“No one does that,” I agreed.
And yet there was no door hidden in the wall.
“Shall we go ask the major again?” she asked.
“It’s that or go out for a beer.”
Ghost wagged his tail. Booze hound. But as we approached the door, Ghost immediately started growling. The fur on his back stood up like the bristles on a wire brush, and he barked sharply at the closed bathroom door.
“ Cuidado,” snapped Lydia, bringing the rifle up.
I pulled open the door and we went in fast. The room was as we left it. Ghost ran straight to the desk that blocked the bathroom and his growls deepened. Something was pulling the wolf out from under the dog’s facade.
“Cover me,” I said as I grabbed the desk and hauled it out of the way. Lydia and Ghost moved to one side. I drew my gun and yanked the bathroom door open.
The soldiers we’d roughed up were where we had left them, except that they were dead. Their throats had been torn away and they lay in a lake of blood. The metal cuffs I’d used to secure the major were twisted out of shape as if someone had put them in a vise and applied a hell of a lot of leverage. Or an unnatural amount of physical strength.
And the major was gone.
Ghost snarled. Not at the dead men, but at the rear wall of the small cubicle. There were bloody handprints on the wood behind the toilet, and the back wall-actually my missing hidden door-stood ajar. I quieted Ghost with a gesture as I bent close to the opening. There was no sound, but a harsh, foul-smelling odor wafted out on a sluggish current of air. It wasn’t the stink of petroleum or the sewage smell of methane, and it wasn’t the garlic I’d swallowed. This was a stench that provoked the most primitive reactions in me so that in my head the Civilized Man cringed back, the Cop became aware and defensive, and the Warrior bared his teeth in fearful, vicious defiance.
It was the sick-sweet aroma of rotting meat.
The perfume of death.
Chapter One Hundred Eight
Near Aghajari Oil Refinery
June 16, 5:54 a.m.
Violin tapped her earpiece. “Oracle.”
“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”
“Patch me through to my mother.”
Lilith came on the line in a few seconds. “Where are you?”
“I’m a mile from the Aghajari refinery.”
“Good. The rest of the team is ten minutes out. Leave a trail of bread crumbs for them.”
Violin patted her pockets to make sure that she had plenty of transponders. They were small and designed to look like discarded cigarette butts. All she had to do was crush the filter to activate the battery. All Arklight field teams had trackers.
“And, daughter?” said Lilith.
“Yes?”
“Be smart.”
“You trained me well, Mother.”
“I’m not talking about the mission. I trust you in combat. But you know nothing at all about men.”
Violin hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not a good liar, my love. I saw how you looked at Captain Ledger, and how he looked at you. I did not live my entire life in a cell. Don’t let infatuation or any other feeling affect you. Not now, not tonight. Be the warrior you are.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“‘Yes, Mother.’ I wonder if you heard a word I said.”
“I hear you, Mother. I’ll be careful and I’ll be smart.”
“Good,” said Lilith. “And there’s one more thing…”
“Yes?”
“When you face the Upierczi… I know some of them are your brothers.”
“Yes.”
“They are not family to us, girl. They are monsters. Show them mercy and they will consume you.”
In the darkness, Violin smiled. It was as cold as knife steel. “Mother-‘mercy’ was a lesson you never taught me.”
She disconnected the call and melted into the shadows.
Chapter One Hundred Nine
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:57 a.m.
I backed away from the open door. “Listen, this is what we came for. Go upstairs until you get a signal and then get everyone down here.”
Lydia eyed me dubiously. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait right here until you get back.”
“C’mon, Gaucho… I was born at night but it wasn’t last night.”
“Just go. That’s an order, Warbride. Clock’s ticking so do it now.”
She gave me the kind of look my mother gave me when she was really pissed, but she did as she was told. “Try to be alive when we get back,” she snapped, and then with a swirl of black robes she was gone.
I stepped over the corpses and moved to the door once more, listening to the darkness. Nothing. I even tried the earbud once more. Same thing. I would like to think that the lack of signal was simple interference from the dense rock, but I wasn’t actually stupid.
“Uh-oh,” I said to Ghost. I said it like Scooby-Doo. “Rut-roh!’ The joke didn’t make either of us feel any better.
I debated getting the hell out of there, and if this mission was about anything else I would have. This was so phony they should have just painted the word “Trap” on the secret door. On the other hand, if I walked away now and the device was really here, then what was my next play? Buy a condolence card for the relatives of anyone who used to live in the Middle East? Not much of an option.
I licked my lips and used my toe to nudge the door open. I wasn’t afraid of smaller explosives like Semtex. Ghost was trained to sniff them out and warn me. I glanced at him. He wasn’t barking but he was shivering and his hair was standing out in all directions. Not as comforting as I would have liked. I clicked my tongue and he flinched. Then he shook his body like he was shaking off cold water and he looked up at me with troubled eyes. I wished he could talk because the information his senses were processing were probably going to be pretty crucial to my survival over the next few minutes. But only Lassie can explain complex predicaments with a bark; Ghost was merely a dog.
Letting the barrel and flashlight lead the way, I stepped out of the bloody bathroom and into a narrow passage with rough stone walls. The same kind of stone as the wall in the picture Rasouli showed me. Rough, gray white. A little whiter than the walls behind the metal stairs I’d climbed down. A different mineral composition this far down.
I moved down the hallway. Ghost, as silent as his name, was right behind me. The corridor turned and turned, making sharp rights and lefts and then tilted as it angled down deeper into the underbelly of the desert bedrock. The air moved past me, flowing up from below. The stink of death was still there.
I rounded the last turn and the hallway ended at an open doorway beyond which was a massive chamber. There were stacks of wooden crates in uneven rows, but this was clearly not a storeroom. I stood in a vast cavern whose ceiling was a mass of dripstone stalactites that hung like the fangs of an infinitely large dragon. Water dripped seventy feet to the concrete floor, where it pooled around broken stones, fallen rock, and the corpses of at least two dozen men.
They were piled into a mound, their bodies torn and slashed, their skin crawling with maggots and cockroaches and vermin that skittered away from my flashlight beam. The stench of all that rotting meat was dreadful.
I moved cautiously forward. All of the bodies were male, and some of them were naked. No way to tell if they were Iranian, but that was my guess. Many of them were tough-looking, well-muscled, in their twenties and thirties. From the uniforms of the clothed ones I could tell that they were refinery roughnecks and security people. Some of the naked ones probably were too; the killers had likely made them strip off their uniforms before the killing began. I wondered if one of the killers was wearing a major’s uniform.