The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  Eleven seconds …

  The fourth soldier either never tried or quickly gave up trying to get his MPT-9 around. Just barreled into his wheezing comrade from the side, forcing McCracken up against the elevator wall. Pinning him there while the soldier fought to free his own pistol.

  No way Blaine could find the now-writhing man’s holster again or free his submachine gun in time, at least not all of it. But the angle of impact had left the butt riding high above his shoulder, just the angle McCracken needed to employ both hands to jam it forward, striking the final soldier in the forehead the same moment the man’s pistol cleared its holster.

  Five seconds …

  He got off one shot and then another, the first missing McCracken’s left ear by mere inches and the second clanging into the ceiling. Blaine, meanwhile, kept the butt pressed against the fourth man’s shattered nose and shoved forward, the writhing soldier still pressed between them when the final man’s head slammed into the far compartment wall. An instant was all McCracken needed—to draw the submachine gun butt backward and resteady it for a blow straight on—with enough practiced force for the man’s nose to explode bone backward into his brain.

  Two seconds …

  The mental clock in his head nearly exhausted, Blaine jerked that MPT-9 from the shoulder of the solider still pressed against him, letting him crumple. The elevator doors opening as he stripped a second MPT-9 from the body of the slumped soldier whose face was only a memory. Both weapons in hand when he burst out into the security area manned by soldiers caught between motions, the echoing din of gunshots having already reached them.

  McCracken opened up with both submachine guns, catching all of them by surprise. He felt the surge from the steady pulse of fire kicking up superheated air into his face, his teeth rattling in rhythm with the steady clacking of the twin weapons. His ears first stung, then seemed to bubble with air. Blaine was only vaguely conscious of the bodies toppling around him, most suspended between breaths and actions. A few at the outside of his firing arc managed to free their weapons, even find the triggers before McCracken’s fire cut them down with neatly stitched bullet lines across their torsos. He’d heard battle described any number of ways over the years, as a fog, a dream, even as a razor-sharp reality. Today, with a dozen men felled before any could get off a decent shot, it seemed a combination of all three.

  McCracken discarded the empty submachine guns, the air rich with the smells of oil and gun smoke. The clock in his head had started up again, telling him he needed thirty more seconds to execute the final stage of his plan. Cutting it close, then, even closer than he thought when he caught the sound of helicopters approaching overhead.

  CHAPTER 8

  Natanz, Iran

  Blaine knew the choppers couldn’t possibly have been responding to an emergency call, not this fast. They must have been carrying replacements as opposed to reinforcements. Still, the two dozen or so troops likely to be inside the old Russian MI-8 helicopters would learn in mere moments what was transpiring and would surge from inside their cabins ready to join the battle.

  That left him with no choice other than to rush through the doors leading into the facility, waving his arms frantically to signal the choppers. In that moment, the side doors on both MI-8s jerked open, the troops ferried here already poised on the starting blocks with weapons steadied before them.

  McCracken backed away, pretending to be warding off debris kicked up by the rotor wash when his real intention was to reach the garbage truck currently emptying the first of several dumpsters lined up one after the other. The truck had turned up innocuously in several satellite reconnaissance photos, enough to give him an idea of where to find the last thing his plan required.

  A means of escape.

  “What do you mean he’s gone?” Minister Hosseini demanded of the Revolutionary Guard major in charge of security for the aboveground installation. “He can’t be gone!”

  “We’ve searched everywhere,” the major insisted.

  “But you sealed off the grounds. We’re in the middle of nowhere here with an electrified fence surrounding the complex. Keep looking, Major.”

  “But—”

  “You have your orders,” said Hosseini. “Now follow them.”

  The garbage truck rumbled down the last stretch of highway before the rendezvous point, just moments away now.

  “Gotta hand it to you, boss,” said Sal Belamo from behind the wheel. An ex-middleweight boxer who’d once fought Carlos Monzón for the crown, Belamo had the scars to prove it and experience dating back to the heyday of the Cold War where he specialized in close, professional-style enemy executions. A generation before, he’d actually been assigned to take out McCracken, but opted to join forces with him instead, which began a relationship that had endured ever since. “You outdid yourself this time. You ask me, anybody thinks you’re too old for this shit better throw away their watch.”

  “You agree, Indian?” McCracken asked the hulking, seven-foot figure squeezed against the door on the other side of him.

  “I’ve never owned a watch, Blainey,” said Johnny Wareagle, his oldest friend, who’d fought by his side in Vietnam and in pretty much every war since, mostly the ones nobody ever heard about. “I determined long ago that the passage of time has nothing to do with minutes and seconds.”

  “Guess we’re living proof of that, aren’t we?”

  Sal Belamo braked the truck and eased it off the main road toward the rendezvous point with the Israeli team who’d be escorting the three of them out of Iran. “This is a Mercedes, you know. Goddamn Mercedes garbage truck.”

  McCracken could only hope that the dumpster in which he’d taken refuge while Sal and Johnny completed the real drivers’ rounds contained no radioactive material.

  “I ever tell you I was supposed to be part of the whole Desert One fiasco back in 1980?” Belamo continued.

