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  “Make as little noise as possible,” Osborne said. “They won’t know it’s you and if they hear something they won’t hesitate to shoot.”

  “I know,” Whitney had said, and she eased into the trough and crawled away.

  Now she was back.

  Ashley helped her out of the cable run and they sat on the floor hugging each other.

  “He’s dead,” Whitney said finally. She looked over at Osborne. “I saw his body at the base of the stack, and there was a lot of blood on the snow.” She lowered her head and began to cry in great racking sobs.

  Osborne had hoped that Egan’s people would have been more interested in keeping watch on the control room than the outside of the building. But the booster antenna was one of the main keys to the success of their operation. And at this point there was no telling if Cameron had managed to reach it before he’d been stopped.

  Which put them back at square one because with what little they had they wouldn’t be able to hold off a sustained assault for much more than one or two minutes. He had the carbine he’d taken from the contractor outside Henry’s but less than half a magazine of ammunition, plus the carbine Cameron had brought with him and one full magazine, for a total of less than sixty rounds between the two M4s. Cameron had taken the Beretta with him, which left only Osborne’s SIG-Sauer and about twenty-five rounds of ammunition, plus the Ithaca twelve bore and the handful of shells Ashley had gotten from the back of his SUV.

  The only way into the control room other than the door was the cable run, which he hoped they hadn’t figured out yet, or through the window opening that was fifty feet off the generating floor.

  They wouldn’t try to get a grenade through the window for fear of killing the women, nor did he think they would get up on the roof and blow their way inside with a half kilo of Semtex; too much could go wrong.

  He’d tried to work out all their options, but the one that worried him the most was the one he hadn’t thought of. The one a nutcase might come up with.

  He caught a movement down on the floor out of the corner of his eye and just managed to duck out of the line of sight when at least two gunmen opened fire, spraying the room, most of the rounds slamming into the ceiling tiles and fluorescent light fixtures, but several of them hitting steel beams and ricocheting back into the room, at least one round slamming into a control panel near where the women were crouched.

  Keeping low, Osborne made his way to the overturned desk in the middle of the room, and motioned for Whitney and Ashley to get into the cable run.

  “Make your way back to the north side, and I’ll put the grate back in place,” he told them. “Should buy us a little time.”

  “And leave you here alone?” Ashley said, shaking her head. “Not a chance.”

  “Goddamnit, I’m trying to save your life.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s me they want,” Whitney said. “But this is my facility and I’m staying until the Air Force gets here.”

  Someone pounded at the door. “Sheriff, we know that you’re in there with Dr. Lipton and Ms. Borden!” Egan shouted.

  Osborne grabbed Cameron’s M4, and checked the load. The magazine was only half full, which left him his, plus the one full one. He switched it to single fire and handed it to Whitney. “Don’t fire unless someone makes it through the door,” he told her as someone pounded on the door again. “But once you start, don’t stop until your weapon runs dry.”

  “Send the women out and you can walk away from this alive!” Egan shouted.

  “I only have six rounds,” Ashley said.

  “You’ll have to conserve them. Fire one the same time as the doc shoots, but then hold off until they get through the door. They probably don’t know we have a shotgun, but once they find out they’re going to get real cautious.”

  “Then what?” Ashley asked, and Whitney nodded.

  “Keep firing. There can’t be that many of them. Someone has to be guarding the other hostages and someone has to be keeping a lookout for Nettles and his people.”

  “Last chance,” Egan shouted.

  “Help is on its way!” Whitney said. “Jim talked to Captain Nettles.”

  “Do they know about the hostages?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fire in the hole!” Egan shouted.

  Osborne managed to shove the women down and shield them with his body when a tremendous bang filled the room, hammering off the walls and ceiling. The metal door and the desk blocking it were ripped to shreds, the pieces flying up and out and bringing down half the ceiling, two pieces of shrapnel slicing into his back and left leg just above his prosthesis.

  Whitney was dazed but Ashley squirmed away from Osborne and popped up the same moment he did.

  A lot of dust obscured the opening, and for a long beat nothing moved, until someone poked a carbine around the corner and opened fire one-handed, spraying the room, one shot catching Osborne high in the shoulder, shoving him backwards.

  Ashley fired once, the Ithaca’s twelve-gauge spread completely filling the open doorway with pellets, giving Osborne time to roll right toward the shot-out window, before another M4 was poked around the corner and the shooter fired a short burst before pulling back.

  They were professionals, taking their time, and Osborne’s heart sank a little. Nettles was probably waiting them out in order not to jeopardize the hostages. And it was exactly the right thing to do.

  The muzzle of the M4 came around the corner and Ashley fired off another round at the same moment Whitney popped up and fired four times in rapid succession.

  Blood streaming from his wounds, Osborne got up and managed to hobble to the front of the room where he pulled up just to the left of the door opening.

  “Fuck it,” someone on the other side said, and two men rolled through.

  Osborne fired at point-blank range, taking the first man in the base of his head just below his left ear at the same time Ashley and Whitney opened fire, taking the second man in the chest, driving him backwards.

