The Leveling

Broken glass tinkled as it fell to the asphalt.

Someone groaned. Mark lifted his head. The Lada hadn’t been equipped with airbags and the seat belts had been removed, so the two Chinese who’d been in the front seat had been thrown outside—one lay facedown on the pavement, the other sprawled awkwardly on the hood of the police car. Both were motionless and bleeding, their bodies twisted into unnatural positions. Thompson was unconscious in the back of the Lada, slumped in a kneeling position on the floor. The groaning had come from the Chinese who was still in the backseat next to Thompson.

The driver’s side door of the police car opened. Daria unbuckled her seat belt, pushed away the deflated airbag, and stumbled out.

The Chinese next to Thompson groaned again, so Mark aimed a foot at the man’s head and kicked him as hard as he could until Daria climbed onto the hood of the car. “Gotta get out of here, Mark.”

She pulled him out through the front windshield. His face and hands scraped against the broken glass. He rolled off what was left of the hood of the car and hit the pavement on his knees.

“Can you stand?” asked Daria.

Mark forced himself to do so. The world was spinning. He felt nauseous and had an unsettling feeling that his head wasn’t properly attached to his neck.

“I’m good.”

Quick footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see a single Chinese embassy soldier sprinting toward them with a worried look on his face and an automatic rifle slung across his back.

Mark stumbled to the Lada, pried open one of the back doors, and grabbed a pistol from the Chinese he’d been kicking. Gripping it with both hands, he swiveled and fired a warning shot.

The embassy soldier stopped short. He’d clearly been expecting to help with an accident, not become a part of a firefight.

Mark fired another shot above the guy’s head.

Daria screamed out something in Mandarin Chinese. The soldier let his rifle slip off his back and sprinted back to the embassy gate. He’d return within a minute, Mark knew. With reinforcements.

Daria retrieved the soldier’s rifle. “We’re outta here!”

“Thompson.” Mark’s head was pounding. Blood from little cuts on his head dripped into his eyes.

Sirens wailed in the distance. “No time.”

“Help me get him out.”

Daria face registered exasperation. “You get him out, I’ll get us a car.”

Mark pocketed the gun of the Chinese who remained unconscious in the Lada and dragged Thompson out of the backseat. Thompson was a thin but tall man, and Mark struggled with the dead weight.

Fifty feet behind him, Daria commandeered a Volga sedan at gunpoint from a man who had stopped to gawk at the accident. She pulled up next to the ruined Lada and skidded to a stop.

Mark yanked open the rear door, clasped his hands around Thompson’s chest, and heaved him into the backseat of the Volga.





37


Washington, DC



“AIM POINT ONE, Arak.”

A satellite image appeared on an LCD monitor. The monitor was embedded in a sound-dampening fabric wall at the far end of the conference table in the White House situation room. A PowerPoint slide with a series of bullet points popped up on an adjacent monitor: 40 megawatt heavy water reactor, air defense protection, onsite government housing, collateral damage risk: low.

“Accepted,” said the president’s national security advisor. The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the commander of CENTCOM, and the secretary of state—all members of the principal’s committee—concurred.

“Confirmed,” said the president. He took a big sip of his black coffee. It was six in the morning. He’d made his decision.

“Aim point two, Natanz.”

The satellite image showed a lonely collection of buildings right where the desert met the Zagros Mountains.

The bullet points on the PowerPoint slide said: Uranium enrichment site, 9000 centrifuges confirmed, heavily fortified, collateral damage risk: low.

“This slide bears some additional explanation,” said the secretary of defense. “Note that the armaments slated for the first attack include three twenty-two-thousand-pound MOAB bombs to clear the surface, followed by four of our thirty-thousand-pound bunker busters. When those go off in quick succession, it may cause enough of a seismic event that the Russians and Chinese will assume we’ve hit the Iranians with a tactical nuke. We’ll have to have our diplomats ready to shoot that theory down pronto before it gets out of hand.”

“Understood,” said the secretary of state.