“Let’s do this quickly,” replied Vahid. “Take a run and head toward the base. Stand by while I talk to the ground unit.”

The commander of the Pasdaran unit was in his own truck, coming south. Worried that he had mistaken the vehicle, Vahid told him to pull off the road immediately and fire a flare. He hunted around in the air for several seconds before he found the signal well to the north.

“Stay where you are until we clear,” Vahid told him. “We’re making our run now.”

TURK HEARD A LOUD SCREECH, THE SOUND OF METAL ripping, then nothing; the world had gone silent. The truck disintegrated around him, whirling him into the darkness at the side of the road. The next few moments were lost in a cloud of metal haze and fire. He crawled across the dirt, a black cowl around his head. He choked. His eyes burned. Finally he got to his feet and took a few tentative steps, moving toward clear air.

Grease—where was Grease?

Turk turned back toward the expanding fist of smoke that marked the road. He still didn’t comprehend what had happened. They’d hit a bomb or something.

“Grease!” he yelled, starting forward. “Grease!”

The putrid air drove him to the left. He crossed the road and saw the front end of the truck sitting a few yards away. It looked as if it had been sawed in half, then quartered. The cab was nearly intact, propped on one end by the wheel.

Grease was still inside. Turk ran to the door, grabbed his shirt and pushed it between his fingers and the handle to act as an insulator if the metal was hot. But the latch was cool, as was the rest of the cab; it was the back of the truck that was on fire.

Turk pulled the door open. Grease was slumped forward against his restraints, hanging a few inches from the steering wheel. Turk undid the belt, fingers fumbling. He pulled at Grease, and though the sergeant’s eyes were closed, somehow expected that he would follow him from the truck. Instead, his companion and protector sprawled out the door, face first against the ground, his feet wedged under the damaged dashboard.

“Come on,” said Turk. He hooked his arm under Grease, pulling him up and out. He started back in the direction that he had come, circling back to the spot where he first emerged from the smoke.

It didn’t occur to Turk that Grease might be dead until he put him down. He couldn’t hear anything, and despite the full sunlight could barely see. His ears had been blown out by the bang of the explosion, his eyes unfocused by all that had happened.

“God,” moaned Grease.

The word restored Turk’s hearing. But it worked too well. Now he heard everything: the drone of planes in the distance, the rumble of trucks far away, the sizzling hiss of the fire continuing to burn.

He needed a gun. And the control unit. And Grease’s ruck. But where were they?

“Stay here,” Turk told Grease, letting him down as gently as he could manage, then ran back to the destroyed truck. The AK-47 and the control pack sat in the dirt a few yards from the front of the cab.

Looping the backpack strap around his right shoulder, Turk picked up the gun. He could hear a truck engine whining in the distance.

Grease curled himself into a little ball, moans and grunts coming from the recesses of his abdomen. He started to cough, and didn’t stop until Turk lifted him to a sitting position. “We have to get to cover,” Turk told him. “Can you walk?”

Grease groaned something in response. Turk twisted himself around to lever Grease upward, trying to be gentle as he propped the wounded man onto his back.

“We’re going, let’s move,” said Turk, commanding his feet and the rest of his body to cooperate. He decided he couldn’t get the gun or the control ruck without losing his balance; he’d have to come back for them.

Turk began walking away from the road, his first goal simply to get as far away as possible. Blood and adrenaline rushed to his muscles. He felt strong.

“We’re getting the hell out of here,” he told Grease.

Grease, draped over his side and back, didn’t answer. He moved, as if trying to walk.

“I got it,” Turk told him. “Let me do it.”

A clump of gray and green loomed before him. At first glance it looked like a large body, laid out on the ground. Turk pushed that image away, stubbornly insisting to his brain that it couldn’t possibly be a body. He was right; within a few yards the shadow had broken itself into several small trees and a cluster of rocks. He walked steadily toward it, Grease’s weight pushing him closer and closer to the earth.

The rocks were the far side of an open pit that had been bulldozed sometime before, then abandoned. Turk walked to the rocks and put Grease down as gently as possible. Taking off his own shirt, he fashioned it into a narrow pillow and placed it under Grease’s head.

“I’ll be right back,” he told his friend. “I have to get our stuff.”

Grease said nothing. Turk took a step away, then remembering that he wasn’t armed, reached down and took the sergeant’s handgun. He held it in his hand as he ran back in the direction of the road.

6

Iran

“TRUCK DESTROYED,” CAPTAIN VAHID TOLD THE ground commander as he headed for the airfield.

“Are there survivors?”

“I don’t think so,” said Vahid. “I took a pass but the smoke was so thick I couldn’t see anything. The vehicle split into several pieces.”

“Acknowledged, Shahin One.”

“I’m rather low on fuel,” said Vahid. “I’ve already sent my wingman to make an emergency landing.”

“We’ll proceed to the site. Thank you for your help.”

“I can do one last run if you want.”

“Negative, Captain. Thank you for your help. God is great!”

“You’re welcome. God is great!” he repeated, with more enthusiasm than he had mustered in some time.

7

CIA campus, Virginia

“THEY DON’T SEEM TO BE MOVING ANYMORE,” SAID Breanna, staring at the screen where Turk’s position was marked. “They’re only a few miles south of Qom—are the Guard units responding there?”

“The Iranians are still trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Jonathon Reid, who’d gone over to the console where a digest of NSA intercepts were being displayed in near-real time. “They’re very confused.”

The intercepts, compiled from a variety of sources, were translated by machine and color-coded for source. A program in the network applied various filters, showing Whiplash only the information that corresponded to a set of keywords and geographic locations. The sheer volume of the intercepts as well as the Iranians’ own confusion made it doubly difficult to figure out what was going on.

“What about that Pasdaran colonel who was assigned to handle the investigation into the first attack?” asked Breanna. “Where is he?”

“I’m not sure at the moment,” said Reid. “We’re working on it.”

“There’s one nano-UAV remaining,” said Teddy Armaz. “It was the unit with the malfunctioning sensor. It has about five minutes of flight time left.”

“Can we self-destruct it?”

“No. The X-37B is well out of range.” Armaz looked over Bob Stevenson’s shoulder at the status panel. “It should destroy itself on its own in about five minutes, since it hasn’t had a command.”

Breanna nodded. The self-destruct protocol was one of several safeguards that had been instituted throughout the military’s UAV fleet following an accident in 2012 that allowed a Stealth drone to descend into Iran practically without damage. Ironically, the capture of the drone and the subsequent sale of its technology to China had spurred the development of several more advanced American UAV projects, including the Hydras. Iran would have been better off simply letting the Stealth UAV alone.