The Chimera Vector (4 page)

‘I thought we were the only team in Iraq,’ Damien said. He’d seen them too.

‘Then I guess you thought wrong,’ Jay said.

‘Slow down,’ Sophia said.

Jay’s eyes went wide in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You for real? Jesus, Soph, I should be going faster, not slower.’

‘We don’t want to attract attention.’

In all honesty, she wanted nothing more than to get out of there as fast as possible. Before the other marines worked out they’d been duped.

The stretch of dusty road ended just shy of its second klick. A set of gates were open and manned. A single vehicle was waiting to be cleared. She searched the pockets in the back of the driver’s seat, found a first-aid kit and stole a small tube of Dermabond. Holding on to both, she curled up in the foot space behind the passenger seat. She pulled an olive-colored backpack over her, hoping it would conceal her in the waning darkness.

Jay kept the 4WD in second gear. Sophia held her breath. She heard boots crunch on gravel as they moved just outside her door. A radio crackled and a scratchy voice said something. She listened, breathless.

‘Go ahead.’

Jay whisked the 4WD through the gates, out of Joint Base Balad.

Chapter 3

It had been twenty minutes since they’d left the base. Sophia wanted to change vehicles.

The road Jay had taken was feeding them between two mountains, their peaks dipped in fog. Coming up on their left, a town peppered across the mountainside forest. Two-story yellow-clay houses were nestled in a stepped fashion, the rooftops acting as walkways for the levels above. Sophia couldn’t see any vehicles in the town itself, but up ahead was a repurposed hospital bus.

‘Jackpot,’ Jay said, pulling in beside it. He hunched over the steering wheel, rubbing his eyes. ‘On second thoughts, it probably wouldn’t make it over the next hill. I think we have a better chance sticking with what we got.’

‘A military Land Cruiser doesn’t exactly blend in,’ Sophia said. ‘And neither does a hospital gown or military uniform.’

Jay was about to answer back but sneezed instead. It was absurdly loud inside the 4WD.

Damien slouched in the front seat, arms folded. ‘So much for stealth. I’m pretty sure goat herders on the other side of the mountain heard that one.’

‘Shut it,’ Jay said. ‘You snore like a trumpet.’

Sophia remained still in the back seat. Since their capture in the desert, something was different. She felt . . . strange. She examined the hospital bus parked next to them. At least, what had once been a hospital bus. The drab olive paintwork remained, but it was decorated with straw-colored curtains and had collected a small army of trinkets on the dashboard.

‘Where’s your knife?’ she asked Jay.

He pulled the KA-BAR from its scabbard.

She took it from him. ‘Take the bus.’

He exhaled loudly through his nose. One nostril whistled in disappointment. ‘No way. Riding a brick would be faster than riding that bus.’

‘Not if the brick was painted in army cam,’ she said.

‘Fine. I suppose you have a point for once.’

She could see a clothesline on one of the rooftops. Dry clothes. No one was outdoors yet, it was too early.

‘Think you can get us some clothes?’ she said. ‘And shoes for me if you can.’

Jay grinned. ‘Easy.’ He stepped out of the 4WD. ‘I’ll steal some cash too.’

‘Jay.’ She climbed through to the front seat. ‘Quietly.’

He winked. ‘It might interest you to know that I have the grace of a ballet dancer.’

She shut the door in his face. ‘I sincerely hope not.’

That should’ve earned a chuckle from Damien, but instead he said, ‘I shot the staff sergeant.’

‘I know,’ Sophia said.

She watched Jay plot a careful path to the clothesline, then surveyed the town again. Not a soul in sight. Good. She pulled out the disposable cigarette lighter and began sterilizing the tip of the KA-BAR knife.

‘We killed that family,’ Damien said. ‘They looked like soldiers. But then they weren’t.’ He watched her sterilize the knife. ‘I grabbed that girl. I thought she was a soldier. I don’t know what I was doing.’

Sophia withdrew the knife from the flame. ‘Get the hip flask.’

Damien searched the pockets of his stolen uniform for it.

She offered the underside of her right forearm. ‘Pour.’

He unscrewed the lid, splashed alcohol on the skin over her RFID. Now she stank of cheap whisky.

The RFID was a radio-frequency identification tag encased in silicate glass and implanted under her skin. It was pill-shaped and about twice the length of a grain of rice. It kept precise GPS coordinates on all operatives in the field, above or below ground. As long as they had them under their skin, Denton would always know where they were. He had been using the RFIDs with the Fifth Column Assetrac—asset-tracking system—since 2004.

