DEATH AND SAND now available

DEATH AND SAND is now available in the Kindle Store, and will be free to download this week. You don't need to have read the previous books to enjoy this one, so this is a perfect place to start if you're a new reader. The link is HERE.

DEATH AND SAND Prologue

 PROLOGUE

BEYLAGAN

 

Avery awoke to a wisp of black hair dangling over his face and soft, warm flesh against his body. He was a light sleeper, his senses always switched on and attuned to external stimuli in his environment, and having someone sleeping beside him was a rare enough occurrence that he stirred immediately.

“Sorry. I tried not to wake you,” Jay whispered as she leaned over him to reach for the phone vibrating on the chair pulled up against the cot to serve as a nightstand. Jay was short for Jaleh. She all but loathed that name, which meant “hail stone” in her native Farsi, and she internally grimaced and died a little on the inside any time she heard someone utter it. “Your phone’s silent, so I guess Garrison doesn’t need you for this one.”

“Thank God for that,” Avery grumbled. “What is it?”

Jay checked the incoming message. Then she sighed and laid down on top of Avery. “Change of plans. I’m needed downstairs.”

“Now?” Avery frowned. Their established timetable for CONCOURSE had nothing scheduled for another forty-eight hours. “What time is it?”

“03:00.”

“Shit.

“Indeed,” Jay agreed. She yawned, rested her chin on Avery’s chest, and looked up at him, her faces inches away. “Well, it’s not like we couldn’t have easily gotten an extra two hours of rack tonight if we had been so inclined.”  

“We all make mistakes.”

Jay rolled her eyes and said, “God, you’re asshole. What am I even doing in here?” Then she scooted forward to kiss him one last time before getting up.

Laying on the cot, Avery watched her dress. She pulled on cargo pants, a sports bra, and a drab tank top before slipping on a pair of Merrell hiking boots with the laces left undone. She had the toned, muscled physique of a kickboxer. Avery had sparred with her before. He was nearly twice her size, but she was quick and hard to hit.

Jay paused halfway to the door and looked over her shoulder. “Are you coming or what?”

“I’m not moving an inch until they call for me directly.” He glanced at his own phone sitting on the chair. “Until then, I know nothing.”

CONCOURSE was Jay’s op, anyway. Avery was just a knuckle dragger, and his input in anything outside of security matters was minimal. If they didn’t need him, he would happily fall back asleep within the next five minutes. He closed his eyes.

Five seconds later, his phone chirped and vibrated with an incoming text. He groaned and sat up.

Jay flashed him an impish smile through the darkness. “Guess I’ll see you down there in a few, after all.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

 “Don’t take too long, love. Best we not keep Garrison waiting. You know how testy he gets with the hired help.”

That was putting it mildly.

Avery was accustomed to answering to Agency elitist micromanagers who viewed “scorpions,” the in-house name for Global Response Staff security contractors, as something on a level somewhere between furniture and dog shit.

Garrison—almost certainly not his real name—took it to new levels, and Avery had nearly come to blows with the GS-13 from the Directorate of Operations’ Iran Operations Division more than once during the past three weeks they had spent together at this rundown safe house in the sleepy little town of 16,000 people in southern Azerbaijan, just a handful of klicks from the Iranian border.

Avery watched Jay leave. She moved fluidly and silently across the room like a cat, without disturbing any of the decrepit floorboards. She gently cracked the door, slipped out into the dark hallway, and left Avery alone.

Disappointment gnawed at him.

He told himself fuck it, and shifted his thoughts elsewhere.

They had spent the best part of the past three weeks held up in this dingy safe house doing next to nothing productive. It didn’t matter to Avery. Most jobs like this one ultimately went nowhere, but Langley, or rather some front company buried behind layers of bank accounts and shell companies, paid him all the same, and he certainly looked forward to the evenings with Jay.

Whenever they stepped out of one or the other’s tiny, cold, dank bedroom, their relationship, such as it was, went back to being all business, and Jay turned hardened, professional operator, switching off whatever affection and femininity she exhibited during the more intimate moments they shared.  

Like Avery, Jay had no problems compartmentalizing her life. She also possessed a confident, self-assured personality that was not dependent on external validation, and she and didn’t play games. That’s what he liked about her, and that’s why this worked—whatever it was they had going on exactly. Jay was always upfront and direct in the manner that only a former soldier could be, and he always knew where things stood with her.

For his part, Avery found it refreshing to share his bed with a woman who did not ask about the scars that marked his body, nor the unseen ones he carried inside, someone who understood why flashbacks and night terrors sometimes snapped him awake in the middle of the night.

Once CONCOURSE concluded, they would go their separate ways until the next job brought them together, or maybe they’d find time to link up stateside when they were both on a training rotation at Harvey Point or some DOD site in the middle of Nevada.

He knew there was no future potential for anything with her. Attractive, intelligent, confident, and nearly ten years younger, she could do a hell of a lot better than him, and he was not delusional or desperate enough to think that he was the only guy with whom she shared this type of arrangement. That was okay. He had always been on his own and was comfortable with it. He just focused on the present, enjoyed whatever time he spent with Jay for what it was, and kept himself from going down any self-indulgent, sentimental mental rabbit holes of wishful thinking and longing for something that wasn’t meant for him.

Fuck it.

Avery pushed the bullshit out of his head, threw on his Timberlands, 5.11 pants, and a faded black T-shirt. He grabbed the Russian MP-443 Grach off the floor and slipped the pistol into the holster on his hip because in the field, even at the safe house, he never went anywhere unarmed. Azerbaijan wasn’t Iraq or Syria, but it wasn’t exactly Britain or Germany either.

___

 

Jay looked up at him as he entered the team room. She held the eye contact for a couple of seconds before reverting her attention back to Garrison as he continued whatever he was in the middle of talking about, pointing to something on the laptop screen with a corpulent, sausage-like finger. She knew better than to oversell things by totally ignoring or disregarding Avery. A skilled and seasoned HumInt operator, she knew how to act naturally in front of others while giving away nothing. For Avery’s part, most people found him stoic and damn near unreadable anyway, and tended to avoid him, which suited him just fine.

“Okay,” Garrison said through his slight southern drawl, glaring at Avery over the top of his laptop, “now that we’re all here, maybe we can get started.”

There were four others seated at the metal folding chairs positioned around the big wooden table in the dimly lit room. Heavy blackout curtains covered the windows. They ran jammers to block potential electronic surveillance.

“Paul” came assigned from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center, tasked with making sure a foreign intelligence agency had not penetrated the operation.

“Gina” and “Tom” were specialized skills officers. The former managed covert communications into and out of Iran with the asset, and the latter was an Iranian subject matter expert who spoke Farsi.

Then there was Evan. The young, heavily tattooed, steroid-enhanced, and surprisingly soft-spoken former SEAL from Kentucky, with his neatly trimmed operator beard, answered to Avery, who cared little for having to show the novice contractor the ropes, but at least the kid knew his place and showed an attentive willingness to learn.

