by Bryce Adams
Cold sweat kept forming on her brow, which told her she’d gone into mild shock. The unforgiving mechanics of her Mossad training helped her to fight through it, but it couldn’t actually heal her. The only people who could do that were hundreds of miles away, and she didn’t have a plane to get to them. Planes…what the hell made her think of planes? For a good two minutes, all she could do was hold herself up against the work bench and watch little propane fires outside the tower reflected in Haddad’s pooling blood. She knew that two minutes was longer than Ambrose and Mashhadi would need to kill one another.
Planes. Warplanes. Gideon.
Celestine threw herself across the room, towards the big military radio looming at the other end of the command center. It was Russian-made, of course, but Mossad had trained her on equipment like this when she was still in her late teens, constantly telling her that behind enemy lines in an Arab country, knowing how to use Russian equipment would save her life. The smoking ruins in the yard were proof that she’d been a good student: knowing how to use something also meant knowing how to destroy it.
She forced her hand to slow down as she dialed in Gideon’s standard operating frequency. Celestine’s own voice sounded alien to her as she whispered: “Underworld…this is Cherub, reporting from Heaven.”
Gideon’s reply was immediate. “Cherub. Report.”
The rest poured out of her in a voice full of blood and phlegm. “Cherub here, Underworld, along with Seraph. We found Heaven as expected, neutralized the Mormons, and Seraph…Seraph has gone to engage Sorcerer.”
The American colonel broke in, “Cherub, what is Seraph’s disposition? What happened to Sorcerer?”
Her eyes hurt, and for some reason her eyelids were fluttering. Goddamned nerves. “Uncertain, God Almighty. Request that you send in an evacuation team immediately. I’ll find Seraph and deal with Heaven.”
Gideon respond “Cherub: give Underworld the precise coordinates for Heaven and I can direct my Plague to avoid your location.”
“Underworld: Heaven is located in the northeastern corner of the inner castle. But you can’t call down a Plague yet—Seraph is at ground zero, and I don’t know his condition.” God, why did her voice sound so fuzzy in her own ears?
Gideon didn’t answer right away. He’d taken his hand off the receiver on his end, leaving Celestine to hang in the dark for an eternity before he responded, “I called down a Plague thirteen minutes ago, Cherub, with orders to destroy the entire castle. I had no reason to assume you were alive. Find cover now, repeat: now, and I will attempt to direct the Plague toward the northeastern end of the castle and Heaven itself.”
Celestine screamed until her voice cracked, “Goddamn you, Gideon! Call off the strike!”
“No. Seraph’s life is not worth leaving Heaven intact. He knew the risks. But now you have a chance.”
A crackle and series of grunts came out of the other end of the handset before it went dead. It was at least thirty seconds before any response came from the two old men. “Lemark,” came the American colonel’s voice, “I’m in control, but be advised that Gideon will not stop the strike. That leaves you, soldier. Get Hayes out of there, then stay the hell away from the northern half of that castle until the airstrike is done. I’m sending a bird to your location immediately. Be alive to catch it.”
“I’ll save Hayes even if it means killing the Iranian myself, Colonel. Send that bird.”
She dropped the handset and gathered a head of steam as she sent her shaken body careening into the fiery yard, aiming for the stone chapel looming beyond the SCUDs, a million miles away.
Chapter Forty-Three
When he squeezed that trigger, Ambrose felt all his hatred and fear leak out of him. He wasn’t even afraid of what Haddad would do to Celestine, because he had spent a thousand sleepless nights visualizing the look on Jamsheed Mashhadi’s face when the Iranian realized what had just happened to him: someone had lured him into an enclosed space and bombarded him with nerve gas. Ambrose waited to watch the first spasm shoot up Jamsheed’s back. He wanted to see the first plume of spittle bubble up around the sides of Jamsheed’s mouth, and Ambrose didn’t care that he also smelled the almond tang of sarin, or that both of his hands shuddered like an earthquake had erupted inside his bones.