  Another shooter poked a carbine around the corner, and Osborne deflected its muzzle upwards with the barrel of his own weapon, a half-dozen shots going wild into the ceiling.

  “Down!” he shouted at the women, as he swiveled to the right at the same moment he lowered his aim and emptied the magazine into the corridor.

  Ashley had stood her ground, and as Osborne rolled back left, she opened fire with the Ithaca, giving him time to eject the spent magazine, slam home a fresh one, and charge the weapon.

  Someone down on the main floor of the generating hall started shooting, and people began shouting, and immediately the shooting escalated into what sounded to Osborne like a pitched battle. Nettles.

  “It’s over, Mr. Egan. You and your people put your weapons down and show yourselves.”

  No one answered.

  Osborne cocked an ear and he thought he might have heard boots on the metal stairs at the end of the short corridor.

  “Cover the door!” he shouted to Ashley, and he turned and hobbled to the blown-out window in time to see two men racing to the north end of the building, both of them dressed in white military camos.

  He emptied the magazine in rapid fire, one shot at a time, at the retreating figures, the rounds ricocheting off the tile floor, dangerously close to the feedwater heater, but missing until the two men ducked under the gas feed line from the wellhead where he was sure that he had hit one of them. But then they were gone.

  Hobbling back to the doorway he poked his head around the corner for a snap look, but except for a third man down no one was there. He went out and checked for a pulse, but the man was dead, as were the two in the doorway.

  The firing on the main floor suddenly stopped, and except for the constant whine of the turbine the power station was quiet.

  “Up here!” Osborne shouted.

  “Jim Cameron?” someone answered from the foot of the stairs.

  “No, Sheriff Osborne. I have Dr. Lipton and Ashl
ey Borden with me.”

  Two Rapid Response operators came up the stairs, their M4s at the ready, and when they came around the corner they pulled up short.

  “Ms. Borden,” one of them said. “Put your weapon down, please.”

  Ashley grinned, and lowered the Ithaca. “About time you guys showed up.”

  Near Mashhad, Iran

  On the Border with Turkmenistan

  D.S. WOOD WAS BONE-WEARY, the events of the last twenty-four hours totally unprecedented in his life, and crossing the border into Iran in his company jet, still a couple of hours before dawn, he couldn’t begin to think what the next year, month, or even day, was going to bring him.

  He wasn’t going to end up in prison like Bernie Madoff and some of the other guys whose financial dealings landed them in prison for life. He knew that much. But watching the lights of Mashhad, a city of nearly three million people, rising in the distance to the south, he didn’t know if he had done the right thing by transferring nearly two billion dollars out of his Trent Holdings into the Central Bank of Turkey at Ankara.

  But Margaret Fischer had telephoned to warn him that the SEC had issued her a subpoena to answer questions about her business dealings with Trent and a recent trip to Havana.

  “What do I tell them, D. S.?” she’d asked.

  “The truth, that you and I never had business with each other, and the closest I’ve ever come to Havana was a fishing trip out of Key West about twenty years ago.”

  “They may not buy it,” she’d said, and he had heard a trace of fear in her voice.

  “Maggie, you’re a big girl in a man’s playground, you figure it out,” he had told her and had hung up. Whatever the SEC wanted with her, the bitch deserved it.

  But that had been before Kast had telephoned on the encrypted Nokia with news of yet another failure at the Initiative, this time the Venezuelans screaming for blood, and to strongly suggest the meeting in Mashhad.

  “If I were in your shoes I would transfer as much of my money out of the U.S. in the next few hours as I possibly could, because the feds will be knocking at your door any minute,” Kast had warned.

  “Not to Iran.”

  “No, nor Venezuela. My advisers tell me that Turkey would be a safe bet, since most of your derivative funds are tied up in the Middle East oil fields.”

  “A contractor giving financial advice to a fund manager?”

  “Let’s just say that I have a vested interest in keeping you out of jail and your wealth accessible. You owe me seventy-five million and I want to collect it.”

  “Why Iran? You can’t be very welcome there.”

  “I’ve closed down operations in South Carolina, and moved everything to Mashhad because I was made an offer that I couldn’t refuse.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sanctuary, D. S. You should think about it.”

  The phone at his elbow chimed and Wood answered, it was Captain Kellogg on the flight deck.

  “We’ve been given clearance to land.”

  “No questions about invading their airspace?”

  “No, sir. They were expecting us,” Kellogg said. “But once we set down we’re going to be pretty much out of touch with anyone in the West.”

  “Nothing to worry about, Bob. We’re only going to be on the ground for a little while. Shorter than our Havana trip.”

  Kast had briefly explained that the Iranian government had offered him the chance, including financial support, to build a training base for Venture Plus in the mountains outside of Mashhad. Totally free of U.S. law, he would get help with the recruitment of enough men to form a force of at least battalion and possibly brigade strength who he would personally train for missions anywhere in the world that would never involve shooting at American servicemen.

  “Same thing Erik Prince did with Blackwater,” Kast said.

  “But he set up in Abu Dhabi—not an enemy state,” Wood had countered. “And one that’s certainly a hell of a lot more stable than Iran.”

  “I couldn’t be a chooser,” Kast had said. “Neither can you be.”