Avery mostly had Evan monitoring comms and the surveillance cameras they had surreptitiously positioned around the safe house and throughout the surrounding neighborhood. The previous night, they had gone out to recon the border crossing, hiding in the hills and using optics to scope out the route from Iran as far as they could see into that country. Every day, they took a drive around the town running a SigInt package, looking for signals that might indicate the covert presence of another actor.

There was one more man in the room, always present but even more of an outsider than Avery. He remained standing the whole time, leaning against a wall across the room, often more of an observer than active participant in these sessions.

Ehud represented the Israeli side of this joint operation.

Avery sensed that the unsmiling, sinewy Israeli, with his shaved head, steely gray beard, and leathery, pock-marked skin, was the one really in charge here, or at least, Garrison seemed often to defer to the Israeli. Avery also sensed from the Israeli’s demeanor and calloused hands that Ehud was no desk-bound manager from King Saul Boulevard. He had no doubt that Ehud was a seasoned, veteran field operative, likely former military, who was accustomed to dirtying his hands on his country’s many overt and covert battlefields.

The Israelis had better intelligence networks and reach in the Republic of Azerbaijan than did the Americans. President Aliyev once described the relationship as something akin to an iceberg, with nine-tenths of it hiding beneath the surface. During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Israel had provided weapons and intelligence to the Azerbaijanis. Rumor had it that Baku had agreed to provide the Israeli Air Force access to Sitalchay Air Base, an abandoned former Soviet facility seventy kilometers outside Baku, for potential strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

While SD/FORGER, the cryptonym for the asset they planned to bring across the Iranian border, belonged to the Americans, the Israelis had greased the wheels with Baku, allowing them use of Azerbaijani soil for the extraction.

From Baku, they could also easily ferry Forger aboard a plane and then fly him out to a comfortable site somewhere in Europe, where he would undergo an exhaustive debriefing.

They were still keeping the Azerbaijanis in the dark about the nature of CONCOURSE, but all the security and surveillance equipment Avery and Evan had set up was meant to alert them to counterintelligence activity from the Iranians or Russians more so than Azerbaijan’s State Security Service. The safe house sat barely eight miles from the Iranian border, after all, and Iranian covert elements were active in-country and not afraid to get aggressive.

“What have we got?” Avery asked.

“The timetable has changed,” Garrison said. “Forger is on the move. He’s on his way out.”

On the table before Gina sat the covert communications device they used to send and receive encrypted messages with Forger via satellite burst transmissions.

It was a somewhat cumbersome, old-school method of communication, but necessary after a hostile foreign intelligence agency had penetrated the CIA’s Internet-based covert communications system, leading to the compromise of agent networks in Iran, Lebanon, and China, and the torture and deaths of dozens of highly placed sources.

Signal, a commercial messaging app that allowed end-to-end encryption, had become an efficient means for covert communications—even NSA couldn’t crack the app’s AES-256 encryption—but they had to assume that Forger’s phone was compromised, infected with spyware granting Iranian counterintelligence agencies access to the device. Although a user could set their Signal messages to auto-delete, the very presence of the app would be enough to arouse suspicion from Iran’s spy hunters.

Jay frowned. “What changed? I thought we had another two days.”

“So did I,” Garrison said, “but we received the emergency signal twenty minutes ago requesting immediate extract. Forger wants out now, so we’re bringing him out. That’s the promise we made him. He’s en route to the rendezvous point in Zanjan from Arak now. ETA is 15:00 this afternoon.”

“That doesn’t give us much time.”

“I’m well aware.”

Avery glanced to the maps and photos pinned to the wall to orient himself.

The Arak Nuclear Complex, where Forger did most of his work, was home to a heavy water reactor capable of producing weapons grade plutonium. Forger lived in an apartment complex nearby, but his family also owned a home Zanjan, a city one-hundred-eighty-six miles from Arak and two hundred miles from the border. Resting in the shade of the Qaflankuh Mountains, surrounded by grasslands and riverbanks, Zanjan was a quiet, calmer, more scenic place than heavily industrialized, densely populated Arak. Forger spent as much time as he could there, often taking his work, and aways an assigned minder, with him.  

“What about his family?” Jay asked. “They were part of the arrangement we had with him.”  

“That’s outside my concern,” Garrison said, “but we’ve alerted our station in Stockholm. The chief there can coordinate with the Ops Center at Langley. What happens in Stockholm isn’t my problem.”

“It will be your problem if you end up with a non-cooperative defector whose wife has been shipped back to Tehran, paraded before the cameras, and begging for him to come back home so the mullahs will spare her life, and it might become problem when I link up with him and he wants assurances that his family is safe.”

“Then give him assurance,” Garrison ordered.

“You want me to lie to him?”

“I don’t give a shit. Tell him whatever you need to tell him to keep him moving toward the order. When we’re through here, I will speak directly to the station chief in Stockholm and make certain everyone’s on the same page here. Don’t worry.”

While Forger currently served as a senior engineer in FEDAT, the Field for the Expansion of Deployment of Advanced Technology, the official name for Iran’s nuclear program, his wife worked for the foreign ministry, presently assigned to the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Stockholm.

Forger and his wife had children late in life, after frustratingly unsuccessful attempts to conceive and two miscarriages. When she finally came, albeit three weeks early, underweight, and sickly, their daughter became everything to them. Doctors diagnosed her with Type One diabetes at age twelve.

At first, Forger’s and his wife’s government positions made it easy to obtain the necessary analog insulin, at the cost of nearly half their combined monthly salary, despite the nationwide shortages resulting from renewed Western sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program. Although sanctions were supposed to still allow for Iran’s importation of humanitarian goods, the reality was a wholly different story, and much of that imported insulin disappeared and ended up exported illegally for the profit of smugglers and corrupt officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controlled over a third of Iran’s economy.

Over time the shortages worsened, driving the price of insulin, if one could even find the means to source it, beyond what two civil servants could afford. Then COVID hit, with the government’s ineffective response highlighting Iran’s systemic economic disparities and the mullahs’ mismanagement of resources. The pandemic eventually resulted in the deaths of over six million of the most vulnerable Iranians, Farah, Forger’s daughter, among them.   

 Her death finalized Forger’s decision to commit treason against his country.  

“Is Forger compromised?”

Jay directed the question toward Paul, their counterintelligence guy, who shrugged sheepishly and looked away, instilling little confidence.

“We don’t have any further details at the moment,” Garrison said. “If or when Forger tells us more, you’ll obviously be the first to know. Still, it might be prudent to expect the worst and plan accordingly.”

“We are monitoring Iranian communication channels,” Ehud said. His scratchy smoker’s voice sounded like someone had rubbed his vocal cords raw with sandpaper before soaking them in vinegar. Azerbaijan hosted several Israeli electronic listening stations targeting Iran, and Ehud stayed in close contact with them. “Nothing so far to indicate cause for alarm, but of course, it is early, and we are still assessing the situation.”

“Will Forger be alone?”

“I think we should anticipate that he will either have an escort or have security forces in pursuit. I mean, it’s highly unlikely that Forger somehow ditched his own minder,” Garrison said. “He doesn’t have the tradecraft for that type of thing.”

