The Ares Decision Read online

  But the Muslims were different. They were acquiring first-strike technology that Hitler could only dream of, and they didn’t share the Soviets’ aversion to self-annihilation. In many ways, they courted it.

  Finally, he looked up at Collen. “Pay the man what he wants and get rid of them.”

  67

  Western Iran

  November 30—0802 Hours GMT+3:30

  JON SMITH UNZIPPED THE tent and crawled out, leaving Howell to roll up their sleeping bags. The rising sun was still obscured by clouds, but the gust seemed to be dying down. For most of the night, it had sounded like they were camped in a train station—the wind would build in the north, the roar of it slowly approaching until it got hold of their nylon shelter and tried to tear it apart.

  He waded through three feet of new snow, skirting along a stone wall that probably dated back a couple of thousand years. At its end was a six-foot sculpture of a face topped by an elaborate headdress. It had once watched over the entrance to a thriving city but was now relegated to the less lofty job of securing one of their tent’s guylines.

  This was the beginning of their second day skiing from the-middle-of-nowhere Turkey to the-middle-of-nowhere Iran, and he could feel the stress building in his stomach. Sarie was out there somewhere, as was the parasite. Had she agreed to use her expertise to modify it and doom millions to death? Or had she refused and doomed herself ?

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep himself in check, to think things through and give their situation the respect it deserved. All he wanted to do was throw his skis on and go until his lungs burst. But to where?

  Howell’s head appeared from inside the tent and he examined the sky with a smile. “Doesn’t look so bad.”

  “See if you still feel that way after ten hours of breaking trail.”

  “Every day aboveground is a good day,” he said, dragging their packs into the snow. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  Smith pointed down a steep slope that started thirty feet from their camp and then started dismantling their tent. At one time, the grade had probably given the city’s archers an advantage over invading armies, but now it just screamed “terrain trap” to any backcountry skier or military man worth a damn.

  Howell clicked into his skis and eased up to the edge, frowning down at the cliff bands and cornices that overhung the shadowed canyon. He thumbed back at the silent heads watching them. “One well-placed grenade and we’ll be joining our friends here as permanent residents.”

  Smith stuffed the tent in his pack and skied up next to the Brit. “You’re forgetting one thing—we’re actually trying to get ambushed.”

  Howell shrugged. “I guess we should look on the bright side, then.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’ll probably get killed skiing down.”

  With that he kicked off and arced gracefully down the slope. Normally, the British weren’t known for their skiing prowess, but Howell’s time in the California mountains had obviously overcome the challenges of his birth. Fresh powder curled over his head as he dodged a rock outcropping and picked up speed.

  Smith tensed when a large slab of snow around his friend began to move, pacing him as gravity dragged it into the gap ahead. The avalanche he thought was coming didn’t materialize, though, and a few moments later, Howell was waving a pole enthusiastically up at him.

  He put his AvaLung in his mouth but then spit it out. The device was designed to help a buried skier breathe long enough to be rescued, but if he kicked off a slide, they would both be buried. And with no help forthcoming, it would only serve to prolong his suffering.

  The cornice he was standing on was about five feet high, and he jumped off, hip checking in the deep snow before springing upright and hurtling down the slope. Under other circumstances, it would have been a perfect day, and he tried to enjoy the roller-coaster sensation as he dove in and out of the powder, occasionally looking back to see if the snowpack was holding.

  It did, and he pulled up to Howell, who was grinning through the ice clinging to his stubble. “I don’t suppose we have time for one more?”

  Smith actually laughed, managing for a brief moment to forget why they were there.

  “Maybe we’ll hit it again on our way out,” he said, taking off his skis and reaching for his skins before realizing that Howell wasn’t listening. Instead, he was completely focused on the canyon wall ahead of them.

  “You got something, Peter?”

  “Movement at the top.”

  “Nothing we can do. Skin up and let’s get moving.”

  He did but clearly wasn’t happy about it. Walking into an obvious trap was embarrassing enough for an SAS man, but not fighting his way out of it would be downright mortifying.

  “Anything behind us?” Howell said.

  Smith tried not to be obvious scanning the ridge. “I don’t see anything. But that—”

  A puff of snow erupted ten feet to their right and they dove away from it as the muffled sound of the gunshot filtered down the cliff. Smith immediately rolled upright and tried to get to their skis, but more rounds rained down on them, spraying him with ice and snow.

  “We’re in a cross fire!” Howell shouted, reaching instinctively into his jacket for the gun that wasn’t there. Lost backcountry skiers tended not to be armed.

  The intensity of fire increased, closing in on them as the snipers found their range. Howell started wading toward a small rock outcropping at the base of one of the canyon walls, making comically slow progress through the deep powder. Shots were striking within two feet of him, one every second or so, from what Smith calculated to be at least three separate guns. He wasn’t going to make it.

  Then everything went silent.

