THE FOUR PEOPLE IN the snipers’ hide had felt helpless and were horrified as they watched the experiment unfold, for there was nothing they could do to stop the murders of the innocents in the cages. Delara covered her ears and buried her face in the carpet of leaves beneath her when she saw her brother fall. Mahmoud was dying in great pain, and she was powerless to help.
Kyle Swanson’s brain had kept churning, figuring out a plan. The mission had never been to rescue hostages but to get inside the building and its web of tunnels to document what was in there. When he saw how the experiment developed, he got the idea to turn the deadly weapon against its creators.
He gathered the others and explained what they were to do. Aggressive action was the best antidote for the useless feeling that had engulfed them all. Swanson, Tipp, and Hughes would execute a long-range ambush to kill as many of those cold-blooded bastards as possible and then steal their work.
THERE WAS NO URGENCY at the site as the workers went about their jobs as if this were a normal day. Perhaps it was, for them. The man with the ATV, still in a white hazmat suit, zipped out to the first pen and turned off the valve to stop the escaping gas. Without looking at the bodies, he reattached the cart and brought the narrow tanks back to the site and returned them to a small fenced area near the building, the loading zone in which the canisters were filled. Another worker waited there with a water hose, buckets, and a scrubbing brush to wash down the driver, the ATV and cart, and the canisters.
The three Chechnyan mercenaries lounged around the jeeps, smoking cigarettes and watching, waiting for Juba to give the signal for them to grab their weapons and kill the scientists, their assistants, and then any leftover prisoners. After that, the boxes of explosives and incendiaries they had packed along would be placed at vital points and the structure would be destroyed. Juba had not yet given the signal. They waited, three hardcore fighters loyal only to the big paychecks, half already paid up front, half on completion. It was more than a fair deal as far as they were concerned. There were no threats among the busy men in the white coats, other than that extraordinary and lethal gas. The mercs were happy the wind was at their backs, blowing away the remains of the spray, and the sprinkle of rain had begun.
Director Ali Kahzahee was in his private office. He had spent many months coming in and out of the site and was glad to be leaving for the final time, the complicated work done. A number of laboratories scattered around the world had worked on various parts of the project, but it was Kahzahee and his team who had brought it all together and made it work.
His personal knowledge was invaluable, and Kahzahee knew that once the project was completed, his usefulness to the Iranian regime would be at an end. The soldiers who had been guarding the site would probably sweep up the entire team and demand the formula, particularly since Tehran thought they were part owners of the project. Juba and his guards would protect them on the swift journey into Europe, where Saladin had promised to help them all build new lives.
The director folded up his laptop computer, which contained his research, and stuffed it into a black briefcase along with his detailed notes. He then took a final turn around the office, checking every drawer and file cabinet. There were no mementos or reminders. A pile of discarded notes and reams of results was scattered in the middle of the floor, where it would be soaked with gasoline. Everything was to be burned.
The soldiers at the roadblocks might be curious about the smoke, but Kahzahee had not sounded the all-clear siren, and the military would not enter the area until they heard it. He picked up a pair of pliers from his desk and snipped the curling red, black, and green wires to the alarm. The all clear would not sound today.
There was no concern about the people he had killed in the experiment, just a sense of scientific satisfaction. The director grabbed his briefcase and headed for the door.
Juba was in the communications room, where he had placed a call to a number in Paris. Saladin had answered.
“It is ready,” said Juba. “The test was impressive.”
“Excellent. Do we have the material in hand?
“The director gave me an envelope with a complete disk and matching set of printouts. I will bring them out.”
“What about backup copies? Does Kahzahee have a set?”
“I would imagine so. The material is too valuable to entrust to anyone working for him.”
Saladin paused. “Are you somewhere that you might be overheard?”
“Yes,” said Juba.
“Very well. Make sure to destroy any backup material after you dispose of the staff.”
Juba saw Director Kahzahee come into the communications area and smiled at him. “We will all be leaving soon,” Juba said. “Yes, sir. I will tell him you said so.” He terminated the conversation. “Saladin sends his personal congratulations, Director, and says there will be a bonus waiting for you in Paris.”
THERE WOULD BE NOTHING sexy about the ambush, just total surprise by an unexpected enemy with overwhelming firepower shooting from a secure position on high ground only seven hundred meters away. “Kill everybody on site so we can get inside. You saw what they did to the prisoners,” Swanson told the others, his voice low and determined. “They deserve to die. Take down all those fuckers.” Then he laid out the targets and the firing sequence. “I’ll take the bodyguards, and Tipp, rake the area for any targets you see. Hughes, you put some RPG rounds into the container storage area and we will see how they like a little of their own shit on them. Everyone engage on my first shot.”