‘I think we’re all a little confused right now,’ Sophia said.

Damien watched with detached interest as she made an incision over the top of her RFID. Blood escaped. She ignored it, flexed her forearm a few times to nudge the RFID, then used the tip of the blade to coax it out. The fingers on her right hand twitched involuntarily. The pain almost made her drop the knife, but she clenched her teeth and fought through it. The RFID slid out. She discarded it between her feet. It can stay in the Land Cruiser, she thought.

She wiped the blade, let Damien douse it in more whisky, wiped again, then swapped the flask for the blade and lighter. It was Damien’s turn now.

She stared at the incision in her arm. It was hard to believe what she was doing. Her thoughts didn’t feel like her own any more. For a moment, she considered secretly approaching Denton and explaining she was no longer fit for service. But he would never trust her again. And there would be nothing she could say to change that. If she returned to the Fifth Column, she would face her end. All the more reason for them to cross the Iraq–Iran border again and get back to Tehran, where they had some chance of obscuring themselves from the prying eyes of surveillance satellites.

She gritted her teeth, pulled out the tube of Dermabond and applied a thin stripe of the violet liquid across the cut. She held it in place with two fingertips on either side. Once it was set, she poured whisky on Damien’s forearm, then watched him cut out his RFID. When he was done, she gave him the Dermabond.

Jay returned. He was wearing a thick woolen jacket and a headscarf, but fortunately no glamor turban. There were two other jackets slung over his shoulder. He opened the driver’s door. ‘Bus is ready to roll.’ His breath fogged the air between them.

‘I didn’t even hear you,’ Sophia said. ‘Good work.’

He dangled a set of keys. ‘Someone up there loves me.’

Damien snorted. ‘That’s hard to believe.’

‘And we’re rich.’ Jay shoved a wad of notes into Sophia’s hands. ‘Two million rials.’

Sophia checked the notes. ‘That’s around 200 bucks.’

Jay unraveled his headscarf. ‘Right. Well, it’s all I could get my hands on without being compromised.’

Sophia took the headscarf and wrapped the notes inside. She jumped out of the driver’s seat. She could see a wafer of orange upon the horizon. The sun was rising.

She turned to Jay and handed him the knife. ‘We can go to Tehran. But you need to remove your RFID first.’

He glared at her. ‘Are you fucking insane?’

‘Jury’s out on that,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point changing vehicles if they can still track us.’

Grumbling, he snatched the knife off her and rolled back the sleeves of his jacket. ‘I’m only agreeing to this because Tehran has some seriously good beer.’

***

Denton sat alone in the private jet as it skimmed the North Atlantic skyline. From above, the water’s surface looked restless and murky, reflective of his mood. The air phone rang. A sharp, high-pitched noise that irritated him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We’ve tracked every military Land Cruiser within a radius of fifty klicks,’ Grace said.

Denton had assigned Grace as leader of the team tasked with tracking and capturing the defective operatives: Sophia, Damien and Jay.

‘We have two suspect vehicles,’ she went on. ‘One is confirmed to contain military personnel, but the other has been abandoned at a large lake east of the border. It stopped moving one hour and twenty minutes ago. Echo Four India has disabled booby traps inside the Cruiser and recovered the RFIDs. The defective operatives cut them out.’

‘That shouldn’t be possible.’ Denton pinched his nose and exhaled hard. His ears popped. ‘Wait one.’

He opened his laptop and navigated to the US National Reconnaissance Office portal. He logged in with his Department of Defense ID, then said to Grace, ‘Coordinates.’

He keyed in the GPS coordinates as she read them out. He was using recent coverage recorded by the KH-14–2 spy satellite. Once the imagery loaded, he overlaid the road maps and fed in Grace’s team’s locations. With that done, he gave the terrain his full attention. He could see a lake near the eastern border that was shaped like an arrowhead and flanked by nearby mountains. He identified the abandoned Land Cruiser just north of a small town on the lake’s east side, and zoomed in on the ultra-high resolution image to inspect the river. Panning east, he followed the river as it snaked away from the lake towards a mountainous region.

He checked the operations queue for all satellites in this area over the next six hours. Only one was in range—the same KH-14–2 that had recorded the recent coverage—but it was currently in use for a high-priority operation.