Except Jamsheed didn’t spasm or froth. He just came at Ambrose with his arms stretched forth. He shouldn’t have been able to close the thirty feet between them so quickly, but he did, so Ambrose dropped the pistol and fell back to absorb Jamsheed’s assault. The Iranian aimed right for his torso with a wrestling takedown, which told Ambrose that Jamsheed felt his coordination leaving him. He was bigger, stronger, and possibly faster than Ambrose, but none of that would matter if he’d lost control of his body. At that point only savagery would help Jamsheed, and Ambrose didn’t mind getting savage.
Ambrose pivoted to the left so Jamsheed stumbled and only got a single arm wrapped around his target’s waist. One was enough, though: Ambrose felt Jamsheed’s left hand grip into his side and begin squeezing for a kidney. A black pulse went up his side as Jamsheed actually slid his thumb under Ambrose’s lowest rib. Resisting his grip felt like trying to battle the tide of a winter ocean.
Then his anger caught fire and brought Ambrose back to the surface. While Jamsheed’s back and neck were level with Ambrose’s waist, the American drove both of his elbows down in quick succession, aiming to sever the sweet spot where the Iranian’s spine connected to his brainstem. He didn’t feel like giving the sarin a chance to finish its job.
The sarin…Ambrose stabbed his right elbow down like a piston into the nerve cluster of Jamsheed’s left shoulder blade, making the bigger man shiver and loosen his grip a bit. But he had aimed to kill, and at that distance he shouldn’t have failed.
His left elbow missed worse, barely hitting Jamsheed on his right shoulder. Again, the bigger man trembled as his body absorbed the trained strike, but the blow didn’t kill him, or even break anything; it had been years since Ambrose hit a man in anger and didn’t break something.
Snarling, Jamsheed pulled Ambrose forward by his torso and threw a big fist at his face. The American got his left hand forearm up and deflected, hearing a wet thud as Jamsheed shattered his own right hand against the ancient castle stone at full force. Ambrose countered by dropping his right knee down into the middle of Jamsheed’s left shin and splitting the bone like cheap metal on an anvil.
Jamsheed released his left hand and finished things before his broken shin even mattered. With a single furious upward swipe of his right arm, he knocked Ambrose’s hands away from his body, and then he flexed his knuckles into a knife-edge and drove his maimed hand right into the ribs above Ambrose’s heart. The Iranian’s dying body betrayed him and didn’t execute the strike properly. It didn’t send splinters of cartilage into Ambrose’s lungs or stop his heart through sheer blunt force trauma; all it did was fracture three of his ribs right where they hit his weakened sternum, making Ambrose gasp in shock and slump back against the wall, broken.
Jamsheed grabbed Ambrose by his throat and held his head upward so they could see eye to eye. Jamsheed’s mouth moved haphazardly, like the work of a shoddy puppeteer, but the dark intelligence that still glimmered in his eyes told Ambrose that he thought he was saying something. Instead, all that came out was a bovine moan accompanied by yellow, bile-stained froth.
The dying Iranian was too far gone to notice as Ambrose grabbed the black tube in his pants pocket and stabbed the thing into his own leg.
To Ambrose, what happened next felt like the universe splitting open. Something warm coursed through his veins and clamped down on his twitching muscles like a mother holding her baby. He could breathe again, even if each inhalation felt like eating live scorpions. More importantly, he could think. That moment of clarity told him exactly where he was: beaten and broken, lying beneath a stronger and faster opponent who was gloating over his dying prey.
Then Ambrose felt the atropine hit. I
t immolated his chest, massaged his dying heart, then flew straight into the fibers of his muscles like lightning striking the surface of the ocean, boiling all the fish beneath it. He decided to kill Jamsheed Mashhadi.
Ambrose grabbed Jamsheed’s wrist and used it to gain upward momentum, slithering out of the bigger man’s grip. Rising to his feet, Ambrose shot his hand into Jamsheed’s mouth and grabbed his lower jaw, thumb around the underside of his chin and fingers curling around his lower incisors. In the same motion he yanked that hand backward and pulled Jamsheed’s head along with it. As Jamsheed stumbled forward Ambrose felt the sinews of his enemy’s jaw rip and break, until the bone came loose of the muscle and hung connected to Jamsheed’s skull via nothing but tanned facial skin.
