Smith slid down with his back against the wall, swearing under his breath. The Takavar were going to be raining down on them like the wrath of God in less than an hour. It wouldn’t take them long to wipe out Farrokh’s forces and put Omidi on a plane to Tehran.
“Do your people have anything heavier than assault rifles?”
“One rocket-propelled grenade.” Farrokh pointed at a rooftop to the north. “It’s up there.”
Smith dared a quick look, spotting a launcher hanging over the shoulder of a man holding a camera phone around the edge of a chimney. The angle wasn’t great, but with a little luck it might be possible to thread the archways and get the charge through a window.
“We have to use it,” Howell said. “No choice.”
“What?” the Iranian said. “No. There are hostages. Women and children.”
Smith peered over the wall again. “If Omidi’s injured and it’s bad enough, maybe we can offer him a deal. He gives us the case and we let him walk.”
“No way,” Sarie said. “I know him better than anyone here. If you want that case, you’re going to have to pry it out of his dead fingers.”
“I tend to agree,” Farrokh said. “Omidi is not a man of compromises.”
Smith sat silently for a moment, trying to focus on the tactical situation and not imagine the faces of the frightened people inside that building.
“Then Peter’s right. Ask your man if he can make the shot.”
Farrokh stared angrily back at him. “I can’t help wondering if you would be so perfunctory if those were American hostages and the weapon was a threat to Iran.”
Smith raised his head over the wall a few inches again and examined the pharmacy, trying to determine the strength of the barricades and catch a glimpse of the men behind them. When he got to the last one, his eye picked up movement. The shelving pushed up against the window began to rock violently, causing the few products remaining on it to cascade to the floor.
“No…,” he muttered when the cop who had been manning the position came partially through the window, breaking free the last shards of glass. He twisted around, throwing wild punches at something just out of sight as gunfire hammered the walls around him. He was hit in the shoulder, but kept fighting until two more rounds penetrated his back and left him hanging unnaturally on the sill. A moment later, the blood-streaked face of a woman appeared. She fell on the lifeless man, tearing at him, her mouth working in silent rage as bullet after bullet impacted her thin body.
“He’s infected them!” Smith shouted. “Blow it! Blow it now!”
Farrokh still had his phone line open and began screaming into it. A moment later a contrail appeared from the rooftop and the grenade glanced off one of the pharmacy’s archways, exploding in front of the heavy doors with a lot of smoke and noise, but little damage.
Smith yanked his rifle over his head and shoved it into Sarie’s hands before pulling his.45 from its holster. “Kill everything that moves. Do you understand me? Kill everything.”
Omidi’s victims came out of the smoke, moving fast as Farrokh continued to shout orders into the phone. Howell fired calmly, hitting everything he aimed at like he always did. Sarie, despite her exceptional skill, was finding shooting people very different from shooting animals and targets. The men on the rooftops and in the streets hesitated, and by the time they understood what was happening, it was too late.
86
General Asadi Daei stood in the C-130’s cockpit door looking through the windscreen as the plane rose from the air force base and banked right. The most recent reports were that as many as fifty resistance traitors were digging in at the lab and that another twenty-five or so were fighting in the streets of Avass. Fortunately, the local police had managed to get Mehrak Omidi to a defensible building and he was there awaiting the first wave of paratroopers to drop.
Daei was about to ask for an updated ETA now that they were in the air, but the pilot turned and tapped his earphones, indicating that a communiqué was coming through.
The general grabbed a spare headset and leaned over the copilot to toggle the switch isolating the line. “This is Daei.”
He straightened slightly when the static-ridden voice of Ayatollah Khamenei came on. “Security has been fully breached, General.”
Despite having been wounded three separate times in the war with Iraq, Daei felt a trickle of fear. “Breach” meant that the disease he’d been briefed on had escaped containment. “Full breach” meant the infected were loose in the streets.
“I understand, Excellency.”
“God be with you.”
The channel went dead, and Daei opened a separate line to the commanders of the other transports. “We are moving to plan Theta. I repeat. Plan Theta.”
After getting acknowledgments from the entire force, he hung the headset back on the wall and stood motionless for a moment, feeling slightly dazed. In the other planes, envelopes would be opened and his officers would be describing the nature of the expected resistance to their teams: people with the strength of three men, drenched in blood and attacking everything that moved like a pack of rabid dogs. It seemed impossible — a paranoid fantasy. But the intelligence had come directly from Omidi and he was not a man prone to fits of hysteria.
Daei walked to the back of the plane, where a well-equipped medical team was strapped into utilitarian seats. “We have a full breach.”
They immediately released their harnesses and began rushing around, opening crates filled with protective clothing, digging through stacks of medical equipment, and talking in loud, frightened tones.
He would now be forced to concentrate the vast majority of his troops on Avass. His biohazard team would unload at a nearby airstrip while paratroopers secured the streets. Their only mission now was to get a live victim of the parasite back to the plane. When they were in the air, he would be told where the deadly organism was to be taken.
Somewhere south of their current location, bombers with instructions to turn Avass into a burning hole in the ground were waiting for the green light. Even the Takavar soldiers would not be allowed to survive — the risk that they could spread the infection or relate details that didn’t support the official story was too great.
87
What you’re looking at was recorded about six hours ago,” Dave Collen said.
The DCI took a seat in front of a laptop displaying a series of satellite images. They were hazy and the resolution had been degraded by magnification, but there was still no doubt about the ferocity of the fighting. A military truck had exploded after slamming into what looked like a rock outcropping, and its burning parts were strewn out among the bodies lying in the sand.
“An underground facility?” Drake said as the images were replaced with ones of a group of men flipping a similar truck back onto its wheels and pushing it forward as moving cover.
Collen nodded. “We had no idea it was there, and as near as I can tell neither did any of the other intelligence agencies. We’re going back over our satellite data from the last few months and finding evidence of increased activity, but whatever the Iranians are doing there, they’ve pulled out all the stops to hide it.”
“And we think this is related to the parasite?”
“No way to know for sure, but I’d bet good money on it. We have photos of a private jet landing on an abandoned strip not far from there a week ago.”
“Omidi?”
“Again, there’s no way to be certain. But when you combine the jet with the fact that Smith and Howell saw fit to try to get into Iran on foot and the noise we’re getting about biologists being pulled off their jobs by the secret police…” His voice faded for a moment. “I’m pretty confident that Omidi got his parasite and that he’s weaponizing it in this facility. Maybe with the help of Sarie van Keuren.”