“What do you mean?”
“They’ve got a full-on bio-war lab set up here, just like Ron figured. I’m guessing this guy was one of the test subjects-or something, I’m not sure what.”
“Can you tell what biological agent is in use?”
They heard a shout from the distance and Harry came back on hurriedly. “I’ll let you figure that out, sir. We just ran out of time.”
“What’s going on out there, Nichols?” Lay demanded. Only silence answered his question. The comm link was dead.
Dragging himself up over the rocky ground, Harry cast an anxious look back over his shoulder, then upwards toward the rest of his team and the archaeologists they had freed.
“Hit it!”
Ahead, Tex threw himself prone, the detonator in his right hand. The distance was right. The former Force Recon demolitions expert checked one more time to see that the rest of the team had gone to ground. Mullins, the young student, had his head up and Tex shouted an angry warning in his direction. His thumb depressed the button…
The ground shuddered, earth rippling beneath the prostrate men. Harry averted his eyes, sheltering them against the blast. The next moment, heat washed over them like a tidal wave, expanding outward from the center of the explosion. Devastation…
Watching from the mountain road two kilometers to the south, Major Hossein saw the whole thing. He knew the layout of the base camp well enough to know what had just exploded. His fuel supplies.
With one blow the Americans had destroyed his chances of overtaking them. They had two more hours till daybreak. With their advantages in night-vision technology, they could lose themselves in the mountains in that time.
His eyes narrowed as he looked down upon the camp, his gaze sweeping toward the south end of the motor pool. For a moment he thought he was seeing things, his night vision destroyed by the glare of the flames. He rubbed his eyes and took another look.
A smile crept slowly across his face. He turned and called to one of his men. “Bring the radio. I need a secure uplink with Tehran.”
Harry lifted his eyes from the rocky soil, sensing almost instinctively that something was wrong. That feeling was only reinforced by the muffled curse he heard break from Hamid’s lips a few feet up the slope.
He turned, looking back at the base camp, into the oily clouds of black smoke curling up into the sky, angry red tongues of flame shooting from the midst of the inferno like daggers.
It took him a moment to place what was wrong, his eyes adjusting to their new surroundings. Then it hit him with the force of a thunderbolt. The lower end of the motor pool. One of the tankers was still intact.
Tex appeared at his shoulder, the detonator still clutched in his big hand. “Wires must’ve got crossed down there, boss,” he stated tersely, thumbing the button once again as if to assure his own mind of the grim truth.
“Who set the charges for that tanker?” Harry asked, turning to look his old teammate in the eyes, assured of the truth of the answer.
“Davood,” the Texan replied, his gaze never wavering.
A flicker of movement entering the circle of light caught Harry’s eye and he turned. Men were crossing the ridge to their south, men with rifles in their hands. IRGC soldiers, flooding back toward their base camp.
The young Iranian-American agent came up to them at that moment, worry lining his face. Tex turned on him.
“What went wrong?” he demanded.
“I don’t know. It was dark-maybe the wires got crossed, I don’t know. The
“One’s not good enough,” Tex exclaimed, the words escaping from clenched teeth. “You were taught to set explosives
“Leave it!” Harry ordered, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We don’t have time for this.” His index finger stabbed downhill at the soldiers fanning out, moving in on the base camp.
“We need to extract before they realize we’re gone.”
After another sharp glance in Davood’s direction, the big man nodded. Harry turned away, gesturing to Hamid. “You take point. Lead us to LZ OSCAR.”
A grim smile flashed across the Iraqi’s face. “Roger that, boss. Alpha Team, move it out.”
“Tex, you take responsibility for the old man and Eliot,” Harry continued, giving his marching orders. “Keep them at your side. Davood, take Mullins.”
“Wait a minute!” the college student cried out, jerking away as Davood put a hand on his arm. “How do you know our names?”
Harry ignored the question and dropped to the back of the line, his eyes flickering to the rear as he edged up the side of the mountain. It wouldn’t be long. The men below would be coming after them. And now their pursuers had fuel…
Major Hossein stood in the ruins of his camp, smiling ruefully. The Americans had been thorough. Or at least they had tried to be. Only one of his fleet of fuel tankers was left, standing all alone, its paint scorched by the heat of the flames that had fanned across it. He knelt down by the back of the truck, noted how the det cord was looped uselessly around the tank. Uselessly, because of one oversight. One of the wires attaching cord and detonator had never been connected…
Oversight? Rather a gift from one of Allah’s faithful. And the major smiled once again, his dark countenance lit by the still-flickering fires. BEHDIN had come through for him…
“A call for you, commander. It’s the DCIA over at Langley.”
General Charles Benet turned, his eyebrows going up. “David Lay? What does that old sonuvagun want with me?”
The aide shrugged, handing the mobile phone to the JSOC commander. “Joint Special Operations Command, General Benet speaking.”
“General, this is David Lay.”
“So my aide tells me. Good thing you caught me, director. I was just leaving for the night.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to put that on hold, general. We’ve all got a long night ahead of us.”
“What’s going on?” Benet asked, a distinct note of hostility in his voice. He didn’t like the CIA director, and didn’t pretend to.
“You mean no one’s briefed you?”
“Stop circling the field, director. What’s going on?”
“Operation TALON went down the tubes two and a half hours ago. Our team was ambushed at insertion, the Huey blown out of the sky. We have four survivors on the ground, in need of extraction. You have a Pave Low squadron on temporary deployment at Q-West in northern Iraq.”