As he fell forward, Jamsheed’s stubbly Adam’s apple jutted outward at an improbable angle. Ambrose whipped his left elbow out to meet that bulge like an executioner swinging his axe at a condemned man’s neck.
The end result was comparable.
Chapter Forty-Four
Celestine developed a headache as she half-ran, half-limped across the yard. She didn’t know how long two minutes were, but she knew that she had burned a lot of it. For some reason the entire castle now smelled like almonds, which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since the night before in that corpse-strewn mineshaft.
She paused to catch her breath against the northernmost SCUD launcher, only fifty feet from the chapel sitting at the northeast corner of the inner castle. She knew her senses were playing tricks on her as she heard a breeze begin to whistle in the east, despite the fact that the night air was quiet all around her. But that whistle kept building, building, building until it had become an unearthly chromium shriek, like metal talons scratching on a cosmic chalkboard.
A pillar of fire shot up from the western tower, streaking toward the eastern sky. High up in the darkness it struck something and exploded like a red rose in the middle of the constellation Orion. Despite the explosion, the metallic shriek in the air intensified.
The anti-aircraft battery on the western tower shot off two more of its white surface-to-air interceptors, and Celestine felt the hot air of their launch thrusters sear her face like a furnace blast. Then the eastern sky answered back, as a bolt of red fire shot out of the black sky and ate the entire anti-aircraft battery as it prepared to launch another volley.
Another red bolt hit the tower itself, sending the thing crashing into the yard in a rain of blackened limestone. The warplanes screamed overhead and Celestine thought their banshee wail would split her skull. Gideon Patai’s Plague had arrived, and she prepared to die.
The SCUD furthest from her went up. Air-to-surface high-explosive ordnance had struck the missile at its midsection and ignited the rocket fuel in its ass, creating a moment of stillness as though a giant hand held down the night. Then the calm ruptured into a tempest of cinders and molten metal. Celestine’s luck held out, and the shockwave knocked her onto her stomach before the storm of white-hot debris could shoot outward and gut her.
She lost consciousness for a moment, but the next shockwave—another SCUD detonating—woke her up like a coded patient hit by a defibrillator. Two SCUDs down, one to go: the one right next to her. Celestine breathed in and tried to stand.
Gulping air inward made her spine tickle, and somehow that slight tickle knocked the legs out from under her. She felt more than smelled the tingle of almonds permeate the air as she looked dazedly towards the nearby chapel where Ambrose had been. The roof had caved in, and chemical-tanged smoke was leaking out between the fallen stones. Jamsheed’s sarin was smoldering, and whatever hadn’t burned off was leaking into the air all around her.
Ambrose…she thought. Celestine tasted foam at the side of her mouth, and the hand lying in front of her was doing a little dance, just like his did. Only one SCUD left, the one right next to her, and then both of their missions would be done.
Another shockwave hit—or maybe it was a convulsion—yes, definitely a convulsion, and she flipped onto her back with a gasp, unsure how she’d done it when she couldn’t walk a moment earlier. Pressure shot down her left leg as something stabbed into her hip with a single quick blow. She couldn’t bend her head downwards to see it, but she knew her luck had evaporated, and one of the big bits of shrapnel had finally gotten her. Maybe she’d get lucky and bleed out before the sarin paralyzed her lungs or snapped her spine.
Then the pressure in her hip moved, and she realized it wasn’t shrapnel. A long face drooped down in front of her, glowing with the battered-to-hell handsomeness of Clint Eastwood in his prime. The man had icy blue eyes shot through with red streaks, and his big dilated pupils shone orange with the inferno of the castle yard. He was holding her, and the pressure on her hip came from one of his hands, which grasped something that was sticking out of her leg.
Celestine’s body convulsed with sensations of a cold burn. Something coursed through her veins that made her stop spasming. Then a volcano opened in her chest, pumping magma through the cooling cavern of her heart. She gasped over and over like a child too upset to cry, then the gasps became a scream as it felt like she was exhaling a thunderstorm.
