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Vahid cut his speed and adjusted his trim. It wasn’t clear what the problem was. He craned his head upward, staring down the side of the aircraft. He saw only jagged shadows.

“I have a flight emergency,” he told the controller finally. “I need to return to base.”

“What happened to your target?”

“I—I’m not sure. I need to land immediately.”

THE FIRST MISSILE MISSED SPECTACULARLY, FLARING IN the sky more than a mile away, its final arc a fiery, flamboyant semicircle above a nearby mountain.

They weren’t as lucky with the next.

The pilot turned sharply into a box valley as it approached. The missile continued straight, temporarily lost, then veered to follow. Either the maneuver caused a malfunction or the circuitry sensed a near miss and the warhead exploded, sending a small stream of shrapnel into the air.

Some of the spray hit the Cessna’s left wing, tearing jagged holes in the skin. Worse, bits of the shrapnel flew into the side of the fuselage. Two large pieces of metal struck the engine. A third barely grazed the windshield, etching a jagged line across a third of it, yet somehow leaving it intact.

Two more went through the pilot’s window, striking him in the head and neck. He slumped; as he did, his body hit the wheel and pushed the plane downward.

Half realizing what was happening as the plane tipped, Turk dropped the control unit and reached forward, grabbing the pilot’s shoulders and pulling him back against the seat.

“Hold him back, hold him back off the stick,” Turk told the Israeli. “Help me.”

As the other man pushed the pilot back, Turk tried leaning over him to grab the yoke. The plane was still nosing down, though not as dramatically. The ground closed in. This wasn’t going to work.

“Pull him out of my way,” said Turk, trying to squeeze into the seat as the Israeli pulled the pilot away.

Taking hold of the control yoke, Turk pulled back against the momentum of the plane as he struggled to get the nose level. The Cessna was not reluctant; she wanted to stay in the air, and finally pulled her chin up to comply with her new master’s commands. But the loss of the engine and closeness of the ground were a problem neither she nor Turk could fully solve. He struggled to keep the wings level as the plane continued. She was steady and tough; if there’d been a runway ahead, the approach would have been near perfect.

But there wasn’t a runway ahead.

“Brace!” yelled Turk. “Brace!”

MISSIONARY

1

Iran

THE CESSNA STAYED LEVEL TO THE LAST SECONDS, HER wheels touching the earth nearly together. A great deal of speed had already bled off with the destruction of the engine and subsequent descent, but she was still moving at a good clip, racing forward with no brakes to help slow her.

The only piece of luck was the fact that they had cleared the last of the low hills, coming to ground in the desert behind them. Baked by the sun and scraped by the wind, the ground was hard if not perfectly smooth, and they bumped along for a few hundred feet until the right wing found a patch of loose dirt. The plane pitched and turned sharply, skidding along for another hundred feet before tipping back the other way. The left wing snapped; the Cessna dug into the earth for a few yards, then teetered back upright, as if the laws of physics had decided to give the occupants a break.

By the time the aircraft stopped, Turk had been tossed around like stone in a polishing machine. He was dizzy and his nose felt as if it was broken; his face, neck, and shirt were covered with blood. He’d fallen or been dumped into the narrow space between the rear and front row of seats, wedged sideways against one of Grease’s legs. Unfolding himself upright, he flexed his arms, surprised that though disoriented, he still seemed intact. He coughed, and felt as if he was drowning—the blood from his nose having backed into his sinuses.

Grease grabbed Turk’s arm and pulled him in his direction, yanking Turk across the folded forward seat and out the passenger side.

The Israeli stood a few feet away, waving an AK-47. “Come on. We have to get out of here,” he yelled at them.

Turk turned back to the plane, not quite comprehending where he was or what had happened. He put his hand to his lip, then his nose.

“Damn!” He cursed with the pain.

“Your nose,” said Grease, next to him. “You have to stop the bleeding. You have a handkerchief?”

“I need the control unit,” said Turk.

He took a step back to the plane but Grease stopped him.

“I’ll get it,” said the sergeant, handing him a patch of cloth—his shirt sleeve, which he’d cut off with a knife. “Put your head back and stop the bleeding. You’ve already lost a lot of blood.”

Turk’s nose felt numb until he pushed the wadded cloth against the nostril. The pain ran up the bone ridge and into the space between his eyes, as if he’d taken an ice pick and plunged it there.

“Let’s go,” said Grease, remerging with the control unit stuffed into Turk’s rucksack.

“Where’s the pilot?” managed Turk through the wadded cloth.

“Dead,” said Grease.

“Aren’t we going to bury him?”

“No time. They’ll be looking for us.”

“It’s a mercy he’s dead,” said the Israeli. “I would have had to kill him myself when we landed.”

THEY DEBATED BRIEFLY WHETHER THEY SHOULD SET the plane on fire, but decided that whatever small advantage it might have in making it harder to get information about them was more than counterbalanced by the fact that it would make it easier to find. Grease squared away the plane as well as he could, hoping to make it less obvious that there had been passengers, but there was nothing he could do about the blood splattered around the interior in blobs both big and small in the back. They set out east, walking along a wide plateau that sat like a ledge above the valley to their right. Had they settled down a few hundred yards in the other direction, or perhaps stayed in the air for another mile, they would have all died in the crash. It was luck or Providence, take your pick, but Grease clearly was awed, giving Turk complete credit for their survival.

“You did a hell of a job,” he told him. “It was a great job.”

It was the first time Grease had said anything positive to him, and yet Turk felt he had to be honest: he hadn’t really done much.

“I just held the nose up, the plane did the rest,” he said, then asked where they were going.

“Train line runs to Naneen,” Grease told him. “We’ll parallel the road and the train tracks. Our guys will pick us up where and when they can.”

“You talked to them?” asked the Israeli.

“They’ll know. I have the GPS. We just have to get there.”

“We blew it up,” said Turk. “The whole place—I wonder.”

“What?” demanded the Israeli.

“The explosion was huge.”

“Nuclear explosions usually are. Even underground.”

“It was a bomb?” asked Turk incredulously. He’d been told they were blowing up machinery.

“Why else would they send you on such a suicide mission?” asked the Israeli, trudging onward.

2

CIA campus, Virginia

BREANNA STOCKARD RUBBED THE TEARS AWAY FROM her cheeks. They were tears of relief, if not outright joy—the indicator on the map was moving in a way that what the computer declared meant Turk was still alive.

She pushed her hand away quickly; she didn’t want the others to notice her emotion.

“I’ve transmitted the information to the ground team,” said Danny Freah. “Gorud just acknowledged.”