Pandora's Grave (31 page)

“No. Everything is still go-mission. Contact information for Richards will be uploaded to your TACSAT when you land in Israel. He’s in position.”

“Copy that.”

3:05 A.M. Tehran Time

The Alborz Mountains

Iran

It was cold on the valley floor, the type of cold that makes up in bitterness what it lacks in actual temperature. The two men waited in the shadow of the cliff, out of the sight of any watchers.

“Thanks for coming,” Thomas said after a long moment.

“My sister told me to bring you back alive,” was the reply, Sirvan’s tone filled with amusement.

Thomas flushed, thankful for the darkness to hide his face. He could still see the look in Estere’s eyes as the two of them had left camp—the look of a proud young woman holding her emotions fiercely in check.

The young Kurd cleared his throat. “Time?”

“Five minutes to drop,” Thomas replied, cupping a hand round the luminous dial of his dive watch.

The silence was well-nigh unbearable, just a faint breeze there below the cliff. Thomas found himself holding his breath, waiting senselessly for the sound of airplane engines. They would be flying too high, he knew that. Coming in with their transponder disguised as that of an airliner.

The laser designator was there, fifty meters ahead of them, hidden in the scrub brush of the valley floor.

Waiting.

It came like a ghost out of the night, the parachute a faint shadow in the pale light of the crescent moon.

The two men exchanged a tight-lipped smile before leaving their cover. So far, so good…

4:21 P.M. Eastern Time

Cypress, Virginia

“They’re not leaving,” the man announced grimly, eyeing the old antebellum mansion with binoculars aimed through the tinted windshield of the Suburban.

“You read the audio transcripts, Vic,” his companion retorted. “A security detachment was dispatched twenty minutes after you took out Sarami.”

The man called “Vic” sighed. “Call the rest of the team and tell them to rendevous with us in Falls Church. Time for Plan B.”

“Plan B?”

“Sit tight and wait,” came the terse reply.

3:25 A.M.

The village

Iran

They drifted into the village from the north, a pair of strange, misshapen figures shuffling awkwardly forward.

The thick biosuits made communication difficult, so the two men communicated largely by hand signals, punctuated by an occasional hissed instruction.

Death hung over the village like a cloud as they moved forward, picking their way through the detritus of human life. Mutants in the land of the dead.

A girl of perhaps five years of age lay across the threshold of her home, her face still distorted in the agony of death, her body bloated from a day in the sun. Thomas looked down for a moment in pity, then passed on. He could hear Sirvan whispering a prayer behind him.

They both stopped beside the body of a middle-aged Kurdish man, lying on his belly in the dust of the street. His arm was splayed out from his side, the flesh ridged with black veins of blood.

Thomas looked over at Sirvan and saw the Kurd nod through the helmet of his biosuit. The two men knelt by the body and Thomas drew his combat knife, laying it beside him as he moved to roll the body over.

Suddenly, Sirvan’s hand descended on his arm with a grasp of iron as a gasp broke from the Kurd’s lips.

“
Stop
!” he hissed, never slackening his grip.

“What?” Thomas demanded in surprise.

Sirvan’s index finger shot out, pointing below the dead man’s armpit. There, stretching from beneath the bloated body, barely visible in the shadow, was a thin wire.

The corpse was booby-trapped.

“A pressure trigger,” Sirvan whispered, struggling to make himself understood. “If we roll the body from off the mine…”

He didn’t need to finish. Thomas knew all too well what he was talking about. A bouncing betty. Once the pressure came off the trigger, the mine would bounce two or three feet into the air and detonate, spraying shrapnel in every direction.

His skin crawled at the thought. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“Why the wire?” he asked at length, unsure as to whether it was simply a back-up mechanism, or something more sinister.

Having apparently wondered the same thing himself, Sirvan’s fingers were already tracing their way along the wire, careful not to touch the thin strand separating them from death.

“More explosives,” he hissed a moment later, pointing to the house on the other side of the street, pantomiming an explosion from its walls. “A trip-wire,” Sirvan announced, coming back to Thomas’s side. “Tension-sensitive.”