  Howell slowed and finally stopped a few yards short of cover. A hole in the clouds had opened up, and he raised a hand to shade his face as he scanned the ridge again.

  “Stay where you are! Do not move!”

  The accented voice echoed through the gap, making its source impossible to pinpoint. A moment later, ropes appeared above them, tumbling gracefully through the air. Before the ends had even hit the ground, men appeared on both sides of the canyon, rappelling quickly as a few more shots kicked up the snow between Smith and Howell. A reminder that any aggressive move on their part could be easily dealt with.

  68

  Western Iran

  November 30—1449 Hours GMT+3:30

  AFTER THEY WERE RELIEVED of their backpacks, it was made crystal clear that if they fell behind, they would be left to die. And the threat wasn’t an idle one. With the wind picking up again and a high-pressure system pushing temperatures into the single digits, they wouldn’t last long with only their skis and the clothes on their backs.

  For now, though, it appeared to Smith that they were safe. The nine men who had ambushed them were disbursed in an ever-​lengthening line across the open plain. He glanced back to check on the man charged with guarding him and saw that he was stopped more than a hundred yards back, leaning weakly on his poles as someone helped him off with his oversized pack and slipped it over his own shoulders. Smith smiled when he realized that the young soldier’s benefactor was none other than Peter Howell.

  Beyond the initial barked orders and threats, none of their captors had said much of anything. In fact, Smith still wasn’t dead sure who these men were. Had they been sent by Farrokh? Were they an Iranian military patrol taking them to prison for violating the border? Were they bandits or drug runners interested in a ransom? All questions had thus far gone unanswered.

  What he did know was that it was a fairly ragtag unit. Their fitness and skiing ability were all over the place, and their equipment was dated at best and on the verge of falling apart at worst.

  Smith picked up his pace, feeling the cold air penetrate his lungs as he closed in on the unfortunate man who had been stuck taking possession of his seventy-pound pack. One of the soldier’s hands was stuffed in his jacket, and he held both po
les in the other as he shuffled awkwardly forward, the cold and monotonous grade starting to take their toll.

  He was startled when Smith came alongside and yanked down one of the pack’s side zippers but was too tired to do anything to protect himself against the weapon he assumed his American prisoner was retrieving.

  Instead, Smith pulled out a pair of state-of-the-art ice-climbing gloves that he’d been carrying as spares. The young man looked at him over wire-rimmed glasses caked with ice and gave a short nod of thanks.

  Smith sped up again, passing one exhausted captor after another until he settled in behind the man on point.

  “Your team needs a break.”

  The man tensed and twisted around, apparently surprised that his prisoner had been able to close the gap between them so quickly and silently.

  “Perhaps it’s you who needs the rest?”

  By way of response, Smith just thumbed behind him.

  The man looked out over the line of stragglers, his irritated frown turning to an expression of disgust when he saw Howell, now carrying both a pack and a rifle, giving an impromptu seminar on efficient snow travel.

  “Academics and intellectuals,” the man said in lightly accented English. “They’re loyal to the movement, but even with training so many are… What’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Unathletic?” Smith offered.

  The man shook his head, sending a cascade of snow from his hat to his neatly trimmed beard. “Wimps. That’s it. Not like you Americans and British. In the West a doctor and an old man can penetrate the jungles of Uganda, escape one of the cruelest terrorists in the world, and then travel forty miles into the mountains of Iran. You’re killers. Born and bred for it.”

  He skied away and Smith just let him go.

  “Making a new friend?” Howell said, coming up behind him. The next closest man was more than fifty yards back, struggling to incorporate the Brit’s advice into his skiing technique.

  “Actually, I’m getting the distinct impression he doesn’t like us. Based on what he just said, though, I think we found the people we were looking for.”

  “And that means we’re supposed to trust them?”

  “Don’t have much choice.”

  “I used to have a mate who liked to say, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’”

  “Used to have?”

  “IED. We never managed to scrape up enough of him to put in a box. I guess he finally answered his own question, though.”

  Smith didn’t respond, taking off up the canyon at a pace that once again brought him up behind the man breaking trail. “I think we need to remember that we’re on the same side here.”

  “Are we?” he said without looking back. “Like we were in 1953 when the CIA deposed our democratically elected leader and replaced him with a dictator?”

  Smith knew he should just remain silent—this man was their only chance to find Farrokh. On the other hand, it wasn’t in his nature to just roll over when his country was insulted.

  “Am I mistaken, or was that in response to him nationalizing British Petroleum’s holdings in Iran?”

  “Ah, yes. Your oil. The most important thing in the world—more important than the lives of innocents. More important than the democracy you want to force on everyone. That is, everyone but the Saudis, where women aren’t even allowed to operate a car.”

  “All we ask is that you send us a relatively stable supply of fuel and don’t harm our citizens. In return, we agree to keep a gigantic money hose aimed at the entire region.”

  “And if we don’t want your money? If we want to pursue a nuclear deterrent against your government, which has publicly threatened us with annihilation?”

