On the screen, Prescott watched in fascination as the operatives approached the back door of a Tehran apartment building. They’d been flown over the border quietly, by helicopter; their journey through the desert had been followed every step of the way from the White House. After the initial group touched down, they’d separated, figuring that infiltration of the capital would be easier if they approached the city as individuals. The only hang-up had come when the truck carrying one of them had broken down on the road. That particular operative had been smuggled out of the country, his part of the operation scratched.
Now the CIA operatives, dressed in local garb, set a quick-burning charge on the outside of the ironwork door. It flared brightly, but in the alleyway, there was nobody to see it. One of the operatives gently nudged the door open with his foot. Before him spread a dark hallway.
“No lights,” came an order.
“Check,” whispered one of the men.
They crept down the hallway, visibility no greater than ten feet ahead. To the sides ran door after door. A light flashed on behind one of the doors; an old woman suddenly thrust it open. One of the operatives sprang forward, grabbing the handle and easing it shut. “Police,” he bellowed in Farsi, hoping the rest of the apartment dwellers would hear him. “Stay in your home.” She nodded, terrified, and let the lock click home. In Tehran, questioning the police would have been foolhardy.
The operative waved the team forward.
At the end of the hallway was another door, heavier than the normal apartment doors. The operatives placed another charge, let it burn through. When it finished, they nudged the door open with their weapons. Behind the door, a cement staircase led down, the angle steep, the stairs narrow. The men would have to move single file.
“Death trap,” muttered the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“Shut up,” shot back Prescott.
“No lights,” the commander reiterated.
“Check,” said the operative running point.
The men moved forward, slowly, taking the slimy steps carefully. Then, down the hall, they heard screaming. In English. Footsteps, charging directly at them. The operatives shouldered their weapons, aiming down into the darkness.
“What the fuck is this,” one of the operatives swore softly.
Then he saw.
The cracked cement tore into the soles of Brett’s feet, gashing them, but Brett hardly felt it—he hadn’t moved this fast since high school football. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” he screamed at the Americans standing twenty yards above him on the stairs. “THEY KNOW YOU’RE HERE! GET OUT!”
He heard the sound of a couple of safeties being switched off—and then he saw the guns pointed directly at him. “RUN, YOU MORONS!” he shouted. The operatives were blocking the stairs, standing there idiotically. Then again, he had time to think, he was covered with blood from head to toe.
He didn’t have time to explain the blood, however. He didn’t have time to explain the bodies of Yusuf and his fellow thug lying a hundred feet beneath them, several stories into the earth. He didn’t have time to explain how he’d heard Ashammi walk down the hallway two days before—heard his cultivated Arabic recede along the hallway, fade in the distance, heard Ashammi inform Yusuf to guard the American pig general at all costs, not to let anyone in, that Allah would reward him for his good work.
He’d waited. He’d bided his time. For forty-eight hours, he had kept himself awake, waiting to hear any sign that Ashammi had stayed at the site. He’d cursed Prescott—the president had failed him again, ignored his request for an airstrike, let Ashammi escape thanks to dithering and gutlessness. Then, he’d begun banging on his door.
“Yusuf!” he yelled in Farsi. “Yusuf! Your pig mother whore is lying with the Zionists tonight. I shit on Mohammed’s beard!”
When that tirade resulted in nothing more than some angry grunts from Yusuf, Brett turned it up a notch. His Farsi was limited, but as he knew that for every language, the first words to learn were the most colorful curse words available. Now he unleashed them over and over again.
Yusuf threw open the door, snarling.
And Brett hit him directly in the face with four days’ worth of shit and piss. It hit him right in the eyes. Before he could wipe away the waste, Brett punched him in the belly with one hand, grasping for Yusuf’s knife with the broken arm. The pain made him gasp.
Yusuf went crashing into the hallway, slamming his head on the stone wall. He bellowed in rage; his companion, the seventeen-year-old cameraman, came running down the hall, an aged Kalashnikov in his hands. Brett grabbed Yusuf with both hands, clenching his jaw, and spun him around like a tackling dummy. Yusuf spun, stumbled, regained his equilibrium, and then charged. Brett sidestepped him, deflected a clumsily thrown haymaker, and then stepped behind him and slit his throat.
Yusuf spluttered, his blood jetting from his neck in great bursts. Brett pulled his head back, opening the wound wider. As he did, the seventeen-year-old appeared in the doorway, shouting in Farsi. He opened fire just as Brett charged him, using Yusuf’s still-upright body as a battering ram. He threw the giant Persian at the teenager, hearing the bullets thunk deep into Yusuf’s flesh. Yusuf, clasping at his throat, tumbled forward, landing directly on his friend in the hallway. Before the boy could push Yusuf off, Brett jumped on top of Yusuf’s corpse, pinning the boy to the ground.
Then, without hesitating, he stabbed the boy through the eye.
When he looked up, he saw the explosives packed along the ceiling.
Then he noticed a camera, operated by remote, in the corner of the hallway. It hadn’t been there during his initial trip for the hostage videotaping. Now, however, it was, and it was moving.
Finally, he heard a voice from above, yelling in Farsi: “Police. Stay in your home.” The Farsi had a slight American accent.
He pushed himself to his feet and sprinted, lungs screaming for air, down the hallway.
“RUN, YOU MORONS!” he shouted. When the operatives finally recognized General Brett Hawthorne, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and covered with blood, they turned and ran. They smashed their way down the hallway—no time for discretion now—as the basement exploded, rocking the ground beneath them. Two of the men fell; Brett vaulted them, yelling at them to get up, grabbing one by his bulletproof vest and virtually throwing him down the hallway with his good hand. Civilians’ heads popped out into the hallway as the explosion registered; Brett looked over his shoulder to see them engulfed in the flame that poured down the hallway like water through a flooding pipeline. A blast of heat rocketed him through the door at the end of the hallway. The other operatives sprinted ahead of him; one man behind him screamed inhumanly as the fire caught him.
Brett turned back, pushed the man down into the dust, smelling his sizzling flesh as he tried to put out the flames. The man’s screams finally stopped as he fell unconscious. One of the other operatives grabbed the burning man by one arm; Brett grabbed the other. Together, they ran down the alleyway into the darkness.
In the Situation Room, Mark Prescott sat back in satisfaction, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, as the feed cut out. Sparse clapping broke out in the room. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs turned to him, eyes wide. “They knew we were coming, Mr. President,” he said. “They knew we were coming.”
“What do you mean?” Prescott asked.
“The explosion. And then how do you think our guys got out of there so easily afterward? The Iranians must have known Ashammi was there. They’ve been housing him. They just didn’t want to fight us directly, that’s all. They were expecting Ashammi’s thugs to take our guys out. When that didn’t happen, they backed off.”