Support and Defend (43 page)

T
HE RED
M
ERCEDES
SUV appeared out of the forest, two hundred yards away. It continued down the hill for several seconds, as if the driver did not see three five-ton trucks parked in the middle of the two-lane road with more than two dozen infantrymen holding weapons high in the air. But finally the driver realized his predicament, and he slid to a stop fifty yards from the roadblock.

Then he just sat there, parked in the middle of the road. Dower stood front and center in the roadblock, closest to the SUV. He felt like a matador staring down a bull.

His first officer stood just behind him. He shouted to his platoon, “That’s right, men! Guns high and pissed-off faces. Nobody’s fucks with Third Platoon!”

After twenty seconds, the Mercedes back up and turned around. It started racing up the road.

Dower said, “SAWs . . . Give them something to run from!”

All six light machine-gunners fired their weapons fully automatic. Even though blank rounds weren’t quite as loud as actual live ammo, it sounded real enough. The incredible noise bounced off the tree line, and Lieutenant Dower knew the men in the Mercedes would have thought they were taking fire from behind.

The red vehicle disappeared into the forest up the hill.

Dower’s Charlie squad leader asked, “We ain’t chasin’ it, are we?”

Dower didn’t know for sure, he hadn’t been given instructions on what to do if the armed men retreated, but he wasn’t going to let his men see any indecision. “Fuck, yeah, we are! Load up!”

D
OM WAS EXHAUSTED,
he’d covered well over a mile, almost all of it downhill in deep snow.

He’d fallen on his face a half-dozen times, but still he ran like hell. He knew the men on the road somewhere below him were essentially defenseless, and they would be going up against several armed and motivated killers. Dom had a loaded weapon, he just needed to bring it to the fight before it was too late.

He stumbled down onto the wet blacktop—this was the fifth switchback he’d crossed—and just as he started crossing the road he heard several fully automatic light machine guns firing somewhere down in the valley. His heart sank, worrying the men were firing blanks against a half-dozen trained Iranian operatives.

But right when he got to the middle of the road, racing to the snow on the other side, the red Mercedes SUV squealed around the turn on his left, heading up toward him.

He was only seventy feet away.

The driver saw him, Dom was just a man in jeans and a sweatshirt and dark hair and a beard, but he held an American carbine rifle in his hand. The Mercedes accelerated, Dom swung his rifle toward the threat, flipped the fire selector switch to fully automatic, and blasted the SUV as it neared.

He saw the windshield explode and the metal hood rip with pockmarks of bullet holes and smoke and steam spray out from shredded hoses in the engine compartment, but the vehicle kept coming. Dom dived off the road, tumbled into the snow, just barely missing the grille as it passed.

He rolled to his knees, opened fire on the Mercedes from behind, but after a few rounds his gun clicked.

He was out of ammo.

The SUV launched off the road and went airborne, slammed into a tall pine tree, shaking hundreds of pounds of snow free from his needles and sending them crashing down onto the roof of the red vehicle.

Dom leapt to his feet, the adrenaline of the moment overtook his exhaustion, and he ran to the crash.

M
OHAMMED
M
EHDI
M
OBASHERI OPENED
the driver’s-side door and rolled out into the snow. He was covered in blood, but he knew it came from Ajiz in the driver’s seat. The Lebanese Hezbollah cell leader from Lyon had taken a round to the throat and another to the forehead, and now the entire front seat of the Mercedes was as red as the exterior paintjob.

Lying stunned in the cold snow, Mohammed first felt for Ethan Ross’s microdrive. It was right where he left it inside his jacket. Then he got his hands around the pistol in his waistband, and he pulled it free.

Behind him he heard a shout, then a series of grunts and impacts. Men in hand-to-hand combat, just feet from where he lay. He pushed up to his hands and knees, began swinging the pistol around to aim it at the threat, but just as his gun found a man in its sights, the man kicked at the pistol, knocking it out of his hand and up into the air. It landed somewhere in the snow far behind him.

A bearded man with wild eyes grabbed Mohammed by the collar of his jacket and lifted him, threw him onto the hood of the Mercedes. The Iranian looked around for support from his Quds men, but through the smashed windshield he saw Shiraz dead in the car, and Isfahan on the ground in the snow.

“Where is the scrape?” The man spoke English. That was no surprise, although the fact he was alone, and seemingly unarmed, did seem peculiar.

“Where is the
fucking
scrape?” The man shouted, then he slammed Mohammed’s head into the hood. The young Revolutionary Guards officer started to reach into his jacket, but the American grabbed his wrist and reached into the pocket instead. He pulled out the drive and looked at it.

“Is this it?”

Mobasheri nodded.

“This is all of it?”

Another nod. Mohammed closed his eyes. He had failed. “Everybody had to die for this little thing?”

Mohammed opened his eyes, eyeing the strange man curiously. He said, “Yes. They did. Of course. We are at war with the West.” He shrugged a little. “You just do not know it.”

D
OMINIC
C
ARUSO WRAPPED
his strong hands around the thin man’s neck, and he started to squeeze. He knew he could strangle him easily, he could do it as quickly or as slowly as he wanted. And he thought he might do just that. The rage in him—pushing out through the exhaustion, outlasting the cold and the pain, overwhelming the sadness of the loss of those who did not survive—the rage was a pure and powerful force, and Dom almost gave into it.

