there wasn’t time and instead braced for the impact with the rocky ground.
He ignored the soft crunch of at least one of his ribs and threw a hand out for the loose weapon. It was pointless, though. The man on top of him had both superior position and a fifty-pound weight advantage. He was going to get to it first.
“Peter! The g—”
There was a brief flash of blond hair in the darkness and suddenly the weight was gone. Smith rolled and grabbed the pistol, ignoring the excruciating pain in his side as Sarie began losing her wrestling match with the man she’d tackled. The scales swung back in her direction, though, when Smith pressed the gun against the back of the man’s head.
He pulled her away, examining the moonlit faces around them over the sights of the pistol. The group of refugees they’d joined during their escape from Avass had dwindled to about twenty-five individuals, four of whom were definitely infected. Three were still in the confusion stage, but the other had just turned on two boys helping him walk.
Farrokh had immediately waded in, shouting in Persian and waving his machine gun, but the scene quickly turned to chaos. Some people fled, pushing and tripping over each other, while others tried to control the screaming, bleeding man and protect the boys from what Smith assumed was their father.
Howell had taken over the attempt to put the man down but was facing the same problem of a shifting crowd and dim light that Smith had been contending with. Finally, the infected man escaped the person trying to hold him and presented his chest for a split second before he could turn again on his fallen sons.
It was a stunning shot — barely missing no fewer than four people before impacting center of mass. The man went down on his back, thrashing wildly and howling like a wounded animal.
By the time he went still, all eyes were on Howell and the gun still smoking in his hand. None of the people fully understood what was happening or why there were three Westerners with them, but they’d tolerated their presence. Now, though, a British stranger had just shot an unarmed man they’d known all their lives.
Farrokh tried to take advantage of the ominous silence to offer an explanation, but no one seemed to be listening. He hadn’t been lying about his credibility in this part of Iran — it wasn’t much better than theirs.
The boy whose life Howell had saved jumped to his feet and shouted at them, his accusations falling on what appeared to be sympathetic ears.
“I think we’ve worn out our welcome here,” Smith said. “Time to go.”
Farrokh ignored him, continuing his pointless explanation and barely managing to sidestep a much older man’s lunge. More and more people approached, hurling epithets and insults that even Smith’s nearly nonexistent Persian could decipher.
Finally, Farrokh faced reality and squeezed off a quick burst over the crowd’s head before joining their retreat. They kept their weapons trained on the mob, dodging hurled rocks and not stopping until they’d put a good five hundred yards between them.
“The other three are going to go fully symptomatic in less than an hour,” Sarie said. “We can’t just leave those people. We’re the only ones who’re armed.”
“The guns don’t matter,” Smith said. “They’ve turned against us. There’s nothing more we can do.”
“Nothing more we can do?” she responded, the fear and despair twisting her voice into something very different than what he remembered from their first meeting. “The Iranians aren’t going to be able to control this. These people have no idea what they’re facing.”
“She’s right,” Farrokh said. “You said the Americans were going to help us, Jon. Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You spoke with them.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“And?”
He looked at Howell, but there was no help there.
“I told them to wipe out the entire area.”
“What do you mean ‘wipe out’?” Sarie said.
“We have a nuclear submarine off the coast. I told them to use it.”
There was a brief silence before Farrokh spoke. “I don’t understand. By nuclear submarine, you mean a nuclear-powered submarine armed with conventional weapons—”
“I mean a submarine armed with nuclear missiles.”
Smith saw it coming but didn’t bother to defend himself, instead taking a rifle butt to the center of the chest and falling painfully to the ground. Howell’s hand hovered over the gun in his waistband, but beyond that he didn’t seem to want to get involved. Sarie just stood in dumbfounded silence.
“You told your people to attack my country with nuclear weapons?” Farrokh shouted, aiming his rifle at Smith’s head. “I trusted you. My men died for you!”
“Farrokh…,” he started. It was hard to get the words out with his cracked ribs and the weight of what he had done trying to suffocate him. “What choice did I have? I couldn’t risk—”
An explosion flashed to the west, followed a moment later by a deep rumble that shook the ground. They all turned and saw a wall of flame at least a hundred feet high spring up from the main road about fifteen miles south of Avass.
The planes over it broke formation and began spreading out, their outlines gaining detail in the glow of the fire until Smith could positively ID them. American F-16s.
It took him longer than it should have to process what was happening. The prospect of certain death had dulled his sense of the here and now, bogging him down in past regrets.
“Castilla’s not going to do it,” he said finally. “He’s not going to use the nukes! Farrokh, give me your phone again. If I can call in our position, there’s a chance I can get us the hell out of here.”
Epilogue
Smith steadied himself on A bracket supporting the Humvee’s computer system as Randi Russell launched the vehicle across a washed-out section of road. They’d run into each other the day before at a UN-staffed mobile hospital where he was giving a briefing on the effects of the infection. She was part of a CIA team charged with preventing grassroots insurgencies from popping up and interfering with efforts to head off a pandemic.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going, Randi? All I see out here is rocks and sand.”
“Farrokh’s a man who likes his solitude and anonymity,” she shouted over the roar of the engine. “But now that we know who he is, you can count on the fact that we’ll be keeping close track of him.”
Sarie leaned up between the seats. “Is he all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine. I think he’s just milking a last little bit of peace and quiet before he has to jump into the middle of the chaos he’s created.”
Farrokh’s people had uploaded hours of raw video depicting what had happened at the lab facility and Avass, effectively turning the entire world against Iran. The Russians and Chinese had finally seen the light and committed to heavy sanctions, Al Jazeera had turned into a twenty-four-hour-a-day anti-Iranian rant, and the United States was being publicly criticized by the Arab League for not just flattening the entire country.
“Is our position still that we’re not going to jump in after him?” Peter Howell asked from the back.
“That’s the agreement the politicians made,” Randi replied. “Though it feels more like a Mexican standoff at this point.”
She slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop, pointing to what looked like a goat trail winding its way up a boulder-strewn slope. “That’s where you’ll find him.”
“It looks really steep,” Sarie said apprehensively. “And it’s dead in the sun.”
Her leg was mildly infected, and between the antibiotics, the fever, and the twenty-hour workdays, she was a little less spry than normal. Despite that, though, she let Howell help her to the ground and then came alongside the open driver’s window. “It was good meeting you, Randi.”
