Drone Strike

Stoner preferred speed over safety. He began looking for a vehicle. In the meantime, the words describing his mission played over and over in his head:

Turk Mako. Locate. Neutralize.

9

Istgah-E Kuh Pang, Iran

THE PANTS WERE TOO SHORT AND THE SHIRT A LITTLE too wide for Turk, but they were better than what he had. The dampness actually felt good, soothing and cooling his strained and bruised muscles.

As he balled his old clothes up, Turk formulated a tentative plan. It was simple and bare, yet it seemed to take the greatest mental exertion to construct. He would rest here until the sun set. Then he would set out along the railroad tracks, heading north with them as far as he could.

It was some 112 miles in a straight line to the Caspian. Much of that was over mountains—but that was good. Mountains meant cover. They also meant there would be plenty of places to rest.

The most difficult part was a stretch of twenty miles or so through a desert. That would take him at least five hours—a whole night, he thought, for it would be too dangerous to travel during the day.

Turk slid his satellite phone from his pocket. No one had tried to contact him. But that wasn’t unusual. Protocol called for him to contact them, since they couldn’t know whether he was near someone or not.

He raised his finger to unlock the phone, but then stopped, not because he was afraid the Iranians would home in on the signal, but because he was suspicious of Brea

Maybe the phone had a bomb.

He stared at it, knowing he was being paranoid. But he couldn’t call. He just couldn’t.

What would he say if he did? Help? Would he cry like a baby? What was the sense of asking them for something they wouldn’t give?

Better to put the phone away and do this on his own. Or die, if that was the option. Because the only one he could really count on was himself, not them, not even Brea

He understood Grease now. From the very begi

That was what Grease was trying to say at the end. He thought it was a failing, a fatal weakness.

It doesn’t negate who you were, Grease. You were still a hero.

My hero.

I’m going to get out of here. On my own.

Turk slid over to the corner of the ruined building, leaning against the walls. Without trying to, he fell fast asleep.

HE WAS IN OLD GIRL, PUSHING THE STICK AROUND. IT was his last mission back at Dreamland, flying with the admiral.

Except it wasn’t. He was lower, treetop level, looking for something.

Trees, not the open terrain of Dreamland.

There was someone with him in the backseat, though he wasn’t sure who.

Grease.

They were doing a recee, looking for the rest of the patrol. He saw the bus, moving along the highway. He pressed his mike to tell Grease.

It didn’t work. He turned his head and could see him staring from the backseat, no helmet on, dressed in the Iranian fatigues they’d worn.

It was a dream, a dream! I am dreaming!

A sense of horror came over him as he stared into Grease’s face.

Grease!

You abandoned me!

But you were going to kill me!

You abandoned me!

Turk jerked his head up, fully awake, back in the cellar of the ruins. Something loud passed overhead.

An airplane. Two airplanes.

He got up and went to the open window at the rear of the building. The planes were nearby.

They were Phantoms, their smoky contrails lingering as they climbed about three-quarters of a mile to the north.

Phantoms?

The sun was still fairly low in the sky—nine o’clock, he calculated. When he looked at his watch, it was 0921. He’d slept for a little under two hours.

The jets took another pass, this one from the north, riding down the railroad tracks. They were Phantoms, all right, not U.S. planes but Iranian, vintage craft held together by duct tape and ingenuity, as the saying went. Turk saw a reco

He heard them coming back and waited, pressed against the wall in their direction. They passed almost directly overhead and he watched them stride into the distance, then bank into a circling turn. As they came around north of him, he saw their landing gear begi

They were landing.

For a moment he was confused—why land in the sand? Then he realized they must be using the air base where he and Grease had stolen the vehicle the night before.

Turk stared into the haze until the planes were well out of his sight. He slipped back to the corner then, sliding his back against the ancient stones, intending to sleep some more. But he’d no sooner hit the dirt than he heard vehicles nearby.

“Damn,” he muttered, grabbing the assault rifle. “Damn.”

10

Iran

STONER FOUND NO VEHICLE WORTH TAKING IN THE hamlet of a dozen houses near where he had landed, and the only thing with four wheels in the next town was a farm truck so old and rusted he doubted it would last more than a mile. He ran for a while instead, moving through the foothills and skirting the village of Saveh, since he was making decent time and there was no need to risk being seen. He checked on Turk’s location every half hour, using a radio device that tapped into the Iranian cell phone network and from there a Web site where Whiplash was relaying the data. While the Web site could be found and his cell phone intercepted, as a practical matter he was following the theory behind Poe’s famous Purloined Letter—hide in plain sight, and no one will see you.

Some nine miles east of Saveh, Stoner came to the outskirts of another village, this one large enough, he reasoned, to have a good choice of vehicles. It had taken nearly three hours for him to get this far; he reckoned that it would take another two to get to Turk. Taking the vehicle now was insurance against needing one later; getting away from the area after dispatching Turk would be best done quickly.

The place wasn’t particularly large, and with a few key exceptions—one being the lack of pavement on the streets, another the two minarets—it looked like a rural hamlet in the southwestern United States might have looked in the late 1940s. As Stoner got closer, he noticed a curious set of low-slung brown structures near the older houses.

He stopped. Focusing his eyes—his augmented vision let him see about as well as a good pair of field glasses—he examined the huts. At first he thought they were barracks and that the village had been turned into a military town, something not unheard of in Iran. But as he watched, he saw people emerging. After a few minutes of observation, he realized the structures were hovels constructed for the poor by the government, or some local charity. The town was filled with them. Many of their occupants worked at the small factories on either end of the village or tilling the fields that surrounded it.

Stone moved around the outskirts of the village cautiously, staying just beyond the edge of the cultivated fields. His smart helmet was slung over the top of his narrow rucksack; his gun was over his shoulder. The dark green jumpsuit he wore was patterned after clothes Pasdaran mechanics used. If he went into town, he would stash his gear and keep his mouth shut, hoping that between the coveralls and his frown he would look both sufficiently ornery and ordinary to be left alone.