At least one goon from Oghab-2, Iran’s nuclear counterintelligence and security agency, always accompanied Forger, which meant his opportunities to compose and transmit a message via the covert communications device landed few and far between. 

“Rules of engagement?” Jay asked Garrison. She hid it well, but Avery sensed the subtle changes in her tone and demeanor and knew she was becoming stressed.

“Once across the border, you’re weapons free. Consider anyone who in any way threatens mission completion as actionable.” Garrison paused for a moment. “You’re the one in the field, so I’ll trust your best judgement.”

Avery shifted in his seat as he listened to the exchange. He felt his patience degrade. He knew Garrison was setting Jay up to take the blame for anything that went wrong inside Iran. Avery had also sat in on enough Agency ops to know that everything about this was highly improper.

“We need to either wait until we receive additional information from Forger, or someone should accompany Jay across the border,” he said.

Garrison looked at Avery as if the former Airborne Ranger had just taken a shit in the middle of the floor. He looked from Avery to Evan. “And who the hell do you think is going to accompany her? I’ve got two white military aged males. One’s a tattooed hillbilly, and the other looks like an old rugby player ready for a brawl, and neither has any Farsi or cover for status. You’ll both stand out like a turd in a swimming pool.”

“Agreed one hundred percent,” Jay said before Avery could respond. “I’ll be better off on my own in-country.”  

“I can go in separately, shadow her from a distance,” Avery persisted. “I’ve done this type of thing before.”

“I’ve done this type of thing before, too,” Jay countered. She shot him an exasperated look. Garrison watched with obvious amusement. “The Basij would pick you up within twenty-four hours of stepping foot in Iran. Why the hell are we even having this discussion?”

“Because I’m here to manage op security, and you’re about to enter an extremely non-permissive environment while we possess a less than adequate grasp of the facts on the ground, thanks to the typical Agency shit sandwich Garrison has just tossed on our plate.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Garrison snapped. “You’d better watch yourself if you don’t want to end up blacklisted after this job.”

Watching silently, Ehud rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and muttered something under his breath in Hebrew.

Avery ignored them and looked to Jay. “I haven’t lost a principal yet. I’ll be damned if you’re the first. There might be a damn manhunt underway for Forger as we speak.” 

“Understood, but I will provide my own security in-country, as originally planned. Nothing has changed as far as I’m concerned, not until we know more facts,” she said. “I can handle myself in the city and on the highways. All I need is overwatch at the border crossing, and someone monitoring Iranian signals and comms.”  

“I’m mission controller. I have execute authority,” Garrison said before Avery could protest further. “Despite this development, my field operator is willing and confident to proceed, and I will trust her judgement and abilities. My counter intel and comms specialists see no indicators we’re compromised anywhere on our end, and the moment that changes, we will pause to re-evaluate our next move.”

“As it should be,” Jay said.

“Very well,” Avery relented, knowing it was a lost battle.

Ehud cleared his throat. “There is one other development we must bring to your attention,” he told Jay. Then he glanced over to Garrison, who nodded his approval to continue.

Great, Avery thought. This should be good.

“We understand that Forger will have with him a secure, tamperproof, transit case. Regardless of what happens to the asset, it is imperative that this case leaves Iran with you.”

Jay arched an eyebrow. “A last-minute addition to the mission objective? I don’t suppose I have a need to know what is inside this case?”

“No. You certainly do not,” Ehud replied as he lit a cigarette. “Just know that the contents of the case are nearly as valuable as the asset himself. Perhaps more so, depending on one’s perspective.”

Jay nodded but stayed silent. Far as she was concerned, she did not answer to the Israeli. Avery was on the same page with her there.

“Understood?” Garrison asked. 

“Understood.” Jay’s gaze shifted to the clock on the wall. “We should get to it. This doesn’t leave me with much time to reach Zanjan.”

___

 

“What the actual fuck was that?” Jay asked Avery when they were back in the bedroom. Now wearing jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt, and Adidas running shoes, she sat on the edge of the cot with a compact mirror positioned on the chair as she tied her hijab around her head, covering her shortly-cut hair and leaving only her face exposed. Then she made sure she had everything supporting her cover.

“Something’s not right,” Avery said.

“No shit.”

“Whatever the hell that was with Ehud back there only proves it. Why didn’t that come from Garrison? Something else is going on here.”

“Really? The spooks are keeping us in the dark and feeding us shit while scheming and playing spooky games? I’m totally shocked. Seriously, do you think I’m new here or something?”

“You know, it’s okay to tell them to fuck off when something doesn’t right feel right.”

“Right,” Jay scoffed. “Fucking brilliant. That will keep the contracts lining up.”

“You’re the only Farsi-speaking woman in Ground Branch. No one is going to have the balls to put a black mark in your 201 File. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I wasn’t worried, and I don’t need you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t worry about. I also don’t need the career advice. You know, somehow, I have managed to pull off dozens of successful ops over the past few years without having you watch my back, right?”

Avery started to respond, but then he caught himself. He had a feeling that anything he said at this point was only going to fuel the fire. He also sensed this conversation was not strictly a matter of professional disagreement.

“And when the hell did you become so risk averse, anyway?” Jay asked.

“I’m not risk averse, but I’m sure as hell not willing to put my life on the line an asshole like Garrison who has mysterious Israelis whispering in his ear and who can’t wait to show off his shiny new prized defector to the pols in Washington and our partner services overseas while he receives all the accolades, medals, and pats on the back from the Seventh Floor.”

“I don’t give one shit about Garrison. Just because you have a chip on your shoulder about him doesn’t mean I do. This isn’t about him.”

“What is it then?”

“Are you really that callous? What about the asset, Avery?”

“What about the damn asset? I first started doing this shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, where half the assets were plotting to stab their handlers in the back. I had to action more than a couple of oh-so-precious assets. Assets are disposable commodities in this business.”

“This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. Forger is different.”

“Why? It’s not like you developed him, cultivated him, recruited him, and forced him into this. You have no obligation to him.”

“I’ve met Forger in person multiple times. I met his family.”

“You owe them nothing. At the end of the day, like most assets, he’s a traitor.” 

Jay sighed and shook her head, growing more exasperated by the minute. “It would be impossible for you to understand, so I won’t bother explaining. Forget it.” 

“Try me.”

“You’re not Iranian. You don’t have family trapped in Iran. You have no idea what this man is risking by helping us and what he’s escaping from.”

Avery nodded. Now he thought he understood, at least somewhat.

“When my parents fled Iran, they had to leave behind many loved ones,” Jay said. “Many were imprisoned, others killed. I have uncles and grandparents I will never meet. I know it’s just a job for you, and you’re not attached to the outcome, but this man has risked everything to help America, and someone speaking on behalf of America made him a promise to bring him and his family out.”

“I get it.”

“Of course, handlers lie to their agents all the time, and make promises they know damn well will never go fulfilled, but like you said, I’m not his handler. I made a promise to him, and I will keep it.” Jay collected her thoughts and shook her head. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter, anyway. My personal reasons for going in are really none of your business.”