  “That was never our government’s position—it was just a few congressmen shooting their mouths off.”

  “But regimes and circumstances change, do they not?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to resolve the world’s problems today,” Smith said as the sun dipped behind the mountains. “So why don’t we just say that both of our countries have been very naughty and focus on what’s ahead instead of what’s behind?”

  69

  Central Iran

  December 1—2206 Hours GMT+3:30

  SARIE VAN KEUREN MOVED carefully in her hazmat suit, constantly glancing back at the poorly maintained tubes supplying her with fresh air. The lab had the look of something slapped together over the course of a few weeks, with containment protocols that were well below one hundred percent functionality. And anything less than one hundred percent might as well be zero.

  She could credit Omidi with one thing, though. He’d been incredibly diligent in making certain that the lab—and virtually every other room she used—shared a glass wall with the cell where he kept his parasite victim. A constant reminder of where she would end up if she didn’t behave.

  The man Omidi had called a rapist and murderer was fully symptomatic now but hadn’t yet started to weaken. Every move she or the people working in adjacent rooms made attracted him, and he went back and forth in a mindless frenzy, slamming into the glass barrier over and over in a desperate attempt to find the parasite a new host.

  She tried to forget about him, but it didn’t do much to calm her. A few feet away, De Vries’s corpse was lying on a table with the top of his head missing and an expression of rage frozen into his face. Blood had pooled on the floor beneath him due to a backed-up drain that probably just emptied untreated into the ground. Overall, better than Bahame’s cave, but only just.

  The slide in her microscope contained one of many cross sections of his brain, which combined with a heavily monitored Internet connection, had been useful in confirming some of her guesses about the infection and providing some surprising refutations of others.

  The initial targets of the parasite were the frontal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex, virtually shutting off any complex reasoning that would allow the victim to control base emotions such as rage or to understand the potential consequences of their actions.

  Even more interesting was the damage to mirror neurons that had a hand in giving humans empathy and a connection to others. The pattern of damage was very specific, though, and she wasn’t sure why. A compelling hypothesis was that it destroyed victims’ ability to identify with uninfected humans while allowing them to continue to identify with infected humans—thus explaining why they didn’t attack each other.

  Most interesting, though, was the bleeding. The capillaries in the head burst due to high concentrations of the parasite in that area and not necessarily because the infection was targeting them specifically. It was similar to sneezing or coughing or diarrhea—a symptom that evolution selected because it allowed for the spread and survival of the pathogen. In the end, though, the bleeding from the hair was nowhere near as bad as it appeared. Victims did not die of blood loss as everyone assumed. They died as a result of brain damage.

  The parasite multiplied unchecked and seemed to have a frighteningly slippery genetic code that adapted quickly. As crowding in the targeted areas got worse, parasites with a mutated taste for other parts of the brain became increasingly successful. Eventually, they began going after areas controlling autonomic functions such as heart rate, thermoregulation, and respiration.

  The good news was that it was far more than she’d expected to learn in such a short time. The bad news was that she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the information.

  70

  Central Iran

  December 2—0755 Hours GMT+3:30

  THE ONLY EMPTY SEAT remaining was at the head of the table next to Omidi. Along each side sat what could be described as her department heads—highly educated scientists with different specialties and backgrounds. While none had degrees specific to parasitology and some were less impressive than others, each was perfectly competent. And that made them dangerous.

  “Dr. van Keuren,” Omidi said as she sat. “You’ve had an opportunity to do the initial autopsy on Thomas
De Vries. What did you discover?”

  She’d never been a good liar, but it was time to learn or die. There would be no white knight or last-minute rescues. She was on her own.

  “The parasite has a very fast breeding cycle and is as adaptable as any I’ve seen. That should make it relatively easy to modify. Getting a quicker onset of full symptoms will just be a matter of using lab animals to artificially select the fastest-acting parasites over the course of successive generations.”

  She wasn’t telling Omidi anything a second-year biology student couldn’t figure out, but he didn’t seem aware of it. Maybe this was going to be easier than she’d thought.

  “Would that also have the potential of decreasing the time to death, Doctor? And if that’s true, wouldn’t the parasite’s ability to spread be compromised as its hosts die off more rapidly?”

  The glimmer of hope she’d felt a moment before faded. It was a question that she’d wanted to avoid as long as possible—one that demanded lies that could expose her. Once again, Omidi had demonstrated that while he was as evil a son of a bitch as she’d ever met, he was by no means stupid.

  “Attacks on the frontal lobe and related areas of the brain are correlated with blood loss, but only loosely. What I’m talking about here isn’t increasing parasitic load; it’s making it more targeted. It’s actually possible that this would slow the time to fatal blood loss, because bleeding is just a secondary effect.”

  “Are you certain that death is from blood loss?”

  His question sent a jolt of adrenaline through her that she struggled to hide. Did he know something?