  “What happened?”

  “I got pulled after telling the suits in charge the plan was for shit. They took offense to that. Wasn’t one of my better days.”

  “Just like this isn’t going to be one of Iran’s better ones,” McCracken said, turning to Wareagle. “Got that satellite phone, Indian?”

  “Where could he have gone?” Hosseini demanded of the Revolutionary Guard major, after still no trace of the filmmaker had been found twenty minutes later.

  “Perhaps you’re asking the wrong question, Minister. Perhaps you should concern yourself with what he was doing here.”

  “Isn’t it obvious, you fool?”

  A subordinate rushed over, extending a satellite phone toward Hosseini, who clutched it to his ear. “Speak!”

  “We found the real Hakeem Najjar bound and gagged in his apartment,” the secret policeman he’d dispatched reported. “Shaken, but otherwise fine.”

  “Find out everything he knows, especially about the man who impersonated him, and then make sure he disappears for good.”

  “Understood, Minister.”

  Hosseini ended the call and handed the satellite phone back to his subordinate, turning to find the major still standing there.

  “Isn’t there something you’d be better off doing? Like finding the man who infiltrated this complex, perhaps?”

  “I was just wondering how anyone could have pulled off something so elaborate. And why?”

  “He saw everything the complex has to offer. He knows everything! Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “Oh, it’s enough,” agreed the major. “I’m just not certain that it’s all.”

  “What else could there be?”

  “His equipment,” the major said, innocently enough. “I assume you confiscated all of it prior to his dismissal.”

  “Of course. The camera itself, along with the portable lights he used and the batteries that supplied power. All were inspected and X-rayed two different tim
es in accordance with security protocols.”

  “These batteries would’ve had a lead casing,” noted the major. “I assume your inspection team considered that in their protocol.”

  Hosseini felt himself grow cold. “In the name of Allah … No, it can’t be …”

  And then he was rushing back for the elevator, which was still slick with drying blood.

  The Natanz facility was totally off-line, no way to make contact in or out other than via satellite phone. No cellular or Internet service was available or accessible whatsoever. Had workers dared risk their jobs or worse by bringing in cellular devices with them, they’d find all signals blocked by sophisticated jamming devices that prevented any from getting in or out.

  So McCracken took the satellite phone from Johnny War­eagle and began entering a number.

  “The camera equipment!” Hosseini blared to the Revolutionary Guard captain in charge of security for the underground facility. “Where is it?”

  “Placed just as you instructed.”

  “Where?”

  The captain led him down the hall to a single narrow door and opened it to reveal shelves of military ordnance. A single shelf against the far wall that had been empty now held the fake filmmaker’s confiscated equipment.

  “See,” the captain reported, “everything but the camera itself, also as you instructed.”

  Hosseini hurried to the shelf, reaching it just as the captain flicked on a light that spotlighted all four of the portable camera batteries, each about the size of a shoe box.

  McCracken wasn’t sure who had handled the conversion process, knew only that the plan he presented to David was to take three relatively low-yield tactical nuclear warheads in the five- to ten-megaton range and convert them from missile deployment to ground-based explosives. Originally these smaller warheads had been called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions and included models like the W48 that could be loaded into a 155-millimeter nuclear artillery shell. The warhead in the even older W33 would work just as nicely, although in a more crude fashion, but for his money, McCracken was betting the United States had supplied Israel with W45 warheads lifted from the deactivated line of MGR-3 Little John missiles for the mission.

  McCracken didn’t know whether it was Israeli or American scientists who’d handled the complex chore of refashioning three of his four Canon BP-975 battery packs into nuclear weapons with ground-based detonation capabilities. It couldn’t have been easy trying to squeeze all that ordnance and technology into a prepackaged size, each with a combined yield many times greater than the much larger bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The filmmaker Najjar actually used a smaller battery pack, with too small of a casing to use to hide a bomb, so this was the one liberty McCracken took with the man’s process, prepared to explain the anomaly to Hosseini had he been challenged.

  The four portable camera batteries, three of which had been converted to nuclear bombs, had been waiting for him when he reached Tehran. The fourth was all he needed to work the lights, the others purportedly there for backup power on the chance it was needed.

  He came to the final number and paused briefly before pressing it.

  “Boom,” he said softly.

  Hosseini and the Revolutionary Guard captain were halfway back to the elevator, each lugging two of the portable batteries, when a buzzing sounded. The men detected it in their ears but couldn’t determine its source, until they cast their eyes downward in the last moment before the three flashes erupted together. The blast wave spread outward in a millisecond, consuming everything it reached in the last instants before the secondary blast sent fiery heat reaching a million degrees a mile in every direction underground.

  Sal Belamo had just reached the rendezvous point a dozen miles away when McCracken felt the earth rumble. It wasn’t so much beneath as all around him, the world itself quaking. There was no sense of a primary or secondary blast, no air burst that flushed heat into the atmosphere. Instead there was only a vast cloud of dirt and debris coughed into the air, not in the shape of the traditional mushroom cloud so much as a smoke storm kicked up from an oil fire.

