The first car’s doors flung open and two men in Iranian Republican National Guard uniforms hustled out, one holding an AK-47. The other man was waving his arms, clearly agitated.
Sweat dripped from her forehead and stung her eye. She wiped it away and looked back through the scope. Any second now the truck’s back door should open. The men should jump out and open fire on the cars.
But it wasn’t happening.
Lisa watched as one of the military men walked all the way up to the driver’s side of the truck, looking like he was trying to get the attention of the driver.
What was going on? Why hadn’t they begun their attack?
The rear door to the truck remained closed. The three cars were at idle, waiting behind the truck, which was sprawled across the highway. Lisa’s hand muscles were getting tense, her finger digging into the metal ring that formed the trigger guard.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement at the base entrance. She looked up in time to see a military troop transport, loaded with men, leave the front gate of the naval base and turn onto the highway, taking the same route as the cars. A whistle. It was very faint, but she could make it out in the background. Someone at the entrance to the base was blowing a whistle over and over, alerting members of their security team.
Then it began.
From her distance, the gunfire sounded like the far-off snapping of firecrackers. A few pops rang out, spaced a second or two apart. Then more cracks spaced closer together as the firing became more rapid. Looking through the scope, Lisa saw bright red blood splatter on the front windscreen of the truck as the guard with the AK-47 gunned down the driver.
The back doors of the truck finally slammed open and several of the men ran out. They fired wildly in front of them. The first one off the truck was accidentally shot in the back by someone from his own group. He dropped to the pavement, blood spewing onto the dusty black surface. The other men fired into the cars, walking their rounds throughout the first car, just like they’d been told.
The rear car’s doors popped open and two Iranian security men stumbled out, taking cover behind their doors and firing their weapons at the men coming out of the truck. Sprays of bullets from AK-47s and Israeli submachine guns tore through metal, glass, and flesh.
The second car’s driver put it in reverse and slammed on the gas. It went crashing into the rear car, which was parked behind it. Two of the men hiding behind the rear car’s doors were knocked to the ground, dropping their weapons as they fell.
Lisa placed her crosshairs over the driver’s-side window of the second car. She moved her sweaty finger over the metal trigger, relaxed her breathing, and pulled. The recoil reverberated through her, the stock of the weapon slamming back into her shoulder, but she had been ready for it. She had braced herself and immediately reloaded without taking her eyes away from the scene. The front windshield of the middle car exploded into a spiderweb of white and pink lines. The car’s wheels stopped turning.
The primary targets were in the second car. Now that it was immobilized, the men in the truck would have a better chance of succeeding. She looked at the troop transport that had driven out of Bandar Abbas Naval Base and was now screaming down the highway toward the firefight. The assassins needed to hurry, or they would be outnumbered.
Lisa heard a near-constant stream of gunfire from her mountain perch. She watched as the three remaining assassins hobbled out of the rear of the cargo truck. These were the cautious ones. They had waited and watched. Now they approached the second car and fired into the shattered windshield.
The military transport skidded to a halt behind the rear car. A dozen uniformed men funneled out and began cutting down the remaining assassins. There were too many for Lisa to shoot with a sniper rifle.
She waited until all but one of her attackers was down. This lone survivor was crouched behind the first car. He had been hit in the leg by the look of it. She moved her scope view back over to the second car. It was riddled with bullet holes. There was a good chance that all of its occupants were dead. Still, the truck full of soldiers that had just arrived would try to take any survivors to get immediate medical attention.
That would not do.
Lisa reached for her phone and scrolled down to a contact marked XEXECUTE-FIREX. She typed in the five-digit code and sent it as a text message to that contact. She watched through her scope.
The US-manufactured directional fragmentation mines exploded in rapid succession, like a series of sideways-pointing cluster bombs going off one after another.
The carnage was instant. At that close range, the dozen or so men that remained standing were decimated. Lisa had never seen so many die so quickly. It was exhilarating.
The pressure-blast from the explosion had shattered all of the windows of the vehicles. Fragments of molten-hot metal shot through and ripped apart the limbs of everyone in the kill zone. The interior of the second car was now visible, and that was all Lisa needed.
She moved the crosshairs of her rifle over to the backseat of the second car and found her target: the wife. While she looked dead, Lisa needed to be sure. She pulled the trigger, reloaded, and fired again.
She then jumped up from her prone position and lifted up the Zero MMX electric dirt bike. Designed for use by American Special Forces, the bike gave her fifty-eight horsepower of near-silent propulsion, and enough stability to race down the mountainous desert terrain. She made sure that the body bag was attached to the rear and wouldn’t drag on the ground, then flipped the on switch, twisted the handle, and accelerated downward, toward the bloody street below.
She rode standing, careful to keep her balance as the bike raced and bounced over sand and stone. She hoped that she had tied the body bag on tight enough the night before so that the corpse wouldn’t fall off.
Fifteen seconds later, Lisa sped up to the second car and looked inside, confirming that all of the passengers were indeed dead. Satisfied, she looked down the darkening road, towards the gate. A second Iranian troop transport van, followed by a police vehicle with flashing lights, was now racing her way. She retrieved the H&K MP-5 from the side holster mounted to the bike and flipped the safety switch to the symbol with three red bullets. She took careful aim at the front windshield of the incoming vehicle.
It was a far shot for such a weapon. It was unlikely that she would be able to hit anyone from this distance. But her goal wasn’t to kill, it was to ensure that they followed her. It was getting darker out. They would see the muzzle flash. With any luck, a round or two would hit the truck. She didn’t want to get to the water without being noticed.
Lisa pulled the trigger. On full auto mode, the MP-5 emptied thirty rounds in the direction of the truck in three bursts. The weapon rattled, but had little recoil. Lisa could just make out the windshield cracking as one of her rounds hit its target. She dropped the weapon onto the sweltering pavement and rolled the accelerator of the bike. She sped down a sandy road, heading to the beach.
Almost there. Multiple sirens in the distance.
She glanced back. The truck turned off the main highway and onto the dirt road to follow her, but Lisa had already built up a sizeable lead. She was several hundred yards ahead when she skidded the dirt bike to a stop, careful not to fall off with the weight of the dead American body behind her. She pulled the pin on the incendiary device that was attached to the underside of her seat and hopped off, letting the bike fall on its side. She unzipped her ghillie suit and let it drop to the ground, her metamorphosis almost complete.
The bike began smoldering. Then thick black smoke erupted from intense blue flames as the incendiary charge went off. As the security truck raced up to the scene, the dead body became engulfed in flame, artificially intensified by chemical accelerants. The fire was supposed to confuse the Iranians into thinking that he had died trying to escape, and not several days ago as he actually had. Whether it worked or not wasn’t important. It was enough to implicate the United States.