“Yeah,” Ambrose whispered as he held her close, pointing down at his own leg, “I felt like that too.”
“H…Hayes?” She reached a trembling hand up to feel for his face. “I was coming to w—warn you…”
Ambrose tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. “Sorry, Lemark. You dropped the fucking ball on that one. You’re lucky those planes were too busy dogfighting to finish the ground game.”
“Dogfighting?”
He looked around at the burning wreckage of the castle around them, then pulled her to her feet, trying to hide the pained grimace that wouldn’t leave his face. “I assure you, I have no idea.”
2012
September
Next Monday
Chapter Forty-Five
The lights were dim in the mountainside chateau on Mount Damavand where Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a few of his most trusted clerical allies sat around a conference table. Most of the clerics were fidgeting—chewing their nails, fiddling with their hands, chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette. Khamenei didn’t appear upset. He sat with his good hand cradling his bearded chin, staring off into space as he heard the bad news coming through the speakerphone in the middle of the table.
General Qasem Soleimani’s words crackled over the conference call unit, making his preternaturally calm voice buzz like a wasp hive. “All three planes were lost to the enemy, but Syrian observers confirm that the complex was destroyed. Our pilots deployed high-explosives that burned ungodly hot and melted right through the casings of most Tuva canisters, releasing traces of the sarin but devouring the rest. Anyone in the castle was killed by the gas or the fire. That seems to include Jamsheed Mashhadi, although we have no way of knowing whether these alleged American and Israeli spies survived. Hezbollah claims they lost a dozen of their best men, including a high-ranking commander named Haddad,” he paused, “They also learned what he did to our embassy, they got word of his threat to unleash Tuva on Israel, and they’re blaming us for him going rogue.”
“Hezbollah is spying on us?!” one of Khamenei’s lieutenants barked. If it weren’t for the man’s connections, Khamenei would have disappeared him then and there for his indiscipline.
Soleimani replied, “You miss the point. In all probability we just lost three F-14s in a dogfight with Israeli F-16s over Syrian airspace. Following the battle, my Jordanian assets reported that two Israeli submarines left the port of Eilat on an eastern trajectory. They haven’t resurfaced, but by now they could have passed the Yemeni coast, which places their missiles within range of southern Iran. We’re on the brink of war, and all that needs to happen is somebody, be it America, the Zionists, us, Syria, or even Hezbollah, acknowledging that the incident occurred.”
A cruel old cleric with glimmering eyes and the nickname “Ayatollah Crocodile” snorted, “T
he Jews and Americans won’t dare mention the incident. Neither will Hezbollah or Syria, if we tell them to remain silent.”
There was a long pause. Wherever Soleimani was, military trucks were whizzing by in the background, growling through the speakerphone like hungry dinosaurs. Soleimani said, “Syria might. Master, Assad is furious with us. He says he never agreed to a plan on this scale, and he certainly never agreed to anything that might actually bring Israeli or American operatives into his country. He’s even talking about expelling our military advisors until we issue a formal apology to him.”
The ayatollahs erupted into a cloud of babble. Some of them were outraged by the Syrian dictator’s impudence, others his ingratitude, while the rest despaired at the thought of losing the vital Syrian link that connected Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Khamenei’s calm voice cut through the chatter. “He can’t, so we won’t.”
Mutters throughout the room seemed to be split fifty-fifty between agreeing with him and worrying that he might have been wrong. Khamenei picked apart each of their faces, noting who looked at him like he was slipping with old age. Those ayatollahs would be corrected later.
Khamenei took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly against his robe, using only his good hand to do the whole thing. “General, I admit my confusion: I asked for a field agent, and you gave me Jamsheed Mashhadi. You said he’d worked with Hezbollah before, and that he was a gifted weapons engineer who could operate in the field. You also intimated that he would be willing to die a glorious martyr.” Khamenei replaced his spectacles and continued, “On the strength of that recommendation, apparently I have squandered many lives, several tons of advanced weaponry, and the goodwill of our closest allies. In military terms, catastrophes on this scale are branded failures of leadership.”
