With the Predator right on its tail, the BushCat turned due west and flew on, still almost hugging the ground. They crossed the empty, unlit highway in the middle of a mile-wide gap between two of the towns.
Van Horn glanced to her left. The ground there rose in folds and ridges, climbing several hundred feet above the basin floor. Those hills would block any impulses from the Iranian air defense radars deployed south of them, near Bandar Abbas. She raised the BushCat’s nose and gained some altitude.
Flynn breathed out in relief.
“I was starting to wonder just how long you could hold your breath,” Van Horn observed wryly.
Even a couple of hundred feet gave them a much better look at the terrain they were flying over. Clumps of small shrubs and bare rock dotted the sprawling plain, but its most distinctive features were several alluvial fans that spread northward from the higher ground along its southern edge. These were the accumulations of sand and gravel which had been washed down off the hills over centuries and millennia and then deposited in triangle-shaped patterns across the basin.
Van Horn banked back north and flew low along one of these formations, closely studying the lay of the land through her goggles. The Predator peeled away from behind her and started slowly circling over the valley. At last she nodded. “Okay, this spot looks doable.” She glanced at Flynn. “But this could be a little rough,” she warned.
“I am in your hands, O great pilot,” he said solemnly.
She laughed. “Yeah, don’t you wish…”
Aware that he’d gone red, Flynn was suddenly very glad that their night vision gear only showed shades of light and dark.
All business now, Van Horn circled back the way they’d come and lined up with a shallow wadi at the heart of the alluvial fan. She reached up and pulled a control handle. The BushCat’s wing flaps came down, offering more lift, as she simultaneously throttled back.
Smoothly, they slanted down out of the sky and touched down on the sand surface with a jolt and a little bounce. The little plane shook and rattled, jarred slightly from side to side as it rolled down the dry streambed, with bigger rocks and clumps of brush blurring past on both sides. Plumes of dust and blown sand kicked up by its landing gear trailed behind the tail. Carefully, Van Horn throttled all the way back and applied her brakes gently. The BushCat came to rest a little under four hundred feet from its touchdown point. Its propeller slowed and stopped turning.
With a sense of relief at being back on solid ground, even if it was deep inside hostile territory, Flynn unbuckled his safety harness and unlatched the aircraft’s soft-sided door. He dropped lightly out onto the wadi’s sand-and-gravel floor and drew his pistol. Then, ducking back under the wing, he moved up the side of the dry stream. At the top, he went down on one knee — checking their surroundings through his night vision goggles. There was no sign of movement. And no new lights showed in any of the villages several miles to the east. From the looks of it, none of the locals — most of whom should be soundly asleep anyway — had noticed their landing.
Turning, he gave Van Horn a thumbs-up signal.
She nodded and radioed the Predator circling overhead. “Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat. We’re clear. The winds on the ground are very light, just occasional gusts from the west at less than five knots. Make your drop when ready.”
“Right that, Tiger Cat,” McCulloch answered from her remote station back at Zaranj. “Stand by.” The Predator broke out of its orbit and flew a short distance to the west, climbing to around five hundred feet. “Dropping now.”
Abruptly, the streamlined cargo container slung under the drone’s long fuselage detached. It plunged toward the ground. A moment later, a parachute blossomed above the falling container, dramatically slowing its descent. It slid downwind and thumped to the ground in a puff of dust about fifty yards from the BushCat. The parachute canopy immediately collapsed, fluttering only a little in the light winds.
Flynn sprinted over to the grounded container. It was about eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high. He knelt beside it and reeled in the parachute, compressing it into a compact, easily handled bundle at the same time.
Van Horn joined him just as he finished undoing the straps that held the cargo container shut. She helped him pull it open. Mesh netting and more restraints secured five, five-gallon fuel cans at one end. They took up about a quarter of the interior. “Well, gee, I guess I get to fly out of here after all,” she remarked with a note of quiet relief. The nearly four hundred nautical mile trip here had almost completely drained the BushCat’s relatively small gas tank. Refueling with supplies flown in by the Predator had been their only hope of allowing the light aircraft to make it back to Afghanistan.
Flynn nodded. “And my next ride’s intact, too.” He patted the small motorcycle fitted tightly into the rest of the cargo container. It was a battered-looking Austrian-made KTM 250 XC-F dirt bike. Motorbikes were a common mode of transportation in Iran’s cities and countryside, so this one shouldn’t draw undesirable attention.
The next hour passed in a flurry of hard work — carting fuel cans back to the BushCat and emptying them into its gas tank, and then hastily camouflaging the empty cargo crate with dried brush and dirt. With that done, Flynn wheeled the motorbike over to the grounded plane.
Van Horn handed him his small suitcase. She watched while he strapped it precariously onto the back of the dirt bike. “Well, Señor Duarte,” she said quietly. “I guess this is where we say goodbye.”
He nodded soberly. His Persian wasn’t fluent enough for him to masquerade as a native Iranian, so he’d opted to stick with his cover as a Venezuelan, although this time with a passport and travel documents that identified him as a minor official in the South American nation’s Ministry of Petroleum. Caracas’s revolutionary government was a close ally of Tehran’s dictatorial regime, so travel between the two countries was reasonably common.
His forged documents, produced by the Quartet Directorate’s top experts, were excellent. They were so good, in fact, that in almost any other country, he could have simply flown in aboard a regular commercial flight, trusting that his false identity papers would pass inspection. Unfortunately, Iran’s Islamic government now required every foreign traveler to obtain a special computer-generated visa authorization code before arriving. This new process gave its security officials plenty of time to break anything but the most elaborate and detailed cover story — something that Four had no time to develop for him. Without a genuine code, Flynn would have been arrested the moment his phony papers were scanned at an airport or other point of entry. As it was, he’d have to be extremely careful not to attract close scrutiny from any Iranian authorities. One simple computer check would doom him.
This mission was a high-wire act from beginning to end. Over the equivalent of a pool of molten lava. And all without a net, he realized uneasily. Once the BushCat took off, he would be completely on his own.
Van Horn must have read his gloomy thoughts. She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down for a deep, fierce kiss. “You take care, Nick,” she said sternly, stepping back. “Do not piss me off by getting yourself killed.”
Taken completely by surprise, Flynn grinned almost unwillingly. “I’ll do my best to avoid that,” he promised. “On my honor.” He held up his right hand, palm out, with the middle three fingers vertical and his thumb holding the little finger down.