The Leveling (19 page)

A green Peugeot was about a half mile behind them and gaining fast, accelerating through the curves.

At the end of the ridge, at a spot where there was a ravine not unlike the one from which he’d escaped, Decker said, “Stop.”

“A town,” said the driver. “Three kilometers. We’ll take you. We’ll stop there.”

“Here,” said Decker. He should have gotten out at the cluster of houses he’d seen back down the road. He wasn’t thinking clearly.

“Three kilometers. The town will be better.”

By then the green Peugeot would have caught up. Decker gripped the driver’s shoulder with his wounded hand and gave a violent squeeze. “Here, goddammit! Here!”

The car slowed to a stop and backfired.

“I’m sorry,” said Decker.

“American?” said the woman.

“I need the rest of the soda!”

“Get out,” said the driver.

The girlfriend quickly handed Decker four more cans of Coke, along with a large bag of sugared almonds. Decker mumbled his thanks and opened the door. As he was stumbling out of the car, she pulled out a half-full bottle of Smirnoff vodka from underneath the passenger seat.

“
Na!
” said the driver to his girlfriend. The look on his face said
no way in hell are we giving him that
.

“For face,” said the girlfriend, looking at Decker. “For clean.” She touched her face, as if swabbing it with a cotton ball, and pushed the bottle of vodka into his hands.

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

W
HEN
M
ARK REGAINED
consciousness, he was in the front seat of the Lada, his face mashed up against the dashboard and surrounded by shattered glass. A police car, its hood reduced to an accordion-like crumple, lay a couple of feet in front of him.

A strange silence persisted, as though time had stopped. For a moment Mark wondered if he’d been rendered deaf.

Broken glass tinkled as it fell to the asphalt.

Someone groaned. Mark lifted his head. The Lada hadn’t been equipped with airbags and the seat belts had been removed, so the two Chinese who’d been in the front seat had been thrown outside—one lay facedown on the pavement, the other sprawled awkwardly on the hood of the police car. Both were motionless and bleeding, their bodies twisted into unnatural positions. Thompson was unconscious in the back of the Lada, slumped in a kneeling position on the floor. The groaning had come from the Chinese who was still in the backseat next to Thompson.

The driver’s side door of the police car opened. Daria unbuckled her seat belt, pushed away the deflated airbag, and stumbled out.

The Chinese next to Thompson groaned again, so Mark aimed a foot at the man’s head and kicked him as hard as he could until Daria climbed onto the hood of the car. “Gotta get out of here, Mark.”

She pulled him out through the front windshield. His face and hands scraped against the broken glass. He rolled off what was left of the hood of the car and hit the pavement on his knees.

“Can you stand?” asked Daria.

Mark forced himself to do so. The world was spinning. He felt nauseous and had an unsettling feeling that his head wasn’t properly attached to his neck.

“I’m good.”

Quick footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see a single Chinese embassy soldier sprinting toward them with a worried look on his face and an automatic rifle slung across his back.

Mark stumbled to the Lada, pried open one of the back doors, and grabbed a pistol from the Chinese he’d been kicking. Gripping it with both hands, he swiveled and fired a warning shot.

The embassy soldier stopped short. He’d clearly been expecting to help with an accident, not become a part of a firefight.

Mark fired another shot above the guy’s head.

Daria screamed out something in Mandarin Chinese. The soldier let his rifle slip off his back and sprinted back to the embassy gate. He’d return within a minute, Mark knew. With reinforcements.

Daria retrieved the soldier’s rifle. “We’re outta here!”

“Thompson.” Mark’s head was pounding. Blood from little cuts on his head dripped into his eyes.

Sirens wailed in the distance. “No time.”

“Help me get him out.”

Daria face registered exasperation. “You get him out, I’ll get us a car.”

Mark pocketed the gun of the Chinese who remained unconscious in the Lada and dragged Thompson out of the backseat.
Thompson was a thin but tall man, and Mark struggled with the dead weight.

Fifty feet behind him, Daria commandeered a Volga sedan at gunpoint from a man who had stopped to gawk at the accident. She pulled up next to the ruined Lada and skidded to a stop.

Mark yanked open the rear door, clasped his hands around Thompson’s chest, and heaved him into the backseat of the Volga.

Washington, DC

“A
IM POINT ONE
, Arak.”

A satellite image appeared on an LCD monitor. The monitor was embedded in a sound-dampening fabric wall at the far end of the conference table in the White House situation room. A PowerPoint slide with a series of bullet points popped up on an adjacent monitor:
40 megawatt heavy water reactor, air defense protection, onsite government housing, collateral damage risk: low.