As he tightened his grip he heard a rumbling noise. At first he thought it was the Iranian’s throat emitting a low gurgle and his windpipe was crushed. He ignored it for a moment, concentrated on his task, and soon three large U.S. Army green trucks pulled up behind him hill and stopped. Men leapt out and ran over, they enveloped the scene, checking the dead and wounded, pulling men out of the car and securing weapons.

All through it, Dom kept the pressure up on the small man’s neck. The Iranian was turning blue in the face, his mouth was open, and his fat tongue poked out an inch.

Dom watched him with fascination for a moment. He wondered how long it would take for him— “Sir?”

—to die.

“Sir?”

Dom relaxed his grip. The Iranian on the hood of the Mercedes sucked in a desperate chest full of air.

“Sir?”

Dom turned around. An African American first lieutenant stood with his rifle pointing at him.

“Step away!”

Dom said, “You’re gonna shoot me with your blanks?”

The young officer said, “If you know we’ve got blanks, you must be one of the good guys.”

Dom shrugged and go of the Iranian’s neck. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

“Sir, we are ordered to secure this scene.”

Dom nodded distractedly. Then said, “Good. Start by securing this little fucker. He might have weapons on him, I suggest you strip him down to nothing and hog-tie him. He’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than he looks.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dower ordered his men to take the still gasping man off the hood of the SUV and cut his clothes off with their combat knives. They pulled him into the street, and Mohammed screamed in terror while they went to work on him.

Dom took Dower away from the rest of the group. Sirens in the distance seemed to grow by the second.

“I’m FBI,” Dom said, but he offered no identification. “Here’s the deal, Lieutenant. In a few minutes half of Italy is going to be here. I need to be gone when that happens. It wouldn’t hurt if you and the prisoner were gone, too.”

The young junior officer just nodded.

Dom reached into his pocket and handed him the microdrive. “This is little thing is what all this is about. That’s all you need to know. A guy from CIA is going to show up at your barracks at Vicenza pretty soon. Hell, he might beat you back there. He’s going to want you to hand this over. If you do that, you and your platoon probably have some pretty big attaboys coming your way. If you lose it, your career is over.”

Dower’s hand closed over the device.

“Take the prisoner back, too. If I take him with me, he’ll turn up in the shallow grave, and he might be worth something to somebody.”

“We’ll take him.” Dower looked around at all the dead bodies in the snow. “Can I ask who those men are?” He hesitated, still looking at the bodies in the snow. “I mean . . . who they
were
?”

Dom shrugged. This young man and the others just risked their lives. They deserved some information about what this was all about. “They are all Iranian spies. They’ve killed innocent people on four continents in the past week. And today, you boys stopped them.”

Dower’s chest heaved with pride. But even so, he said, “I do believe
you
stopped them, sir.” He smiled. “But I’m not going to deny we might have helped a little bit.”

Dom smiled, slapped the young man on the shoulder, turned, and headed back into the trees.

A
DARA
S
HERMAN PICKED
C
ARUSO
up twenty minutes later from the driveway of an unoccupied mountain chalet. Dom had been hiding behind a woodshed as Italian police cars raced by, but when she arrived he ran across the driveway, climbed into her rented BMW, then laid himself gingerly in the passenger seat and lowered it flat.

Adara had the BMW turned around and leaving the area again in seconds.

They passed dozens more emergency vehicles rolling through the valley, they even heard a helo in the air, though the weather was likely still below minimums. Adara concentrated on the road, but after only a few minutes of rolling in silence, Sherman looked down at Dom and thought he might have passed out.

Adara asked, “Caruso? Caruso? Talk to me. Are you injured?”

Dom just nodded slowly.

Her eyes widened. “You’re hit? Where are you hit?”

“I’m going to need you to evaluate me. See how bad it is.”

“Okay. I’m pulling over.”

“No. Keep going. We’ll get out of here, back on the highway, head back to the northwest.”

“You sure you can hang on?”

Dom nodded. Coughed a little. His eyes closed.

“Just keep talking to me, okay?”

“I’ll . . . I’ll try.”

They drove for a full minute before Adara said, “When you came up to the car on the drive, I didn’t see you were hurt. You looked tired, yeah, but not wounded.”

“It’s bad, Sherman. I told you.”

“Okay,” she said. Then, “Where, exactly, were you hit? I don’t see blood.”

Dom fought a little smile now. Adara missed it. “Look. You’re the medic, not me. You’ll have to check me out. There’s a hotel I passed on the way down. It looked really nice. A steak restaurant off the lobby. I say we check in for the night, order a couple of bottles of champagne.” One of Dom’s eyes cracked open and looked over at Adara quickly, then it closed again. “For medicinal purposes, only, of course.” He coughed, making a show of it now. “And then you give me a complete physical.”

Now both eyes opened slowly, and he found Adara behind the wheel, staring down at him. A little smile crossed her lips, but she seemed to be fighting it.

“You’re an asshole. You had me worried.”

Dom said, “It’s about ten more miles. Near the border.” He smiled. “I’ll try to hang on till then.”

Adara just drove now, looking out at the road. After a long moment she said, “My first inclination is to say no, to drop you off at the next bus stop I see, and to go home without you.”

Dom pushed the button to move his seat back into the upright position now. He said, “I’m holding out hope for your second inclination.”

Adara nodded. “Gerry
will
want me to sign off on you before you return to duty. Maybe we should start that process with a complete physical.”

Dom shrugged. “Okay. Sure. Let’s do it for Gerry.”

Adara said, “But I’ll warn you now. It won’t be easy. You will have to prove to me you are in peak condition.”

“I’ll give it my all, Sherman.”