Pandora's Grave (5 page)

He took them, glancing over them briefly. They were forged, of that he was sure. The Air Force Academy had never produced a colonel like the man that stood before him. He looked up and managed a smile, playing out his part of the charade.

“Everything appears to be in order, colonel. I’m Colonel Luke Tancretti and welcome to Q-West.”

6:34 A.M. Local Time

A cottage above Lake Galilee

Israel

“So, that’s the situation at the moment, sir.”

“Nothing’s changed.” General Avi ben Shoham brought his clenched fist down onto the desk beside him, swearing angrily. “Eight days. And nothing. Just this blasted game of chicken with the Iranians, wondering who in heaven’s name is going to blink
first
!” He glared over at the young man standing before him. “Read me the last transmission again.”

The chief of the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, popularly known as Mossad, closed his eyes as his aide began to read the transcript, the words burning themselves into his memory just as they had done every time he had heard them, ever since they had first been uttered, eight days before. The day when one of his prime intelligence assets had disappeared off the face of the earth. He knew them by heart.

“… three of the Americans are dead… The Iranian military will be here soon… I am initiating the destruction of all mission-pertinent files. Nothing will be left for them to find… Good-bye and
Mazel tov
.”

Good luck. The last words known to have been spoken by their agent, a man he had known and respected for years. A man who at that moment had needed more than his share of luck.

Shoham turned back to the window, gazing out over the lake below him, a lake of darkness, a lake of turbulence. In ancient times, the Jews had called it the abyss. For him it had always been a symbol of the country he had sworn to protect. Dark, turbulent, teetering on the brink of destruction, of the abyss. Of
Galilee
.

He had conceived the operation, overseen its execution, watched as it started to produce some of their best intelligence on exactly what the Iranian government was planning. The best since the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of the Shirazi as military dictator. Six months. That’s how long it had lasted. And now this. His aide’s voice brought him back to the present.

“Sir, I don’t think the Iranians know he was working for us.”

“Why?” the Mossad chief turned on the young man, fire flashing in his dark eyes.

“Well, sir,” he began, suddenly hesitant under the general’s gaze, “every time in the past that they have burned our agents, they’ve immediately exhibited them to the world as a sign of Zionist treachery and duplicity. This time, they have been completely silent.”

“Then what
did
happen to him?” Shoham demanded, his voice filling the room like an echo of thunder.

“Sir, I have no idea.”

“I figured as much,” the general said heavily, walking across the room to his desk. “The Americans will come calling soon, wondering what happened to their citizens. It’s just a matter of whom they’ll call first, Tehran or us.” He glanced up quickly, looking across the room at the aide. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly even. “We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Right, sir.”

“Get me Tel Aviv.”

8:05 A.M. Baghdad Time

Q-West Airfield

Northern Iraq

“All right, gentlemen. Another burst.” The crackle of Kalishnikov assault rifles on full-automatic followed his order, a high rippling sound reminiscent of a string of firecrackers going off.

Harry lifted the binoculars to his eyes, gazing down the makeshift firing range. Good, he thought. Quite good. But not good
enough
.

“Davood, Parker,” he ordered sharply, “pick it up a bit. We need to tighten those groupings.”

“Roger, roger,” the New Yorker replied, the metal stock of his AK-47 fully extended against his shoulder as he lay prone against the hot desert sand. He sighted quickly down the barrel and triggered off what was left of the magazine into the silhouette target seventy yards away. “How’s that, chief?”

Harry nodded grimly. The chest of the paper target had been all but obliterated. “Good work. Davood?”

The Iranian hadn’t moved, instead was glaring up at Harry, irritation glinting in his dark eyes.

“I
said
, give it another try.”

Davood gestured downrange, at his last grouping. “I’ve already done the best I could. And I’d like to see you do better.”

Harry was at his side in two quick steps, twisting the assault rifle from his grasp. Their eyes locked for a brief moment in time, their faces only inches apart. “Don’t do that again,” Harry whispered, his voice a low hiss. “
Ever
. If it happens after deployment, people will die. Because of
your
stupidity.”