“Look, Jay, I really was just doing my job. I would have reacted the exact same way and said the same shit no matter who the operator was going in.” Avery paused. “Frankly, I was surprised you didn’t raise the same objections with Garrison.”

Jay sighed. With the hijab, she was hardly recognizable. She started packing her bag.

 “Regardless,” she said, “whatever’s going on between Garrison and Ehud, it changes nothing. I’ve operated inside Iran before, for far longer period of times, performing far more dangerous jobs. I’ve got this, Avery, and you were way out of line back there.”

“If you say so.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s drop it. Continuing this conversation is just going to make me want to punch you in the face, and then you’ll have to explain to Garrison why you suddenly have a broken nose and split lip.”

Fuck it. Avery drew a breath and let it go. He had plenty more he could say, but he didn’t, because now they both needed to stay focused and on task. Plus, he felt reasonably confident that Jay was the one overreacting back there, but vocalizing that particular observation certainly would not help his cause any.

The door creaked open, and Evan stuck his head in. He may not have heard a word uttered between Avery and Jay, but his expression indicated he instantly felt the tension simmering in the room, or maybe he picked up the lingering, musty scent of sex.

 Avery was glad for the interruption.

“Uh, Miss Jay?”

“Yes, Evan?”

 “I just wanted you to know that I looked over the Land Cruiser one last time, and it’s ready to go. You’ve got one spare tire and enough fuel bladders to get you to Zanjan and back. Two days’ worth of rations. Shocks and suspension should be good if you gotta go off-road. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll show you how the hidden compartments work. It will be a tight fit, and he won’t like it any, but you’ll be able to squeeze Forger.”  

“Perfect. Thank you, Evan. I will be right out.”

Evan turned away and disappeared down the hallway. Jay grabbed her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and started after him.

“I’ll see you on way your back out,” Avery said to Jay’s back as she walked past him.

___

 

Shortly after Jay left the safe house at 07:30 in the specially configured Land Cruiser, Avery grabbed another four hours of sleep. He assumed that Jay had done the same, but he had slept alone this time. He knew he needed all the rest he could muster because he would likely deploy by the end of the night.

Then he spent the most of the remainder of the day in the ops room with the others as they drank coffee, monitored comms, watched the progress of the Land Cruiser’s GPS beacon on a computer screen, and waited for the next check-in with Jay as she drove cross-country on her route to the rendezvous.

Gina, the comms officer, occasionally broke the small talk among the others and intruded upon Avery’s brooding with the updates coming in through her headset.

Nearing 10:00, she reported, “Ground Jay has picked up route two south of Tabriz and is en route to Zanjan. ETA is three hours and thirty minutes given current traffic patterns. No further communication from Forger.”

Jaleh’s call sign referred to a type of bird native to Iran’s east, as well as an insider reference to her position in Ground Branch.

She found it much more dignified than “Enchantress,” the call sign that her former, almost exclusively male teammates had bestowed upon her during her time in the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, after she had used her looks and social persuasion to get close enough to a Russian diplomat—Lavrov’s number three, no less, whose predilections favored young, lithe, brown women —in Vienna in order to clone the hard drive of his computer and plant spyware on his Era encrypted phone. She’d spiked the Ivan’s Stoli in his suite at the Hotel Imperial, so, thankfully, she hadn’t had to go all the way with his bloated, sexagenarian ass. By extension, the op had given the Intel Community direct access to Lavrov’s personal comms ahead of the Ukraine invasion.

Things would speed along now that Jay had negotiated the backwoods from the border and across Iran’s rugged, northwestern rural corner to the highway. Now, passing along major urban centers like Tabriz, her chances of encountering security forces increased greatly. Avery hoped the Israelis’ SigInt and ComInt specialists at their listening stations were doing their thing, listening for indicators of new vehicle checkpoints or search activity.

Avery glanced at the clock on the wall and did the math.

Jay was due to arrive at the rendezvous point at approximately 11:00. Then she’d conduct an extensive surveillance detection route and put eyes on the meet site before making the link-up with Forger at 15:00. She was sleep deprived as it was, thanks in no small part to Avery, and by the time she met Forger, she would already have eight hours of driving under her belt. Then she would make a run immediately back to the border. The original plan called for an overnight stay in Iran before escaping, but Forger had sent the emergency extract code, which meant Jay needed to haul ass.

Avery imagined she would have already downed a Dexedrine pill or two by now. He knew that once Jay was prematurely awakened, she had a difficult time going back to sleep. The three or four cups of coffee she had poured down her throat before leaving the safe house simply wouldn’t cut it.

He concealed the growing apprehension he felt as he watched the tiny blue dot on the digital map slowly inch deeper and deeper into Islamic Republic of Iran along route two.

The previous nine hours since the last meeting in the ops room had left him with little appetite, but shortly before noon, he stepped into the kitchen and filled a plate of marinated lamb kabobs, stuffed grape leaves, and gutabs, rolled dough filled with spinach and cheese. He washed the food down with two cups of black tea with cinnamon and orange slices. A sayanim, one of the Jewish, non-Israeli “helpers” who aided Mossad operations in foreign countries, brought fresh, local food to the safe house each day.

Garrison appeared equally anxious, but for altogether different reasons.

Ehud was damn near inscrutable, the only indicator as to his state of mind being the cigarettes he rapidly burned through, leaving Avery to wonder just how many packs of Greek Karelias this guy had brought to Beylagan. A perpetual gray haze wafted in the enclosed space. When he wasn’t smoking and sipping coffee, the Israeli made constant calls on his Thuraya sat phone, jabbering off in rapid fire Hebrew, or tapped away incessantly at the touchscreen, no doubt staying in contact with someone at King Saul Boulevard or one of the listening stations.

Occasionally, Ehud pulled Garrison aside, and they conferred silently with each other out of earshot.

Avery trusted neither one of them.  

At 11:10, Gina announced, “Ground Jay is in Zanjan and running countersurveillance measures.”

The next few hours were the slowest. Then, at 13:30 Jay next reported that she was “black,” or free of surveillance, and she confirmed both Forger’s family home and the meet site appeared clear, too.

Part of Avery hoped that Jay would have cause to abort the meet and extract right then and there. The feeling surprised him, and then he realized, as hard as he tried to avoid it, he had become emotionally invested in her. Fuck. He hated when that happened. He looked forward to putting this op behind him. 

Once they received word that she had the package and was inbound, Avery would grab his gear and head out to the border crossing. Until then, there was little for him to do, so he rested and studied the satellite overheads of his operating space on the border, designated Homeplate, familiarizing himself with the layout and details of the hills, gullies, and the rutted, unpaved, tract of road.

Really, he knew he was just trying to keep his mind from addressing the obvious, that despite his assurances to the contrary, his concern was far more than professional.

Although equipped with expertly forged Iranian identity booklet and driver’s license, and an Iranian license plate on the Land Cruiser, Jay’s cover remained threadbare and poorly backstopped, and she was practically relying solely on her ability to blend in, pass herself off as local without drawing scrutiny from the likes of the police, or worse, the Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ internal security branch, and bullshitting her way past any unavoidable encounters with the aforementioned goons.

