They put everything they had into it, but it didn’t budge.
“Again!”
“Jon,” Sarie said, coming up behind him. “What’s that at the top of the hole you made?”
He wasn’t sure how he’d missed it, but there was a blackened wiring harness tangled in the top rail, blocking the door’s movement. He reached up and yanked it out as Farrokh and his men curled their fingers through the small gap they’d made.
It happened a painfully slow quarter-inch at a time, but the door ground its way back. When they’d opened it a little more than a foot, the young man who had brought them the grenade stepped in front of it. “I think it’s large enough!” he said. “I can get through.”
“Stop!” Smith shouted, but it was too late.
The man had barely entered the gap when a gunshot sounded and he went limp, his body suspended between the door and the jamb — a victim of the same trap they’d set for the monkeys.
Farrokh dove for cover, but Smith moved up behind the man. There was no time for regret or respect for the fallen. Omidi was getting farther away with every minute and they couldn’t afford to get pinned down here.
More shots rang out, thudding dully into the dead man’s flesh as Smith grabbed him by the back of the jacket and lifted him fully upright. It sounded like a single gun, semiautomatic, with rounds designed for impact, not penetration.
“Peter! You’re with me!”
The Brit fell in behind as Smith shoved the bleeding corpse through the hole, using it as a shield as he entered a cavernous, intermittently lit parking garage.
The shots kept coming, absorbed by the dead weight of the body, which was getting increasingly awkward to maneuver. He could feel Howell pressed up against him as they moved right, taking cover behind a concrete pillar that looked to be on the verge of collapse.
Howell returned fire, getting close enough to the prone man to spray sand and broken rock into his eyes. He leapt to his feet and ran stumbling toward a van twenty yards behind him, but instead of taking cover behind it, he just kept going.
“I believe he’s had about enough of this day,” Howell said. “Hard to blame him.”
Smith turned back toward the door. “It’s clear. Come on through.”
After Sarie, Farrokh, and his surviving men were safely out, Smith ducked back into the facility and worked a table into the cavern so that he could use it to block the gap.
“You three stay here,” he said, pointing to Farrokh’s men. “Nothing comes out — even if it’s someone you know. Do you understand? If they want out, tell them to go back to the main entrance, where we’ve got people trained to check them for wounds that could indicate infection.”
They nodded and he ran toward a group of vehicles parked on the other side of the cavern with Farrokh in tow. A quick search didn’t turn up any keys, and Smith jabbed a finger in the Iranian’s direction. “You said you’re an engineer, right? Can you hot-wire a car?”
“An engineer is different from a thief, Colonel.”
“Great,” Smith muttered as Howell kept watch in case the guard they’d chased off rediscovered his courage. Sarie, though, had disappeared.
He was about to call to her when the sound of an engine firing up echoed through the enormous chamber. A few moments later, a pickup full of maintenance equipment skidded to a stop in front of him.
“Need a ride?” Sarie said, leaning out the open window.
“Peter! We’re rolling!”
She slid over and let him take the wheel as Farrokh jumped through the passenger door. They were already pulling away when Howell threw himself into the bed, tossing out toolboxes and shovels to make room as they accelerated toward what Smith prayed was an exit.
The cavern was much larger and more complex than he expected, but they followed a set of fresh tire tracks until they passed through the mouth of a meticulously camouflaged cave entrance.
Farrokh immediately got on his phone and Smith squinted into the blinding sunlight, heading toward the road leading north. They were a good half mile outside the facility’s perimeter fence and probably two hundred feet higher in elevation. It looked like all the fighting was inside the building now, and trucks had been used to block the bridge, with supporting gun placements being constructed out of sandbags.
Farrokh spoke urgently into the phone in Persian and then looked over at him. “My men engaged a vehicle with a mounted machine gun on the road to Avass.”
“That’s it,” Sarie said. “That’s the truck Omidi was in. Did they stop him?”
The Iranian shook his head. “We have people in the village, though. They’ve been told what to look for.”
“Can they stop a vehicle like that?” Smith said.
“Given a free hand, yes. But Avass is a conservative place, and the government will have many friends there.”
“What about the lab?”
“We are gaining control. The two remaining infected men are dead, though there are still some animals loose.”
“How many of your men have been exposed?”
“Many more than we anticipated. But that problem is being handled with the procedures you put in place. Everyone understood the risks of volunteering for this. And the consequences.”
Sarie leaned forward and put her head in her hands. “It’s my fault. I infected them — we were going to lock down the facility and set them loose. If I just hadn’t done anything, you’d have only had a few half-dead animals to deal with. Your men would be okay.”
“There was no way for you to know,” Farrokh said. “You had to act. It was my own stupidity for not anticipating the possibility that Omidi would release lab animals to cover his escape.”
“Our stupidity,” Smith corrected. “Any word on the Iranian military?”
“I’m afraid so. An elite force is in the air.”
84
Avass came into view as they crested a small rise, and Mehrak Omidi examined the ancient buildings lining a maze of poorly maintained streets. The terrain steepened precipitously at the edges of the village, asphalt giving way to cobblestones worn down by a thousand years of foot traffic.
“There!” he said, tapping his driver on the shoulder and pointing to four cars idling by the side of the road. A police vehicle and a pickup full of armed men pulled out in front of them, accelerating to match their speed. Omidi looked in the side mirror as they passed the remaining two vehicles, watching them fall in to protect their flank. According to Khamenei, they were to be escorted to the city center and deposited at the police station, a building that had been heavily fortified over the last few hours.
It was another ten minutes before they penetrated Avass, and Omidi held the briefcase tightly to his chest as his eyes shifted from the buildings hanging over them to the pedestrians rushing to get out of their way. Farrokh’s traitors were everywhere — watching, waiting, plotting. No one was above suspicion. Not anymore.
They passed a crowded market with vendors lined up in front of a stone building hung with antique rugs. Through the windows he could see booths selling jewelry and spices, as well as the Western conveniences that his people had become so addicted to.
At the northern edge of the market, two men dressed in slacks and wool sweaters were struggling to get a large wooden crate to the curb while a woman on a cell phone watched disinterestedly.
As the motorcade closed, the men gave up and started toward an alley, their gait slightly unnatural, as though they were struggling to hold themselves back from running. The woman broke off, too, threading herself through the people on the street and into the market building.