Ghost wagged his tail. Booze hound. But as we approached the door, Ghost immediately started growling. The fur on his back stood up like the bristles on a wire brush, and he barked sharply at the closed bathroom door.
“Cuidado,” snapped Lydia, bringing the rifle up.
I pulled open the door and we went in fast. The room was as we left it. Ghost ran straight to the desk that blocked the bathroom and his growls deepened. Something was pulling the wolf out from under the dog’s facade.
“Cover me,” I said as I grabbed the desk and hauled it out of the way. Lydia and Ghost moved to one side. I drew my gun and yanked the bathroom door open.
The soldiers we’d roughed up were where we had left them, except that they were dead. Their throats had been torn away and they lay in a lake of blood. The metal cuffs I’d used to secure the major were twisted out of shape as if someone had put them in a vise and applied a hell of a lot of leverage. Or an unnatural amount of physical strength.
And the major was gone.
Ghost snarled. Not at the dead men, but at the rear wall of the small cubicle. There were bloody handprints on the wood behind the toilet, and the back wall—actually my missing hidden door—stood ajar. I quieted Ghost with a gesture as I bent close to the opening. There was no sound, but a harsh, foul-smelling odor wafted out on a sluggish current of air. It wasn’t the stink of petroleum or the sewage smell of methane, and it wasn’t the garlic I’d swallowed. This was a stench that provoked the most primitive reactions in me so that in my head the Civilized Man cringed back, the Cop became aware and defensive, and the Warrior bared his teeth in fearful, vicious defiance.
It was the sick-sweet aroma of rotting meat.
The perfume of death.
Chapter One Hundred Eight
Near Aghajari Oil Refinery
June 16, 5:54 a.m.
Violin tapped her earpiece. “Oracle.”
“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”
“Patch me through to my mother.”
Lilith came on the line in a few seconds. “Where are you?”
“I’m a mile from the Aghajari refinery.”
“Good. The rest of the team is ten minutes out. Leave a trail of bread crumbs for them.”
Violin patted her pockets to make sure that she had plenty of transponders. They were small and designed to look like discarded cigarette butts. All she had to do was crush the filter to activate the battery. All Arklight field teams had trackers.
“And, daughter?” said Lilith.
“Yes?”
“Be smart.”
“You trained me well, Mother.”
“I’m not talking about the mission. I trust you in combat. But you know nothing at all about men.”
Violin hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not a good liar, my love. I saw how you looked at Captain Ledger, and how he looked at you. I did not live my entire life in a cell. Don’t let infatuation or any other feeling affect you. Not now, not tonight. Be the warrior you are.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“‘Yes, Mother.’ I wonder if you heard a word I said.”
“I hear you, Mother. I’ll be careful and I’ll be smart.”
“Good,” said Lilith. “And there’s one more thing…”
“Yes?”
“When you face the Upierczi … I know some of them are your brothers.”
“Yes.”
“They are not family to us, girl. They are monsters. Show them mercy and they will consume you.”
In the darkness, Violin smiled. It was as cold as knife steel. “Mother—‘mercy’ was a lesson you never taught me.”
She disconnected the call and melted into the shadows.
Chapter One Hundred Nine
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:57 a.m.
I backed away from the open door. “Listen, this is what we came for. Go upstairs until you get a signal and then get everyone down here.”
Lydia eyed me dubiously. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait right here until you get back.”
“C’mon, Gaucho … I was born at night but it wasn’t last night.”
“Just go. That’s an order, Warbride. Clock’s ticking so do it now.”
She gave me the kind of look my mother gave me when she was really pissed, but she did as she was told. “Try to be alive when we get back,” she snapped, and then with a swirl of black robes she was gone.
I stepped over the corpses and moved to the door once more, listening to the darkness. Nothing. I even tried the earbud once more. Same thing. I would like to think that the lack of signal was simple interference from the dense rock, but I wasn’t actually stupid.
“Uh-oh,” I said to Ghost. I said it like Scooby-Doo. “Rut-roh!’ The joke didn’t make either of us feel any better.
I debated getting the hell out of there, and if this mission was about anything else I would have. This was so phony they should have just painted the word “Trap” on the secret door. On the other hand, if I walked away now and the device was really here, then what was my next play? Buy a condolence card for the relatives of anyone who used to live in the Middle East? Not much of an option.
I licked my lips and used my toe to nudge the door open. I wasn’t afraid of smaller explosives like Semtex. Ghost was trained to sniff them out and warn me. I glanced at him. He wasn’t barking but he was shivering and his hair was standing out in all directions. Not as comforting as I would have liked. I clicked my tongue and he flinched. Then he shook his body like he was shaking off cold water and he looked up at me with troubled eyes. I wished he could talk because the information his senses were processing were probably going to be pretty crucial to my survival over the next few minutes. But only Lassie can explain complex predicaments with a bark; Ghost was merely a dog.
Letting the barrel and flashlight lead the way, I stepped out of the bloody bathroom and into a narrow passage with rough stone walls. The same kind of stone as the wall in the picture Rasouli showed me. Rough, gray white. A little whiter than the walls behind the metal stairs I’d climbed down. A different mineral composition this far down.