Thomas nodded, understanding what he meant perfectly. Trip wires were often activated by pressure against them, essentially pulling a trigger. This was a dead man switch at its most basic. Whether tension was applied or relieved, the end result was the same.

Annihilation.

“Can it be disarmed?” Thomas asked. He already knew the answer, so it didn’t surprise him when Sirvan shook his head “no”.

“We do not have the time,” the Kurd replied. “Given daylight, I could try. Now—no. I was ordered to bring you back in one piece, remember?”

Thomas laughed, the tension broken for a bare moment in time. “Then, we move on?”

Sirvan looked ahead, his eyes probing the dust of the street. “No. Look there—and there. Claymores.”

Something was wrong. Very wrong. Thomas could feel his skin crawl, and his eyes searched the darkness for an unseen enemy. This had been prepared—for them, for
someone
…

He picked up his knife and thrust it back into its ankle sheath. “Then that leaves us with the child,” he said slowly.

Sirvan nodded with equal reluctance.

The two men moved cautiously back to where the little girl lay, their eyes on the ground now, watching ever so carefully for the telltale signs of disturbed earth.

Thomas knelt by the corpse, an unspoken question in his eyes as he glanced over at Sirvan. Was the child’s body mined?

Sirvan extracted a thin, wicked-looking knife from a sheath under his armpit and slid it under the girl’s body, probing gently.

“A grenade,” he announced a moment later, his voice curiously emotionless. “She’s lying on the spoon of a hand grenade. The pin’s gone.”

Thomas nodded, his mind running through their options, considering and rejecting each scenario in turn.

Finally he drew his combat knife and motioned to Sirvan. “Hold the body still.”

There was pain in the Kurd’s eyes as he took his place at the girl’s head, pinning her arms tight to hold the corpse completely still.

Thomas reached up with the knife in his hand, gently slicing away her garments until the thin, malnourished torso lay exposed in the moonlight, the flesh blackened by the spread of the plague.

A muffled curse broke from Sirvan’s lips and Thomas took a deep breath, the oppressive heat of the biosuit suddenly closing in upon him.

His fingers trembled as they closed once more on the hilt of the knife. He had never been a religious man, but his actions seemed suddenly obscene.

Thomas raised the knife above the corpse, looking down into the girl’s eyes, wide-open and staring with death. “God forgive me,” he whispered.

And the knife swung down…

3:40 A.M
.

There were only two men. Harun could hardly understand it. Their garb puzzled him even more. They were wearing what looked like Western-made biological warfare suits. It was as though they had been prepared.

It would not do to expose the full force of the men under his command to deal with these two. They needed to be taken out quickly.

He turned to the sniper at his side. “Can you take them?”

The soldier nodded. “I could make sure of it closer in.”

“Then do so.”

“Tubes,” Thomas ordered. Sirvan passed the sample tubes over from the bio-kit wordlessly.

Working carefully, Thomas squeezed the syringe in his right hand, filling the tubes with the black blood. The cassettes filled with tissue already lay in their tray of formalin at his feet.

He replaced the tubes in the bio-kit and closed the lid, his fingers trembling at the thought of the death that reposed inside.

“We’re done here,” he announced, his voice flat and void of elation. One glance at the gutted body of the girl-child at his feet robbed him of any joy he might have felt.

Sirvan nodded, touching the girl’s forehead with a gloved hand as he rose. “This is what they have done to my people,” he whispered, anger present in his tones.

Thomas started to speak, started to respond to his friend’s question, when suddenly the report of a rifle shot exploded from the heights to the east.

The young Kurd groaned in almost the same instant, pitching slightly forward and staggering against the side of the house.

He caught himself at the last moment, a hand clutched tightly to his left side. Blood seeped from between his fingers.

Things seemed to slow down. Thomas reached forward, shoving Sirvan to the ground just as the sniper fired again.

Two shots. Harun swore in frustration as he watched the men start to move. They had wounded one, but they were still mobile, running now toward the edge of the village.

