Stephen England - Pandora's grave

His headset came alive suddenly. Thomas’s voice. “EAGLE SIX, this is LONGBOW. I am pinned down at the overlook position. Hostiles have a fix on my location. Need help. Need help now .”

“LONGBOW, can you extract?”

“Negative, EAGLE SIX. Egress is closed off.”

Harry glanced back across the canyon, to where his old friend was fighting a last desperate battle. His heart wanted to go to the rescue, to throw his team back into the maelstrom of combat. But he couldn’t.

“Harry?” Hamid was speaking to him. “We going back?”

“No,” Harry replied slowly. “We have a mission Langley expects us to accomplish. We’re moving on.”

Another rattle of gunfire interrupted Hamid’s protest as the tiny group of men gazed out into the darkness, toward their comrade…

Bullets splattered into the rocks beside Thomas’s head and he ducked instinctively. It was a basic tactic, one taught for decades. Fire and maneuver. One section keep their heads down. The other section move in.

It was still taught because it was so simple-and yet so effective. And he could do very little to counter it. He looked up into the shadowy light of the moon, cursing its brightness. A footstep nearby jarred loose a rock, sending it bounding down the hillside.

They were closing in.

The sniper rifle was of little good now and he laid it beside him, drawing the Beretta from its holster. Close-quarters combat.

Another footstep…

A single shot rang out, followed by another, and another, then the sound of a Kalishnikov on full-automatic. And then silence, unearthly silence falling over the rocky hillside.

Hamid glanced over at Harry, balancing his weight on his good leg, a bloody strip of cloth encircling his damaged right thigh. “Let me go back, sir. I can help him to the extraction zone.”

“No. We’ve already lost Tancretti. Thomas may be dead. I need every man here to complete the mission.”

“But we can’t just leave him out here to die!” Davood’s dark eyes flashed angrily, first at Harry, then at Tex. “I didn’t know we did stuff like that.”

“Well, now you know,” Tex interrupted, his voice calm, emotionless.

“But he’s your friend,” Davood protested.

Harry looked over at Tex, his blue eyes tinged with sadness. The big man’s expression was unreadable in the darkness, his face an impassive mask.

“I know,” Harry said finally, listening to the silence that had once again settled over the mountains. The silence of death. He reached down to his belt and pulled out the TACSAT, consulting its built-in GPS. When he looked back up, his mission face was on.

“Let’s get moving, team. It’s six klicks to the base camp. We’ve got to be in and out of there before daylight. Read me?”

“Roger that, EAGLE SIX.” It was Hamid. Slowly, the rest of the team fell into step. Only death lay behind them. A mission lay ahead…

6:09 P.M. Eastern Time

NCS Operations Center

Langley, Virginia

“Anything on the satellite shots from the NRO?” Kranemeyer asked, materializing in the door of Carter’s cubicle.

“Sorenson came through for us.” The analyst leaned in closer to his computer and opened up another file. “This is what we got.”

The image expanded to full-screen and Carter used his pen as a pointer. “He was using thermal view for the overpass. We’ve got a huge bloom here-Michelle thinks that’s the chopper. Then we have a lot of small readings. Let’s face it, director, the Iranians have the hills swarming with men.”

Kranemeyer nodded grimly, his eyes searching the photograph. There wasn’t much hope left. Then he spotted something. “What’s this over here?”

Carter’s gaze followed his outstretched finger. “A small grouping. Looks like three, maybe four men. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

The DCS turned away from the screen, his brow furrowed in frustration. “Why don’t they make contact?”

3:10 A.M. Tehran Time

The mountains

The bodies told their own story. Both of them shot through the head, their blood splattered over the nearby rocks. He could have seen more had it been daylight, but it was enough. The sniper had escaped.

Major Hossein rose to his feet, swearing under his breath. He had been overconfident, too sure of his own abilities. And two of his men were dead because of it. He couldn’t afford such waste.

His eyes scanned the surrounding hills, the crags and canyons that pockmarked the mountains of the Alborz. He had known this country for years. It was his home.

And he knew that five men could vanish into these mountains for an eternity. He could never find them. Except for two things.

Those five men had a mission to accomplish. And one of their number was BEHDIN…

3:13 A.M .

Contacting Langley was the farthest thing from Harry’s mind, crowded out by the countless other thoughts that flooded through his head as he led his battered team slowly down the mountain trail.

He wouldn’t have made contact, even so. He knew his mission, knew what would be needed to accomplish it. And someone had told the Iranians they were coming.

So Langley was inadvisable at the moment. He looked down at the satellite phone attached to his hip. He had felt it throb silently several times since the crash of the Huey. Someone was trying to contact them. Someone wanted to know if they were still alive.

It could be the same someone who had gotten Thomas Parker killed.

Thomas. The very name brought a smile curling to his lips, memories flooding back of the years he had known him. Hard, brutal years, fighting a shadow war across the world. They were warriors of the darkness, bound together only by the brotherhood of arms, an unbreakable bond forged in the fire of battle.

He could think back to the first time he had met Thomas, when the New Yorker had first joined the Company. A man with no past military experience, his easy, wise-cracking manner had at first disturbed Harry. He hadn’t been sure Thomas would hold up. That he could be relied upon. All that had vanished after their first mission together.

They had waded ashore onto the Indonesian island of Java, locking out from a Los Angeles — class sub. Their orders were straight-forward. Take out a Muslim cleric who had been involved in the Bali nightclub bombings.

And that dark night, Harry had found that beneath Thomas’s easy personality lay a man of steel. He hadn’t broken.

All that was over now. Harry sighed heavily, focusing on the mission ahead of him. There would be time for grief. It wasn’t now. He looked down, checking the coordinates he had typed into his GPS unit. Four kilometers…

3:17 A.M.

The base camp

The young sentry stopped his pacing back and forth across the hard, rocky plateau near the entrance to the base camp. Something-he had heard something out there in the night. A sound, perhaps a rock sliding down in the hill. Probably just an animal.

He never had a chance. A bullet came whistling out of the darkness, striking him between the eyes. He toppled backward like a rag doll, hitting the rocky ground as life drained from his body. Three of his comrades around the perimeter died almost simultaneously.

The first line of sentries was down.

Gideon Laner stepped from the darkness, the silenced pistol clutched in both hands. He paused for a moment over the body, gazing down into the sentry’s shattered face. He had been little more than a boy. But the Kalishnikov which lay a few feet from the lifeless corpse was no child’s toy. He had made his choice. And now he was dead because of it.

The trailer door came flying open with a crash, rousing Moshe Tal from his sleep. The archaeologist started to rise, but suddenly the trailer was illuminated by a blinding light as bright as the noonday sun, accompanied by a sound wave that stunned his ears. He collapsed back to his blankets, shaking his head to clear it. He could dimly hear Rachel Eliot scream from two cells down, saw the sentry collapse to the floor as his vision cleared.