He pulled away from the Iranian agent, smoothly ejecting the half-empty clip from the AK, slamming another into the breech with a practiced motion. “Fresh targets!” he ordered, his voice calm and level, as though nothing had passed between them.

The Air Force airman assisting them with the firing exercise stepped quickly forward, replacing the target. Harry waited a moment until the man had stepped back out of the way, then dropped to one knee, flicking the rifle’s heavy safety off with a loud
klatch
.

Harry carefully squeezed the trigger, aiming for the head of the silhouette, holding the rifle in a rock-hard grip as lead streamed from the Kalishnikov’s muzzle, burst after burst of fire. Controlled lethality.

The banana magazine was half-empty when he stopped a moment later, rising to his feet. There was a single ragged hole in the forehead of the silhouette, scarcely larger than a silver dollar.

He turned back to Davood, tossing the AK at him. Uneasy silence hung for a moment over the range as the two men glared at each other. “Let’s get cracking,” Harry said finally, turning away.

Davood took another long look down the range, at the mutilated silhouette, and slowly nodded. He dropped back into his prone position, ready to fire. They didn’t have the time to waste…

4:08 P.M. Tehran Time

The base camp

“So, that’s the situation at present, major.” Dr. Mahmood Ansari looked back down the trailer’s corridor, then turned back to the man at his side.

“You’re certain?” Hossein asked, still unable to believe his ears. “But the archaeologists—I mean, they…” his sentence trailed off.

“That is why I am keeping them in isolation,” the scientist replied. “Eleven died, four survived. I need to know
why
.”

“Tehran will be wanting to know the potential of this. What do I tell them?”

Dr. Ansari turned, seeing the light shining in the major’s eyes, realizing the full import of the question. And he shuddered inwardly.

“Give me time to think about it.”

Farshid nodded. “Twenty-four hours, doctor. Then I will need an answer.”

Major Hossein stepped outside the lab trailer, his hands still trembling nervously. The
power
. The possibility.

He needed something to settle his nerves and he dug into his pocket, coming out a moment later with a pack of cigarettes. American Marlboros, cigarettes he had obtained off the black market. They were expensive, but he had lost his taste for the local weed after his years in Iraq, where anything American could be readily obtained. Decadence? Perhaps. Despite his position in the Revolutionary Guard, he wasn’t a man religious enough to dwell on his sins. Or the penitence he was supposed to have felt.

He took a long drag and sighed as the nicotine flooded through his system, giving him a brief exhilarating rush. He had asked the scientist to evaluate the discovery’s potential, but the truth was, he didn’t need an answer. He
knew
.

The Iranian nuclear program had floundered for years. The cyber-sabotage of the Israeli-American STUXNET and STARS viruses had only been the beginning. Scientists had gone missing, parts had malfunctioned–at one point a reactor had nearly red-lined and been stopped only moments away from turning southern Iran into the wasteland of a second Chernobyl. All that work. And now at his very feet, all around him, lay something far more insidiously powerful, discovered by a
Jew
, of all things!

And he would be a part of this,
if
he lived. A shudder ran down his spine, as he remembered Malik. They had buried him just the day before.

Farshid closed his eyes, willing the image of his friend’s agony to go away, willing it to vanish. There would be more, that he knew, hundreds, perhaps thousands. Upon reflection, it might almost seem a pity. Such was the cost of war…

6:21 P.M. Baghdad Time

Q-West Airfield

Northern Iraq

“So, Colonel, this is the route you plan to take?” Harry asked, scoring a line on the map with the tip of his combat knife.

Luke Tancretti nodded. “It’s about as short as we could manage, nap-of-the-earth all the way, dodging in and out of the mountains.”

“Who’s our pilot, may I ask?”

Tancretti glanced up. “I am.”

“I didn’t realize they sent bird colonels on combat missions anymore,” Harry observed, glancing around at his team.

