Operation TURTLEDOVE.
Delgado had been Harry’s #2 on the operation, a Ranger with almost twenty years in the Army. He had run point for the military wing of TURTLEDOVE, an operation designed to drive a wedge between the Quds Force and their Shia base of support in Basra. A big, easy-going man, he and Harry had hit it off well from the beginning.
And then Delgado had been captured. The counter-insurgency operation quickly turned into a search-and- rescue, but it had been fruitless. The NCO had been beheaded within twenty-four hours of his abduction.
“Why don’t I know this name?” Harry asked
“He was known as
Well, he had gone to his reward…
To be this close. It was almost heady, to be able to smell victory. President Mahmoud F’Azel Shirazi sighed, leaning back into his chair. At the age of 58, Shirazi was a small man, standing about 5' 6', with no discernible paunch. His face was classically Persian, partly hidden behind the greying scruff of a carefully-trimmed beard. He walked with a slight limp, the result of a leg wound suffered during the Iran-Iraq War of the ‘80s.
He had been a young man then, but he was young no longer. The years had taken a toll upon his body.
It would be enough. As it had been revealed unto him in a dream, he would live to see the destruction of the Satan. What more could a man desire?
“Harun,” he said at long last, lifting his gaze to the man standing before him. “It is good to see you.”
Colonel Harun Larijani bowed from the waist, his eyes still fixed on the floor. “Thank you, sir.”
Shirazi smiled, rising from his chair and circling around the desk. “Let us dispense with these formalities, nephew,” he remonstrated, embracing the younger man and gently kissing him on both cheeks in the traditional Middle Eastern greeting. “Your father is well?”
“Yes, my uncle. He is well.”
“He will be proud of you,” Shirazi stated, disengaging from the embrace and returning to his chair. “Sit.”
“Thank you.”
“I assume you’ve seen this?” the Iranian president asked, turning the screen of his laptop around so that his nephew could view it.
“The execution of Major Farshid Hossein? Yes.”
“Your thoughts?”
“I am puzzled by the motivation of Isfahani in this action,” came the ever so cautious reply.
Shirazi nodded. “The Ayatollah is still a very powerful man, and bears watching. He was one of my advisors when we moved Hossein’s Guard detachment in on the Jew and it does not necessarily surprise me that he would seek to take independent action in the wake of this setback. Something like this-very damaging to a man’s pride. Your opinion of Hossein?”
The young man hesitated. “I served with Hossein only briefly, but that was sufficient to impress upon me a man who, although brave, was consumed with his own arrogance. Had he been possessed of enough humility to heed my advice, I feel assured that the Americans would not have escaped.”
It entered Shirazi’s mind that the description of Hossein might apply more accurately to his beloved nephew, but he kept those thoughts to himself. Larijani was a useful tool, competent to obey orders, if not to give them. “Then it will delight you to know,” he said, clearing his throat, “that they did not all escape.”
The look of surprise on his nephew’s face was enjoyable. “Yes, indeed,” Shirazi continued, “one of them is still in our country. Hiding out in the mountains with our old friend Azad Badir.”
“Where?”
The Iranian president stood and walked over to the large map that was spread across one wall of his office. “Somewhere in this circle, by last report.”
“Badir is a fox,” Larijani observed wryly.
“And how do you bring a fox to terms?”
“You lure him from his coverts, into the open where his wiles are of no avail.”
“Exactly!” Shirazi exclaimed, pleased by the response. He reached over and pressed a button on his desk. “Send Dr. Ansari in, please.”
“I’ve got the video feed up, Maria.”
Dr. Maria Schuyler turned to smile at the technician that had just entered the room. “Thanks, Ted. I should be able to take it from there.”
“Sure thing.”
In her mid-fifties, Schuyler had worked as a biochemist at A.I. Dupont for fifteen years before enlisting in the Army following the death of her first husband in the Pentagon on 9/11. Since then, she had become the U.S. military’s leading expert on biological warfare-a job that was typically quite academic. Not today.
With a sigh she turned to her computer and depressed a single key, bringing up the feed. “Good afternoon, director.”
“It isn’t, but I thank you anyway, doctor,” the voice of David Lay replied over the uplink. His face was clearly visible in the webcam, and he looked worried. Very much so.
“I understand.”
“I’m here with the president, Dr. Schuyler. Can you encapsulate your report for him?”
Lay’s face was replaced by that of President Hancock and Schuyler cleared her throat, looking down at her notes. “You must understand, Mr. President, that I have little to go on. All we’re working from is a medium- resolution photograph provided by the CIA, which is hardly enough to make a positive diagnosis.”
“Yes,” Hancock interrupted, “I understand. Your conclusions, doctor.”
“My diagnosis, based solely on photographic evidence, is that the victim was suffering from a particularly virulent case of the pneumonic plague.”
“The Black Death?”
“Essentially, yes, Mr. President, although pneumonic plague is the less common variant, called the
Hancock cast a glance off-camera, presumably at David Lay. “So, it could be spread in an aerosol?”
His question smote her to the heart. There was something here they weren’t telling her. “Yes, sir. That is one of the scenarios we lined out in wargames last year-the possibility of a bio-terror attack on New York city. We did not use the
Director Lay cut her off before she could ask any questions. “There was a further component to your diagnosis, doctor. Perhaps you could elaborate for the president.”
“Of course. If you will look at the photograph, you will see that every blood vessel in the man’s body is outlined in black. That would indicate that the plague entered the man’s bloodstream before death-we’ve seen that before. However, I have never seen it to such an extent, which leads me to the following conclusion, which is purely speculative. Which is that this man was exposed to a more virulent strain of bacteria than any we’ve ever seen. Far more virulent…”