All at once, the faint crack of a rifle smote his ears and the sniper beside him collapsed into his arms, the top of his head blown off.

Splattered with blood, the young colonel dove for the cover of the rocks, unslinging his AK-47 as he lay there. His marksman was dead. His fingers felt wooden, clumsy as he toggled his field radio on. They needed fire support…

They reached the edge of the village in a weird, halting run, Sirvan’s arm flung over Thomas’s shoulder as he struggled to support the Kurd.

No more shots followed their footsteps. “Estere,” Sirvan whispered. “She took them out.”

Thomas nodded, then pushed him on, his heart hammering against his chest as they moved across the rocky terrain. No time. Wherever the Iranians were right now, they would be on their heels soon.

The first
Katyusha
rocket came in at a low trajectory, exploding in the village behind them.

Thomas looked back in shock, watching the village go up in a fireball, the concealed explosives adding to the conflagration.

The Iranians had been waiting for them. He slipped an arm around Sirvan’s waist and pushed on, toward the mountain path. They could still make it, if only…

In the shadow of the mountain, Sirvan pulled away from him, standing there swaying weakly in the pale moonlight. “It’s done, my friend,” he whispered, coughing as he did so. Flecks of blood stained the visor of his bio-suit.

Thomas stared at him, unable to speak, though the protests rose to his lips.

Sirvan put a hand to his side, leaning back against the wall of rock. “Tell me the truth—when the suit is punctured—the bacteria…”

Thomas nodded wordlessly.

“Then there’s nothing to be done,” the Kurd continued, his words more a statement than a question. “Give me an extra magazine.”

“I’m not leaving you here,” Thomas retorted, finding his voice at last.

Sirvan didn’t respond at first, just stared off into the night at the fires lighting up the village. Another rocket slammed into the mountainside above their heads and seemed to goad him into speaking.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said finally, holding out a hand toward him. “One of us needs to live.”

Thomas drew a loaded mag from the pouch at his waist and placed it in Sirvan’s outstretched hand.

“Good luck,” he whispered, the words falling empty and banal from his lips.
Good luck, indeed
. A meaningless wish to one whose luck had run out.

Sirvan nodded, laying the AK-47 on the rock ledge in front of him. Preparing to do battle. “May Allah go with you, my brother.”

Thomas turned away, picking up the bio-kit and disappearing into the darkness…

Ten minutes passed as the young Kurd waited, leaning forward against the ledge of rock he had propped his rifle upon. His side was numb, and he was weakening, weakening by the moment as the wound in his side continued to bleed. He had taken off his gloves and shoved them into the bullet hole, as a rude bandage. It wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t need to.

Everything seemed plain and crisp, as though the hastening approach of death had served to clear his mind. A stone dislodged on the path below him, its rattle warning him of the approach of his enemy. He picked up the assault rifle and held it tightly, his knuckles whitening around the pistol grip, the folding stock extended fully against his shoulder.

It couldn’t be much longer. He prayed that it would not be—that the Iranians would come while he still possessed the strength to fight them.

Another rocket slammed into the mountain above him, the explosion lighting up the night sky. There—a flash of movement on the path, silhouetted so briefly. He dug into the rucksack at his waist and brought out a grenade.

He waited, listening, then pulled the pin with his teeth, rolling the grenade ever so gently over the ledge.

It bounced once on the rock below him, then exploded. Screams. Sirvan smiled, his cheek pressed against the folding stock of his Kalishnikov as he aimed down the path.

A head appeared in his line of vision and he swung the rifle to cover it, triggering off a short burst. The man moaned and collapsed, his body sprawling on the ground.

He should have moved after the first shots. He knew that. But his body was drained of its strength. So weak. So he stayed where he was.

He saw an Iranian soldier dragging a wounded comrade off the path, to the shelter of the rocks. Both of them were dead a moment later, as he calmly took aim and fired, killing first the helper, then the wounded man.

And still he stayed.

A movement out of the corner of his eye alerted him to danger and he threw himself against the rock, bringing the AK to bear on the threat. Knowing even as he did so that he was too late.