“They do,” Luke replied, working hard to keep the irritation out of his voice. His visitors were no longer wearing their Air force uniforms, the uniforms that had never belonged to them, the uniforms that were nothing more than masks for who they truly were. He had
earned
the right to wear his uniform, earned the eagles on his shoulders. And he didn’t like being challenged. The tall man’s questions kept coming like rifle bullets, unexpected and piercing.

“Who’s in your crew?”

“The Pave Low requires a crew of six,” Tancretti began, referring to the large Sikorsky-made HH-53 helicopter. Packed with avionics and sensor equipment, it was often used for night missions. “That’s Lieutenant Cooper, Sergeant Gonzales—”

“Scratch that,” Harry interrupted him, “we’re not using the Pave Low.”

“
What
?” Luke demanded, unable to believe his ears. “There’s no way to pull off this mission without it!”

“You’ll find a way,” Harry replied, his cold blue eyes unwavering. “And if you can’t find one, you’ll
make
one. The Pave Low is undeniably American. If something goes south and it is shot down, our mission will be blown. They’ll know exactly who’s coming for them. That is unacceptable.”

“Then what do you propose using?” the Air Force colonel asked, forcing himself to accept this new reality.

Harry smiled grimly. “I think officially you call it the UH-1H Iroquois. I’ve always just known it as the Huey.”

Tancretti had no reply. He just stood there, shaking his head in disbelief, willing this madness to go away. “The
Huey
?”

A brief nod. “Pick out a good co-pilot and be ready by zero one hundred. I want to be inserted before dawn.”

Harry turned and left the Quonset hut, the rest of his team following behind him.

Thomas stopped him outside. “Do you think we can really pull this off?”

Harry glanced speculatively up at the fading sunlight. “We’ll be cutting it close. But I believe we can do it.” He looked at each of his team members. “Do you all have what you need?”

Everyone nodded, the time for words past. Harry looked down, checking his Doxa dive watch. “We leave in seven hours. Let’s move.”

10:30 A.M. Eastern Time

Boston, Massachusetts

“Remember, just stay on message. I’ve spent the morning working through the press pool to weed out any thorny issues, but we may still have a few reporters that want to play hardball at the press conference. Just don’t let them get you distracted. Play it cool.”

President Roger Hancock stopped tying his tie to shoot an aggravated look at his Chief of Staff. “Stop worrying, Ian. This isn’t my first séance, for heaven’s sake.”

Ian Cahill ran fingers through his greying hair and shook his head. The sixty-two-year-old Irishman had spent well-nigh thirty years of his life navigating the murky waters of Chicago politics before becoming Hancock’s campaign manager in the Wisconsin native’s senate run a decade ago. In the cutthroat world of the Beltway, no one had ever crossed Cahill—twice.

He was known as a ruthless operator with only one inviolable principle: win.

“Mr. President, I know that. I’ve been with you almost since your beginnings in Wisconsin. Which also means I know your weaknesses better than anyone else.”

“Weaknesses?” Hancock asked sarcastically, glancing at his reflection in the mirror. “As in plural?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” came Cahill’s acerbic reply, not a trace of humor in his voice. “You can’t resist bedding anything that wears a skirt and a deuce of a lot that doesn’t. You’re a sneaky, underhanded knave who thinks ‘honesty’ is a dirty word. And in a town where alliances change faster than hotel linens, you can never bring yourself to forget an injury.”

A smile tugged at the President’s lips. “Are you quite done, Ian? How did things go with Ellison?”

“Trevor’s playing ball,” Cahill responded, referring to the managing editor of
The Washington Post
, Trevor Ellison. “He’s going to give us two weeks on the Iran story.”

“Dare I ask what we had to give him in return?”

“An exclusive on campaign announcements from here on in. He breaks them first.”

It was better than the alternative. Apparently one of the American archaeologists had a niece who worked at the
Post
. And she’d been making inquiries. A Secret Service agent entered the room before Hancock could respond, phone in hand. “David Lay on the phone for you, sir.”

It was about time. “Hancock here.”

“Mr. President, we’re at final go-mission. TALON launches in seven hours.”