Now kneeling, Cancer adjusted his point of aim in tandem with his target, his subsequent bullets hitting low and puncturing the desktop. The next shot would establish a clear winner and Cancer took the milliseconds required to make his count, aligning his sights with the profile of the guard’s shoulders and head. Cancer faced one of the absurd thoughts that occurred mid-combat, this one from a trip to the Gettysburg Museum where a display of two molded rounds explained, These two bullets met in midair above Culp’s Hill.

  But no similarly probability-defying feat would occur today—the guard’s head snapped backward and he dropped out of sight following Cancer’s next shot, after which a hail of gunfire simultaneously popped into the desk as Hass entered the room.

  Cancer scrambled upright, continuing his clearance alongside his teammate to find that they were alone in the room. But the adrenaline didn’t subside, and the space wasn’t empty—Hass rounded the desk and fired another two rounds at the fallen guard while Cancer marveled at the sight before him.

  Banks of servers lined the far wall, their matte black surfaces humming quietly. Cables snaked across the floor, and the faint glow of LEDs blinked intermittently in the darkness. Large screens on the wall displayed seemingly random lines of code as cooling fans whirred steadily, pushing stale, slightly metallic air around the enclosed space.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but this was no makeshift operations center or rudimentary command post. The equipment was high-end, industrial-grade tech, the kind of setup designed for far more than basic communications although its true purpose eluded him and his limited knowledge of such technology. Even without fully grasping the implications, he knew they had found something important.

  Before he or Hass could process the sight, the sound of automatic gunfire echoed from deeper in the sublevel. Their earpieces crackled to life with an incoming transmission.

  “Support,” Worthy transmitted, “right hallway, we’re pinned, need backup asap⁠—”

  The message ended with the clap of an explosion, its noise reverberating toward them as Cancer and Hass turned to sprint down the hall.

  34

  The grenade blast shook the room, its sheer force sending a shockwave through the cramped kitchen. Worthy felt the explosion in his bones, echoing violently across the steel countertops and heavy-duty appliances behind which he’d taken cover, the decibel cutoff in his radio earpieces only doing so much to protect his hearing from total annihilation. Only then did he register the searing fragments of shrapnel burning his right side.

  “I’m good,” Ian transmitted from his hiding place behind an industrial-grade oven he’d pushed aside, followed by Reilly echoing the same.

  “Me too,” Worthy transmitted, although he was certain both teammates bore minor injuries as bad or worse than his own—nothing that took their attention off the imminent urge for survival, save the shared and unspoken recognition that their cover was insufficient for protecting them from further grenades.

  Then the gunfire resumed, bullets cracking off every exposed surface and ricocheting across the room.

  Their attackers were clearly experienced in close-quarters battle—they’d simply waited for the team to flush into the first room, then executed an unconventional response by taking up positions in the hallway to isolate them while they were inside. The effort had commenced with the guards firing blindly through the doorway of the lone exit, and Worthy knew at that moment that he, Reilly, and Ian were utterly fucked.

  “They’re firing from the hall,” he transmitted for Cancer and Hass’s benefit. “Must be at least three, four.”

  No response.

  He felt a trickle of fluid across his right cheek that could have been either sweat or tears, and wiped it away to find that it was blood.

  Gunfire echoed in the doorway as the guards continued to fire, the relentless barrages making it impossible for him and his teammates to so much as raise their heads without getting lit up. That meant the guards outside were firing and reloading in succession, secure in the knowledge that their quarry was pinned.

  Worthy gritted his teeth, barely able to hear his own thoughts over the gunfire. Pots and pans littered the floor, and the appliances that had saved their lives now seemed like a cage, trapping them while their enemies had free rein to finish them off.

  Another explosion would do the trick if they didn’t move soon—and yet, all they could do now was hunker down and hope like hell Cancer and Hass arrived before the guards finished the pinned men off.

  The barrage at their doorway faltered, then went silent.

  Cancer transmitted, “They flushed to the room across the hall—move, now.”

  Worthy did so at once, scrambling to lead the way toward the door as Reilly and Ian followed him.

  The transmission meant that Worthy and his men could make it inside the room before Cancer and Hass, and he desperately wanted to exploit the advantage of the guard retreat while he still could. Every passing second would allow them time to seek cover and take aim against their pursuers, and Worthy sought to minimize that span of time as much as he could.

  He cleared the doorway at a run, identifying two enemy dead as well as the room across the hall before charging toward it amid the thud of footsteps from within.

  Any hesitation would be counterproductive in the extreme, and Worthy’s fear took a distant second to the urgency of the situation as he slipped through the doorway and cut right with the desperate hope that his teammates had kept pace.

  The room was larger than the others, a living quarters hastily converted into a defensive stronghold. Personal belongings were scattered across the floor, and three guards were darting behind furniture that would serve as makeshift barricades.

  Worthy managed to shoot one of them twice in the back before he had a chance to make it, firing the opening shots before the enemy realized he was in the room.

  The advantage of surprise ended there as the remaining two men reacted, diving behind cover as the team flooded into the room. Worthy had seen their hiding places—a couch and a standing wardrobe at the far side—and by now he was well familiar with the enemy’s willingness to fire blindly around objects without exposing themselves.

  And while the rules of room clearing were ironclad for a reason, Worthy made the split-second decision that improvisation was in order lest his teammates fall victim to the hidden guards.

