Cold Shot (34 page)

I hope that reprocessing center was somewhere else.

Kyra made her way around the rim to the opposite side and raised the rifle to her shoulder.

She finally saw the convoy through the smoke. Kyra ran as quickly as she could without destroying her aim. She saw no motion, no movement, no survivors. She reached the first truck, which was resting on its back, tires missing and burning fluids spread around the crushed front. She moved around to the back, looked under the metal floor that had become the ceiling of the cargo bed. There were soldiers inside and she tried to suppress the urge to vomit that surged up from her stomach. This time she failed and she spewed her breakfast onto the ground.

Do the job,
she ordered herself. Kyra forced her mouth closed and moved to the next truck.

This one had fared no better than the first. Its frame was twisted and the cab rested on its side at an oblique angle to the bed. Kyra raised her rifle again, her hands shaky, and she stepped around the front. She saw the driver inside through the shattered windshield. He was a bloody mass, his head resting on the passenger door.

The canvas cover over the back was shredded open. Inside were the crushed bodies of a dozen men, twisted at angles her mind refused to believe.

Of course it’ll be in the last one,
she thought. It made sense that it would be in the truck closest to Carreño’s car.

•    •    •

Elham opened his eyes and still couldn’t see. The blood from the gash on his head was running over his eyes and he reached up and wiped it away with his hand. Still blurry, he looked around.

The car was on its side, driver’s side pointing to the sky. Ahmadi was beneath him, still belted in, unconscious. In the front, neither Carreño nor the driver was moving and he couldn’t tell from this angle whether they were living or dead. The front windshield was entirely opaque, the glass spiderwebbed from a thousand fractures. The side windows were gone and the soldier felt a slight breeze run down into the cab, carrying the smell of smoke and dust with it.

Nothing felt broken, though most of his body felt bruised, so Elham reached down and unlocked the seat belt, grabbing the leather handle to stop himself from falling on Ahmadi. He climbed out of the shattered window, his body quietly protesting, and he pulled himself out and dropped to the ground. He smelled gasoline. The fuel tank was certainly ruptured. One bit of flaming debris falling from the sky could turn the car into a pyre with everyone inside.

He couldn’t see the CAVIM site behind him for the smoke and dirt in the air. The convoy was a series of shattered wrecks. Fires were burning everywhere and all of the outbuildings were gone. He uttered a silent prayer that was as much a plea as an accusation leveled against Allah. His men had been in the back of one of the cargo trucks. His entire unit . . .
dead now, surely.
All good men who had deserved better than to die at the hands of some pilot whom they’d never had the chance to fight.

What did the Americans hit us with?
he wondered. Not a nuclear weapon. They wouldn’t have survived that. He’d heard about some of the larger thermobaric bombs the Americans had, the Mother Of All Bombs and such monsters as that. They’d used one of those, surely.

Then Elham saw movement. His eyes didn’t want to focus, but he forced them, and he saw her . . . a woman in cargo pants and a T-shirt, with a rifle raised to her shoulder, moving behind the nearest five-ton cargo truck.

The truck that had carried the warhead.

Elham stumbled around to the back of the car. The trunk was crumpled and hanging partially open a few inches. The car’s frame had bent, cracking the trunk’s door loose. He grabbed it, pulled, and grunted as it moved a few inches. He pulled again, then looked.

The Steyr’s case was there, still in one piece, but too large to pull through the narrow opening. Elham put his boot against the rear bumper, braced himself, then pulled on the trunk door again. It slid a few more inches in the dirt.

•    •    •

The scene at the last truck was little different from the others except that some of the bodies of the SEBIN soldiers had been thrown out of the vehicle onto the ground. She stepped around them, looking at the bodies. There were no survivors. The convoy had been too close to the point of impact.

The last truck was lying on its side. There were no bodies inside this one, to her relief. She stepped inside the back, her foot coming down on the canvas cover that had been the roof and was now the floor. She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out the Maglite, and turned it on.

