Guns sounded in the distance, firing at random intervals. It was antiaircraft fire, undoubtedly the product of overanxious, nervous minds. The Iranians didn’t realize yet it was too late for all that.

Turk regretted having left Grease for dead. It seemed weak and foolish, a surrender that he shouldn’t have had to make. Logically, he knew he had no choice. Grease would have been too heavy to carry very far, and there was no way he could even have gotten here, let alone go on. But it still felt, it still was, terribly wrong.

Whiplash would be tracking him. They might send someone to rescue him—the SEAL response team or maybe even another Whiplash unit.

But if they had assigned Grease to kill him, would they bother?

Maybe Grease meant he’d been assigned to kill him if they were going to be captured.

Surely that’s what he meant. Turk could understand that. He knew too much about the program, about a lot of things. And the Iranians would torture him to death anyway. Being shot by Grease would have been merciful.

Shoot me, Grease. I deserve it for leaving you behind.

He had the sat phone but dared not use it, afraid that the Iranians would monitor transmissions in the area.

He needed clothes. The ones he was wearing were torn, dirty, and covered with blood. He’d steal clothes, then find a place to hide. Rest. At night he would start walking to the Caspian, or at least in that direction.

Turk had taken Grease’s ruck with him, knowing he’d need some of the gear. It didn’t have much in it besides ammo and first aid equipment. That made sense, but he knew he couldn’t take much with him. He needed to stay as light as possible. As precious as the ammo would be in a fight, it would slow him down too much. Besides, he could never really count on fighting his way out; he wasn’t Grease.

Grease!

The control unit was the real weight. But he couldn’t just leave it. Simply breaking it up wouldn’t do. He’d have to smash it to smithereens.

Who out here would have the faintest notion of what it was?

The sun continued to move up in the early morning sky, robbing Turk of the shadows he thought protected him. He needed another hiding place.

He got to his feet, then struggled with the backpacks before finally hoisting them to his shoulders. He started along the trail beneath the power lines, heading toward a set of low-slung buildings at the edge of the desert, beyond the far end of a village. In the distance he heard noises, vague murmurs of people going about their business.

The trail angled away from the train tracks. He decided to follow it, and as he got closer, realized the low-slung buildings weren’t buildings at all but old ruins, hard-baked by centuries of sun. Still, he approached cautiously, balking at accepting his good luck. But the ruins, a small fort and houses eons old, were completely empty.

An excellent hiding place. He shuffled around until he found a building that was small but mostly intact, except for the nonexistent roof. Constructed of large bricks, its floor was completely covered by sand. Turk took off the rucks. Rifling through Grease’s, he sorted out what he thought he could carry in his clothes: two spare magazines in his pocket, three for the pistol, which he strapped to his waist.

The paper map. The GPS. Grease’s phone, similar to his. And two bottles of water.

He slid the ruck down behind the rocks. It didn’t look like much, and even if it was found, wouldn’t tell anyone anything—ammunition for AK-47s had never been a state secret anywhere in the world.

The control unit was different. He needed a better hiding place for that. Turk took it under his arm and slipped out through one of the windows, treading carefully along the stone walls.

How long ago had the place been abandoned, he wondered. It seemed to go on forever. Most of the ruins were no higher than his knee, but enough of the rest remained to convince him that this was once an important place.

Finding a building where a wall had recently collapsed into a haphazard pile of stones, he moved some of them aside, then carefully placed the control unit beneath them. When he was finished, he rose and memorized the place, promising himself he would come back and recover the unit. Then he continued to explore, working his way in the direction of the railroad tracks. He carried the rifle in one hand, down at his side. He held his left arm out, not so much for balance as a guide, pointing the way he was walking.

The ruins were so extensive that when he entered the yard of a house that was still occupied, he didn’t realize it until he heard noises from the back courtyard: a woman calling to her children.

Turk froze, not sure what to do. The woman was standing behind the wall barely twelve feet away. He could just make out the back of her head.

He was about to back away when he saw something fly up in the air.

Clothes. She was hanging things out to dry.

Turk went down on his haunches. As the woman continued to hang up the wash, she began to hum gently to herself. He waited, turning left and right every so often, making sure he was alone. Finally he heard her moving away, back toward the house, calling again to the children.

He edged to the wall, muffling his breath in his mouth. If someone came, he would kill them.

The woman?

He would have to.

The child?

He couldn’t. Probably not even the woman.

Wasn’t he at war with these people? Hadn’t these people built several nuclear bombs? They wanted to kill thousands, even millions of innocents. Shouldn’t he want to kill every single one of these bastards?

If he had to. He didn’t seek war but now that he was here, now that he saw what they had done, what they had all done, he would kill every single one.

Except the child. And probably not the woman.

Turk leaned over the wall. There was a forest of clothes of different varieties, colors, and shapes. He saw a pair of dark pants and a longish shirt. Men’s clothes. They were hung almost against the wall. He leaned just far enough to take them, and whisked them over to him. The material was damp but not as wet as he expected.

Holding them in his left hand, he backed out, rifle ready, then scrambled as quietly as he could back to his hiding place in the ruins.

8

Iran

WHAT AM I DOING HERE? WHAT IS MY MISSION?

I’m lost. I am an assassin. My job is to kill.

I have killed many. In Romania. In Hungary. In the Czech Republic. In France. In Greece. In the States.

Not the States.

Turk Mako. Locate. Neutralize.

And then?

Return.

Stoner rose to a sitting position, gathering himself and taking stock. His legs and side were bruised but he was all right.

Still wearing the helmet, he took off the suit and rolled it into a ball. From the fanny pack at his belt he removed a small incendiary device and placed it in the middle of the ball. Then he walked over to an irrigation ditch at the edge of the field. There was a trickle of water in the bottom, but that was no matter—he placed the bundle down on some rocks, then pulled the ring on the device. It flared and began to burn.

Stoner unhooked the small ruck on his back and unzipped the rear compartment. Inside was a broken down M-4 with customized parts, including a compact upper assembly and a scope made by L3 EOTech that synched with a targeting system in his helmet. He assembled the gun, then checked his location and that of his subject.

Turk had moved since Stoner had begun his descent. He was in a small village near railroad tracks some twenty-five miles away.

It would take him four hours to run there. Or he could steal a car.