Fortunately, Iranian society was a tad more liberal than, say, Saudi Arabia, permitting women to drive and go out in public without a male escort.

Avery watched the clock with growing trepidation and unease that reminded him why he hated becoming attached to others and avoided it at all costs.

They were fifteen minutes past the rendezvous time and the anticipated check-in. She hadn’t missed any of her prior check-ins by more than a minute.

Finally, at 15:35, Gina reported the update they had all been waiting on. “Ground Jay has reported contact with Forger.”

Avery found himself exhaling a sigh of relief and felt the tension building in his chest temporarily release. 

Garrison said, “I knew she could do it. This is happening.”

“What about Forger’s minder?” Avery asked, sensing what had caused the delay.

Gina held up a finger to silence everyone as she listened to Jay’s incoming transmission. Her eyes widened. “Ground Jay has actioned the minder…”

Avery immediately felt the tension grip his chest again as his blood pressure rose.

“…Clean, quick, and quiet. No witnesses. No one is likely to find the body for some time, and Forger reports they have nearly fourteen hours before the minder misses his morning check-in time with his headquarters…Ground Jay is inbound with the package.”

“What about the case?” Ehud asked, taking a deep drag that finished off the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“Ground Jay has confirmed possession of the case,” Gina reported a moment later.

Ehud nodded and lit another cigarette.

Garrison looked over to Avery. “You’re up.”

“On it,” Avery replied and walked out of the room.

___

 

19:30. The air felt cool and breezy. Avery lay on the rugged ground with his legs spread out behind him in a relaxed V. The anti-thermal blanket draped over him would mask his signature from any drones potentially pointing their sensors onto Azerbaijani soil from Iranian airspace. Nearby sat his beaten and weathered rucksack, which contained a med kit, just in case.

Watching and waiting, alone, he felt comfortable and in his element. Certainly, his current circumstances were far preferable to spending another day inside the safe house. The monotony and tedium of a recce never challenged his patience, induced anxiety, or grated on his nerves. He never had a problem with clearing the clutter from his mind, focusing solely on his surroundings, and letting the minutes slowly trickle into hours.

He had established his hide within a slight depression atop a low, flat rise that overlooked the narrow, dirt-paved tract less than two hundred meters away. It was a good spot, well concealed, with perfect sight lines. GPS placed him just a couple of meters north of the border.

The Dragunov SVD sat on its bipod in front of him, with the wooden stock braced comfortably against his shoulder.

Pointing the sniper rifle south down the dusty road toward the vanishing point several hundred meters into Iranian territory, he kept his eye to the glass of the scope. The twenty-five-year-old weapon was locally-procured and Russian-made and had likely fired shots during the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Avery didn’t expect that he’d need the SVD, and he preferred it that way, but in the event that he needed to fire 7.62mmx54mmR rounds into the Islamic Republic, it would look like the work of drug smugglers.

Iran served as a major conduit for drug trafficking, with nearly three percent of the Iranian population addicted. Heroin and opium came from Afghanistan on its way to Europe. Designer drugs came from Turkish labs. Iranian border troops and counter-narcotics cops seized more opiates and heroin than did any other nation worldwide. Clashes with smugglers occurred regularly, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Iranian soldiers and cops each year.

Iran concentrated much of its border security personnel, helicopters, drones, and sensors along the six hundred mile stretch of border shared with Afghanistan and Pakistan. The smaller, northern border with Azerbaijan remained relatively porous and neglected.

The road Avery now watched was one such smuggling corridor. The Israelis had penetrated the smuggling network and used it to move personnel and equipment into and out of Iran, like the Mujahideen e-Khalq fighters whom Mossad had recruited to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists with car bombs, or the hit team that had taken out al-Qaeda’s Abu Muhammed al-Nasri in the middle of Tehran with a remote-controlled machine gun.

On either side of the rutted, eroded path were small and low hills and fields of dirt with sparse, intermittent patches of grass and bushes intermixed with rocks. Gray clouds hung low overhead.

So far, Avery had observed not a single human being in the three hours since he had set up. The only living thing he’d placed eyes on was a stray goat thirty meters away, grazing the grass, oblivious to Avery’s presence, before scampering off to rejoin the herd. Nothing to suggest the route was compromised or under surveillance, but placing a singleton operator within Iranian borders was always a high-risk gamble, and they needed to be sure.

Night descended over the quiet landscape.

Avery unpacked and activated his Nightforce T2-82 Xtreme hi-def spotting scope. The Russians did not do quality night optics, and he did not want to rely solely on the Soviet-era 1PN51 scope mounted to the SVD.  

Wired into the tac net, Avery received updates from the safe house, call sign “Toronto,” through his earpiece as Jay sporadically checked in at her waypoints to mark her progress. She’d just reached Tabriz, where she ran another surveillance detection route, which came up clear, and Gina reported no activity on Iranian communications channels to raise the alarm.

Avery reported that he had no activity on the exfil route.

All was quiet on everyone’s end. For now.

___

 

21:07. The incoming vehicles drove without navigation lights, which meant the drivers used night optics as they negotiated the rutted road.

Avery saw the heat from the engines on his thermals. His first inclination was the pair of vehicles belonged to smugglers. Although Ehud had ensured that the network wasn’t transiting this route this week, Avery supposed it was possible someone else utilized the same route, unknown to the Israelis. He didn’t believe in coincidences, so he already expected the worst.

Without taking his eyes from his scope as he followed the vehicles, he keyed his radio. “Toronto, Vagabond.”

Gina’s voice came through his earpiece a moment later, sounding slightly tinny. He knew Garrison and the others at the safe house were listening in. “Go ahead, Vagabond. What have you got?”

“I’ve got eyes on two vehicles traveling north toward the border along our exfil corridor. Do we know anything about them?”

Silence as Gina consulted with Garrison. When she came back on the net, she said, “Negative, Vagabond. Whoever they, they’re not supposed to be there, according to our intel. Hold eyes on them and report everything you observe.”

“Copy. Stand by…Ah fuck…”

“What happened? What do you see, Vagabond?”  

Avery did not immediately respond.

His stomached tightened as he watched the vehicles, which he identified through his scope as open-topped Fath Safir 4x4 jeeps, stop barely fifty meters from the border, leaving no doubt as to their purpose for being here.

The jeeps turned around and canted themselves so that they blocked most of the road from either side, pointed south. Avery counted four troops piling out. The drivers stayed behind their wheels. One man stood in each jeep, pointing a machine gun over the top of the windshield on the passenger side. The dismounts spread apart and took up positions to cover the road, rifles slung at their sides.

One of the men spoke into a handheld radio as he looked around, surveying the scene.  His gaze passed right over Avery’s position without seeing him.

“Vagabond, are you there?”

“Roger. I’m here.”

“What do you see?”

“The vics stopped and established a blocking position right in the middle of our exfil corridor.” Avery paused, assessing. Despite the cool air, sweat trickled from his pores. His voice barely elevated above a whisper. On a quiet night like this, in open space, sound traveled far. Even from here he could occasionally hear the troops below as their feet kicked pebbles or someone spoke a little too loudly.

