Dale had to assume that the man with the AK would be coming for him. AK man had had the high ground up at the corral and a better weapon. Dale had no hope of mounting an assault of his own. His only option would be to ambush his pursuer, acting like armed bait.
Easier said than done.
A successful ambush required spotting the target, which required Dale to move around. But to move was to give away his position.
He tried to balance both objectives, listening, straining, sweeping left and right with small movements, long pauses between them, the IR scope perched to his eye.
But he heard nothing, save for the far-off whine of that truck. And the faint approach of a helicopter.
He’d been hearing the rumble of distant helicopters all night as the IRGC conducted its search of the roads a dozen miles north. But the airborne rumble he heard now had a different pitch, different rotor cadence—a familiar one. He realized now it had to be a 60, a Blackhawk, probably the Special Forces variant. He knew the sound well. It was getting louder.
Thank fucking God.
The MH-60 Pave Hawk dove over the final hill and flared. The nose tilted up. Men leapt from the open door, five feet from the ground. Choking on dust, Meredith felt rough hands thrusting her forward into the night, spilling out at the edge of the corral.
Weighed down by gear, she stumbled in the loose dirt. Tex wrenched her up by an arm, then nearly tackled her as they sought concealment in the brush at the field’s edge. Two other SEALs were on either side of them, setting up a security perimeter. The rest were still in the helo, which had already flown off in a hurricane of whirling dust. They were to set up a secondary security position to guard against any approaching IRGC forces along the border road.
“You see anything?” she asked Tex once they’d settled and things had become quiet again.
“No,” he said. Then he angled an ear, raising his helmet slightly.
She heard gunfire. Tex raised a fist, telling her to be still, quiet. The shots were somewhere down the hill, a hundred yards off.
“That sure as shit sounds like an AK,” Tex said, rolling away from her for a different view across the field. He said into the radio, “Charlie One, I’ve got enemy contact at my two o’clock, hundred fifty yards. No visual. Estimate single shooter.”
Meredith heard two more three-round bursts in the field across from her. AK man had made his presence known. By order of the senior chief, still aloft in the helo, the two SEALs to either side of Meredith sprang up and ran forward, across the corral, toward the sound of the gun.
Behind Meredith, another man stood, walking forward, arms raised, surprising them all.
Tex swung his rifle at the man.
“That’s our asset!” Meredith shouted, diving at Tex, knocking his rifle off its aim. She sprang to her feet, waved her arms crazily.
“Dr. Rahimi!” she shouted, running to him.
Oleg blamed the arrival of the helo for the miss. Just as it had popped over the hill, Dale had rolled away, making the shot go wide. Now Oleg couldn’t find the CIA man anywhere.
The Spetz operator guessed that the helo was American. It didn’t sound like the MI-8, the recent Russian upgrade for the IRGC, a machine with which Oleg was intimately familiar. It meant the team that was coming for Dale’s extract had finally made it. Everything had suddenly changed.
Out of frustration, the Spetz Alpha operator had shot up the brush behind Dale’s position and run forward to see if it had achieved anything. But on inspection of the area, he saw no movement whatsoever. It seemed that Dale had somehow managed to make it to a different spot, probably preparing to race toward his rescuers.
But there was still a chance. Even if he’d missed Dale again, Oleg was reasonably sure that the CIA man was injured from the original sniper shot. He could still chase Dale down, shoot him before he could rendezvous with the now-orbiting helo, catch him in the brush. Even if he never got back to Rahimi, he’d still get Dale.
To Oleg, that was the meat of the mission.
The Russian crept forward to the area he’d just shot up, climbing in and out of the dry creek bed as necessary to cover ground efficiently while still maintaining concealment. He arrived at the shredded leaves and snapped branches where his previous AK burst had done its damage. He poked around with the barrel, looking for blood. He saw nothing.
The wadi he’d been using zigzagged to his right, headed away from the hill. Oleg wondered if Dale had followed it. It would have taken the CIA man away from the helo’s likely landing area, but it would have been easy to traverse if Dale had had to make a run for it.
Oleg climbed into the wadi. He turned, avoiding a boulder, a few other scattered rocks, dark forms in his NVGs.
One of them moved.
Dale had heard the Russian coming. He’d been lying still among the rocks, listening to the fading clatter of the 60 as it receded behind a hill. He wasn’t sure what maneuver his egress team was executing up there, but with the IR reflector on his shoulder and an AK-armed assaulter hunting him down here, he figured it was safer to get cover than to present himself as a target. So he just lay there, listening, watching.
This kind of hide was second nature to him, drilled into his head over his years as a sniper, a hunter. He’d covered himself with branches, taken still, shallow breaths, even made himself think like a rock.
Finally, when the echo of rotors had faded, there was another sound. First one, then two rustles in the bush back where Dale had just come from.
He guessed that AK man was poking around at Dale’s former hide, up there among the stunted trees above the creek bed. Dale thought about breaking cover, going for the shot, surprising the man. But he knew he was a little off with his rib injury. And he had only six rounds left in the mag. Going for an assault on a better-armed operator could be a fatal error. He waited. The rustle of brush got louder.