I moved down the hallway. Ghost, as silent as his name, was right behind me. The corridor turned and turned, making sharp rights and lefts and then tilted as it angled down deeper into the underbelly of the desert bedrock. The air moved past me, flowing up from below. The stink of death was still there.
I rounded the last turn and the hallway ended at an open doorway beyond which was a massive chamber. There were stacks of wooden crates in uneven rows, but this was clearly not a storeroom. I stood in a vast cavern whose ceiling was a mass of dripstone stalactites that hung like the fangs of an infinitely large dragon. Water dripped seventy feet to the concrete floor, where it pooled around broken stones, fallen rock, and the corpses of at least two dozen men.
They were piled into a mound, their bodies torn and slashed, their skin crawling with maggots and cockroaches and vermin that skittered away from my flashlight beam. The stench of all that rotting meat was dreadful.
I moved cautiously forward. All of the bodies were male, and some of them were naked. No way to tell if they were Iranian, but that was my guess. Many of them were tough-looking, well-muscled, in their twenties and thirties. From the uniforms of the clothed ones I could tell that they were refinery roughnecks and security people. Some of the naked ones probably were too; the killers had likely made them strip off their uniforms before the killing began. I wondered if one of the killers was wearing a major’s uniform.
I shined the light over them, frowning more and more at each new detail I picked out. These bodies were at least a couple of days old. Did that mean that their killers had been fully infiltrated into the refinery for two days? If one of the dead men was the major, then his impostor could easily have ordered staff changes of any kind. Reassignments, replacements. It’s not like Iran has union reps who can make protests or ask questions.<
br />
How deep did the infiltration go? And what was its purpose?
I walked around the mound of dead. The injuries were traumatic. Crushed skulls. Arms and legs torn out of their sockets. Throats savaged.
I took a step forward and my foot crunched down on something. I lifted my foot and looked at what I’d stepped on. Dentures. Big buck-toothed dentures. Or … maybe false teeth is a better word. The Hollywood kind that fit over regular teeth. Like the major’s teeth.
“Oh, crap,” I said, but I was only half surprised.
The major had been an Upier. Had to be. I replayed the fight in the security office. The major had gone down easily, but he’d gone down because Ghost attacked him. Ghost was a white dog—a fetch dog, as far as the Upierczi were concerned—and he was covered in garlic powder. Ghost had eaten some garlic too, and during the fight he’d bitten the major. Garlic was supposed to be fatal, but there might not have been enough of it in Ghost’s saliva for a lethal dose. Instead it had probably weakened the Upier, but not enough to keep him from breaking out of the cuffs. Then he’d killed the other guards and fed on them. Disgusting as that sounds. What had that done for him? Probably like Popeye eating spinach.
As I looked at the corpses, I understood that there had to be a lot of Red Knights here at the refinery, and they’d just started their workday with an O-positive energy drink.
Ghost trembled beside me. I tore my gaze away from the corpses for a moment and looked at my dog. He was cross-trained for all sorts of things including searching for dead bodies, and he doesn’t weigh moral or social implications. He shouldn’t have been scared by this. Excited by blood and the evidence of slaughter, sure, that’s hardwired into his animal brain. But not mass murder. And yet he was clearly terrified. His eyes were huge and rolling as if he was checking every possible line of escape at once, and drool dripped from the corners of his mouth. At the point where his body touched my leg I could feel his heart hammering away at dangerous speeds.
“Easy, boy,” I said in a voice I hoped was soothing. Ghost glupped back some of the drool and looked up at me, though whether it was for reassurance that the pack leader would protect him or instructions on what to do next was anyone’s guess. I stroked his side and patted his flank. He pressed more firmly against me. “It’s okay, Ghost … it’ll all be okay.”
I was pretty damn sure I was lying to him. To both of us.
Then I tore myself away from the carnage and looked around the cavern. I shined my light and saw something dark on top of one of the crates and at closer inspection saw twenty sets of folded clothes. Not the missing uniforms, but almost certainly the clothes of the men who had taken them. Black pants, black shirts, black balaclavas.
“Oh … shit,” I said aloud. Did that mean there were twenty Upierczi down here? Or were they up in the refinery? Up where my team was.
Shit.
I dropped the balaclava I was holding and directed the light into the cavern. It was so wide that the beam didn’t reach the far side, and from the uneven walls and ceiling, it was apparent that this hadn’t been cut into the earth but was a natural cavern that had been repurposed. The far end looked to be a jagged tunnel, but from where I stood I couldn’t make out any details. I crept quietly toward the stacked crates. Some were open and heaps of straw or packing popcorn were spilled like guts onto the ground. A few were still sealed, and I began circling the stacks looking for a crowbar.
Then I suddenly lost all interest in the crates, the crowbar, the dead bodies, and every other damn thing. I could feel the blood in my veins turn to ice water. My guts clenched as I saw what sat on the far side of the crates.
It was there.
Sixty feet away. It squatted there in the center of the big cavern. Sitting out in the open, all by itself except for thick power cords that coiled like snakes toward the nearest wall.
Huge, powerful, feral. Sophisticated in a brutal and primal way.
