The Tenth Circle (4 page)

Natanz, Iran

McCracken checked his watch as the soldiers ushered him into the same elevator that had brought him down from the above­ground facility. Four of them, two on either side, believing they were about to execute a simple filmmaker.

The compartment doors slid closed. One of the Revolutionary Guardsmen pressed the proper button.

Tick, tick, tick
started the clock in McCracken’s head as he doubled over, pretending to be sick, perhaps terrified in recognition of what was transpiring.

“Please,” he said in Farsi, his voice shaky and body trembling, as the guards nearest him crouched on either side. “Please,” he begged again.

McCracken felt one of them touch his shoulder, whether in feigned reassurance or as a firm show of authority, he wasn’t sure.

And it didn’t matter.

McCracken looped his left arm around the soldier’s, straightening it and then slamming it upward so it snapped at the elbow. Then he jerked the man downward toward him and smashed the ridge of his hand into the man’s throat, shattering the cartilage. The man’s gasp had barely sounded before Blaine was behind him, the soldier’s MPT-9 submachine gun, manufactured by Heckler & Koch, pinned between them.

Fourteen seconds, four more to go before the elevator reached the surface
…

So McCracken went for the man’s pistol instead, a PC-9 that was an unlicensed variant of the SIG P226 with which he was eminently familiar. No safety, just a decocking mechanism to ensure that a round was always chambered and ready to fire.

Blaine fired through the holster by jerking it upright. His first bullet took out the elevator’s security camera, while two of the remaining three soldiers were still struggling to right their submachine guns, clumsy weapons for such a confined space, when his barrage of nine-millimeter shells
thwacked
into them.

Eleven seconds
…

The fourth soldier either never tried or quickly gave up trying to get his MPT-9 around. Just barreled into his wheezing comrade from the side, forcing McCracken up against the elevator wall. Pinning him there while the soldier fought to free his own pistol.

No way Blaine could find the now-writhing man’s holster again or free his submachine gun in time, at least not all of it. But the angle of impact had left the butt riding high above his shoulder, just the angle McCracken needed to employ both hands to jam it forward, striking the final soldier in the forehead the same moment the man’s pistol cleared its holster.

Five seconds
…

He got off one shot and then another, the first missing McCracken’s left ear by mere inches and the second clanging into the ceiling. Blaine, meanwhile, kept the butt pressed against the fourth man’s shattered nose and shoved forward, the writhing soldier still pressed between them when the final man’s head slammed into the far compartment wall. An instant was all McCracken needed—to draw the submachine gun butt backward and resteady it for a blow straight on—with enough practiced force for the man’s nose to explode bone backward into his brain.

Two seconds
…

The mental clock in his head nearly exhausted, Blaine jerked that MPT-9 from the shoulder of the solider still pressed against him, letting him crumple. The elevator doors opening as he stripped a second MPT-9 from the body of the slumped soldier whose face was only a memory. Both weapons in hand when he burst out into the security area manned by soldiers caught between motions, the echoing din of gunshots having already reached them.

McCracken opened up with both submachine guns, catching all of them by surprise. He felt the surge from the steady pulse of fire kicking up superheated air into his face, his teeth rattling in rhythm with the steady clacking of the twin weapons. His ears first stung, then seemed to bubble with air. Blaine was only vaguely conscious of the bodies toppling around him, most suspended between breaths and actions. A few at the outside of his firing arc managed to free their weapons, even find the triggers before McCracken’s fire cut them down with neatly stitched bullet lines across their torsos. He’d heard battle described any number of ways over the years, as a fog, a dream, even as a razor-sharp reality. Today, with a dozen men felled before any could get off a decent shot, it seemed a combination of all three.

McCracken discarded the empty submachine guns, the air rich with the smells of oil and gun smoke. The clock in his head had started up again, telling him he needed thirty more seconds to execute the final stage of his plan. Cutting it close, then, even closer than he thought when he caught the sound of helicopters approaching overhead.

Natanz, Iran

Blaine knew the choppers couldn’t possibly have been responding to an emergency call, not this fast. They must have been carrying replacements as opposed to reinforcements. Still, the two dozen or so troops likely to be inside the old Russian MI-8 helicopters would learn in mere moments what was transpiring and would surge from inside their cabins ready to join the battle.