“We’re compromised,” he said.

“Copy. Do you have identification? Are they IRGC?” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Negative on identification, but I don’t believe we’re looking at IRGC. The equipment and uniforms don’t look right.”

A minute passed before one of the troops took a few steps, giving Avery clear line of sight to the emblem emblazoned over the door on the nearest jeep. He also saw the Belgian Malinois sitting in a cage in the back of the jeep.

 “Toronto, you there?”

“Go ahead, Vagabond.”

“I have positive ident. They’re NAJA. Border Guard Command.”

“Roger, Vagabond, stand by.”

“You guys going to alert Ground Jay? We should call her off.”

“Stand by, please, while we assess.”

“Assess what? You need to alert Ground Jay. Where is she, anyway? Patch her through to me directly.”

“Negative, Vagabond.” Garrison’s voice came over the net. “Ground Jay is still nearly an hour out. We have plenty of time to watch how this situation develops. Our friend here is having his people look into this.” By “friend,” he meant Ehud. “Just relax. Hold eyes on and report the second anything changes. Understood?”

Avery frowned. He had suspected it earlier, but now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this op was fucked. He just didn’t understand why. His instincts and internal threat receptors went wild. There were a dozen things he wanted to tell Garrison, but none of them would help Jay any or change the situation on the ground, so instead he drew a breath and said, “Affirmative.”

All he could do was watch and wait.

Tactically assessing the scene, Avery thought he could drop maybe three of the NAJA troops, if it came to that, before the others reacted and put down lead on his position. Be nice to call in Evan, but he knew Garrison wasn’t about to leave the safe house unprotected.

Avery ran the scenarios through his head, the different ways a contact could play out. None of them ended well.

___

 

22:08. “Vagabond, Toronto.”  It was Gina on the net again, which was good because Avery had no desire to hear Garrison’s voice. Still, he thought heard the ops officer’s voice in the background as he conferred with Ehud. 

“Go for Vagabond,” Avery said. “What’s our status?”

“The Friends have run this new development past their ears who have been monitoring NAJA frequencies. The border guards are looking for two Pakistani males in a Toyota hatchback doing an opium run tonight through our exfil corridor.”

That was good news, sort of, but not really. It still meant that Jay had to get past these assholes somehow, or delay the exfil and spend the night in Iran with the clock ticking down the hours to when Oghab-2 would realize Forger was missing.   

 “Unacceptable,” Avery said. “The exfil route was supposed to be clear.” 

“The Friends don’t know anything about these Pakistanis. They’re outside the network.”

“So, we’re working with total shit intel while we have an operator in the field,” Avery said. “That’s it. Alert Ground Jay. Call her off until the exfil corridor is clear, or we can secure an alternative route.”  

“Negative, Vagabond. The package needs to come out tonight.”

Avery lost it. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘negative?’”

“Listen, asshole.” Garrison was back. “We don’t know how long these border guards will be out there, and we’ll have an even bigger problem on our hands when Forger’s minder fails to check in early tomorrow morning. Once that happens, we’ll be dealing with more than a handful of border guards. We’ll have the entire Ministry of Security and Basij on the hunt.”

Avery was silent, but he realized Garrison had a point. Even so, he thought, maybe that’s why it was ill-advised to run a singleton into a non-permissive environment with zero support infrastructure in the first place.

“So,” Garrison continued, “until further notice, Ground Jay is clear and we are still a go.”

“Did you advise Ground Jay?”  Avery asked.

“Roger. Ground Jay is confident to proceed and implement her cover. Just do your damn job and ensure that the package gets out intact by any means necessary.”

Avery noticed Garrison’s choice of words. “You mean Ground Jay, too, right?”

“The package is priority.”

“Right. Copy that.”

Avery signed off and shook his head. This thing just kept getting worse.

 What cover? Jay’s cover for action was threadbare.

In a contingency like this, she planned to tell the border guards that she had family who lived over the border in Beylagan, and she had just received a call from her brother telling her that their very ill father had just taken a turn for the worst and didn’t have much time and was holding on to see his youngest daughter a final time, hence her urgent, late-night drive.

Maybe the story would just be wild and crazy enough that the border guards would buy it.

She could show the guards her phone, which would display a call from an Iranian-number that belonged to a burner phone at the safe house. Jay’s own phone came with a Tabriz area code, a couple weeks’ worth of backlogged calls and texts, and photos of her nonexistent family. The Azeri government had provided a visa to supplant the story. The Israelis had provided expert forgeries of Iranian-issued travel and identification documents, but those would not stand up to anything beyond a visual inspection.

It was over if one of the guards sensed something was amiss and called it in to verify any of it.

Still, Avery knew that Jay had gotten herself out of tenser situations. He knew she’d once talked her way past a Pakistani Taliban checkpoint in Waziristan. It wasn’t like she was about to come up against the Basij. She could handle these border guard looking for drugs.

But so far, CONCOURSE was rapidly devolving into an unequivocal shitshow, and at this point, Avery had concluded that the op’s intel, support, and management were worth less than a wheelbarrow full of Iranian rials.   

Avery made up his mind.

If the worst happened, he was prepared to do whatever it took to see Jay across the border, and he’d even make sure the package got out too if he could. If he failed but somehow still managed to walk away alive, he was going to beat the shit out of Garrison.

___

 

23:25. When Avery received the alert that Jay was approaching Homeplate, he automatically tightened his hold around the Dragunov’s pistol grip, flipped off the safety selector, and pulled the wooden thumbhole stock firmly into his shoulder and against his cheek. He watched the border troops through the glass.

They were still set up on the road. Avery had hoped that maybe they’d catch their smugglers and take off, but no such luck.

Although he was more accustomed to Mil Dot scopes, he was comfortable enough with the PSO-1’s unique T-shaped floating reticle. He trained extensively on the Russian equipment from the armory of foreign-sourced weapons at Harvey Point. The PSO-1 was actually far simpler to use than Western scopes and required minimal calculations, which made sense, because the PSO-1 was designed for Russian soldiers, after all.

 Regardless, at this distance, he couldn’t possibly miss.

Additionally, the element of surprise should offer him a huge advantage if it came time to start dropping border guards. He’d rather not have to drop these guys who were just doing their job and meant no harm to anyone other than drug traffickers, but he would not hesitate to do so.

He watched and sized up each of the guards, ascertaining who was in charge, who was most alert, who posed the biggest threat if things went loud, who had their hand on the radio, and who appeared complacent, lazy, or drowsy. It wasn’t much in terms of providing Avery with a tactical edge, but it might be enough to buy him a few extra seconds if there was a contact. Plus, it helped make him feel like he had control over the situation.

The glow of headlights suddenly appeared where the road snaked around a wide hill.

Avery heard one of the Iranians call out in Farsi, drawing the attention of his compatriots. They saw the approaching vehicle, and they drew more alert. The headlights on both jeeps suddenly switched on, highlighting the road ahead.

As the road straightened, the Land Cruiser slowed as Jay reacted like a driver suddenly and unexpectedly facing down a roadblock manned by armed men. The machine-gunners in the jeeps pointed their weapons at the Land Cruiser. The dismounts spread out along the road, staying out of each other’s fields of fire and holding their rifles in low-ready, not threatening or aggressive, but alert and ready to react.