  McCracken continued to feel the rumbling for several more seconds in the pit of his stomach, wondering whether it was his imagination at work or if this part of the world was literally shaking itself apart. Then it subsided, slowly, leaving Belamo to let out a hefty sigh.

  “Now that was some ride,” he uttered. “You ask me, even Disneyland’s got nothing to match it.”

  “I might head there myself, now that this is over,” McCracken grinned, noticing Belamo exchange a wary glance with Johnny Wareagle. “Uh-oh, what am I missing here?”

  “It’s not good, boss,” Belamo told him.

  “The Hellfire reborn, Blainey,” Wareagle elaborated, using the term he’d coined way back in Vietnam. “Only in our own country.”

  “And this time it hit close to home, boss,” added Belamo grimly. “Up close and personal.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Missouri River

  McCracken stood on the shore just short of the cordoned-off eastbound span of the Daniel Boone Bridge that had been blown up by placing explosives strategically in line with the aging supports. The entire span had ruptured, plunging more than sixty vehicles into the waters below the previous morning while he was still in Iran.

  He ran his eyes past the assortment of uniformed and other investigative personnel identified by the initials on their jackets, stopping on a civilian who viewed the scene with feigned detachment. Blaine made his way toward him, watching rescue and search efforts that had continued unabated for twenty-four straight hours now.

  He reached the civilian standing apart from all the others and flashed an ID he hadn’t used in years, still enough to make the man’s eyebrows flicker and to study Blaine’s face closer.

  “I read you as the kind of man who goes after the shitheads who pull of shit like this,” the stranger said.

  “Likewise.”

  “Di Oppresso Liber,” the man said, quoting the Special Forces motto: To Free the Oppressed. “Wish I was still in that game. Rather be pulling grenade pins than strings.”

  “ ’Nam?”

  The man didn’t nod, didn’t have to. “We got two hundred in the water. A man like you shows up on a scene like this, I’m guessing it’s about one of them.”

  The whole trip here, McCracken had been replaying a visit he’d had from an old friend twenty-five years ago. There hadn’t been a lot of lovers in his life, and Henri Dejourner came with news about one of them.

  “She died two months ago.”

  “You haven’t come here to inform me I was mentioned in her will.”

  “In a sense, I have. Lauren Ericson is survived by a son. He’s yours.” Dejourner had a memo pad out and was reading from it. “The boy’s name is Matthew. He’s three months past twelve and is enrolled in the third form at the Reading School in Reading, England. He is, at present, a boarder at the school after having lived the rest of his life in the village of Hambleden twenty-five minutes away.”

  “How did Lauren die?”

  “Traffic accident.”

  “Does the boy …”

  “No, mon ami. He has no knowledge of you. Lauren told him his father deserted them.”

  “Then he does have some knowledge of me.”

  Matthew had turned out not to be his son at all, but that hadn’t stopped Blaine from treating him like one through the rest of the boy’s youth, never prouder than when the young man was admitted into Britain’s Special Air Service. Matthew had had a son out of wedlock, but had ultimately married the woman who later ran off, leaving Matthew to raise Andrew Ericson by himself. Blaine had met the boy once, years before, but had no idea he was in the United States for the year on a student exchange program until Johnny and Sal broke the news of the terrorist attack in which Andrew been caught.

&
nbsp; Matthew, meanwhile, was on a mission somewhere, the Middle East probably. He couldn’t be reached, and Blaine didn’t want him getting this kind of news from some mountain messenger when he’d never leave his squad anyway. That left the task at hand to him. McCracken had let himself hope it wouldn’t be this bad. That the drop wouldn’t be as long or the waters as cold and deep. But he’d been on scenes like this often enough to know the odds of a successful rescue diminished by the hour under these conditions, and the grim expression worn by the man by his side pretty much said it all.

  “Sixty rescued so far with a bunch of those not expected to make it,” the man continued.

  “How deep’s the water?”

  “Averages seventy-five feet. Temperature’s just under forty degrees. You want a reason for hope? Bodies will be washing up on the shoreline as far as fifty miles away for the next two days and a few of them will still be alive. A few.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been here before,” McCracken told him.

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “It’s different when it’s personal.”

  The man slid closer to him, took his hands out of his pockets as if about to comfort Blaine with a touch to his shoulder, but then just left them there dangling. “My advice? Don’t get involved.”

  McCracken gazed back at the remnants of the classic cantilever bridge built way back in 1932. Ironically, construction of a replacement span was already nearing completion. Blaine took his phone from his pocket to snap some pictures, but it slipped from his grasp to the cold ground.

  The stranger retrieved the phone and handed it back to him. “My second piece of advice: Keep this handy in case you need to call 9-1-1.”

  “I am 9-1-1,” McCracken told him.

  The man stuffed his hands back into his pockets. “Then I guess it’s unfortunate you were too late to help that kid.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Washington, DC

  “Washington’s on lockdown,” said Henry Folsom, gazing across the table at McCracken. “The whole country’s on lockdown. Can you believe this shit?”