Deadly as hell.
My heart started beating as fast as Ghost’s and all the spit in my mouth turned to dust.
“God,” I murmured, but I was looking at the devil.
The bomb.
Chapter One Hundred Ten
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:05 a.m.
I moved toward it. I wanted to run. God, I wanted to run for my life.
I kept moving toward it, drawn to the sheer enormity of what it represented at the same time as I was totally repulsed.
Ghost was right with me, but he seemed happy to be away from the dead, which is weird. Dogs like smelly, rotting stuff. He should have been having a field day cataloging all the scents. He wasn’t.
The device was larger than I thought. Four feet high, six wide, eight long. The data on these models gave a weight range between eight hundred and sixteen hundred pounds. This one looked bigger, maybe a ton. I wasn’t going to slip it into a pocket and run out of here with it, and I wasn’t going to sneak it out on a hand truck.
I was going to have to de-arm it.
I tapped my earbud again in the vain hope that somehow there was a signal. Nothing, and glancing over my shoulder at the heap of corpses I had a pretty good idea why. Whatever was happening, whatever the Red Order and the knights, or the knights themselves, had running—the infiltration, the communications jamming—was happening now.
The only thing that kept me from having a stroke right there was the thought that there were a couple of dozen of our unknown hostiles here at the refinery. Not the time to detonate the device.
Hopefully they were not suicide soldiers.
My inner Cop told me to shut the fuck up and pay attention to the task at hand.
I used my forearm to wipe sweat out of my eyes, then took a long steadying breath, and focused my mind on the PDA strapped to my forearm. I tapped the keys to pull up the de-arm procedures for the nuke. I scanned it to refresh my mind and then scrolled back to the first step.
“Okay,” I said aloud, hoping that my voice sounded competent and calm. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cure cancer. About as likely.
I have a little bit of religion. Not much, just enough to get me to church on Christmas and Easter. I wasn’t much for personal prayer. Not like my friend, Rudy, who was a staunch Catholic. However, as I removed my tool kit on the cowling of the beast, I was praying as hard as I could.
My tools were all made from an ultra-high-density polymer rather than metal. Plastics are nonconductive. The steps sound easy. Remove the screws holding the cover plate in place, disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the timer to the detonator. Sounds easy, but this is where you’re most likely to encounter a booby trap. Trembler devices, fake wires, micromotion detectors, heat sensors. If nothing goes boom at that phase you hit the whole red wire–blue wire thing.
I slowly unscrewed the six screws and checked to make sure that there wasn’t a trip wire rigged to an anti-intrusion trigger. There was no wire visible. Sweat ran down my face and stung my eyes. Ghost smelled my fear and whined nervously. I held my breath as I removed the plate.
Nothing went boom.
I set the plate down and addressed the wires. The leads from the battery were easy to spot. And, yes, they were red and blue. Always have to appreciate the classics.
There was a second plate covering the electronic trigger device. This was the brains of the machine, a computer that operated the neutron trigger and would fire it as soon as the activation code told it to. In devices like this, the code could be radioed in or hand-entered. I glanced up at the rocky walls. No, maybe the device on the oil platform in Louisiana could be activated via radio, but no radio signals at all were getting in here. They must have come and hand-entered it. As soon as I removed the plate I should be able to determine how much time was left before detonation. With any luck it would not already be ticking. Ideally, a two-hundred-year countdown would be nice.
I gingerly removed the screws and lifted off the plate.
And stared at the digital scree
n display.
“What the fuck?”
The bomb was not ticking away its last few seconds.
All of the little lights were dark. The timer wires were not even attached.
I stood up and backed away from the device.
The bomb wasn’t live. Not yet.
I wanted to fall down. Swooning like a Victorian maiden seemed like a proper response.
The universe so rarely cuts me a break that I usually don’t recognize them, or believe in them, when they show up.
Nevertheless here it was.
“Ghost old buddy,” I said. “I think we finally got lucky.”
There was a sound behind me. A soft scuff.
I spun around. I knew what I would see standing in the dark behind me.
A Red Knight.
But I was wrong.
There were two of them.
So much for luck.
Chapter One Hundred Eleven
Arklight Camp
June 16, 6:06 a.m.
Church swiveled in his chair, looking from one screen to another. On each of them the teams were in motion, but on the Aghajari screen the little glowing dot that indicated Joe Ledger had winked out.
There were two possible explanations. Either he was deep underground, or his transponder was damaged. Neither optioned seemed to be a happy one.
Church touched the communications button. “Talk to me, Auntie.”
“The ball’s in play. Riptide Team reports zero resistance, no apparent hostiles. They’ve taken the rig and are searching for the device. SEAL Team Six is in the water checking the underside and the drill head. Landshark Team is inside the Beiji refinery but no joy so far. Same for the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Only resistance is at the Pakistani site. We have satellite and predator surveillance, but, as yet, bubkes. Local military were on-site for an inspection and they encountered Zulu Team. At present no shots fired.”
“Keep me posted.”
He turned to the screen on which the remaining identification codes were posted. V/I, M/S, and J/I. Circe’s face looked at him from an adjoining screen.