The man Avery had assessed as the officer in charge stepped forward on the road and held out a hand, gesturing as he shouted in Farsi.

Jay brought the Land Cruiser to a slow stop thirty feet from the border guards and shut her engine off as instructed.

 Avery held his scope over the Land Cruiser as the driver-side door swung slowly open. Then a pair of hands appeared, held high, as Jay slowly and carefully climbed out and stepped away from the vehicle with a suitably confused and startled look on her face.

A couple of the border guards did a double take and exchanged looks amongst each other, clearly not expecting a solitary, young, attractive woman.

Avery watched as a couple of the dismounts pointed their weapons away, angled toward the ground, and the officer’s body language seemed to also loosen and relax as he approached Jay and addressed her.

Two of the dismounts walked carefully up to the Land Cruiser and shined their weapons’ tactical lights inside, looking the vehicle’s interior over. Then one of the guards patted down Jay, looking apologetic and contrite.

 Finding no weapons or threats, they next waved over the dog handler.

No sign of Forger, Avery realized, passing his optic slowly along the Land Cruiser’s windows, which meant the asset remained stuffed inside the hidden smuggling compartment in the back of the vehicle. That must have been comfortable for the fifty-five-year-old nuclear engineer with the bad hip and knees. Avery just prayed Forger had the discipline to hold still and not make a sound for the next few minutes.  

Avery watched as Jay spoke to the officer in charge, who was now looking over her documents, shining a small flashlight onto them. He also made her hand over and unlock her phone. She complied like someone who knew she was innocent with nothing to hide and would be on her way sooner by cooperating

Avery could tell from her facial expressions and gestures that she was giving the officer her rehearsed spiel. She looked distraught and desperate as she told them about her dying father a few miles away. Avery even thought that it looked like she had mustered out a few tears.

He saw something else in her eyes, though, something the borders guards would miss. He saw how her gaze subtly and briefly shifted as she eyed the officer up and down, checking out his slung rifle and sidearm, and then her gaze swept along the nearby dismounts, formulating a tactical assessment and a plan of action, indicating to Avery that she was switched on and ready to act. Good.

The dog handler let the Belgian Malinois walk around the car and sniff out the interior. After their sweep, the handler spoke to the officer and shook his head.

The dismounts started looking bored again as they realized they were dealing with a nothing burger, letting their rifles hang at their sides on their slings. Two of them started casually chatting with each other.

Avery could tell they were buying Jay’s story, but the officer wasn’t quite ready to let her go. Obviously, she wasn’t trafficking drugs, but he understandably must have still found something suspicious about the lone woman driving for the border in the middle of the night.

The officer walked over to one of the jeeps with Jay’s documents and climbed in. He spread out the documents on the seat next to him, unpacked his cell phone, and placed a call.

“Vagabond, Toronto,” Gina’s voice suddenly came through Avery’s earpiece. “Tell us what you see.”

Avery did so, as he watched the officer jabber off into his phone, presumably with his HQ. The officer frowned and kept his gaze locked on Jay. Avery did not like where this was going. He moved his finger over the SVD’s trigger.

The officer dismounted and gave some orders to his men. One of the border guards unpacked a handheld sensor—thermal maybe, or a motion detector capable of picking up micro movements like a human heartbeat—and approached the Land Cruiser. Walking around to the open back, he bent over and leaned inside to sweep the vehicle.

From what he could see through his scope, Avery saw the man push the seats back and rummage around the vehicle’s interior.

Avery realized he was holding his breath, and he found that his finger had tightened around the Dragunov’s trigger, taking the slack out. He exhaled slowly through his nose and then inhaled deeply, willing his body to relax.

Meanwhile, the officer returned to Jay and jabbered off about something. He looked more stern and rigid now, clearly unaffected by Jay’s emotional display. Whatever he was telling her, Jay protested, her response animated and emotional, and Avery figured she was pleading with him now.

 Someone called out. Two more troops immediately rushed over to the Land Cruiser’s open hatchback. Avery saw them digging around inside. His view was obscured, but he knew what was going on, and he saw the expression suddenly change on Jay’s face. They’d found Forger.

A moment later, they hauled Forger away from the Land Cruiser and shoved him down against the ground. One of the Iranians held up a metal case. Whatever it contained, it looked heavy.

The other border guards snapped up their rifles. Another approached Jay, pulling the handcuffs off his utility belt while the officer yelled into his radio.

Well, Avery decided, there was no way Jay could talk her way out of this one.

He set his reticle over the back of the officer’s head, checking and adjusting his angle to ensure that if the round went through, it would not strike Jay. He inhaled deep and slow and held it to steady his body. He broke the trigger on the exhale. Even suppressed, the report of the SVD cracked loudly in the air, giving the other border guards a startled jump.

By then, the 7.62mm round had already tapped the officer’s skull, cracking it open like an eggshell and spilling blood through the air and onto the dirt.

While the Iranians were surprised, which inhibited their reaction time by precious seconds, Jay was not.

Before the officer’s body even hit the ground, she spun and launched herself at the man approaching with the handcuffs. She landed a low-kick, collapsing his legs. As he went down, she grabbed the rifle slung around his shoulder and busted him in the face with the stock.    

 By that time, Avery had already dropped a dismount running over to assist, taking him with two shots to the torso, and he was transitioning to the men on the machine guns in the jeep.

Additional gunshots thundered in the air as Jay neutralized another dismount before diving for cover behind the Land Cruiser. She just barely dodged the stream of machine gun fire that ripped into the earth and kicked up a cloud of dirt and dust. Additional bullets pounded against the Land Cruiser, punching holes through the vehicle.  

Avery put a bullet through the nearest machine gunner’s head and transitioned rapidly to the next one. He fired and missed when the target dropped into cover within the jeep, but Avery tracked him, sighted on a chunk of partially exposed shoulder through the open jeep, and depressed the trigger. Tissue, bone, and blood exploded into the air from the man’s torso. When he painfully fell out of cover, Avery adjusted his aim and put a round through his chest, hammering his plate carrier, and then a final one through his head, blowing the contents of his skull out over the jeep’s upholstery.

Avery’s ears registered more gunfire, and he realized he was taking incoming. Bullets struck the ground several meters away from him. He spotted two dismounts positioned between the jeeps, using the vehicles for cover, as they fired their rifles into the hills. Thanks to the SVD’s suppressor, they had no muzzle flash to narrow down Avery’s positions, and their rounds didn’t come close to him. Plus, he could tell from these guys’ erratic shooting that they were scared and panicking.

Avery fired once and missed, his round striking the jeep’s hood. He didn’t have a good angle on them, but he had distracted them long enough for Jay to break cover, leading with her purloined rifle pulled tightly into her shoulder. She crossed the open space between the Land Cruiser and the jeeps in a half arc, and when she got a good sight picture, she engaged, putting two bullets into the back of one of the shooters. The second whirred around with his rifle and caught a bullet through his face.