‘We won’t have the luxury of live satellite coverage,’ Denton told Grace, ‘so you’ll have to find them the hard way.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘Do you have any leads?’

‘We suspect the defective operatives crossed the river either by boat, ferry or possibly by swimming. It would be logical for them to steal a vehicle and continue on a northeast bearing.’

‘Into the mountains,’ Denton said.

‘Difficult for us to ambush by vehicle. It’s a clever way for them to slow us down. We’ve placed a blocking party in just before the north border. We have four helicopters searching vehicle routes. There aren’t many, so it won’t take long to find them.’

Denton zoomed in to inspect the Land Cruiser’s location. ‘I think you’re wrong.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘Colonel?’

‘They’re not heading for the north border,’ he said. ‘They’re still moving west. They’re heading deeper inside Iran, you halfwit. Move your—’

He stopped, realizing the implications of what he’d just said. The defective operatives were heading for the holy city of Qom, right near a subterranean former military base the spy satellite was queued up for. The same former military base that a US Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber was soon to take out with a GBU-28 bunker-buster bomb—the Fifth Column’s planned retaliation for the suicide bombing.

Sophia and her team were walking right into the middle of a 2.5 ton bomb.

Chapter 4

‘We could hand ourselves in,’ Damien said. ‘We don’t know for sure they’d kill us.’

‘It’s happened to other operatives,’ Sophia said. ‘What makes you so special?’

‘You’re the teacher’s pet, Soph,’ Jay said from the driver’s seat. ‘If anyone survives, it would be you.’

‘I’m not interested in testing that theory,’ Sophia said.

‘Then what are you interested in?’ Jay said.

She watched as he steered their newly procured brick-on-wheels hospital bus over a long bridge and into a tunnel that ran deep inside a mountain.

‘Getting into Tehran, blending in and holing up,’ she said. ‘There’s a budget hostel on Amir Kabir Street that has dial-up internet and kettles that boil water. It’s basic but it’ll do us. We get a double room and bunker in as American backpackers.’

‘Again,’ Damien said.

The bus crawled up the steep tunnel, churning through second gear.

‘And then what?’ Jay said.

Sophia checked the rear-vision mirror. There was a fire truck starting up the tunnel behind them. It seemed to be having just as frustrating a time as they were.

‘Consider another career,’ she said. ‘Can you paint, Jay?’

‘With a sniper rifle.’

Sophia spotted a Humvee entering the mouth of the tunnel ahead of them. ‘Twelve o’clock.’

‘Fuckers!’ Jay said. ‘Get down. And my face is showing—give me a scarf or something.’

‘I don’t think they’ll go too hard on your fashion sense,’ Damien said.

Sophia took her eyes off the Humvee just long enough to check the rear-vision mirror. Even if they could reverse and get around the fire truck, the Humvee would outrun them. She could see the fire truck had turned around. It was heading back onto the bridge, water leaking from its fire hose. She looked back at the approaching Humvee. It pulled up broadside, window down. Javelin fire-and-forget missile launcher.

Jay hit the brakes. ‘Forget the scarf.’

‘Get to the back,’ Sophia said. ‘Now!’

She scrambled to the rear of the bus, Damien two steps ahead.

Jay stayed in the driver’s seat. He threw the bus into reverse. Its right side scraped the tunnel, whipped around, its left side exposed to the Humvee. She didn’t hear the missile launch, but knew in a tunnel like this it would be firing in direct attack mode. It hit the road beside the bus. She covered her face as glass fragments showered her. One side of the bus buckled inwards. How the shooter had missed, she had no idea. But she wasn’t about to complain.

The bus tipped onto its right side and slid, headfirst, back the way they’d come, down the tunnel’s sharp decline. Sparks skittered across either side of the bus like a parting wave. Sophia switched her grip to the seat beside her and held tight. Dizziness overpowered her. As she struggled to make sense of the world at a ninety-degree angle, she felt her right shoulder crunch against something . . . heard metal screaming . . . glass exploding . . . asphalt . . . darkness . . . black.

***

Sophia opened her eyes. The bus was still on its side and sliding. The sound of metal scraping asphalt filled her ears. She could see Damien. He was at the front of the bus, out cold, draped precariously close to a window frame, asphalt rushing past underneath. Jay was still conscious; he scrambled to pull Damien away from the window.