Ground Zero

by Don Pendleton

  There was a note of arrogance in the man’s tone that pricked Bolan’s attention. He was sure he had the upper hand, which might be all the soldier needed.

  “You expect me to step into a hail of fire?” Bolan asked in Arabic.

  “That is not a native accent,” Mussivand replied calmly, switching from Persian to Arabic. “An American? European, perhaps? You understand Farsi but choose not to speak it back to me.... Would that perhaps betray you?”

  Bolan checked his watch: two minutes. It would be a simple hit if he could be sure that the man was unarmed, but nobody sounded that arrogant without a gun in his hand.

  “You might as well speak,” Mussivand continued. “It will do you no good to try to prevaricate. If you try to enter the room, I will shoot you, and if you try to escape, you will find your avenue of escape cut off by the military. I have, of course, alerted them.”

  Bolan cursed softly. The one thing that had not been included on the schematics was a direct line to the military. Of course, that made perfect sense, and it was probably wireless, which would be why it had not shown up on any plans. It also explained the light security presence in the block.

  Bolan sheathed the Stryker knife and reached for a grenade. If they had military on their tail, any pretense at subtlety had to go out the window.

  “Okay, so you’re smarter than me and well prepared,” Bolan began. “American, yes. We know about your funding of al Qaeda cells in the U.S., and we’ve closed you down—”

  “For now,” Mussivand interrupted smugly. “But we will soon find another route. You cannot stop us. I am just a little surprised that you traced it to me, and that you have the temerity to attempt such an outrage. You will, of course, be paraded through the streets and shown off to the media for your crimes before you are executed. Unofficially, before you can be exchanged, of course.”

  Bolan smiled mirthlessly as he fingered the Semtex he had taken from a pouch on his web harness. It was a small amount, but enough to cause the collateral damage required in such a confined space. He primed it with the detonator and continued talking to buy the seconds he needed.

  “The idea was that I come here and take you out with no trace as a warning to your government, or whichever faction of it is backing you in this. A nice, quiet assassination. But I guess it’s not going to be that way.”

  “Indeed not. Step into view, after divesting yourself of all weapons,” Mussivand demanded.

  “Oh, come on. You don’t think I’m that stupid, do you?” Bolan sighed before tossing the primed Semtex into the room and throwing himself to the floor as far away from the doorway as possible, his mouth open and hands over his ears to prevent concussion and deafness.

  The explosion was sudden, and it seemed to shake the whole building with its ferocity. Whatever quiet had existed before was now shattered as alarms and sirens wailed, meshing with the voices of those who were startled by the rending of the evening’s quiet.

  Dust from the study room filled the hallway, and the candles extinguished by the blast threw the apartment into darkness.

  Bolan had the Desert Eagle in hand as he looked into what remained of the room. Furniture had been splintered by the blast, the windows blown out and the decor ripped around the walls. Mussivand was sprawled across the floor, his body ripped and torn by the blast, his limbs at unnatural angles. There was no doubt that he was dead, and no need for Bolan to finish the job. A Beretta 93R lay near his lifeless arm.

  Bolan turned away and went out the door, heading for the stairs. This was not a time to risk the elevator. He still had the pistol in his hand, and as the door to one of the other apartments opened and a man appeared clutching a gun, Bolan snapped off a shot. The man was quick and ducked out of the way. By the time he was back in the frame and looking for the intruder, Bolan was gone.

  * * *

  YURI SWORE LOUDLY as the explosion echoed through the building. Knowing Cooper’s plan, he realized that something radical had gone awry and that withdrawal was the order of the day. The front entrance was not a viable option. Sirens already sounded and alarms wailed, triggered by the effects of the blast. A man leaving the building by the front would be running straight into the arms of the approaching authorities.

  He would have to use the back way. Hopefully he would meet up with Cooper, and equally hopefully he might just avoid authorities who would be slower to approach the rear.

