Turk rose to a sitting position. “What time is it?”
“Oh-seven-twenty. Come on. We have to move.”
“Did you wake me up?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
“What’s happened? Were we spotted?” asked Turk.
“No—they have a new mission for us. For you.”
“Huh?”
“We’re not done yet,” added Grease, walking out around the sand pile.
Turk shook out the blanket he’d slept on and folded it up. The control gear and his rifle were sitting next to him. He checked the pack, made sure everything was there, then shouldered it and went to find the others.
Gorud, the Israeli, and Captain Granderson were standing near the hood of the car, bent over a paper map. Not one of them looked anything less than disgusted.
“Here’s the pilot now,” said the Israeli. “Let’s ask him.”
“We have to get up beyond Qom without being seen,” said Granderson. “We have to be up there before midnight. They want you to launch another strike. And they won’t tell us where it is until we’re in place.”
“How can we go somewhere if we don’t know where we’re going?” asked Turk.
“Even the pilot is baffled,” said the Israeli darkly.
“It’s not his fault,” answered Gorud. He slid the map around to show Turk. “We’ll backtrack up this way, and go the long way around, across the mountains, then come down through the desert. This way, we avoid the area they hit altogether.”
“Back up a second,” said Turk. “How are we going to attack the place again? It blew up.”
“It’s another facility,” said Gorud. “They didn’t know it was there. But they’re not sharing details at the moment. This is roughly where we’re going. It’s north of Qom.”
Qom—rendered sometimes on maps as Q’um, Qum, or Ghom—was located about a hundred miles south of Tehran, and at least two hundred by air from where they were. Qom was a holy city, with hundreds of seminaries and universities. It housed a number of important sites sacred to the Shi’ite branch of Islam, and served as the general locus of several nuclear enrichment plants.
“We have to go north,” said Granderson. “Stay as far away from the crash site as possible. Then we’ll cut east. We don’t want to be stopped, if at all possible.”
“What do we do if we are?” asked Grease, peering over Turk’s shoulder.
“Deal with it, depending on the circumstances.”
WITH THE CAR AHEAD OF THE TROOP TRUCK, THEY drove northward through the desert on a barely discernible road. They risked the lack of pavement to cut an hour off their time and avoid the highway, which one of the scouts said had been heavily traveled by military and official vehicles since dawn. The scrub on the hillside gradually became greener as they drove, and soon they saw a small patchwork of narrow streams and ditches, with an occasional shallow pond.
Turk, sitting in the back passenger seat of the car, passed the time by trying to imagine what sort of people lived here and what their lives were like. Farmers of some sort, though most seemed to have given up tilling some years before. The handful of buildings they passed—always very quickly—looked abandoned.
As they wound their way down on a road that led west, they passed a high orchard whose fruit trees were fed from a shallow but wide creek along the road. Two men were inspecting the trees. Turk slid down in the seat and watched them stare as they passed.
A few minutes later they found the road blocked by a dozen goats ambling passively down the hill. The goatherd was in no hurry to move, even when the Israeli, impatient in the driver’s seat, began to use the horn. The goatherd cast an evil eye at the car and the truck behind it, slowly guiding his charges off the road.
“You think he knows we’re foreigners?” Turk asked Grease when they finally cleared the obstruction.
“I think he doesn’t like the government or the army,” said Grease. “Common out here.”
A few minutes later, as they approached the heart of the valley, Gorud spotted a pair of Iranian soldiers near the side of the road. They were about a half mile outside of a small hamlet that marked the intersection of their trail and a wider road that led to a local highway north.
“There’ll be a roadblock,” said Gorud over the team radio to Granderson and the others in the truck. “You’re escorting us away from the earthquake zone. We’re under orders from the oil ministry to report to Kerman by noon.”
Kerman was an administrative center, sufficiently big and far enough away that it should impress whoever stopped them.
Sure enough, a checkpoint appeared two bends later. Two soldiers ambled from the side of the road as they approached. The men, both privates and neither old enough to grow more than a loose stubble on their chins, raised their arms to stop the car.
“I talk,” said Gorud. “You can mumble in Russian, but it’s best if you don’t say anything.”
He rolled down the window as Dread eased on the brakes. Rather than getting out, Gorud climbed up so that he was sitting on the ledge of the door, talking over the roof to the two soldiers. He waved papers at them, speaking in rapid Farsi.
An officer walked out from behind the small clump of trees. His body language said he had a long day in front of him and didn’t want it to start badly.
Gorud took full advantage, and began yelling at the man before he even reached the road. He slipped out from the window, papers in hand, and began walking toward him, still yelling. The officer finally put up his hands apologetically, then waved at the driver to continue. The two privates stepped back and Gorud got in the car.
“Go, go, go, go,” he said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”
Turk relaxed and leaned his head to the right, looking past Gorud to see what lay ahead.
The sharp crack of rifle made him start to turn his head. There was another shot a second later, then automatic rifle fire and a light machine gun, but by then Grease had grabbed him and pushed him down toward the floor to protect him.
10
CIA campus, Virginia
RAY RUBEO TOUCHED HIS EAR BEFORE REPLYING TO Breanna’s question—a bad sign, she realized.
“You might have enough vehicles to strike both plants,” he told her.
“From what you’ve seen of the three-dimensional map,” said Danny, “do you think it’s possible?”
“Possible, Colonel, is one thing. Just about anything is possible. But will it happen? That is another question.”
“Your best guess, Ray. Will it work?”
Rubeo frowned, and crossed his arms. The body at the front of the conference room appeared almost real—if Breanna squinted, she would have sworn that Rubeo was actually standing there. But in fact he was speaking from his home out West; his image was a hologram.
“I think it’s the sort of gamble we can only decide to take when we have all the target data,” said Rubeo.
“What if we don’t get any more?” asked Breanna.
“Then it becomes a computing problem. A difficult one.”
“All right, thank you,” she said. “We’ll be in touch soon.”
The holographic projection disappeared.
“He’s in a particularly upbeat mood,” said Danny.
“What do you think?”
“Unless the Agency develops more information in the next few hours, I think you have to split the forces,” said Danny. “You only have a few hours left.”
“I’m not even confident they can get the best route figured out by then,” confessed Breanna. “There’s so little data on the sites.”
She swung in the chair and picked up the phone to call Jonathon Reid, who was over in the CIA main building.
“We’re still working on it,” said Reid when they connected. “By eight A.M. our time, I hope to have a definitive word on which of the two sites it is. New images from the 57 would be helpful.”