“How many planes?”

“One is reported.”

“They’ve done that before,” said Vahid. One would be far less than the number needed for an attack.

“Yes, the other night, before the incident occurred. Be prepared for anything.”

22

Iran

TURK LAY ON HIS BACK, DRIFTING. IF THEY’D CLIMBED Mount Everest, he wouldn’t have felt as if he’d accomplished more.

But they were hours from their mission, and then days from getting out.

Maybe two days, he thought. Even less. They’d take the truck, go north, hopefully hook up with a new reaction force.

“Aren’t you supposed to check in?” asked Grease.

“Oh shit. Yeah.” Turk’s chest muscles groaned as he got up. These pains were new; at least his body was trying to be original.

He took the satcom from his pocket. They were on a ledge facing south; the ridge rose several hundred feet above the road they’d left, but it was far from the highest point in the area; even in the dark he saw higher peaks to his left and right. The ledge itself was about the width of three bowling alleys, and maybe twice as long. The back end, which faced west, formed an irregular wall from three to five feet high as it ran north. There was a path down the east side that they hadn’t seen in the satellite image, or at least not recognized; Grease had scoured the area for signs of someone else but found none.

“This is Tiger, checking in.”

Breanna answered. “Go ahead, Tiger.”

“We’re ready for the download.”

“We missed the 2300 mark,” she said.

Not by too much, he thought, but she continued before he could protest.

“It’s all right. We understand all your difficulties. We have a new arrangement. We’re going to connect two hours before the attack. It’ll be a longer download, but it will be fine. You won’t need to do anything, as long as you’re in position and the unit is on.”

“Good,” Turk told her.

“The parameters—your instructions for the attack are going to be a little more complicated than originally planned. You’re going to do more flying than we thought.”

“Hey,” said Turk, suddenly perking to life. “Complication is my middle name.”

“Good. Whiplash, off.”

Turk looked over at Grease, standing with his arms crossed over his rifle.

“Complication’s your middle name, huh?” said the sergeant. “Now what the hell are they throwing at us?”

“I don’t know. It has to do with flying, though. I can handle it.”

In fact, it would be welcome.

THE HOURS PASSED SLOWLY. THE MOON DISAPPEARED. Turk completed the download without a problem. They still had a little over two hours to go before the attack would start. Until then his biggest concern was keeping his fingers from turning numb with the cold.

Grease continued to scan the ground below with his glasses. Turk secured the control unit, making sure it was ready before it went into standby state.

“Do your legs cramp?” he asked Grease when he was done.

“Say what?”

“Your legs. Don’t they get tired? Cramp?”

“No. I’m used to using them.”

“So am I, but climbing and everything.”

“Yeah, I guess. We train pretty hard.”

“So I saw.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Turk went to Grease’s pack and took out one of the water bottles. “Were you trying to get me to quit?”

“We were trying to toughen you up.”

“Quitting wasn’t an option,” said Turk.

“Good,” said Grease, unmoved. “Don’t drink too much of that water. Hard to say when we’ll get more.”

There were three more bottles in the pack, but Turk didn’t argue.

“Lot of traffic out there.” Grease gestured. “They’re moving units around.”

“They must be looking for us.”

A stupid thing to say.

“They didn’t tell me I was blowing up nukes,” Turk added, more to change the subject than to impart information. “They only said we were blowing up equipment.”

“Maybe they didn’t know.” Grease continued to gaze into the distance.

“No. They didn’t tell me because, if we were captured, they didn’t want the Iranians to know what they knew. It all makes sense now. I mean, we were expendable, right?”

“Always are.”

“Even now, I imagine they won’t say everything.”

Turk stared south. Qom, the holy city, lay somewhere in the distance; he thought it was the glow of light at about ten o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The Iranians had deliberately set their program up near the holy site to make America hesitate before attacking it.

The city would survive. From what he’d seen of the first attack, only the immediate area aboveground was affected; belowground might be a different story, though he had no way of knowing.

Still, to risk not only your own population—a million people lived in Qom—but a shrine holy to your religion—what sort of people did that? What religious leader could, in good conscience, approve such an idea?

The same kind of leader, perhaps, that would dream of wiping out another people because their God was not his God. Turk couldn’t begin to comprehend the hatred, the evil, it involved.

“Trucks down there,” said Grease, pointing. “See them?”

Turk went over and looked. The vehicles were driving northward in roughly the area where they had left the road. For a moment they appeared to stop, but it was an optical illusion, or some trick with his mind: the vehicles were still moving.

“I don’t think they’ll look for us up here,” he said. “We’re pretty far from the labs. Five miles—that’s pretty far.”

“Yeah.”

“Once we hit them, they’ll be so confused we’ll have an easy time getting away,” said Turk. “It’ll be like the other day.”

“You think that was easy?”

“Wasn’t it?” Turk knew he was just rambling, trying to find something that would reassure himself, not Grease. He felt a need to talk, to do something, but at the moment all he could do was wait for the download to complete.

“Airplane,” said Grease.

Turk heard it, too. It was coming from the south. He listened for a moment.

“Jet,” he told Grease. “They’ll never see us.”

23

CIA campus, Virginia

“AIRCRAFT ARE AWAY. AIRCRAFT ARE TRACKING,” DECLARED Teddy Armaz, the head of the nano-UAV team. “Exactly sixty minutes to ground acquisition at my mark . . . Mark.”

The screen at the front of the room showed the swarm’s position over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, southeast of the Bay of Bengal. They were gliding bricks at the moment, hurtling toward the earth at about Mach 5. In about twenty minutes the swarm would split into several subgroups. From that point they would fly a set of helixlike paths toward the target area, following the elaborate plan Rubeo’s people had worked out to optimize the attack on the two sites.

When Breanna first saw the rendering of the flight paths, she had trouble making sense of it. The composite diagram looked like a piece of multicolored steel wool, pulled out at the top and twirled to a point at the bottom. Several of the individual loops looked like the path hailstones took in a storm cloud.

The complexity worried her greatly. What Rubeo saw as a set of mathematical equations, Breanna viewed as a collection of potential disasters. If just one of the aircraft deviated from its course at the wrong moment, it might collide with two others; the trouble would quickly mushroom. While the systems had been checked and rechecked, there was always some bit of random, unforeseeable chance, some oddity of fate that could interfere and throw everything into a mucked-up tangle in the blink of an eye.

Rubeo, standing at the back of the room, arms folded, didn’t believe in chance or luck, at least not in that way. Breanna glanced back toward him, watching for a moment as he stared at the progress screen at the front of the room. He didn’t move; he didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood ramrod straight, observing.