The next morning, a knock on Alex’s door brought Casey into the room. “She snores worse than I do.” She cast Alex a look. “But I’m thinking you know that.”
Alex grunted, as a second knock brought in Adira. She grinned at Casey. “I needed that. A good night’s sleep; feeling good.”
Casey groaned, but then she grinned. “Yeah, and you talk in your sleep. You must have hot dreams, huh?” She winked at Alex.
“What?” Adira rounded on her but Casey waved her away.
They found seats or stood waiting as both Sam and Eli opened large cases. Adira and Casey had their abaya scarves around their necks.
“Are we okay to be in here together?” Alex asked. “With unmarried women?”
Adira shrugged. “If you were just an Iranian citizen, I would say definitely not, and you could expect a visit from the morality police. But they’ll turn a blind eye as you are IRG.” She sat at a table and flipped open a small computer tablet and switched to satellite feed. She then selected the Mashhad District, and drilled down on Tous, but the angle and height of the satellite didn’t allow enough clarity on the images.
“Ach, not close enough.” Adira threw her hands up.
“We’ll need to go in — hard and fast,” Alex said.
“Belly of the beast,” Sam said.
“Just the way we like it.” Casey had a twisted grin on her face. “Fight or die.”
Adira nodded. “Fight or die? Yes, and if they take you, you will want to die. And it will be death, eventually, after a long and painful few weeks of psychological and surgical torture.”
Alex got to his feet. “Every second we are here increases our chances of being detected. We need to get this over with before the odds shift.”
“Agreed.” Adira stood. “We need better eyes in there first.” She turned to Eli. “Send in Tweety.”
“Onto it.” Eli flipped open his case and was pulling out a small device in pieces which he began snapping together. When he finished, he had what looked like a small bird in his hands, complete with fake feathers.
He laid it on the bed and then went back to the case. He adjusted the lid, which became a view-screen, with a joystick pad and a few other small controls. Adira went to the window and opened it, and stuck her head out momentarily. Then she pulled back and stood aside. “All clear. Let him fly.”
Eli fiddled at the controls, and then three spikes, one on each wing and a third on the tail, started to spin. Blades flicked out, and then like a small helicopter, the bird lifted soundlessly. Eli guided it to the window. On his screen, their room was displayed in high resolution.
Sam clapped his hands. “Now that is cool.”
Alex grinned. “Spy cam, and all wrapped up in a local bird of prey package. We now have our eyes. Nice work.”
“It’s more than just eyes.” Adira nodded. “Shaped like a desert kestrel, and just like them, can hover on thermals for hours. Perfect camouflage for a spy drone.”
Tweety zoomed past Adira, and the group crowded around Eli’s screen as it darted out the window. The drone rose to several hundred feet and zoomed across the several miles of desert to the town of Tous.
It was small, not more than a single square mile, with only a few thousand residents. The structures were a mix of 1950s modern and extremely ancient, dating back thousands of years. Many of the central structures were enormous sandstone monuments; some towering many stories and built from blocks larger than trucks, and all fitted together with barely a seam showing.
“What are we looking for?” Casey asked, putting her hands on Eli’s shoulders and pretending to massage the Mossad agent.
Eli grimaced but kept his eyes on the screen. “Something that doesn’t fit — Northern Arabic script, or something guarded with no clear reason, and of course, traces of high energy particle radiation.” He looked at a small readout on the side of his screen. “So far we have nothing above background normal, but as we have seen from Mosul, even moving the radioactive matter through the area leaves an atomic trace. Tweety can pick these up.”
“Clever bird,” Sam said.
“Israeli tech.” Adira smiled. “Tell Jack Hammerson I’m happy to trade him some.”
There were few people on the street, and Adira started to point out different buildings to the group. “The Mausoleum of Ferdowsi, and that’s the grave of Akhavan-Sales. All just relics now.” She nodded toward a long wall so old it was now crumbling back into the desert from which it had come. “The Darvaze Razan Gate.” She snorted. “It was an ancient barrier and a place of kings and magic. Many wanted to be buried here, simply because it was rumored to be one of the portals to the afterlife,” she went on. “That large structure there is the Harounieh Dome…”
“See that?” Alex pointed. “Wait, back Tweety up.”
“The dome?” Adira asked.
“Yeah, someone’s inside, pulled back into the shadows, but they’re there.” Alex frowned as he stared at the dome. It was a huge foreboding structure, but something seemed to call to him, draw him to it. He blinked and shook his head to clear it.
“Got something.” Adira pointed at the data rolling up the screen. “Tweety sniffed a trace.”
CHAPTER 13
Tweety landed on the bed and Adira lifted it and stroked it like a real bird. “So, we have a marginal high energy particle spike at the dome, but everything else is insignificant.” Adira shook her head. “Should be more, if what we seek is in there.”
“Might be. Hammerson says they’ve detected mole-holes out in the desert off Kashaf-Roud’s river valley. Just like at their Arak facility — hard to see, very well concealed, but they’re there. He thinks it might indicate something interesting below ground. Like a nuclear facility, or something they felt needed to be bomb-proof. They’ll do further deep penetration scans when the satellite is in a better proximity orbit.”
Alex felt the pulse in his comm. pad, and pulled it out — it was more data from Hammerson. He exhaled with his eyebrows raised as he looked at the images.
“Eli, sending this through to you. Put it up on screen.”
Eli grabbed the data and pulled it into his device and then opened the image file. There were several shots of Tous and the surrounding geography. The first shot was a surface image taken from a few thousand-foot resolution, then what they sought became clear as the layers were pulled back through stratigraphic imaging.
“Ho-leey fuck,” Casey scoffed.
Below the ancient town was a network of tunnels, like a giant many-armed creature with its head directly below the monolithic dome. A single long tunnel extended out to the desert, to the Kashaf-Roud area.
Sam folded huge arms. “Big network. Going to be a lot of bodies in there.”
“That big, that hidden, definitely something worth protecting.” Eli flipped through the images. “Perfect place to assemble tactical nukes.”
“And reanimate freaking corpses,” Casey added, mouth turned down.
“Then let’s shut ’em down,” Alex said, straightening. “Leave nothing behind. We’re not coming back.”
“I heard that.” Casey clapped once, eager to get going.
The group went out fast, piling into the vehicle with Eli in behind the wheel. They sped along the highway, pulling over on a rise above the small town. Alex stepped out with Sam and Adira.
Sam put a scope to his eye. “All quiet.”
“Above ground.” Alex looked over at the tight cluster of dwellings with the huge dome structure toward its center. “We go in fast. If we encounter aggressive resistance, we remove it.” He turned to nod at Casey, who was leaning out of the car window. She gave him a thumbs up.