Kyle considered the Russian-made SVD Dragunov sniper rifle to be a serviceable weapon, but not in the same class as its American counterparts, and certainly far behind his personal Excalibur. The synthetic buttstock fit comfortably against his shoulder, and his right hand eased around the pistol grip. The canvas sling seemed archaic, but the magazine could hold ten rounds of SVD 7.62 × 54 mm ammunition. It was semiautomatic, not a bolt action, and was almost fifty inches in length, upgraded to a POSP 8 × 42 sniping scope that worked well in harsh environments. It was an old hog, dating back to before the Vietnam era, but it would do what needed to be done on this day in Iran. He slowly pushed the barrel through the foliage and scanned for his first target.
He chose one of the bodyguards who had come in this morning and was now sitting on the hood of a jeep, facing away from Kyle. He looked like he was trained as a fighter and therefore presented a primary threat. For a sniper, a back shot is a golden opportunity, since it gives the target no chance to notice that he is taking his last breaths. Kyle had already checked the range card and had done the other calculations in his head for windage and the bullet drop going downhill. He put the reticle just below the man’s neck, exhaled, let his heartbeat slow, and squeezed the trigger straight back until the Dragunov barked and the bullet hurtled toward the unsuspecting man at 2,700 feet per second.
The Chechnyan fighter jerked forward as if he had been slugged in the back by a big hammer, his eyes opening wide with surprise as he fell facedown in the dirt. The bullet severed his spine and exploded within him, tearing his organs to pieces before pushing a mass of tissue and blood out through a big exit wound in his chest.
Kyle shifted his aim to another Chechnyan who was spinning around at the familiar sound of a shot being fired. Swanson was cold and smooth, not hurrying. This guy was just reacting, he wasn’t going anywhere. Kyle aimed for center mass, and the Dragunov spat out another powerful bullet, which took the second man in the chest. The victim remained still for a moment, then slumped to his knees, grabbing at the fatal wound as blood poured between his fingers. He fell over dead.
Off to Kyle’s right, Joe Tipp opened up with his RPK light machine gun, with the long barrel braced on its folding bipod, slapping out three-round bursts throughout the general area…Clack-clack-clack…Clack-clack-clack. Several men were sent sprawling. Tipp had two spare big banana clips for the gun nearby so he could reload quickly. He was not going for any random fire to keep their heads down. As a trained sniper, Joe Tipp was taking enough time to aim and kill people. The gunpowder smell of burned cordite rose in the hide.
To Kyle’s left, Travis Hughes came into a kneeling position with an RPG-7 launcher on his shoulder and fired a grenade that burst from the tube with a loud whoosh! Four sharp fins popped out to stabilize the flight, and ten meters away, the grenade armed itself. Sizzling at the tip of a hot red exhaust tail, the high-explosive round zoomed into the storage area and exploded hard when it hit metal, setting loose a spray of the poison gas.
The crashing symphony of the ambush was fully under way, and none of the people at the site had yet fired a shot in return. In fact, none had yet even reached a weapon.
Watching through binoculars from beside Kyle, Delara Tabrizi viewed the destruction with a burning fury on her face. “Kill them,” she said through gritted teeth. “Kill them all!”
INSIDE THE BUILDING, JUBA heard the shots, and three seconds later the RPG explosion shook the concrete structure, blowing around a layer of dirt and debris. An attack was the last thing he had expected, and he instantly recognized that his situation had totally changed.
“What’s happening?” Director Kahzahee, who had been heading for the door, stopped in midstride and turned back.
Juba stepped closer, looking through the door and then glancing out a side window. Men were running around trying to find shelter, and smoke was spreading along the ground while a misty haze rose into the air. “Either the Iranians are coming to take over this place, or some dissident bandits are making a raid. Either way, it is not good for us.”
“The fools are shooting at the container loading area! Some of those canisters are still filled with the gas!” The director dropped his briefcase and grabbed for a fresh biohazard suit hanging on a wall hook as another RPG grenade whumped into the containers and rattled the building.
Gas! Juba was beginning to feel a pull of panic and forced himself to slow down enough to think and act. There was no time to go through the complicated procedure of getting a full biosuit back on, and to just stand where he was would be a death sentence. He had to get out!
In one motion, he pulled a Heckler & Koch 9 mm pistol from his belt holster and fired two bullets into the skull of Director Kahzahee, picked up the fallen briefcase, and dove through the side window in the wall across the room from the exploding storage area.
He tucked his head and shoulders and hit the ground with a roll, in a shower of splinters and glass that sliced at him. This wasn’t the Iranian government, he thought. It was dissidents who were determined to capture the site and expose its secrets to the world, making the government in Tehran be viewed around the world as monsters.
