They deserved it. Iran’s nuclear program had been critically disabled. It would take at least a decade for the Iranians to reconstitute the human and mechanical infrastructure; by then, all manner of things would have changed.

Still, they weren’t finished.

“All right,” she told the room. “Settle down. We need to get our people home.”

2

Iran

TURK LAY ON HIS BACK, CONFUSED AND DISORIENTED. The control unit, still in his hands, had fallen onto his chest, but for a moment he didn’t realize what it was. He was so tired that his brain was scrambled and his eyes physically hurt; dizzy, he thought he was falling from his bed in a dream.

His confusion lasted only a second. A jet passed somewhere above, nearby and low.

“Grease!” Turk sputtered.

Grease pulled him up by his shirt. “We have to move,” said the sergeant. “Come on.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Turk started putting the control unit into the pack.

“Let’s destroy it,” said Grease. “We don’t need to carry it.”

“There’s still one more UAV overhead,” said Turk. “Which way is the truck?”

“We can’t get it. There are troops watching it,” said Grease. “We’ll circle around and take one of their vehicles.” Holding his rifle in one hand, he started down the slope, half sliding, half walking.

Turk strapped on his ruck and followed. After a few yards he found the slope so steep he had to dig his feet in sideways against the dirt. He leaned his whole side into the hill, trying to keep some control as he started to slide. Digging his heels in didn’t work; he pushed with his elbow and finally turned his whole back against the earth, barely slowing until he slid into Grease’s back.

The soldier said nothing, pulling him off silently, then tugging him to follow down a much gentler incline to a nearly flat path that tucked south. Bisected by a wide but shallow creek bed used by runoff during downpours, the path straightened as they went, moving along what Turk guessed was once a farm field, abandoned years before.

After they walked for a few minutes he spotted a building and what looked like a working farm, or at least a place where underground water allowed trees to grow. It was too far away to see what sort of orchard this might be. The trees looked thin, almost disintegrating in the early sun as they formed a narrow column roughly parallel to the path. Grease and Turk walked past the farm quickly, continuing until Grease, moving by instinct rather than map or GPS, turned sharply to the right.

“Stop,” he said, after they’d gone another hundred yards.

Turk obeyed, lowering himself to his haunches while Grease continued forward. It was quiet, eerily so; Turk knew that they had succeeded, yet the lack of a response seemed to contradict that.

No, he thought. They were five miles from each site, too far to see what was going on at either. And it would be impossible for the Iranians to respond quickly, even if they knew what had happened.

The Iranian jet took another low pass near the hill. If it weren’t for the plane, he might have thought this was all a dream.

3

Iran

CAPTAIN VAHID CHECKED THE MIG’S FUEL. HE WAS perhaps five minutes from his reserves, though he had more leeway now that he could use the Pasdaran base. It looked like he would need it: the ground commander had put the attack on hold, deciding at the last moment that he needed clearance not just from Colonel Khorasani but his own commander to make the attack on the truck.

The delay was excruciating. He widened his orbit around the search area, moving up and down Highways 7 and 71, which twined around each other from Tehran to Qom. The great salt lake, Hoz-e Soltan, sat to the east of the highways, a vast flat mirror of salty water so shallow it could be walked across, even in the rainy season.

Hoz-e Soltan was famous in Iran, and Vahid’s older sister had told him stories about monsters in the lake when he was a young child. Bad children were led there and made to walk along the edge, where they slowly sank into the marshy edge.

But not all the way. When only their heads were above the surface, birds would come and build nests on their hair. The salt would preserve them forever as waterlogged mannequins, swelled and wrinkled by the saltwater.

On Vahid’s first visit as an adult, he was surprised to see shapes rising from the salt bed in the distance. They looked like heads and nests, and for a moment he felt the same horror he’d felt listening to his sister. It was only when he drew closer that he realized they were large mounds of salt crystal and cakes of salt packed tightly like concrete, the afterbirth of the receding water.

“Do they want us to bomb this truck or not?” asked Lieutenant Kayvan finally. “Five more minutes of this and we are walking to base.”

“We have more time than that,” said Vahid, though he agreed with Kayvan’s point. The idiot Pasdaran should hurry up and decide whether they wanted their truck shot up or not.

“Shahin One, can you hear me?” Colonel Khorasani’s voice exploded in his helmet, sharp and angry.

“I hear you, Colonel.”

“What is your status?”

“Colonel, the ground commander is waiting permission to destroy the truck.”

“I already gave the order.”

“Yes, Colonel, but the ground unit—”

“Destroy that vehicle immediately. Destroy anything near it. Do it quickly. Destroy anything that moves. Use every weapon you have. Do it now, Captain.”

“Colonel, there are friendly units within a few hundred yards,” said Vahid.

“You have my orders.”

“Shahin One acknowledges.”

“Whoa,” said Kayvan. “What bit his ass?”

“Line up with me.”

“Did he just give us permission to wipe out the Pasdaran unit?” Kayvan asked.

“Follow me in, and watch out for friendlies,” snapped Vahid, switching to the ground unit’s frequency to warn them.

4

Iran

PACING ON THE HIGHWAY A MILE NORTH OF QOM, Colonel Khorasani shook the handset of his satellite communications system as if it were a rattle before handing it back to Sergeant Karim in the command truck. The jets were some thirty kilometers north, much too far for him to see or hear.

“Has Fordow 14 checked in?” he asked his aide.

“No, sir. We’re working on it.”

“Work harder.” Khorasani folded his arms in front of him and began pacing. Occasionally he glanced at the dusty skyline of the holy city on his right, but mostly he kept his eyes in the direction of Fordow 12, which had reported an “incident” nearly twenty minutes before.

The report was sketchy, but alarming: the captain of the Guard unit stationed there had reported a blast followed by a fire in the main underground bunkers. It had been severe; he reported there was a massive cave-in, with smoke and debris still spewing from the ventilation shafts. The access elevators were off-line; he had sent two men from the security team down the secondary stairways to find out what happened.

The men had not yet reported back. It was, after all, a long way down.

Khorasani had questioned the captain personally, asking about aircraft. There had been no sign of any, nor had the local radars picked up bombs or missiles approaching.

Sergeant Karim bent to the phone.

“A policeman near Baqeraba reports he felt an earthquake a few minutes ago,” he said, looking up.

“Take his name.”

“There was another report—”

“Don’t bother me with trivia, Sergeant. Record the names. We’ll have someone talk to them.”

Khorasani had felt nothing, but the reports were ominous. When Karim hung up, he told him to try Fordow 14 himself.