Pandora's grave

He tossed one end of the rope up over the tanker and pulled it down the other side, twisting the cord into a knot. Placed at that point, the explosion would split the fuel tank apart, igniting the gasoline inside. Testing the knot to make sure it was secure, he attached the detonator. As a hurried beep-beep-beep assured him the trigger was engaged, he moved to the other tanker.

Harry pushed open the door of the trailer cautiously, following his gun barrel into the room. Hamid was on guard outside.

A strong smell of antiseptic was the first thing that struck his nose, followed by another, equally recognizable. The smell of death.

His eyes swept the room, taking in the scene. The inside of the trailer was like a hospital room. His mind flitted back to the schematics they had been shown back at Langley. The computer simulations the photoanalysts had made of the Russian bio-war trailers.

He was standing inside one. For once the spooks had gotten it right.

A body was hermetically sealed inside a container on the far side of the room. Harry stepped closer, peering into the- casket. It was the only word he could think of.

At first he thought the night vision goggles were distorting his sight, but then he looked closer. The man was naked, lying on his back a few inches beneath the clear, air-tight plastic. White, Caucasian. Probably one of the archaeologists he had come to rescue.

He was no longer recognizable, every vein of his body puffed out and outlined in black. Harry had never seen anything like it. In his fifteen years of service for the Agency, he had seen bodies in every stage of death and decomposition, but never anything like this.

Harry reached down and unstrapped the TACSAT from his ankle. Phone home…

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia

“Kranemeyer here. Speak.”

“Director, this is Nichols. I’ve found another one of the archaeologists.”

“Who?”

Irritation showed through in the voice that responded. “I don’t have the time to run around identifying corpses, sir. I’ll leave that to the desk jockeys.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes, and his body’s in worse shape than anything I’ve ever seen.” Kranemeyer exchanged a sharp glance with Ron Carter. Coming from the man on the other end of the line, that meant something.

But Harry was still talking. “I’ve taken a photo with the TACSAT’s camera. Uploading to the Agency intranet as we speak. See if you can get an ID on what killed him.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve got a full-on bio-war lab set up here, just like Ron figured. I’m guessing this guy was one of the test subjects-or something, I’m not sure what.”

“Can you tell what biological agent is in use?”

They heard a shout from the distance and Harry came back on hurriedly. “I’ll let you figure that out, sir. We just ran out of time.”

“What’s going on out there, Nichols?” Lay demanded. Only silence answered his question. The comm link was dead.

4:04 A.M.

The base camp

Dragging himself up over the rocky ground, Harry cast an anxious look back over his shoulder, then upwards toward the rest of his team and the archaeologists they had freed. Three, he thought, his mind instinctively supplying the digit. Four …

“Hit it!”

Ahead, Tex threw himself prone, the detonator in his right hand. The distance was right. The former Force Recon demolitions expert checked one more time to see that the rest of the team had gone to ground. Mullins, the young student, had his head up and Tex shouted an angry warning in his direction. His thumb depressed the button…

The ground shuddered, earth rippling beneath the prostrate men. Harry averted his eyes, sheltering them against the blast. The next moment, heat washed over them like a tidal wave, expanding outward from the center of the explosion. Devastation…

Watching from the mountain road two kilometers to the south, Major Hossein saw the whole thing. He knew the layout of the base camp well enough to know what had just exploded. His fuel supplies.

With one blow the Americans had destroyed his chances of overtaking them. They had two more hours till daybreak. With their advantages in night-vision technology, they could lose themselves in the mountains in that time.

His eyes narrowed as he looked down upon the camp, his gaze sweeping toward the south end of the motor pool. For a moment he thought he was seeing things, his night vision destroyed by the glare of the flames. He rubbed his eyes and took another look.

A smile crept slowly across his face. He turned and called to one of his men. “Bring the radio. I need a secure uplink with Tehran.”

Harry lifted his eyes from the rocky soil, sensing almost instinctively that something was wrong. That feeling was only reinforced by the muffled curse he heard break from Hamid’s lips a few feet up the slope.

He turned, looking back at the base camp, into the oily clouds of black smoke curling up into the sky, angry red tongues of flame shooting from the midst of the inferno like daggers.