Jay kicked the rifle away from the man she had wounded and restrained him with his own handcuffs.

Avery provided overwatch as Jay cleared the jeeps and swept the kill zone, checking over each body. When she held up a hand to signal Avery, he grabbed his gear and scrambled down the hillside to the road. It took him less than three minutes to reach her. He slung SVD and drew the Grach pistol, which he took in both hands in the low-ready position.  

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking over the scene. Having found a med kit in one of the jeeps, Jay was now stuffing the surviving Iranian’s wounds with gauze.

“I’m fine, but this mission is fucked.” Jay shook her head, swore in Farsi, and stood up.

“No shit. I’ve been saying that all day.”

“I mean we’re mission failure. All of this was for nothing.” She spat onto the ground. “Fucking disaster.”

“What?”

“Forger.”

“Shit.”

Avery realized he had totally lost track of the asset during the contact, his focus solely on Jay. He internally admonished himself, knew he wouldn’t live this one down. Tunnel vision was an amateur mistake.

 He followed her the forty feet to the Land Cruiser. Forger remained sprawled out like a ragdoll on the ground where the border guards had thrown him, riddled with bullets from errant machine-gun fire and leaking a rapidly collecting pool of blood across the dirt. His glasses sat broken and crooked on his face while his eyes stared vacantly at nothing.

Avery started to speak but the voice in his receiver cut him off. It was Garrison. “Vagabond, Toronto. What the hell is going on? Repeat, what-”

“We had contact with the border guards. Forger’s dead. I have Ground Jay. We’re extracting.”

Avery heard Ehud yelling off a string of Hebrew in the background. Then Garrison said, “What about the case?”

“Yeah, we have it,” Avery replied, his gaze settling on the object in question, where it lay near a dead border guard and coated in dirt.

“Bring it out, and take Forger’s remains as well,” Garrison instructed. “Are there any survivors among the border guards?”

“Yeah, we have one. He’s wounded.”

“We can leave no witnesses behind if this is to look like the work of drug traffickers. Do you understand?”

“Understood.”

“Very good. We’ll see at back the safe house shortly.”

Avery signed off.

“What was that?”

“They want us to execute the Iranian.”

Disgust washed over Jay’s face. “Fuck that.”

“Agreed.” Avery had killed in cold blood before, but he wasn’t about to execute a wounded man who had just been doing his job and posed no threat to an already blown op. “By morning they’ll know Forger’s missing anyway, and they’ll make the connection to the dead border guards eventually, so what the fuck difference does it make at this point? Garrison can drive over here and do it himself.”

Jay hauled the case off the ground and tossed it into the back of the Land Rover She paused, looking at it for a moment. It had a handprint scanner, which Forger could no doubt unlock.

“Should we what this was all about first?”

“Negative,” Avery said. He lifted Forger’s corpse into a fireman’s carry and set him in the back of the Land Cruiser. “It won’t change a thing, and we’re better off not knowing. Fuck this job.”

“Right.”

Avery walked around the Land Cruiser. He checked the hood for bullet holes, then climbed in and keyed the ignition to make sure the vehicle was still operable. Jay got in beside him.  

“You know they’ll blame us for Forger, right?” Avery asked as he put the Land Cruiser in drive. He accelerated and swerved around the roadblock, tumbling over the terrain before steering them back onto the road and onto Azeri soil.

Jay didn’t respond.  

Glancing over at her, Avery saw her faraway gaze. She looked borderline despondent, and he recalled their last conversation at the safe house.

“It wasn’t your fault, Jay.”

“Fuck off and drive.”

___

 

They returned to the safe house after running countersurveillance measures. Avery pulled the Land Cruiser into the attached garage. He climbed out and pulled shut the rolldown door. Jay hadn’t said a word to him on the drive back, but at the moment, he hardly cared.

Garrison and Ehud met them as they came through the door into the house. The latter was smoking a cigarette, and the noxious blue-gray haze wafting in the air indicated that it was far from his first.

“Thank God you’re back,” Garrison said with exaggerated relief. “What the hell happened?”

Staring him down, Avery raised an eyebrow. “What the hell do you think happened?”

“The case? You have the case, yes?” Ehud snapped. His gaze drifted to the case in Jay’s hand. He stepped forward and practically tore it away from her. He looked it over before glancing to Garrison and nodding. “Very good. We need to get this out of the country immediately. My people will confirm the authenticity of its contents.”

Garrison gestured with his hand and said, “Have at it, pal.”

Watching the Israeli saunter off, Avery drew a deep breath and realized his hands had clenched tightly into fists at his side.

Nearby, Evan, Tom, and Gina worked with a frenetic sense of urgency as they broke down the safe house, wiping surfaces, disconnecting crypto gear, and packing Pelican cases full of equipment.  

“Jay,” Garrison said, brushing past Avery. “This didn’t turn out how any of us wanted, but you did a hell of a job out there. No one could have asked more from you.”

“Except maybe to bring out Forger alive,” she said.

“Nah,” Garrison replied. “Your tasking was to link-up with Forger and deliver him to the border, and that’s exactly what you did. You performed exemplarily, and that’s going in my report.” His eyes shifted toward Avery. “It was this guy’s job to ensure you crossed the border unharmed.”

“Fuck yourself, Garrison,” Avery said, and the ops officer reacted with the indignant shock of someone who had just taken a slap to the face. “I advised we delay the exfil, and you know it.”

“Really?” Garrison said. “Well, I’m going take a second look at the comms transcripts before I send it back to Langley, so we’ll see.”

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Avery shot back. “It was your sloppy ass intel that put us in contact with those border guards and left seven bodies cooling on the border next to the asset. This is the most half-ass job I’ve ever been on.”

Avery glanced to Jay, expecting her to back him up, but her expression was distant and showed total disregard for the pissing match currently underway.

“Yeah,” Garrison said, not backing down, “I can say the same, and in fact, I will in the post-action reports I’ll need to file with the Seventh Floor. Let’s hope word of this one doesn’t leak to Capitol Hill or the press.”

Avery silently stared Garrison down. The senior ops officer blinked and shifted his stance, taking a step back after realizing his threat did not have the same effect on Avery as it might on some rookie case officer or analyst. 

“Speaking of which,” Garrison continued, “Jaleh, we’ll begin after-mission briefings at the Ramstein facility. We need to get out of Azerbaijan ASAP. Avery, your services here are no longer required. I trust you’ll find your own way out of the country.”

“You don’t want me to sit in on the post op debrief?” Avery asked suspiciously.   

“I don’t see a need,” Garrison replied. “Jay was at the border and saw everything that went down. If Langley has any questions for you, they know how to reach out to you.”    

Garrison began speaking to Jay about their next moves. She didn’t even look at him.  

Avery walked away without a further word or glance toward either of them.

Barely twenty minutes passed before he had packed his gear and slipped out of the safe house without anyone noticing He made his way to Ganja, home to the nearest international airport, ninety miles from Beylagan. 

Avery used a black diplomatic passport to book the first available flight out of the country, a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight to Amsterdam. He never spoke to Jay again, and he never thought about CONCOURSE again.