the nuke, and its shock had exploded the other one as well.