The Chimera Vector

Chapter 7-2

Denton sat alone in the private jet as it skimmed the North Atlantic skyline. From above, the water’s surface looked restless and murky, reflective of his mood. The air phone rang. A sharp, high-pitched noise that irritated him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We’ve tracked every military Land Cruiser within a radius of fifty klicks,’ Grace said.

Denton had assigned Grace as leader of the team tasked with tracking and capturing the defective operatives: Sophia, Damien and Jay.

‘We have two suspect vehicles,’ she went on. ‘One is confirmed to contain military personnel, but the other has been abandoned at a large lake east of the border. It stopped moving one hour and twenty minutes ago. Echo Four India has disabled booby traps inside the Cruiser and recovered the RFIDs. The defective operatives cut them out.’

‘That shouldn’t be possible.’ Denton pinched his nose and exhaled hard. His ears popped. ‘Wait one.’

He opened his laptop and navigated to the US National Reconnaissance Office portal. He logged in with his Department of Defense ID, then said to Grace, ‘Coordinates.’

He keyed in the GPS coordinates as she read them out. He was using recent coverage recorded by the KH-14–2 spy satellite. Once the imagery loaded, he overlaid the road maps and fed in Grace’s team’s locations. With that done, he gave the terrain his full attention. He could see a lake near the eastern border that was shaped like an arrowhead and flanked by nearby mountains. He identified the abandoned Land Cruiser just north of a small town on the lake’s east side, and zoomed in on the ultra-high resolution image to inspect the river. Panning east, he followed the river as it snaked away from the lake toward a mountainous region.

He checked the operations queue for all satellites in the area over the next six hours. Only one was in range—the same KH-14–2 that had recorded the recent coverage—but it was currently in use for a high-priority operation.

‘We won’t have the luxury of live satellite coverage,’ Denton told Grace, ‘so you’ll have to find them the hard way.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘Do you have any leads?’

‘We suspect the defective operatives crossed the river either by boat, ferry or possibly by swimming. It would be logical for them to steal a vehicle and continue on a northeast bearing.’

‘Into the mountains,’ Denton said.

‘Difficult for us to ambush by vehicle. It’s a clever way for them to slow us down. We’ve placed a blocking party just before the north border and we have four helicopters searching vehicle routes. There aren’t many, so it won’t take long to find them.’

Denton zoomed in to inspect the Land Cruiser’s location. ‘I think you’re wrong.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘Colonel?’

‘They’re not heading for the north border,’ he said. ‘They’re still moving west. They’re heading deeper inside Iran, you halfwit. Move your—’

He stopped, realizing the implications of what he’d just said. The defective operatives were heading for the holy city of Qom, right near a subterranean former military base the spy satellite was queued up for. The same former military base that a US Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber was soon to take out with a GBU-28 bunker-buster bomb—the Fifth Column’s planned retaliation for the suicide bombing.

Sophia and her team were walking right into the middle of a 2.5 ton bomb.