The metal crate was four feet square, intact, but dented on all sides with holes punched through it in several places from debris or sharp corners of the truck bed as far as she could tell. Kyra pointed the light inside the largest gouge in the metal she could find and looked in.

The light played over a large green cone, still secured inside its thick metal box.

Kyra stared at the device.
How many kilotons?
she wondered. A hundred? Five hundred? A megaton or more? Fission or fusion? Uranium or plutonium core? What design?

It survived,
she thought. That was what mattered.

The enemy still had a warhead.

The crate was far too large and too heavy for her to move by hand and the cargo truck was destroyed.

Then she heard the first sounds in the distance, the rumbling of vehicles. She checked her watch. It had been almost thirty minutes since the bombing. The SEBIN in Puerto Cabello had seen the mushroom cloud, maybe even heard the explosion. They had tried to call the factory and gotten no answer. Now they were coming. They would secure the warhead, load it onto another truck, drive it away, and the United States would never find it again until Avila or Ahmadi was ready to reveal it.

Can’t let them just have it,
she thought. She needed to buy time. Jon could hold the SEBIN off with the Barrett for a while, but they’d eventually find him, flank him, and that would be that.

Kyra stared at the crate as she heard the truck getting closer. Then she reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and checked the battery charge . . . 72 percent. She set the HK down, reached into the crate, and wedged the phone inside behind some of the foam padding lining the edges, out of sight. She shined the light inside and looked for it. Satisfied that it wouldn’t be easily spotted, she turned off the Maglite and put it back in her pocket, then grabbed the HK and backed out of the truck.

•    •    •

The bullet hit the truck’s metal bumper, missing her head by six inches and Kyra heard the supersonic
crack
as it passed by her ear. She jerked away from the sound, her heart hammering in her ribs. She dove behind the truck again, rolled to a crouch, and raised the HK. There was no second shot. She looked up at the bumper.

The bullet had passed through it, tearing a hole and splaying the thin metal skin open like the peel of an orange. She stared at it, eyes wide, then swept the rifle over the space in front of her, every sense hyperactive, looking for the threat. Whatever caliber the weapon that had fired that shot, it was too large to be a sidearm or a carbine. It was big . . .
Sniper rifle? Like the Barrett.

•    •    •

Elham muttered and slid the Steyr’s bolt forward. It should’ve been an easy kill, the distance to the target less than a hundred meters, but the world was still spinning too much and he’d missed the shot. Now the target had taken cover and was aware that she was being observed. That always made the second shot harder. He chambered the second round and put his eye behind the scope again.

•    •    •

The smoke was covering the field of fire and Jon couldn’t see much. The breeze was picking up and starting to blow some of the dark cloud away, creating holes in the smog, and he could see parts of the wrecked convoy.

He heard the deep, low snap of the rifle shot.
That wasn’t an AK,
he knew. Someone in the valley had a bigger rifle than that. He held the scope on the wreckage, looking for a target. The wind shifted the smoke and he finally saw Kyra crouched behind the farthest truck. He swept the Barrett left and saw the dim outline of the town car another hundred yards away.

“C’mon,” he muttered. He couldn’t see a target.

•    •    •

Kyra stuck her head out just far enough to see, then pulled it back, and another rifle shot struck the cargo truck, hitting metal somewhere she couldn’t identify. “What kind of moron shoots at a nuclear weapon?” she muttered.

•    •    •

Elham heard the approaching vehicles behind him. He didn’t need to hit the target now, he just needed to pin her down until the SEBIN arrived. They would flank her and either flush her out for him to shoot, or they would shoot her themselves. Probably the latter. He didn’t care now.

He saw the woman stick her head out for an instant and he rushed the shot. He knew it wouldn’t hit her from the moment he jerked the trigger. But she would hear it and stay in place. Time was her enemy now, not his.

