“Okay,” I said as everyone crouched down, “combat call signs from here out. Everyone on coded channel one-eight. Warbride, Ghost, and I will do a sweep of the north half of the lower level. Dancing Duck, you and Chatterbox take the upper levels. Shouldn’t take you long.”
That was true enough. Although a bomb does more damage in an air burst-which could be approximated by mounting it high on the rig-the likelihood of it being there was small. It would be spotted and it wouldn’t do as much damage to the oil, and the oil was a more likely target than a refinery stuck out in the middle of a desert. The upper-deck sweeps were necessary for certainty, though, even if they felt like time wasters.
“Sergeant Rock and Green Giant, sweep the lower levels. If either or both teams come up dry, then rendezvous with me down under. Rasouli’s picture showed a cavern or underground chamber.”
“What if we meet the fearless vampire hunters or those Red Knight goons?” asked Lydia.
“They’re not Iranian nationals,” I said. “No grace for them. So that means one person on each team has a nonlethal gun for diplomacy and the other has live rounds for deal-closing. Chatterbox, Sergeant Rock, and Warbride are the best shooters, so you get to play with the grown-up toys.”
“Hooah,” they acknowledged.
I unslung the bag I carried and opened it. We had used most of the garlic powder and oil according to Jonatha Corbiel-Newton’s instructions, but there was some left. Everyone held their hands up and I filled their palms with powder.
Bunny’s face was screwed up in distaste as he choked his down. “Never eating Italian food again,” he complained. He washed it down with a mouthful of water. We’d been following this ritual for hours now, and I felt like my stomach was churning from all I’d swallowed. I passed around my pack of gum and everyone took a stick.
I used the last of the powder on Ghost, working it into his fur. He absolutely hated it, and it probably reduced his sense of smell by two-thirds, but I was the pack leader and he endured it. Pretty sure he was going to crap in my shoes first chance he got.
Before we broke the huddle I added a final note. “This is a shit job and we all know it. We’re rolling on squeaky wheels here as far as intel goes and we know for a fact that we have more enemies than friends. Watch your asses, trust no one, and do not get taken.”
“Yeah,” said Warbride, “and don’t take candy from strangers.”
Everyone grinned, and it seemed for a moment as if they were all at peace with this. Maybe, I thought, it was the kind of warrior’s calm that sometimes happens when soldiers know that they’re walking into the valley of the shadow of death and that there’s no real way out.
Chapter One Hundred Two
Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park
Tehran, Iran
June 16, 5:00 a.m.
The last call was the kicker, and he was looking forward to this. It rang eight times before Grigor answered.
“There’s been kind of a wrinkle,” said Vox breathlessly. “This is urgent and you have to act right now. You need to get the triggers in place, and I mean right now.”
“We don’t have the-”
“I know, I know. Look, Grigor, you’ve played fair with me and I’ve been jerking you around. That was wrong, and I’m saying it to you right now. I was wrong and I apologize. I’m also sorry as hell about your son. I… lost my son recently, too. So I’m going to stop screwing around with you. I’ll text you the password to activate the code scrambler.”
Grigor said nothing, but Vox was sure he could hear the Upier’s mind churning.
“Something’s happened that made me realize that I’ve been screwing with the wrong guy here.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s LaRoque… he knows. ”
“Knows what?”
“Everything. He knows about the bombs. He knows that the Upierczi are about to rise up. He knows everything.”
“Impossible!”
“No it’s not impossible. He’s kept you in chains for eight hundred years-do you think he hasn’t had you monitored? Especially since the rebirth? You’re more of a threat to him than ever, and he knows it. Just as he knows that the Order isn’t as strong as it used to be. The Agreement’s in pieces, and you know as well as I do that Rasouli is never going to restart the Shadow War. That fucker wants a true jihad. Guess who will be caught in the middle? Guess who LaRoque will use as cannon fodder to force a new Shadow War? Do you honestly think LaRoque or Nicodemus cares a wet fart about you?”
“So what?” sneered Grigor. “Let them come for us. Let them hunt us in the tunnels.”
“Jesus, man, do you ever listen to yourself? Stop auditioning for the remake of Dracula and pay attention. LaRoque isn’t going to come after you himself. He’s too afraid of you. No, he’s leaked information to the authorities. To the DMS, to that agent Ledger, the one who killed your son at the hotel. LaRoque will go into hiding while Special Forces teams come after you, and believe me they will hunt you through the tunnels, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you.”
Grigor was silent, and Vox smiled to himself. Nice. Now it was time to play his final card. The one real kicker. The one that would take all the chips on the table.
“Grigor… there’s one more thing.”
“What?” demanded the King of Thorns.
“The American Spec Ops teams have allies in this. Allies who can help them find you and hunt you.”
“Who? Those Sabbatarian fools? We laugh as we kill them-”
Vox said, “Arklight.”
The sound Grigor made was somewhere between a snarl of animal hatred and a hunting scream. Vox leaned away from the phone, wincing. He thought he heard the name Lilith in there somewhere. Vox was sure he had never heard so much hatred directed at a single person before.
It made his groin throb.
“Give me that password,” seethed Grigor. “I will show them a war like nothing they have ever seen. I will drown them in lakes of blood…”
Vox stopped listening to the tirade. He tapped in the password that would activate the code scrambler he had given Grigor. The scrambler, with its powerful satellite uplink that could send detonation codes to those lovely nuclear devices.
As soon as the password went through, Vox called up the file of all DMS personnel and their families and sent that too. What the hell. The Sabbatarians didn’t seem to be getting the job done. Let Edward the Sparkly Vampire and his undead hordes tackle it. That sounded like a whole lot of fun. Maybe Grigor would be the one to finally tear Deacon’s throat out. How sweet would that be?
Vox disconnected the call halfway through Grigor describing how he would crack his enemies’ bones and suck out the marrow. Or something like that. Vox didn’t care.
All of his cares were over.
Chapter One Hundred Three
Arklight Camp
June 16, 5:02 a.m.
Church had a complete tactical operations board in his Humvee. It was a new design, one that used flexible circuits for a display board that could be erected in curved panels to form a large semicircular arena. High-res images and holographic overlays created a three-dimensional model of the two theaters of operation. Louisiana and the Middle East, and this latter was subdivided into four separate locations: the Aghajari oil refinery in Iran, the Beiji oil refinery in Iraq, the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, and the Toot oilfield in Pakistan.
Small glowing dots indicated the transponder signals from the teams that were moving into position.
A central screen showed Aunt Sallie and the TOC at the Hangar. Church was an observer here, watching Auntie run the show.
“All teams on station,” said Aunt Sallie, who was seated to his right at a gleaming command console. “WMD alarms and hot loop equipment stowed. OPs pulled in. All personnel report alert. Infil teams one through six report ready to move immediately. We are at REDCON-One. Waiting for the word.”