Juba rose, bent at the waist, and ran toward a little gulley in order to put terrain between himself and the shooters while hoping he was moving faster than the spreading and invisible cloud of gas. The wind was on his right cheek, not directly behind him, so that improved his chances of escaping. Wet droplets splashed on his arms and face.
The sustained chatter of an AK-47 being fired on full automatic broke the rhythm of the incoming rounds. One of his Chechnyans was returning fire, taking the attention of the attackers and buying Juba a few more steps. The hired gunman was covering the escape in an effort to protect his own paycheck and called out, “Juba! Start the helicopter!”
Juba was standing completely up now, panting and sprinting hard toward the field where an old UH-1 Huey helicopter was stationed, his heels pounding hard. The droplets continued to splash on him. The chopper’s rotors were sluggishly beginning to turn, and the engine was coughing. Almost out of breath, he reached the bird and jumped into the cargo area, rolling flat on his back, his fist tight around the briefcase handle. “Go!” he yelled. “The gas is escaping.”
The Americans had sold a lot of aging Hueys to the old shah before he was deposed, and the helicopters were a common sight around Iran. The pilot had been running his checklist even before the shooting started. He wasn’t worried about some stray bullets, because the Hueys had proven in Vietnam that they could soak up gunfire and keep flying. Bullets were not the threat, but there might be a veil of deadly gas outside his cockpit.
Juba slammed the big side doors shut, found a dry towel, and wiped his face and arms and hands hard, staring straight ahead at the big drops hitting the broad front windows, some of them coalescing into pools. Rain or gas? He didn’t know.
The pilot made an emergency takeoff, kicking the helicopter to full throttle to let the powerful downdraft of the overhead blades dissipate any gathering fumes. They had to get out of the zone. The tail of the Huey rose sharply up and the heavy nose was almost pointed at the ground; then the lift began as the skids came off the ground. The bird, slowly at first and then more rapidly, sailed along the meadow and then made a sudden jump into the sky, climbing high and fast away from the burning site. No one else had made it out to the field, and the pilot didn’t really care.
KYLE SAW THE THIRD bodyguard hiding behind a Jeep and spraying wildly with an AK-47. The man did not know what he was shooting at and was just throwing out a hail of bullets in hopes of making the attackers duck, or at least pause. Above the racket, Swanson had clearly heard the man shout the name of Juba, but he could not take time to analyze who he was calling to. Swanson pinned the scope on him and saw something happening to his target that made him pause before squeezing the trigger.
The Chechnyan not only stopped firing but dropped his weapon and slapped at his skin. His face was twisted in surprise and then in pain. The bubble of poison gas released by the attack had crawled over the bodyguard, and he was trying to rub it away. Then he began to breathe it, and he stood and ran, as if there were some shelter, grabbing at his throat as if strangling. Kyle understood that the man was trying to reach the water hose and maybe scrub away the lethal drops that were congealing into a gel on his body.
Not going to happen, Skippy. Swanson adjusted the scope, following the movement, and fired. The bullet dropped the bodyguard in his tracks, hitting low on the back, just below the kidneys, and the man crashed and bounced on the dirt. Kyle had not wanted to make a kill shot, just to bring him down. In the view of the sniper, the bastard was not a candidate for an easy death. The man tried to crawl but gave up and rolled on the ground as the gas went into his lungs. He lay there with his chest heaving, turning purple in the face as he choked to death on his own fluids.
“Cease fire. Cease fire,” Swanson called to Tipp and Hughes. “The gas has them now. Let their little miracle finish them off.”
“Shoot them!” demanded Delara.
“No need,” Kyle replied. “What those men did to your brother is now happening to them. I will kill any who might survive.”
“One got away on the helicopter,” noted Joe Tipp. “I tried to nail him, but he was low and moving fast.”
“Yeah. I took a shot at the Huey, but it was too far away for the Dragunov.” Juba? Now that would be an interesting twist to things. Kyle stood up. Fire raged in the container area but was not spreading to the building. A dozen bodies lay on the ground, three still twitching in the embrace of the poison in their bodies. “Anyway, the site is open. We’ll wait for a little while to let that shit burn off or blow away before going in.”
A slow thirty minutes passed and an uneasy stillness came to the area, as if nature were eager to take back the dead zone. Things someday would grow here again. No curious soldiers came looking for the source of the shooting and explosions because the all-clear siren had never sounded.
The light rain began falling heavier, which would help dampen the traces of the gas.
“I want to bury my brother,” said Delara.
Kyle was eating an MRE ration. “I don’t think we can do that. The body is contaminated now, and we don’t know what the stuff is. In fact, you probably should not even look at it, and you definitely cannot touch him.”
She was also standing. “I don’t care. He was my brother. I cannot just leave him out there.”