•    •    •

The wind finally pushed enough of the smoke aside just as Jon heard the second shot. He saw the man standing at the corner of the town car, a large rifle resting on the upended trunk—

—and the memory of al-Yusufiah came roaring back into his head. He saw the insurgent on the roof standing by the mortar, ready to drop a shell down the tube when Jon’s own bullet had opened his chest to the sunlight behind. The emotions of the moment came back a second later, the shock and the shame that had taken so very long to suppress broke through, clenching in his gut. It had always been there, right at the edge of his thoughts and he’d fought it down every day.

And if he shot this man, the new memory would pile onto the old one and he would have two animals he would have to keep in the cage of his mind. He didn’t know if he had the strength to do it.

And then he heard the low rumble of the other trucks in the distance. In another minute, Kyra would be outnumbered and the SEBIN would kill her.

Jon closed his eyes and sucked in a lungful of air, then let it go—

—and held his breath as he felt the wind on his face, blowing right to left, and he shifted the Barrett. He felt calm. Then he pulled on the trigger until the Barrett roared.

•    •    •

The .50-caliber round hit the town car and Elham felt the rush of air push against his chest as the slug punched through the side of the trunk, then the lid and the metal scratched his abdomen as it splayed outward. He fell backward, then scrambled forward, grabbing his Steyr and diving behind the car for cover.

He looked at the holes in the trunk and saw the downward angle between the two.

The sniper was back in the hills, hiding in an elevated position. The Iranian soldier had limited cover, only the car, while the American gunman, who had an entire forest, now had the range.

The odds had just shifted to the other side. Elham didn’t even know where to shoot.

•    •    •

The front and rear windows of the cargo truck both had shattered and Kyra leaned around the warhead crate to look through. She saw the man fall backward, then grab his rifle and throw himself behind the town car. Jon had taken the shot from a half mile away and come within inches of hitting the target.
You missed your calling, Jon.

Kyra heaved herself out of the truck bed, leaned around the corner, raised her HK, and emptied half her magazine at the town car just to let the sniper know she was closer to him than Jon. Then she turned and ran for the next wrecked truck in the convoy.

•    •    •

Jon saw Kyra make her move.
Good girl.
She ran out of his sight picture and he kept the scope on the man behind the town car. The sniper leaned out, trying to see his own target, and Jon pulled the trigger again. The bullet took a little less than a second to cover the distance before gouging the dirt by the car and the sniper pulled back.
Just stay down.

•    •    •

Kyra threw herself behind the last truck and took a second to catch her breath. The vehicles were much closer now. She had less than a minute before the first SEBIN reinforcements would be on-site. The smoke wasn’t as dense now as it had been on her first approach, but it was still heavy enough to obscure her view of the car.

She pushed herself back onto her feet and sprinted out into the open, running toward the crater. She reached the edge, made her way around it as fast as her tired legs would move, and then ran straight for the tree line.

•    •    •

Jon saw Kyra enter the woods.
Time to be going,
he thought. He jumped to his feet and slung the Barrett over his shoulder. He stuffed the LST-5 into his pack and then ran down the hill for what he prayed was the last time.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

Cooke exhaled hard. “They made it out.”

“They’re in the woods but they’re not out. That entire stretch of country is about to get overrun,” Drescher replied. He unfolded a National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Evasion Chart on the table. “They’re here,” he said, putting his finger down northeast of Morón. “Everything in all four directions is a mess of hills covered by forest. That’ll make a helo extraction problematic . . . but not impossible. But the countryside goes flat and empty east of Morón. If they can get that far a lot of the variables just go away, but they’d have to get through the town to make it happen. The military is probably going to lock that place down.”

Cooke nodded.
They can make it.
Someone in the Ops Center was panning the feed, keeping it on Kyra’s thermal image as the woman ran through the forest. “Approved. Get the coordinates for an extraction site ready to deliver. And get the SecDef on the line.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The hills north of the former CAVIM Explosives Factory

Kyra stumbled and went down in the dirt. She pushed herself up and got her legs moving at full speed again. She had no idea where Jon was or how far it was to the truck. They’d left the truck three miles away.
Forty-five minutes if I don’t stop.
She wasn’t sure she could keep that up.