That left him with no choice other than to rush through the doors leading into the facility, waving his arms frantically to signal the choppers. In that moment, the side doors on both MI-8s jerked open, the troops ferried here already poised on the starting blocks with weapons steadied before them.

McCracken backed away, pretending to be warding off debris kicked up by the rotor wash when his real intention was to reach the garbage truck currently emptying the first of several dumpsters lined up one after the other. The truck had turned up innocuously in several satellite reconnaissance photos, enough to give him an idea of where to find the last thing his plan required.

A means of escape.

“What do you mean he’s gone?” Minister Hosseini demanded of the Revolutionary Guard major in charge of security for the aboveground installation. “He can’t be
gone
!”

“We’ve searched everywhere,” the major insisted.

“But you sealed off the grounds. We’re in the middle of nowhere here with an electrified fence surrounding the complex. Keep looking, Major.”

“But—”

“You have your orders,” said Hosseini. “Now follow them.”

The garbage truck rumbled down the last stretch of highway before the rendezvous point, just moments away now.

“Gotta hand it to you, boss,” said Sal Belamo from behind the wheel. An ex-middleweight boxer who’d once fought Carlos Monzón for the crown, Belamo had the scars to prove it and experience dating back to the heyday of the Cold War where he specialized in close, professional-style enemy executions. A generation before, he’d actually been assigned to take out McCracken, but opted to join forces with him instead, which began a relationship that had endured ever since. “You outdid yourself this time. You ask me, anybody thinks you’re too old for this shit better throw away their watch.”

“You agree, Indian?” McCracken asked the hulking, seven-foot figure squeezed against the door on the other side of him.

“I’ve never owned a watch, Blainey,” said Johnny Wareagle, his oldest friend, who’d fought by his side in Vietnam and in pretty much every war since, mostly the ones nobody ever heard about. “I determined long ago that the passage of time has nothing to do with minutes and seconds.”

“Guess we’re living proof of that, aren’t we?”

Sal Belamo braked the truck and eased it off the main road toward the rendezvous point with the Israeli team who’d be escorting the three of them out of Iran. “This is a Mercedes, you know. Goddamn Mercedes garbage truck.”

McCracken could only hope that the dumpster in which he’d taken refuge while Sal and Johnny completed the real drivers’ rounds contained no radioactive material.

“I ever tell you I was supposed to be part of the whole Desert One fiasco back in 1980?” Belamo continued.

“What happened?”

“I got pulled after telling the suits in charge the plan was for shit. They took offense to that. Wasn’t one of my better days.”

“Just like this isn’t going to be one of Iran’s better ones,” McCracken said, turning to Wareagle. “Got that satellite phone, Indian?”

“Where could he have gone?” Hosseini demanded of the Revolutionary Guard major, after still no trace of the filmmaker had been found twenty minutes later.

“Perhaps you’re asking the wrong question, Minister. Perhaps you should concern yourself with what he was doing here.”

“Isn’t it obvious, you fool?”

A subordinate rushed over, extending a satellite phone toward Hosseini, who clutched it to his ear. “Speak!”

“We found the real Hakeem Najjar bound and gagged in his apartment,” the secret policeman he’d dispatched reported. “Shaken, but otherwise fine.”

“Find out everything he knows, especially about the man who impersonated him, and then make sure he disappears for good.”

“Understood, Minister.”

Hosseini ended the call and handed the satellite phone back to his subordinate, turning to find the major still standing there.

“Isn’t there something you’d be better off doing? Like finding the man who infiltrated this complex, perhaps?”

“I was just wondering how anyone could have pulled off something so elaborate. And why?”

“He saw everything the complex has to offer. He knows
everything
! Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Oh, it’s enough,” agreed the major. “I’m just not certain that it’s
all
.”

“What else could there be?”

“His equipment,” the major said, innocently enough. “I assume you confiscated all of it prior to his dismissal.”

“Of course. The camera itself, along with the portable lights he used and the batteries that supplied power. All were inspected and X-rayed two different times in accordance with security protocols.”