  And Kast was right, of course. After Maggie’s call, Wood had begun to feel the walls closing in on him, the cell door slamming shut, his assets frozen.

  “We need to talk in person,” Kast had said. “You can see the setup for yourself.”

  “What if I’m taken into custody, as a spy or something?”

  “It’d be the first thing the Iranians did that Washington would actually agree with. Solve a big headache for them. So it won’t happen.”

  Wood had always gone by the motto that if something didn’t sound or smell right it probably wasn’t. But he was stuck.

  “Just come and take a look. If you don’t like what you see, your jet will be refueled and you can be on your way. Back to Havana, if you want.”

  But Havana was out, of course, because Cuba was one of Venezuela’s strongest allies. Still left a lot of more desirable places than Iran. He figured that with his money he could probably make a case for political asylum in Switzerland or maybe even Monaco or Lichtenstein.

  Within a few hours of talking with Kast, Wood had made a two billion USD transfer to a Trent account in the Central Bank of Turkey, where it would be safe in the short term, and had ordered Kellogg to gather the crew and prep the aircraft for an immediate flight to Moscow with a refueling stop in the Azores.

  Less than two hours after that they’d been airborne, but not to Moscow, rather to Ankara, then to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, where they’d been given permission to turn southeast and enter Iranian airspace for the one hundred and forty mile hop to Mashhad.

  Captain Kellogg called again. “I think you should come up to the flight deck, Mr. Wood, there’s something you need to see.”

  “I thought we were about to land.”

  “We just started our downwind, but I don’t think we want to land here.”

  “Coming,” Wood said, his heart in his throat.

  Tammy, the flight attendant stood in the galley, her eyes wide, obviously frightened.

  Wood stepped onto the flight deck, the airport directly out the left window. “What’s wrong?”

  “Look to the end of thirty-two left, the main runway,” Kellogg said.

  Wood looked out the window, but at first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, except that what looked like a convoy of some sort was parked about a hundred yards or so beyond the end of the runway. “What is it?”

  “Three of those mobile units are Russian SA-2 SAMs.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Russian surface-to-air missiles,” Kellogg said sharply. “Portable units that can be set up anywhere to shoot down an airplane.”

  It struck Wood all of a sudden what had happened; what a colossal blunder he had made purely out of fear of going to jail when there’d been other more viable options for him. He’d dropped everything on Kast’s suggestion and had run like a stupid, panicked woman.

  “Get us out of here, Bob,” Wood said. “Right now.”

  “They’ll be expecting us to land.”

  “They won’t shoot us down, it’d cause too big an international incident. Turn around and get across the border by the shortest possible route.”

  “Fifty miles,” Kellogg said. “Go back to the cabin and strap in, I’m declaring an emergency.” He immediately made a hard right turn out of the downwind leg. “Squawk 7500,” he told his copilot, Kelly Bragg. The transponder code was an automatic emergency signal that the aircraft had been hijacked. Every air traffic controller in the world understood it.

  Tammy was already strapped in as Wood made it back to his seat in the main cabin and cinched his seat belt.

  His seat was on the left side of the airplane, so all he was seeing was the star-filled sky; a foreign sky that made him realize how many regrets he had—how many regrets he should have had.

  They made the turn to the north, the 737-700’s two engines spooled up
to maximum thrust, and for thirty seconds Wood convinced himself that they would make it across the border into Turkmenistan, when Kellogg shouted something from the flight deck.

  Wood was about to pick up the phone, when the jet banked sharply to the left as it dove for the ground. Seconds later the plane banked sharply to the right, when something thumped hard into its belly. A huge fireball seemed to rise up from behind the left wing, and a few milliseconds later his world ended.

  Badlands Ranch

  That Same Day

  THE FIRST THING that Egan became fully aware of was pain in his legs and hip, and then warmth. It seemed that he had been cold for a very long time with an angry buzzing in his head and a hard jostling, at times almost impossible to bear.

  But slowly waking up now he realized that he was lying in a bed, still mostly dressed except for his boots and camos and trousers, and it was still night. He was in a very small room, no light coming through the window. And listening hard he thought that he was hearing someone talking. But no one replied. So far as he could tell it was a one-sided conversation.

  It came to him suddenly that someone in the other room was talking on a radio or cell phone. In Spanish. Rodriguez.

  He pushed the covers aside and sat up slowly, the grating pain making him wince. But he’d felt worse. Especially the time his daddy had come home in a drunken haze and beat him practically to a pulp, cutting up his face, breaking his nose, and cracking three or four ribs. It had hurt like hell just to take a shallow breath, and of course he’d not been taken to see any doctor lest his old man be hauled off by the cops. It was a tough old world. Always had been.

  Getting to his feet, his head spun off in all directions and he fell down, slamming his shoulder into the floor.

  The door opened and Egan managed to raise his head as Rodriguez, dressed now in jeans and a western shirt, came in. There was no light behind him.

  “Take it easy, comp, or you’re going to start bleeding again,” he said, and helped Egan up off the floor and sat him down on the edge of the bed.

  “Where are we?”

  “The Badlands Ranch. But we’re getting out of here within the hour.”