Crocker spun and continued to the front corner, knelt, aimed, and fired. A stream of nine-millimeter bullets cut down an Iranian standing with his back to him. Another bent over his wounded compatriot beyond the opposite corner. Crocker squeezed the trigger and took him down, too.
Then he hurried to the wounded soldier, who was holding his chest. The man started to shout a warning that was cut off by the two bullets Crocker pumped into his head.
Seeing another flash of lightning, he entered the structure and located the door that led to a metal stairway. Akil limped up behind him holding his ankle and wearing a gas mask.
Crocker pointed to the steps. Akil slapped his arm and pointed to his ears.
Crocker had forgotten his earplugs and mask. He quickly fished them out of his pack, along with another thirty-round magazine for the Kashtan that he stuck in the back pocket of his pants. Ritchie and Mancini ran up behind him with masks in place and guns ready, pushed past, and entered the dark stairway.
Their footsteps echoed off the metal steps down to the fourth floor. At the landing Crocker squeezed past them and entered a hallway with Akil at his elbow. About fifteen yards away he saw an older man in dark pants and a white shirt who was holding a brown folder. Mancini rolled a grenade across the carpeted floor that exploded and obscured everything with thick purple smoke. They were in.
Crocker felt his way along the wall in the direction of the office in the far corner-the one that, according to the diagram, belonged to General Suleimani. Another grenade went off. Even with the mask in place, he caught a whiff of a sickening smell, then passed a kitchen of some sort where he saw a woman doubled over, puking against the wall.
A siren blasted so loud it literally stopped him in his tracks and hurt his chest. He heard what he thought was Akil’s voice announcing in Farsi that there was an emergency that required everyone to evacuate the building immediately.
Someone stumbled into Crocker, who bashed him in the face with the butt of his weapon as the siren produced by a black fourteen-by-fourteen-inch device Mancini had brought continued to screech in ungodly 150-decibel short blasts.
Crocker continued toward the target office and felt his skin burning, thanks to another device Mancini had deployed-a compact NLW microwave emitter that penetrated clothing and caused water molecules to vibrate at high speed under human skin.
Crocker took a more old-fashioned approach, kicking in the door to Suleimani’s office and firing at the two men hiding behind the big wooden desk. Their bodies flew back. Blood splattered against the window and the wall and started to seep into the sepia-colored carpet.
Crocker rushed forward to see whether he could identify Suleimani when something hit the back of his head. Since he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he staggered for a second, then wheeled and released a stream of bullets that tore apart a bald man’s neck and chest and sent the metal lamp he was holding flipping in the air and crashing to the floor.
Crocker felt a lump on the back of his head and a trickle of blood. Stepping over the writhing body, he hurried down another hallway to the front of the building. Gunshots ricocheted and echoed. He practically smashed into Ritchie, who was running the other way. Ritchie said through his mask, “The floor has been neutralized. We’re grabbing shit and heading for the stairway.”
“You find Alizadeh?”
“We killed everyone we could find. It’s hard as hell to see.”
“Go ahead! Don’t wait for me.”
He entered the square office that faced the avenue below, saw a big photo of Ayatollah Khomeini on one wall, a large blue-and-white Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution flag on the other. On the desk sat a framed photo of a girl kneeling beside a German shepherd that looked like Brando’s little brother. Behind him stood tall shelves filled with books in Farsi.
The edge of one of the stacks of shelves stood out farther than the others. He pushed on it, and it clicked into place. Looking for a button or lever, he found one under a nearby shelf. He pulled it and the stack sprung open. Inside the wall was a little dark room, at the end of which he found a circular stairway filled with smoke.
Crocker took a deep breath through the mask and climbed down one flight to another dark space. Here the stairway ended. Sweating profusely, he felt along the wall, found a door, and pushed it open a crack. A helmeted man stood with his back to it. Another uniformed man was talking excitedly. A third man out of view was saying something, too.
Crocker reached into the side pocket of his backpack, grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, counted five seconds, then opened the door, rolled it forward, and quickly closed the door. The explosion shook the walls and hurt his head.
Readying the Kashtan, he plowed through the doorway into the smoke-filled, red-misted room, where men were moaning and screaming for help. He saw one figure on the floor holding his mangled leg. A chunk of plaster from the ceiling fell on Crocker, and he slipped and fell, hitting his chin and ripping off the mask.
Part of the ceiling crashed onto a metal table, and someone opened fire. Gas burning his eyes, Crocker rolled left past the legs of a chair and under the table. Bullets ricocheted throughout the room. Seeing a man’s booted foot, he grabbed hold of it and pulled.
The man hit the floor, and Crocker scrambled clear of the table with his Chinese handgun ready, smoke and dust obscuring his view. He could see enough to tell this was a conference room, with a rectangular table in the middle, charts and maps, and speckles of fresh blood on the walls.
He fired two bullets in the head of the man he’d pulled down. On the floor he saw two other bodies. None of the dead men looked familiar.
Hearing people shouting in the hall, he dusted debris off his head and exited the room. Approximately twenty feet away he saw the backs of two soldiers who were running behind a shorter man of the same approximate shape as Alizadeh. He tore after them, steadied the TU-90, and fired. One of the soldiers spun and slid into the wall, leaving a wide ribbon of red. The other returned fire with an automatic weapon.
Crocker dove into an open doorway, waited several seconds, then poked his head out. The second soldier and the man who was with him turned right at the end of the hallway and out of sight. He’d lost the Kashtan somewhere, so he took the automatic weapon dropped by the soldier against the wall. It was an Iranian variant of a M5, called an MPT-9 Tondar-short, with a pistol grip and long curved magazine that Crocker hoped was mostly full. He ran to the end of the hall and hung a right.
He wanted Alizadeh so bad he could almost taste it. But this hallway turned out to be empty, except for discarded papers and shoes. He realized he was headed toward the back of the building. Two-thirds of the way, he saw gray smoke drifting out a doorway, then spotted a trail of fresh blood leading to a stairway.
The angry voices of men shouting in Farsi echoed from below. Out of breath and eyes watering, he hurried down. When he reached the landing and turned left, he saw another flight of steps, and past them Alizadeh and a soldier resting in the corner next to the door to floor two. Alizadeh’s foot was bleeding. The soldier was bent over him. Looking up and seeing Crocker, he reached for the weapon slung across his chest.
Crocker launched himself, firing the MPT-9 at the same time. Bullets tore into the soldier’s torso, but still he managed to squeeze off a few shots. One struck Crocker in the right forearm, causing him to land awkwardly on the second step from the second-floor landing, twist his right ankle, and crash into the soldier, whose body helped break his fall.
As he struggled to get his bearings, he felt something slice into the skin on his right shoulder. His eyes coming into focus, he saw the triumphant look on Alizadeh’s face, eyes glowing with hatred and the shining silver Swiss military watch on his wrist-the same one he’d seen in the underground prison in Barinas.