Zana Rahimi was dead tired, freezing cold, and nearly out of his head with thirst. Zoran, the iron-limbed man who had become his guide, had almost carried him for the last twenty kilometers.
And it was only Zoran with Zana now. The others who had started off with them were long gone. They’d vanished days ago when the IRGC patrols had thickened along the roads. Only Zoran had remained loyal to the mission to get the older gentleman south to the Americans.
It was Zoran’s idea to approach the farmhouse first. He knew how to talk to the villagers around here, he said. He also understood the limits of a man’s endurance. If they didn’t get some help right away, he believed, then the older gentleman from Tehran might die. What good would that be? The Americans needed to understand how badly they’d underestimated the mullahs’ cruelty to the Kurds.
The conversation lasted for about fifteen minutes. The farmer listened, nodded, stood back by the dim light of the clapboard porch. His aging wife provided some water and cold beans left over from dinner. Zana wolfed it all down right there on the porch.
With niceties exchanged, Zana checked his watch. He apologized and told them that he needed to be up in their pasture now. He was tired and liked to sleep under the stars. The old couple thought it an odd thing to do, since they’d offered a bed. But Zana and Zoran insisted.
They walked the last half mile to the pasture in the dark. When they finally arrived, they piled up some cut weeds along a bank and crouched, waiting.
Oleg watched the two of them approach. He was on a bluff, set back from the pasture by about two hundred yards. His head was covered with a black-checkered kaffiyeh, his face darkened with dirt. He was lying on his stomach, looking through the IR scope of the Dragunov, his nine millimeter strapped to the back of his thigh. The AK-12 was within arm’s reach, shoved against a scraggly bush.
He’d been lying there for nearly the entire day. In the old lament of the sniper, he’d had almost nothing to eat and been forced to piss himself twice. He wanted desperately to get up and stretch. But now it was game time and he dared not move a muscle.
He watched the two men coming up the trail toward the pasture. One of them was surely Rahimi, he thought. The weaker one, presumably the scientist, walked slowly. The stronger of them carried a Kalashnikov. Oleg zeroed in on the armed man, thinking it was probably Dale.
But then, even through the IR scope, he could see that it wasn’t. The beard was too long, the posture off—this man was thicker than Dale.
Oleg thought about shooting the armed man anyway. He could take him down, then move to scoop up Rahimi.
But that would spook Dale if he was out there somewhere. Oleg wasn’t going to retreat without knowing John Dale was dead. He decided to wait.
A half mile away, Dale pulled the Suzuki Samurai into a ditch. He wasn’t sure what to expect up ahead, but he certainly wasn’t going to come driving up to it without a solid reconnaissance effort.
It was nearly midnight. The moon, hidden by overcast, had done him the courtesy of providing some ambient light. He threw his pack on the hood of the Suzuki and went to work in the silvery light.
First, he removed the bag’s back plate. After straining with the clever assembly for a minute, he then removed his shirt.
The rigid liner that had formed the frame of the bag was made of Kevlar. Dale used Velcro straps from the bag’s outer straps to position the Kevlar over his chest before throwing on a thicker khaki shirt. He then tore the flexible IR reflector from the bag’s handle and shoved it in a cargo pocket. He was supposed to put it on his shoulder once he sighted Cerberus. That was the way it was supposed to go.
Once ready, pistol in hand, he did a final check of the GPS. He looked at the hill in the moonlight. Things were quiet. Thank God.
He was almost home. For good.