“As much as I hate it, we have to leave them all out there. We are taking a huge risk just going into the building for a few minutes.” He stuffed the half-eaten ration back into his pack. “Look, Miss Tabrizi. Whatever was being concocted down there obviously is one of the greatest weapons-grade poison gases ever created. A real terrorists’ cocktail, and we don’t know its properties-sarin, ricin, anthrax, whatever. We have seen how it kills without conscience, and the bad guys have it, which means thousands of people are now in jeopardy. Your brother gave his life fighting these maniacs, so don’t you think he would want you to do everything you can to bring them down?”
She was near him. Delara knew what he said was true, but…“He is my brother,” she whispered softly.
She looked so small, and there were tears in her eyes. Kyle stepped close and wrapped his arms around her. “I know. I am so very sorry.”
“Our chopper will be here in ten minutes, Shake. Let’s do it.” Travis Hughes had his MOPP suit on.
“Right. Tipp, you cover us from up here with the RPK, then take Miss Tabrizi over to the field where that other helo was. Make that the designated landing zone.”
“I want to go with you!” Delara’s response was immediate.
“No. You really don’t,” Kyle answered, but with a gentle tone instead of that of a combat commander. “You will want to remember your brother as who he was. You don’t want your last memory of him to be a close view of what they did. Please, Delara, I’m asking that you stay here with Joe. Travis and I are doing a quick search and then we’re out of there. Speed is necessary, and you would slow us down…maybe put us all in danger.”
He and Hughes were already moving, leaving no time for discussion. Delara watched them go and turned to Joe Tipp, who was scanning the area with his binos. “He’s right. Let’s finish this and get out of here,” said Tipp. “Kyle is good at this stuff. Trust him.”
“Kyle? That is his name?”
“Oh, shit,” Tipp said. “Forget I said that.”
Swanson and Hughes moved as cautiously as if skating on frozen glass, determined to touch nothing unless absolutely necessary. They ignored the bodies and the exterior destruction and, wading through a thin film of lingering smoke, moved into the building. The mist was gone, but rain was coming down harder.
The body of the man they recognized as the leader of the scientists was on the floor, killed not by the gas but by two bullets to the back of the head at close range. Hughes had his camera running and took pictures as Kyle probed deeper into the office area, his weapon at the ready. A pile of papers had been thrown onto the floor. File drawers hung open. Desks were empty.
The door at the far end of the room stood open, and the two Marines started downstairs. The lights were still on, and they entered a spacious area of several rooms crammed with laboratory equipment and electronics gear. Every computer had been destroyed, the screens smashed and the hard drives removed and crushed. Shelves were lined with covered containers, and at one end was a sterile room that could be entered only through an airlock. It was empty except for more counters and scientific gear.
The place seemed to Kyle to mirror the one they had been in earlier in southern Iran, only this one was still intact. He shuddered to think of the experiments that went on in this place. Through another door and down more stairs. A storehouse of material, and smaller areas that indicated mess and health care facilities. The place was like an underground pyramid, with plenty of space at the bottom and narrowing to that single administrative area on the top. Down low was where the really dirty work was done, and Kyle, followed by Travis, went carefully to the bottom floor and finally into the individual spokes and tunnels. He breathed easier when they found that the dungeon cages were empty. All of the prisoners had been taken out and executed this morning. On the side of one of the cells, they found someone had used a rock to scratch numbers into the concrete wall-999. Hughes took pictures.
“Nothing more down here, Trav. Let’s go back up and gather those papers, then get out of here.” Kyle led the way back into sunlight, almost feeling the dark shadows pulling at him from down below, trying to take him into a cell and lock the door. He shook it off.
Travis stepped to the front door and waved up to Joe Tipp. It was time to get moving. “All clear,” Tipp acknowledged on the radio. “Bird inbound.”
Kyle took down a pair of white biohazard suits hanging on the wall and tossed one to Travis, and they both stuffed the papers on the floor into the garments. Scientific records, notebooks, computer disks and office documents, letters and notes, but they did not know if it was treasure or trash. Finally, Kyle searched the body of the director and found a cell phone and a wallet. He threw both into the makeshift sack. “Let’s go,” he said.
They trotted through the rain, letting the water wash off anything that might have clung to their suits. Joe Tipp was in the open, guiding the helicopter down, while Delara Tabrizi stood to the side.
Kyle and Travis stopped just outside the radius of the powerful rotor blast and peeled out of their biosuits, leaving them on the ground before they climbed into the Pave Low.
“What did you find?” Tipp asked, pointing to the two bulging white biosuits on the floor. The sleeves and arms were folded tight, but loose papers stuck from the neck openings.
“Don’t know. I’m not a scientist,” said Travis, “but whatever it is, I think the intel pukes will be having wet dreams for the next month or so.”