The pilot turned the helicopter around. Two shooters came into Green’s line of fire, and their muzzle flashes soon died. “Got the shooters by the acacia.”
“Nailed the three on the left,” Walker replied.
Roberts looked at the white van. It was quickly disappearing in the distance. He made a swift decision. “We’re going after them. Green, advise the command. Tell them we’ll be late.”
“Right away, sir.”
Green got through to the command center in Nairobi, Kenya and updated them on their status.
“How did they know we were coming?” asked one of the SEALs from the back.
“They’ve gotten to Weydow and made him talk,” Roberts said in a tense voice.
“You think he’s in the van?” asked Walker.
“Not sure—”
A loud bang rattled the back of the helicopter, almost jolting Roberts out of his seat. A moment later, the control panel beeped a sharp sound of alarm.
“We’re hit,” the pilot said. He studied the screens in front of him. “An RPG clipped our rear rotor.”
“We’re going down?” Roberts asked.
“Yeah, we’re going down,” the pilot replied.
The Black Hawk overtook the white van. Roberts squinted but could not make out the driver. The ground sped toward them fast and hard. The pilot slowed down. He tried to seal the helicopter’s fuel lines to avoid an explosion on impact. Roberts braced for the crash landing, a sick feeling forming in the pit of his stomach. His team was going down on his watch. He muttered a short prayer.
The helicopter swerved in a large circle. It tilted to the left and began another turn. The pilot struggled with the system controls. He tried to level the helicopter and execute a somewhat controlled crash landing. The main rotor stopped turning. The Black Hawk fell into gravity’s clutches. It completed another 360-degree turn.
Then it crashed on its starboard side.
The impact rolled the helicopter over. The main rotor blades crumpled as if made of tinfoil, the metal crunching and the glass shattering all around them. The cabin walls closed in. Everything not fastened to the Black Hawk’s airframe was hurled around the cabin like balls in a bingo blower. The pilot’s crashworthy seat protected him from the direct impact, but the windshield folded in as it hit the ground, killing the pilot and Roberts instantly.
The Black Hawk exploded into a million fiery fragments.
Chapter One
Justin Hall glanced through his binoculars at the dirt road down in the valley, expecting to see the silver Toyota of the Iranian defector. His eyes took in the vast semi-desert, the scrub and the gas pipeline alongside the road, the hot air sizzling over the ground, but no sign of the car. He wondered if the nuclear physicist had changed his mind. Or worse. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards or one of the Iranian intelligence services had caught him.
He sighed, blowing at the sand in front of his face. He was on his stomach, observing from a vantage point atop one of the jagged hills in this remote part of northeast Iran. The sun had been baking the land for the last two hours at a constant ninety degrees. Justin wiped the sweat off his brow with his tan headscarf. He took a few sips from his canteen. The warm water did nothing to quench his parched throat.
Justin glanced at the road again, this time through the scope of his C8 carbine. Something moved on the side of the road. A flock of goats, seven, no eight, and a young boy, perhaps no older than eleven, driving them toward the road. Justin smiled as the boy looked both ways for traffic before taking the livelihood of his family to the other side. One of the stubborn goats decided to relieve itself in the middle of the road. The boy ran and shooed it away, back to the flock.
There had been no sighting of a car, not even a motorcycle or a bicycle, for more than an hour. Along with Nathan Smyth, his partner in this clandestine rescue operation of the Canadian Intelligence Service, Justin had travelled early in the morning from Turkmenistan up north. The team had crossed through the porous border with the help of two Turkmen drug runners familiar with the broken terrain. This area had been a theater of war during most of its five thousand years of history. It remained a lawless haven and a preferred route for traffickers smuggling Afghan opium to Russian and European markets. Persians, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Arabs lived in a state of a delicate balance of power shared among tribal leaders and clansmen.
“What are we going to do?” asked Nathan, stretched next to Justin. He leaned back against a large boulder, seeking shelter from the scorching sun.
“We’ll wait,” Justin replied.
“Our guides are growing restless.”
“They’ll have to wait, like we do.”
Justin hung his binoculars around his neck and crawled back. Once he was behind the boulder, he got to his feet and shook the dirt off his desert camouflage fatigues. He took another sip of warm water and used it to wash his dried mouth. He headed toward the battered Nissan Pathfinder of the drug runners. They were supposed to keep watch on the other side of the hill overlooking the steep path leading to the top. Justin found them sheltered away from the heat, enjoying the air conditioning in their cabin, glancing occasionally at the path through the windshield.
One of the guides, the younger one sitting in the driver’s seat, rolled down the window. “Your man is not coming,” he said in English with a heavy accent. “We should go back.”
Justin shook his head. “No. He’ll come. We’ll wait.”
Ruslan, the older guide, rolled down his window. He gave Justin a deep frown and a stern headshake. “This is not the deal we had. We brought you here two hours ago. You were meeting someone at ten. It’s now eleven thirty. We must go back,” he said in Arabic.
Justin stepped closer to Ruslan and locked eyes with him. He replied to him in Arabic, “I made no deal with you. You have a deal with Colonel Garryev. Your deal with him is to bring us here and take us back once we’ve finished our job. As you can see, we haven’t.”
Ruslan seemed unfazed by Justin’s words. “Every minute we stay here we risk being discovered. I know government troops patrol this area. You know they hang drug traffickers in this country, do you?” He rubbed his thick neck as if to emphasize his point.
And you know what they do to foreign secret agents derailing their nuclear program?
The thought brought back bitter memories. Five years ago. The deepest, darkest cells of Tehran’s Evin Prison. He spent a long week in solitary confinement. The jailers fed him moldy bread and foul water but put him on a healthy diet of daily beatings. It took the intervention of Canada’s Prime Minister, complicated negotiations, and an exchange of favors before Justin was allowed to go home.
Justin nodded. “I know what they do. You’re not going to lose your necks. Another day perhaps, but not today.”
Ruslan grinned. “Another thirty minutes. If he’s not here, we’re driving back, with or without you.”
Justin shrugged and walked to the edge of the path. A light breeze toyed with the loose flap of his headscarf. He took a deep breath, enjoying the temporary relief from the dry air. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and searched the bottom of the hill and the surrounding area. No sign of human or animal life. Just patches of scraggly brush, rock boulders, and sand. A lot of sand.
He turned around.
Ruslan gave him a frown and tapped the gold Rolex on his wrist. “Another thirty minutes, Mohammed,” he said.
Colonel Garryev from Turkmenistan’s Ministry of National Security had introduced the two agents to Ruslan as Mohammed and Mehmet — Nathan’s idea, since he loved M&M’s chocolates. They were liaison officers of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as the PKK, a terrorist group waging war against Turkey and seeking the creation of an independent Kurdistan. The two officers were to obtain information from a reliable source about operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. One of the PKK’s largest bases in northern Iraq had been attacked by a joint Turkish and Iranian force, giving credibility to the Canadian secret agents’ cover story. Colonel Garryev knew the true identities of Justin and Nathan, but he was in the dark about the nature of their operation in Iran.