  Yuri raced to the stairwell, making no attempt now to hide the BXP10. As he hit the emergency stairs, he could hear someone descending at speed. He hoped it would be Cooper, as he paused with the SMG angled up.

  “C’mon, what are you waiting for?” Bolan said with a mirthless grin as he came to a sudden stop at the dogleg angle of the stairwell, his Desert Eagle fixed on the Russian, stayed only by the same reflexes that had stopped the Russian from firing without thought.

  The two men hit the stairs that led to the basement garage. Yuri, in the lead, held up his arm to stay the soldier as they reached the exit door. He opened it carefully, scanning the garage space.

  “Okay,” he snapped, leading the way out, BXP10 at the ready. “I hope you can improvise, Cooper.”

  “I sure can,” he said, fishing the stolen car key from a pocket.

  Yuri looked momentarily puzzled, then shrugged as the soldier led him across to the still-unconscious would-be driver, prone on the concrete.

  “Get the gate,” Bolan ordered. “The electronics are out, so you need to slide it across.”

  While Yuri complied, Bolan fired up the engine of the vehicle, whose lights blinked when he hit central locking. Bolan thanked his luck for technology, remembering the days when he would have had to waste precious time finding which car the key fitted. Yuri rushed back and clambered into the car, and Bolan took it out into the street.

  “We’ll have some time,” Yuri commented. “There will be CCTV of us, but they might not immediately access that. What happened back there, by the way?”

  Bolan outlined the events briefly as he drove.

  When he finished, Yuri shook his head. “I thought I was being rash in shooting the security. You go big when you go, Cooper.”

  “Sometimes there just isn’t any other way,” Bolan replied as he took the car in the opposite direction to the safe house. “Fact is, Mussivand is dead and the necessary people will know why. What they tell the world is another thing. Without me—or you—to hold up like puppets, they can’t prove a damn thing.”

  “Then I suggest we get out of Tehran. And soon,” he added pointedly.

  Bolan took the car off the main road, eyeing with some concern the military and police vehicles that were speeding in the opposite direction.

  “There will be footage of us leaving the building in this. We need to ditch it and head back on foot.”

  “Why not just go?” Yuri asked.

  Bolan shook his head. “Listen, we need the ordnance we brought with us if we have a chance of getting into Parchin. We can’t risk compromising the people who have helped us so far. We’ll clean out that safe house and hit the road.”

  “I can’t argue with your reasoning, but I do wonder if we can get back to our equipment,” Yuri said flatly.

  “Won’t know until we try,” the soldier retorted.

  While they had been speaking, Bolan had taken the car down a series of side streets until he was in an area where they could be sure that there was no CCTV. He beckoned Yuri as he got out of the vehicle, then took him down a small alley. More time spent in alleys, Bolan mused, but this time with a purpose. He stripped the beard from his face, wincing at the pull of the spirit gum, and smeared the dark makeup so that it covered his chin. He indicated to Yuri to do likewise and then swapped robes.

  “We’re about a half mile from the safe house, roughly two and a half klicks,” Bolan figured. “And we need to get on
the road before sunup. How well did you memorize that street map we were looking at?”

  “Not well enough to guarantee we can get back without a few detours,” the Russian replied wryly.

  “Me, neither,” Bolan said. “Time to hide in plain sight.”

  They hit the streets, looking a little different from when they had walked into the alley. They walked back to the main road and started to trek back through the city. As they approached the part of the city where the bombed apartment building stood, they hit a cordon of police that held up traffic. They could see in the distance the military and emergency services gathered at the front of the building.

  “You live through here?” one of the police on the cordon asked Yuri as they approached.

  “No, just on our route,” the Russian replied as simply as possible in perfect Farsi.

  “Then take another one,” the policeman snapped before turning to answer a colleague who was yelling across to him.

  Bolan and Yuri chose a route that took them around the block until they could come back toward a route they recognized. Their improvised disguises had passed muster when called on, and they thanked their luck.