The hunter was coming to him.
Dale saw movement through a crack in the branches over his eyes. The man swept the AK back and forth, walked slowly, carefully, just as any trained operator would. NVGs were flipped down over his eyes. He wore a kaffiyeh over his head. The exposed skin of his face was marked up with camo paint. Dale could see a triangle of exposed flesh at the collar. Likely no body armor, then. He sure as hell hoped that was the case. A head shot would be too risky.
Now.
Ignoring the flash of pain that ran down his ribs, Dale rose to a sitting position, lifting his Glock.
The man turned and shot, but didn’t know exactly where to aim.
Dale put six pistol rounds into his target’s chest. The man fell back, dropping his AK, dead.
Kasem had stopped the truck about two hundred yards from the corral when he first heard the helo. They’d been racing toward the border road, preparing to meet the incoming IRGC forces, when they heard the aircraft sweep into its landing.
At first Kasem assumed it would be the arrival of the advanced guard of the IRGC. But then the Iranian’s heart sank. He recognized the helo’s shape as an American Blackhawk. It touched down briefly, deposited a team, and took off again, speeding away. It seemed to be darting in and out of the hills now, its rotor echoes occasionally bouncing off them.
Kasem killed the truck’s lights. He ordered the sergeant up to the fifty-cal, telling him to try to hit the helo if it came within sight. He told the sergeant to train the guns toward the sound of the echoes. He was sure the helo would be circling around again.
As the sergeant searched for the helo, Kasem walked a dozen yards away and found a good vantage point. He raised his IR scope and surveyed the corral. He saw soldiers there moving across the field, gathering at its far side. Occasionally he swept the hills around him, looking for the approach of an IRGC vehicle. But none came.
He swung the scope to his right. The American helo’s turbine engines whined, sounding like they were girding for a landing somewhere not too far from them. The sergeant rotated the fifty-cal toward the noise, pulling a lever.
“Over there!” the sergeant yelled, before letting loose a handful of pink tracer rounds from his fifty-cal that skittered off the dirt, deflecting away into the night sky. He fired again, higher, anticipating that the helicopter would emerge from behind the hill.
But the sergeant was swept from the truck then, spilling backward over the side of the flatbed, silencing the big gun, which swung back and forth from the momentum of its own recoil.
A sniper’s bullet had pierced the sergeant’s neck.
Standing there in the dark a dozen yards from the truck, unarmed, Kasem assumed the next sniper bullet would be for him. He dropped to his stomach and crawled into a ditch.
Meredith had been hastily debriefing Rahimi. In halting English interrupted by his rapid breathing, Zana told Meredith of Zoran, the PDKI fighter who had brought him there. He also spoke of Reza, who was wearing a kaffiyeh. Zana explained that Reza had scooped him up and tackled him in the weeds, told him to wait there while he chased down some other assassin.
No, she’d countered. The situation was reversed. The man with the kaffiyeh was bad. Her husband was still out there, looking to come in. Rahimi had been tricked. The scientist blinked at that, confused.
Tex and another SEAL were huddled near them in the weeds at the edge of the corral.
“Weapons down! Weapons down!” Tex shouted, relaying the order that had come across his headset. “Friendly coming in!”
He turned to Meredith and Rahimi. “Sounds like we got your man,” he said, grinning, his teeth brilliant against his painted face. He pointed.
Meredith followed Tex’s finger. There, on the far side of the field, she recognized John. He was limping, hunched, hanging on a SEAL’s shoulder as they made their way forward. She ran to meet him.
Dale looked up at her, filthy, his hair hanging from his neck like a dirty rag. “What the fuck?” he said, breaking away from the SEAL who’d been holding him up.
She wanted to hug him, but with all the gear and the nearby commandos, there was simply no time for it. Instead, she waved away the SEAL who’d been helping John and crept under his arm, supporting him, taking the SEAL’s place.
“Told you I’d get him,” John said to Meredith as they limped together back toward the edge of the field.
She could feel his warm breath against her ear. “Yeah,” she said, “you did. You fucking did.”
When they arrived at the spot next to Tex, Zana Rahimi turned his gray beard toward both of them.
“Dr. Rahimi, I presume?” John said, hoarsely.
The older man nodded. They hastily shook hands, said a few words of greeting in Farsi.
One of the SEALs then laid Dale flat, opened his shirt, and inspected the deep bruise from the sniper round he’d endured below the body armor. Meredith was right there next to the SEAL, fussing over his every move.
Tex watched her, smiling. “Yeah,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the incoming helo, the 60 coming back to the LZ to get them all. “Is it true you guys are married? That’s the rumor going around the CP.”
“Sort of,” Dale said in a half groan, looking up at Tex with a lopsided grin. The smile turned to a wince as the other SEAL prodded his chest, dabbing the wound with some kind of solvent.
“Well,” Tex said, “if ‘sort of’ actually means no, then please step aside, sir. ’Cause I’d like to propose to this here woman myself.”