“These batteries would’ve had a lead casing,” noted the major. “I assume your inspection team considered that in their protocol.”

Hosseini felt himself grow cold. “In the name of Allah … No, it can’t be …”

And then he was rushing back for the elevator, which was still slick with drying blood.

The Natanz facility was totally off-line, no way to make contact in or out other than via satellite phone. No cellular or Internet service was available or accessible whatsoever. Had workers dared risk their jobs or worse by bringing in cellular devices with them, they’d find all signals blocked by sophisticated jamming devices that prevented any from getting in or out.

So McCracken took the satellite phone from Johnny War­eagle and began entering a number.

“The camera equipment!” Hosseini blared to the Revolutionary Guard captain in charge of security for the underground facility. “Where is it?”

“Placed just as you instructed.”

“Where?”

The captain led him down the hall to a single narrow door and opened it to reveal shelves of military ordnance. A single shelf against the far wall that had been empty now held the fake filmmaker’s confiscated equipment.

“See,” the captain reported, “everything but the camera itself, also as you instructed.”

Hosseini hurried to the shelf, reaching it just as the captain flicked on a light that spotlighted all four of the portable camera batteries, each about the size of a shoe box.

McCracken wasn’t sure who had handled the conversion process, knew only that the plan he presented to David was to take three relatively low-yield tactical nuclear warheads in the five- to ten-megaton range and convert them from missile deployment to ground-based explosives. Originally these smaller warheads had been called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions and included models like the W48 that could be loaded into a 155-millimeter nuclear artillery shell. The warhead in the even older W33 would work just as nicely, although in a more crude fashion, but for his money, McCracken was betting the United States had supplied Israel with W45 warheads lifted from the deactivated line of MGR-3 Little John missiles for the mission.

McCracken didn’t know whether it was Israeli or American scientists who’d handled the complex chore of refashioning three of his four Canon BP-975 battery packs into nuclear weapons with ground-based detonation capabilities. It couldn’t have been easy trying to squeeze all that ordnance and technology into a prepackaged size, each with a combined yield many times greater than the much larger bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The filmmaker Najjar actually used a smaller battery pack, with too small of a casing to use to hide a bomb, so this was the one liberty McCracken took with the man’s process, prepared to explain the anomaly to Hosseini had he been challenged.

The four portable camera batteries, three of which had been converted to nuclear bombs, had been waiting for him when he reached Tehran. The fourth was all he needed to work the lights, the others purportedly there for backup power on the chance it was needed.

He came to the final number and paused briefly before pressing it.

“Boom,” he said softly.

Hosseini and the Revolutionary Guard captain were halfway back to the elevator, each lugging two of the portable batteries, when a buzzing sounded. The men detected it in their ears but couldn’t determine its source, until they cast their eyes downward in the last moment before the three flashes erupted together. The blast wave spread outward in a millisecond, consuming everything it reached in the last instants before the secondary blast sent fiery heat reaching a million degrees a mile in every direction underground.

Sal Belamo had just reached the rendezvous point a dozen miles away when McCracken felt the earth rumble. It wasn’t so much beneath as all around him, the world itself quaking. There was no sense of a primary or secondary blast, no air burst that flushed heat into the atmosphere. Instead there was only a vast cloud of dirt and debris coughed into the air, not in the shape of the traditional mushroom cloud so much as a smoke storm kicked up from an oil fire.

McCracken continued to feel the rumbling for several more seconds in the pit of his stomach, wondering whether it was his imagination at work or if this part of the world was literally shaking itself apart. Then it subsided, slowly, leaving Belamo to let out a hefty sigh.

“Now that was some ride,” he uttered. “You ask me, even Disneyland’s got nothing to match it.”

“I might head there myself, now that this is over,” McCracken grinned, noticing Belamo exchange a wary glance with Johnny Wareagle. “Uh-oh, what am I missing here?”

“It’s not good, boss,” Belamo told him.

“The Hellfire reborn, Blainey,” Wareagle elaborated, using the term he’d coined way back in Vietnam. “Only in our own country.”

“And this time it hit close to home, boss,” added Belamo grimly. “Up close and personal.”