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

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

“He’s in-country,” Smith told Danny.

“Any trouble?”

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

“Were they compromised?” Danny asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No thanks. Too much on the plane.”

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

“How was he?” she asked.

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

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

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

“How was Ray?”

“A sphinx, as usual.”

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

“Cold?” asked Danny.

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

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

“Sounds good,” said Danny.

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

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

3

Iran

THE NEW HIDING PLACE WAS A COLLECTION OF CRAGS at the back end of what had been a farm in the foothills. It hadn’t been tilled in years, and the two men who’d been watching it reported that they hadn’t seen anyone nearby since they’d arrived some forty-eight hours before.

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

“We’ll be ready, Cap,” said Grease.

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

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

Better bullets than a pillow.

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

He should sleep. He needed to be alert.

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

“They’ll get rid of it somewhere.”

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

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

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

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

“Is that my nickname now?” Turk asked.

“Could be. There’s a lot worse.”

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

4

Washington, D.C.

“I’VE NEVER SMOKED IN MY LIFE.” PRESIDENT TODD rose from the chair, defiant, angry, ready to do battle. “Never.”

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

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

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

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