But she threw back her head and laughed, and then she walked away into the night.
In my earbud Top said, “Abdul’s two minutes out, Cap’n. We’re ready to roll.”
“Copy that,” I said with a sigh.
Ghost looked at me as if I was the biggest fool who ever walked on two legs. He was a great judge of character and I could find no fault with his opinion.
Feeling like an idiot, I turned and ran toward the warehouse where my team was waiting.
Chapter One Hundred
On the Road
Iran
June 16, 4:17 a.m.
The plan was for Abdul to take us to an auto repair yard ostensibly owned by his cousin but actually owned by the CIA. He wasn’t happy to see us. He was seriously disgruntled about having a woman along on what he clearly regarded as a “man’s mission.” He said as much in various ways, making sure his comments were loud enough for Lydia to hear. Regruntling him wasn’t high on my list of priorities. If we’d had a lot more time I might have put him in a room with Lydia so they could talk it out and come to some sort of meeting of the minds, though admittedly that would probably end with a meeting between her foot and his nuts. Detente would suffer.
We followed him in the vegetable truck. Even with what we were facing and everything that Lilith had told us-or maybe because of it-everyone was laughing during the trip. Mostly making fun of Bunny, though I finally got some mileage out of “Armanihandjob.” Yeah, I know, juvenile… but as an icebreaker on the way to de-arm a nuke possibly planted by vampires, what do you want?
Abdul led us to the deserted auto repair yard and parked by the vehicle that he would use to drive us into the refinery compound: a clunker of a Chinese Foton diesel truck. It had room for two up front and a big flatbed in the back.
Lydia turned to Abdul. “Unless you got a cloak of invisibility, cuate, how are we-”
Abdul cut her off with a curt shake of his head and then pointed. “Of course not,” he snapped irritably. He strode over to the closest box and opened it. True to its label there was a big hunk of machinery in there. Some kind of turbine. However, Abdul fiddled with a metal knob and the turbine suddenly opened with a hiss of hydraulics. It was a shell and inside was a tiny capsule with a bench. Bunny whistled, but Abdul gave him a sour look. “We made these to smuggle in a team of techs to the nuclear power station. To sabotage the centrifuges.” He shook his head. “We spent three years developing this plan. Three. Now- poof! — it has to be scrapped.”
Top smiled at him. “Did your station chief explain to you exactly what we’re doing?”
Abdul shook his head. “I don’t care. You Americans all think you’re Austin Powers. It’s all bullshit.”
Top, still smiling, bent close and patted Abdul on the shoulder. “I’m really sorry to screw up your plans for recreational vandalism, my friend, but we’re trying to keep your country from getting blown into orbit. So, if it’s all the same to you, you can take your sour feelings and your little pouty face and go piss up a rope.”
Abdul stared at him, uncertain how to react because Top’s friendly and affable smile never even wavered. Then Abdul’s eyes shifted away from Top and swept over the faces of the other members of Echo Team. He wasn’t playing to a friendly crowd.
“Okay, okay, but this is bullshit,” Abdul insisted. His expression suggested that he’d like Top and the rest of us to die in the desert and be eaten by vultures. Three years is a lot of time to invest in anything, but overall my nerves were running so high that, like Top, I managed not to give a shit. You know, the whole nukes thing.
I asked, “What’s the plan to get us into the refinery?”
“These are valuable parts that have been back-ordered for months,” said Abdul. “I have the actual parts here too, and I would have delivered them and waited until these parts were ordered for the nuclear plant.” He waited for us to console him about his great loss, got no love, and continued. “We set it up that way so that when the team was ready we could show up virtually any time of day or night.”
“Good.”
We were out of earshot of the others and Abdul cut me a quick look. He ticked his chin in Top’s direction. “Is what he said true?”
“Unfortunately.”
He sighed and cursed some more, mostly to himself. Or to God. When he had the last shell open he waved the team over and began locking us into the metal capsules. It was uncomfortably like going into a coffin, but it would get us in. I tucked Ghost into one with a rawhide bone and fresh water. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this, and he was trained for it, though he still contrived to give me an aggrieved look as I closed the door.
Because of space constraints, the cases had to be loaded after we were inside the capsules, so there was a lot of nauseous swaying as the chain hoist lifted us up and a heavy-and perhaps deliberate-thump as the crates were set down into the stake bed. The capsule allowed me to sit straight and move my arms and legs a bit. Standing and lying down were out of the question and after a while-and a few thousand jolts and bumps from the truck-my lower back was starting to sing a sad song. I figured Bunny had it worse than me. Kid was six foot seven, and Abdul had packed him into the crate like a magazine in a gun. Not a lot of rattle room.
We were radio silent, giving a bit of respect to Iran’s military police. They were a long way from stupid. Between their own science and what they bought from China and North Korea, they had an impressive array of security sensors, backed by satellites, hidden detection bases, and a general sense of hostile paranoia.
The Foton had, apparently, no shocks or suspension worth mentioning, and I do believe that Abdul found every single goddamn pothole to drive over along the way. Helluva guy. I’d let him marry my sister, if I had one and didn’t like her.
I spent the rest of the ride going over the de-arming sequences. I have to admit it, though… when the crate was opened and the air of the refinery, reeking of oil and sweat and heat, struck me full in the face, it was a relief.
The crate had begun to feel like a coffin.
Chapter One Hundred One
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 4:56 a.m.
The refinery was a crazy house of people. It seemed like thousands to me, running, yelling, pounding up and down metal staircases, moving pallets of fifty-five gallon drums. For them, it was just another day.
There were so many people, and our intel about the daily operations of the refinery were so good-thanks to the now deeply bitter Abdul-that we were able to vanish right into the human herd of petroleum workers. Bug, at Mr. Church’s direction, had hacked into the operations computers here and inserted our work records, IDs, and other data. If someone didn’t recognize us and went to check, they’d find out that we were either just transferred from another rig or had been there for a while but in another part of the massive Aghajari complex. No one took the risk of questioning security officers. Too many of the ordinary cops on rigs like this were actually members of Rasouli’s secret police. This wasn’t Stalinist Russia, but it wasn’t tremendously far away from it, either.
Before we left the storage room where Abdul uncrated us, we synched up and ran through the game plan. We had miles of the refinery to cover. The photo of the nuke showed a poured concrete floor and rock walls, which meant that we didn’t have to crawl around up in the pipes looking for it. However, there was a basement and four subbasements that included endless corridors, storerooms, offices, closets, and even staff quarters, as well as rooms dedicated to water, sewage, electricity, fire systems, alarms, and more. We divided the place into three sections, checked the function of our digital Geiger counters, tapped our earbuds to make sure everyone was on the team channel, and then went to work.