  They walked onto the block where the safe house was located, grateful that there was no one on staff to notice their arrival.

  While they packed their duffel bags, Bolan flicked on the TV in the apartment to catch the news. There were early reports of an explosion and the death of an official, but there were no details. The TV images were the first time that Bolan had a chance to see the full extent of the damage that the Semtex had wrought. He realized how they had ridden their luck to this point and hoped it could continue just long enough to get out of Tehran.

  “Ready?” Yuri questioned. He had cleared the apartment while Bolan had checked their route on the tablet and kept an eye on the news.

  Bolan nodded and killed the TV. In the sudden silence, the noises of the evening that filtered in gave no indication of what was happening nearby. The soldier stowed the tablet in one of the duffel bags and picked up the key for the vehicle that had been left for the second stage of the mission. Although they were headed away from the scene of the explosion, he was aware that he would be taking a possibly traceable vehicle through a city on alert.

  They just needed that luck to last. He had no desire to implicate the men who had aided them at great risk.

  “Let’s go,” Bolan said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Parchin was a military base located in a position where the landscape gave it the optimum security offered by nature. It was the jewel in the Iranian military crown. The roads leading toward it were monitored closely, and for that reason Bolan chose to ditch their vehicle about four miles from the base, assiduously stripping and cleaning it of any incriminating evidence. The sun was rising as the two men started to trek the remaining distance.

  Although they had entered the country via the Caspian Sea and so had made their initial travels over that small part of the country that was plain land, the majority of Iran was on a mountainous plateau, and that had aided the regime in making any military bases both hard to access from the land and hard to spy on from the air or from orbit. There were plans of Parchin that were available from what weapons inspectors and the IAEA knew of the base, but there were also stretches that were nothing more than blank spaces on a plan.

  Their problem was twofold. First, they had unknown areas to penetrate and work in; second, they had to contend with the fact that as the premier military base for the Iranian armed forces, those parts of the base that were known had excellent security and the manpower and ordnance to put paid to even the most well-planned military strategy.

  Their solution was also twofold. First, they were a two-man unit that was only lightly armed and had no intention to cause collateral damage unless it proved to be necessary. This was as much an intel-gathering mission as a military strike. Second, they had the one thing that the strict Iranian regime would never have really expected: an inside man.

  “Truly, I am grateful for the power of finance,” Yuri gasped as he took a mouthful of water while they sheltered in the cover of a small outcrop. “Never underestimate the power of guns and money, Cooper. Political and religious ideologies may have strength and fervor, but unless they have the money to buy big guns, they will always finish second.”

  Bolan scanned the horizon. “Gee, thanks for that critique of power structures in the modern world. I’ll run that by my boss sometime, see what he says.”

  “If he has any sense, he will say the same as mine—the largest number of zeros at the bottom of the page is the winner.”

  “Sadly, I think you’re right. Mostly...” Bolan continued to scan the horizon, looking for any sign of life in the arid, mountainous landscape. They had come across country, bypassing the roads and taking an arced route to avoid contact with the line of communication in order to keep cover. It had made the trek harder than if they had been able to run straight and parallel with the road. Lack of cover had made that an impossible task. Bolan was frustrated by the fact that this had lost them time and energy they could ill afford. With Mussivand dead, the shutters would come down, and they had only so long until they could get back to their rendezvous point on the shores of the Caspian.

  Now they were waiting for their rendezvous: their inside man and the means to get them into the base.

  “There he is,” Bolan said softly. “Get ready.”

  Yuri followed the soldier’s line of view. An Iranian army truck was approaching quickly. The Russian stowed his water bottle and joined Bolan in the cover of a group of rocks nearest the road.

