“Damn!” He cursed with the pain.
“Your nose,” said Grease, next to him. “You have to stop the bleeding. You have a handkerchief?”
“I need the control unit,” said Turk.
He took a step back to the plane but Grease stopped him.
“I’ll get it,” said the sergeant, handing him a patch of cloth—his shirt sleeve, which he’d cut off with a knife. “Put your head back and stop the bleeding. You’ve already lost a lot of blood.”
Turk’s nose felt numb until he pushed the wadded cloth against the nostril. The pain ran up the bone ridge and into the space between his eyes, as if he’d taken an ice pick and plunged it there.
“Let’s go,” said Grease, remerging with the control unit stuffed into Turk’s rucksack.
“Where’s the pilot?” managed Turk through the wadded cloth.
“Dead,” said Grease.
“Aren’t we going to bury him?”
“No time. They’ll be looking for us.”
“It’s a mercy he’s dead,” said the Israeli. “I would have had to kill him myself when we landed.”
THEY DEBATED BRIEFLY WHETHER THEY SHOULD SET the plane on fire, but decided that whatever small advantage it might have in making it harder to get information about them was more than counterbalanced by the fact that it would make it easier to find. Grease squared away the plane as well as he could, hoping to make it less obvious that there had been passengers, but there was nothing he could do about the blood splattered around the interior in blobs both big and small in the back. They set out east, walking along a wide plateau that sat like a ledge above the valley to their right. Had they settled down a few hundred yards in the other direction, or perhaps stayed in the air for another mile, they would have all died in the crash. It was luck or Providence, take your pick, but Grease clearly was awed, giving Turk complete credit for their survival.
“You did a hell of a job,” he told him. “It was a great job.”
It was the first time Grease had said anything positive to him, and yet Turk felt he had to be honest: he hadn’t really done much.
“I just held the nose up, the plane did the rest,” he said, then asked where they were going.
“Train line runs to Naneen,” Grease told him. “We’ll parallel the road and the train tracks. Our guys will pick us up where and when they can.”
“You talked to them?” asked the Israeli.
“They’ll know. I have the GPS. We just have to get there.”
“We blew it up,” said Turk. “The whole place—I wonder.”
“What?” demanded the Israeli.
“The explosion was huge.”
“Nuclear explosions usually are. Even underground.”
“It was a bomb?” asked Turk incredulously. He’d been told they were blowing up machinery.
“Why else would they send you on such a suicide mission?” asked the Israeli, trudging onward.
2
CIA campus, Virginia
BREANNA STOCKARD RUBBED THE TEARS AWAY FROM her cheeks. They were tears of relief, if not outright joy—the indicator on the map was moving in a way that what the computer declared meant Turk was still alive.
She pushed her hand away quickly; she didn’t want the others to notice her emotion.
“I’ve transmitted the information to the ground team,” said Danny Freah. “Gorud just acknowledged.”
“Good.” Breanna glanced away for a moment, collecting herself. “How long before they get there?”
“Hard to say. They were already up near the original rendezvous point.” Danny looked at the three-dimensional holographic display in front of him, tracing the area. “It’s a couple of hundred miles back east. And they’ll have to go south to avoid patrols and whatever else the Iranians put out there.”
“Will they make it in time for tomorrow night?” Breanna asked.
“I can’t even guess. Not at this point.”
“I have preliminary numbers,” said Jonathon Reid from his station. “Just under four megatons. On par with Chagai Two, roughly, at least. Given that the device wasn’t completely ready. It was a close call. A good, good mission.”
Reid rose. Chagai II was an early Pakistani atomic test. Though Western experts continued to debate the matter, it was generally regarded as something of a failure, since it didn’t yield anywhere near the explosion that was intended, which was at least eighteen megatons. (The blast yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima measured between thirteen and eighteen megatons.) The final measure would take some time to determine, using instruments that would provide different data sets, including the magnetic distortion—while the underground explosion did not yield an electromagnetic pulse effect like a high-altitude bomb would, even the extremely slight disruption it produced could be analyzed. In any event, while the yield of the bomb was relatively small, it was still large enough to do considerable damage, and contaminate the area where it was used for decades to come.
“I told the President we would give her a more complete update at the half hour,” Reid told Breanna. “We won’t have visual imagery for another few hours, but the seismic data should be quite enough.”
“We can take some of the video from the WB-57,” Breanna said. “It’s quite impressive.”
“Agreed.”
“Have the Iranians said anything yet?”
“They know something is up—the communication lines went down with the explosion. But it should take them a while to realize the extent of it. They may fear the worst. We’re monitoring the local communications with ferret satellites, so we’ll know pretty much as soon as they do.”
“Mr. Reid, you better look at this,” said Lanny Fu, a CIA analyst tasked to monitor current intelligence from sources outside the operation. “The Iranians just made a status request for all facilities under the Qom directorate.”
“Right on time,” said Reid as he turned back to Breanna. “They fear there’s been an accident or an attack. Their procedure now will be to ask each one to check in, and in the meantime they’ll send someone to the targeted facility.”
“Sir,” interrupted Fu. “The significance here—there’s a code number for a facility on the list that we have no record of.”
“What?”
“I believe there may be another bunker somewhere.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” said Reid. “They have been well calculated. Double-check.”
“I already have,” said Fu. “The analysts have been alerted. We’re working on it.”
“Another lab?” said Breanna.
“I doubt that,” insisted Reid. “I strongly doubt it.”
3
Omidiyeh, Iran
IN THE FIRST FEW MOMENTS AFTER HIS AIRCRAFT WAS struck, Captain Parsa Vahid thought for sure he would have to bail.
Rather than setting off a panic, the knowledge calmed him. It also saved the plane.
Vahid, like many well-trained pilots, became in the crisis a logical, methodical engineer. He worked through a long list of procedures and directions necessary to save the aircraft. If one thing didn’t work—if too much fuel was leaking from one tank, if a control surface didn’t precisely respond—he switched to another, then another, and another, moving on down the checklist as calmly as an accountant tallying the numbers of a sale.
Even when he landed the plane, he confined his thinking to a very narrow checklist. He taxied to the maintenance area, trundling past the white skeleton of a transport that had been battered by an Iraqi attack some twenty-five years before. He shut down the plane and then, finally freed of his life-or-death lists, rose in the cockpit and took the deepest breath of fresh, desert air that he had ever managed.
He was met on the tarmac by the base commander, who asked with a grave face how many of the American B-2s he had seen.