“Accepted,” said the president’s national security advisor. The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the commander of CENTCOM, and the secretary of state—all members of the principal’s committee—concurred.

“Confirmed,” said the president. He took a big sip of his black coffee. It was six in the morning. He’d made his decision.

“Aim point two, Natanz.”

The satellite image showed a lonely collection of buildings right where the desert met the Zagros Mountains.

The bullet points on the PowerPoint slide said:
Uranium enrichment site, 9000 centrifuges confirmed, heavily fortified, collateral damage risk: low
.

“This slide bears some additional explanation,” said the secretary of defense. “Note that the armaments slated for the first attack include three twenty-two-thousand-pound MOAB bombs to clear the surface, followed by four of our thirty-thousand-pound bunker busters. When those go off in quick succession,
it may cause enough of a seismic event that the Russians and Chinese will assume we’ve hit the Iranians with a tactical nuke. We’ll have to have our diplomats ready to shoot that theory down pronto before it gets out of hand.”

“Understood,” said the secretary of state.

“Also, there could be a decent amount of both low and highly enriched uranium at the bomb site, which will complicate onsite confirmation of complete destruction. The cleanup team that goes in will have to be prepared for the radiation factor.”

The CENTCOM commander said, “They are. But when it comes to Natanz, everyone needs to understand that heavily fortified means that the two main centrifuge halls we know of are both protected by two-point-five-meter-thick walls made of reinforced concrete, are buried at least ten meters in the ground, and further protected by a thick surface layer of concrete. Even with the new bunker busters, those underground halls are a tough aim point. The only way the air force feels comfortable guaranteeing their demolition is with an actual tactical nuke.”

“We’ve talked about this,” said the national security advisor.

“We’ll hit it with the bunker busters until we get the job done,” said the president. “If the SEAL team we send down to confirm destruction needs to finish the job, then that’s what they’ll do. We’ll need boots on the ground to take out Fordo anyway.”

“Target accepted with conventional armaments,” said the national security advisor.

The rest concurred and the president confirmed the decision, as he did the decision to hit Fordo—a heavily fortified uranium-enrichment site that the Iranians had built under a mountain—with a combination of conventional armaments and a Special Forces cleanup team.

“Aim point four, Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor.”

“Obviously this is a tough one,” said the secretary of defense.

The satellite image showed a red dot in the middle of an urban area in northern Tehran.

“Define high collateral damage,” said the president, after reading the accompanying slide.

“Two to three hundred civilians plus the technicians on site. Plus they use the reactor for medical purposes. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand patients a week are dependent on it.”

“Are the heavy bombs necessary?”

“If we play it safe and dial down the armaments, we’d probably be able to limit immediate collateral damage to the technicians on site. But if we want to be sure we’ve taken it out completely, including the tunnels we believe are buried beneath the visible buildings, then we should go with the targeteers’ recommendation.”

“North Tehran is the stronghold of the reformists,” said the secretary of state. “If we kill large numbers of civilians there, it will only drive them to the hard-liners. Intelligence is spotty about the tunnels and what they might contain. I’ll accept the aim point, but with reduced armaments.”

“My view is that the aim point should be accepted with recommended armaments,” said the national security advisor. “The reformists will rally around the flag the second the first bomb falls, collateral damage or not.”

“I agree,” said the president. “Level the place.”

The rest of the committee concurred.

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

“I
S HE ALIVE?”
asked Daria.

Mark sat beside Thompson in the rear seat of the commandeered Volga. He put his finger on Thompson’s neck, feeling for the carotid artery.

“Yeah.” He gave Thompson a light tap on the stomach. “William, you with us!”

There was no response.

“What do we do with him?”

Mark’s head was pounding. “The US embassy. We’ll leave him there. How did you find me?”

Daria explained how she’d gotten the message he’d left on her phone and set up a surveillance post with a view of the arch. After the Chinese had closed in and shot the Turkmen soldier, police from all over the city had descended on the scene within minutes. One of them had left his car running, so she’d stolen it—with all that was happening in the square, no one noticed her driving off—and had headed to the Chinese embassy. “I recognized a few of the guys who grabbed you. They’re definitely Chinese Guoanbu. I knew they operated out of the embassy. So I took my best guess and drove right there.”

“And ran straight into us.”

“The Turkmen spent a ton on new Mercedes police cars last year. I figured the Mercedes had airbags and I was hoping you were in the backseat of that Lada.”

“Lucky guess.”

“My options were limited.”

Mark couldn’t argue with that.

“I couldn’t let them take you past the embassy gates,” she added. “If that happened—”

“You did the right thing.” He’d been planning on running, but he might not have made it. “Thanks.” He turned to face her, and they locked eyes for a moment. “Really, I appreciate what you did.”