  The truck slowed, the engine coughing, before it came to a halt just over a thousand yards from where they were concealed. The passenger side door opened and an Iranian soldier got out, cursing loudly in Pashto. He kicked the side of the truck, gesticulating wildly, as he was joined by another man from the passenger side who tried to calm him. From the driver’s side, a man alighted, shrugged and spoke placatingly as he lifted the hood.

  “That’s him,” Yuri said softly, even though there was no chance of their being overheard. “Second cousin. I’d recognize him anywhere.”

  Bolan ignored this cryptic remark. He weighted the Desert Eagle in his hand and indicated that the Russian should take out his own handgun. As Yuri did so, Bolan murmured softly, “One head shot. That’s all we’ve got. You think you can do this?”

  “I have trophies, Cooper. Look to your own shooting,” the Russian replied with a vulpine grin. “The one on the right is mine.”

  “Line ’em up,” Bolan whispered, sighting his man.

  “Ready...” Yuri murmured hoarsely.

  “On three,” Bolan replied, counting them in. The two pistols cracked, shattering the silence of the day.

  The driver dived for cover. The other two Iranians were not so lucky. In middispute, both were cut off as the twin shots found their homes. One man lost the vast majority of his skull, while the other had less blown away, but still enough to destroy any kind of motor function ability as he hit the ground, arms and legs twitching.

  Bolan and Yuri moved swiftly from cover. Before the driver had a chance to regain his feet and dust himself down, they had dragged the corpses off the road, stripping off the uniforms while avoiding covering them in blood. Using water from the truck, they washed the blood off the road and tamped down the sandy soil at the side to cover their tracks.

  “We were not shooting at you, fool,” Yuri remarked to the driver as he tried to squeeze into the uniform of one of the dead men. It barely fit in some places, not at all in others, but with some fortune they would be able to disguise themselves long enough to gain access. Bolan was luckier with his uniform, but it was still a far-from-convincing fit seen up close.

  “Fool, I dived because you might miss, and how suspicious would I seem
if not worried about bullets flying,” the driver remarked, eyeing the two men. “You look nothing like Iranian soldiers. This is doomed.”

  “I like you, mostly because you are Mr. Happy and the opposite of your cousin,” Yuri remarked. “You are being paid well. All you need to do is get us inside, then in the confusion head for the Caspian Sea. A new life in Russia awaits you, my friend.”

  “You make it sound simple,” the driver spat. “Maybe it would be, but I cannot see you getting past the gates and nothing but a slow death for myself as a traitor.”

  “All you have to do is drive. Let me do the rest,” Bolan said sharply. “If you’re not with us, then we’ll leave you here now to make your own way.”

  “That would be certain death,” the driver said quietly.

  “Then shut up and do what I say. That way we’ve all got a chance. Understood?”

  The driver nodded with only the slightest hesitation. They climbed into the truck and started toward the gates of Parchin. In the rear of the closed truck they carried chemicals for the labs, and the soldier knew that the clearance this gave them would enable them to access the areas closest to the unmapped sections of the base. The problem would be getting past the main gate, as the two men with the driver on this trip would not bear close inspection.

  “Stop here,” Bolan ordered when they were less than a quarter of a mile from the base. The driver slowed and looked at him quizzically. The soldier continued, “Motion sensors extend for a klick. Cameras cover the same distance around. Beyond that, there is no known security that extends out beyond that perimeter. Am I right?”

  “I know of nothing,” the driver replied.

  “Then let’s hope you’re right. Wait here. Yuri—with me.”

  The Russian complied, and he smiled slowly when Bolan outlined his plan. It was simple: the two men took the explosives and detonators that remained in their ordnance and went in opposite directions, priming and planting three bombs in each direction, spaced over a distance of five hundred yards each way on either side of the ribbon. They moved quickly, sweating with the effort to beat the clock. When they had completed their task and returned to the truck, Bolan beckoned for the driver to continue, keeping an eye on his watch. As the gates of Parchin came into view and the base opened up before them, he told the driver to slow a little, counting down time as they rolled over the road.