Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

I climbed three flights of stairs, dropped my keys twice, and finally opened the lock. As soon as I was inside I closed and relocked the door and fell back against it with an exhale that came all the way up from my shoes.

My dog, Ghost, was waiting for me, wagging his tail and looking at my hands to see if I’d brought him anything. He’s a big white shepherd, 105 pounds of muscle and appetite. Ghost was cross-trained in a variety of useful skills from combat to rescue; and though he was useful in ordinary bomb detection, he couldn’t disarm a nuke.

I knelt down and hugged him. I kissed his furry head.

“This one’s going to be a bitch, fuzzball,” I told him.

He looked at me with those liquid dog eyes that always seem deep and wise. He whined a little, catching my mood or perhaps smelling my fear. Then his whole body went rigid as he stared past me. Not to the closed door, but to an empty space on the wall. I followed the line of his gaze, willing myself to see what he saw, but a dog is a dog and they see things we can’t. No matter how much we want to.

I listened to the silence, wondering if I’d just heard a soft voice whisper my name again.

But, no… there was nothing.

When I looked at Ghost, he was no longer staring at the wall.

“What is it, boy?”

Ghost, being a dog, just looked at me.

I mean, really… what had I expected him to say? My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on my thighs. Then I fished some dried goat strips out of my jacket pocket and dropped them on the floor. Ghost is peculiar in that he eats his food delicately, one piece at a time, making it last.

Minutes crawled by as I waited for the Mossad shopkeeper to send over the battery. The thought of those moments being chipped off the block of time remaining until those nukes went active was making my heart hurt. I was sweating and it wasn’t the heat in that stuffy little room.

I fished for more goat and my fingers scrabbled over the flash drive. That drove everything else out of my head.

Rasouli said that there were four nukes scattered throughout the Mideast oil fields, and three more unknowns. Maybe one in the States.

“Holy God…” I breathed. Ghost cut a sharp look at me and gave a soft woof.

Southwestern Iran

Twenty Kilometers from the Kuwait Border

Ten Hours Before…

First Sergeant Bradley Sims saw the army truck stop at a crossroads at the far end of the valley. Roadside lights cast the area in a golden glow. He turned off his headlights, slowed his car, and pulled behind an abandoned grain warehouse where he could observe the street through a chain-link fence. The soldiers began off-loading sawhorse barricades.

“No! Oh, god, no!” cried the young woman beside him. Rachel had a cinnamon colored shawl wrapped around her head and face, but the eyes that peered out from under the shawl were bright with new tears. “God, please don’t let them take us back.”

Top pasted on a smile that was filled with far more confidence than he felt. “Not a chance, darlin’.”

He removed a small pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars and steadied his forearms on the wheel as he peered at the men: checking their uniforms, their weapons, their body language, and apparent combat readiness. You can tell a lot about soldiers by how well they go about ordinary tasks. Mediocre ones slouch through it, as if laziness were the best part of down time. The best ones did everything with a degree of polish and professionalism so that even something as simple as erecting a roadblock was done right and done right the first time.

The men at the crossroads did not appear to be a gang of slackers.

Not good.

He tapped his earbud. “Sergeant Rock to Road Trip. On me. No lights. Stop and listen.” Behind him, scattered hundreds of yards apart, the other two cars crept slowly through the shadows, running without headlights.

“Okay, ladies and gents,” Top said into his mike, “this is about to get fun. Here’s what I need and I need it now. First, I need a volunteer-snake oil salesman, feel me?”

“I’m in,” said Khalid.

“Roger that, Dancing Duck. Green Giant, that means you’re Jack-in-the-box.”

“Rock ’n’ roll,” agreed Bunny, and he sounded happy about it.

“Converge on me. I’m Santa Claus.”

He tapped out of the channel.

Rachel grabbed his sleeve. “What was all that? What’s happening?”

Top held up a finger. “My orders are to get you three over the border and into Kuwait. To do that I have to get past that roadblock. I’d go a different way but every other route keeps us in country for at least an hour, and we don’t have that hour. I’ll be straight with you. Best guess is that Iranian military helicopters will be here in fifteen, twenty minutes-we need ten to make it to our LZ and that’s going all out, balls-to-the-walls crazy.”

“‘LZ’?”

“Landing zone. We got our own helo coming, but it can’t come this close to a town or we’d start a war that nobody wants. That means that we have to get through that security checkpoint down there.”

“They’ll know who I am!” she yelped. “They’ll just take me back to that awful place. You don’t know the sort of things they did to us in there.”

“I pretty much think I do, darlin’. That’s why we’re not going to let you get taken. I need you to do what I say, and help me help your friends. Can you do that?”

Her eyes were huge and filled with fear, but the young woman was tough and she took a breath that steadied her trembling hands. She nodded. “Okay.”

“Good. Here’s the plan.” He told her what he had planned, and her eyes went wide with fear and doubt.

The other cars pulled in behind Top’s. Doors opened and immediately Khalid and Bunny quick-walked the two young men toward the lead vehicle.

“Everyone in the back,” said Top. “Stay together and stay down. Things might get loud but you will be safe. No questions now. Let’s go.”

Before he closed the door he made brief eye contact with Rachel, and she nodded and even managed a brave smile. She guided the two young men through the shadows into the back and then squeezed in. There was just enough downspill from the warehouse’s pale security lights to see as she made sure everyone was buckled in tightly. Rachel kept talking to the others, soothing them, calming them. Top reached out and gave her shoulder a single squeeze, then closed the door. He stepped a few yards away and consulted briefly with Khalid and Bunny, and then climbed back behind the wheel of his car.

“What’s happening?” asked Senator McHale’s son.

“Rachel will tell you,” said Top. “Then I need you all to be real quiet. Don’t ask questions and absolutely do not talk to me or interfere with me until I say it’s all clear.”

“Okay,” assured Rachel, and the two young men nodded.

Top turned away as Khalid switched on his headlights and pulled his car onto the road.

“Where’s the other man?” asked the girl. “The surfer guy?”

Top chuckled at that. “Oh, you never can tell where Farmboy’s going to pop up.”

He gave Khalid’s car a long lead, then switched on his lights and followed.

The sergeant at the crossroads held up his hand and then patted the air, indicating that Khalid should slow down and stop. Two soldiers converged on the front of the car from either side, using the flashlights clipped to their rifles to sweep the vehicle. The other three soldiers walked around back, their lights and barrels pointed at the trunk.

Top’s jaw was tight with tension. Timing was going to be critical. If Khalid made an error, he’d be dead in the next few seconds, and then everything would go to shit. He cut a look into the rearview mirror, at the faces of the three freed hostages. They had been held for a year. A whole year carved out of their lives because Ahmadinejad liked using kids as chess pieces in his political games.