  He turned before reaching his corner, making an oblong race across the room and compromising the American sectors of fire in the interests of removing the threats himself. In his sudden burst of speed, however, he found himself unable to stop.

  The attempt at a skidding halt took him beyond the edge of the standing wardrobe, where the entrenched guard was only then raising his weapon around the nearest side. The barrel nearly struck Worthy in the process, missing him by inches as he kept his weapon angled low to dodge the obstacle before firing three subsonic rounds that shredded into the standing guard’s leg. It was an almost point-blank engagement that came and went in the course of Worthy’s skid, and the guard fell to reveal his final comrade behind the couch, now spinning to confront the sudden appearance of an American assaulter.

  Worthy tried to drop to a knee, but his momentum was too great to overcome with any semblance of finesse. He crashed to his side instead, straining to bring his suppressor to bear on the remaining enemy fighter while still sliding across the floor.

  He fired once, then twice more, registering that one or more of his rounds had sailed into the guard’s abdomen.

  Then Worthy’s head struck the back wall, bringing him to a painful stop amid a high-pitched ringing that erupted in both ears simultaneously. He strained to see through blotches of bright color that obscured his vision, managed to deliver another trio of bullets that turned the guard from gut-shot to dead.

  But his fight wasn’t over. The guard he’d shot in the leg was now on his back, swinging his rifle atop his body to engage his assailant as Worthy desperately tried to slither into a position affording him a proper point of aim.

  He never had the chance.

  The wounded guard’s body jolted as if he were being electrocuted, convulsing with the impact of bullets that seemed like they were never going to stop coming. Ian stood beside the wardrobe, erring on the side of caution as he fired a seemingly endless succession of shots that only ended when the guard’s lifeless arms were splayed out on the ground, his rifle abandoned.

  Ian ended his fire then, looking like an angel of death with flecks of blood from grenade shrapnel dotting his face and body.

  “Racegun,” he said, reloading, “what the fuck?”

  Rather than explain his improvised and reckless maneuver, Worthy scrambled to his feet as the blotches of color in his vision began to subside. The room was clear, but not the sublevel—one room still remained, and as he moved to exit the room he saw Reilly leaving first, disappearing into the hall before the flashing figures of Hass and Cancer sped past to back him up.

  Reilly closed with the final doorway, a sense of horror descending upon him now that he was in the lead.

  He’d been in more similar situations than he could recount, and yet this one felt alien to him—he was married now, had no reason to be running around Iran with or without a suppressed weapon. Thoughts like this produced hesitation that could kill a man as surely as lack of experience could, and yet he couldn’t tamp the notion down.

  And despite his best efforts, he felt himself stalling for the briefest of steps just before the doorway.

  Muscle memory took over then, along with a deep subconscious instinct that he had better pull himself together before condemning Olivia, his bride, to a memorial ceremony at CIA Headquarters.

  Till death do us part.

  Then he was inside the room, a desire for self-preservation tearing him apart as he feverishly scanned for targets against a backdrop of distractions that bordered on sensory overload. There were glowing monitors displaying streams of code, flickering maps and screens flashing with shifting data and diagrams. The room felt chaotic, alive with technology, and while his upper body was neatly sweeping his rifle across the space, Reilly’s mind struggled to catch up.

  He identified a figure at the far end of his initial sector of fire, damn near in a blind spot. And with the full realization that he may have been too late, he pivoted the final few degrees and fired.

  To his immense relief, the hasty shot turned out to be a miraculous feat of reaction, pummeling into the target’s side. The man staggered backward, a hand instinctively clutching at the wound as his knees buckled, sending him crashing into a bank of monitors. Blood began to seep through his fingers, spreading rapidly across his shirt.

  Reilly refrained from a follow-up shot to continue his movement to the room’s corner, making way for his teammates to spill inside and finish the job. It was only after he’d come to a stop and swept for further threats and found none that he realized no one else had fired—everyone’s footsteps came to a halt before Reilly’s gaze found his target.

  The man he’d shot, now bleeding out on the floor, was entirely unarmed.

  This newfound knowledge momentarily froze Reilly in place, and then he darted to the wounded man with the frantic hope that he could still be saved. He hadn’t yet scrutinized the room’s interior in full, though the details he’d observed told him that his team had reached some vital nerve center of a command post. Everyone else in the sublevel and the building above had been armed guards, a considerable security element to protect this room—and the lone man on duty to operate the equipment here, who was unquestionably the only one who could give them the information they needed to locate David.

  “You’d better save him,” Ian said as Reilly fell to his knees before the casualty, his training and experience as a medic taking over.

  His casualty was thin, with a pale complexion that suggested more time spent in front of screens than outdoors. His dark hair was disheveled, the sweat beading on his forehead, and his eyes were wide with shock, darting from Reilly’s face to his own bloodied torso.

  The bullet had entered just below the ribs on the man’s right side, leaving a small hole in the fabric of his shirt, now stained crimson. And since there was no corresponding flood on the floor beneath him, the subsonic 7.62mm round hadn’t passed through at all; instead, it had tumbled through the man’s body, wreaking havoc. The blood pooling around the man’s hand was dark, rich with oxygen, and his breathing resulted in a shallow, unilateral rise and fall of his chest.

  Reilly could tell at a glance the extent of internal devastation—punctured kidney, collapsed lung. Massive hemorrhaging in the abdominal cavity, blood spilling into the pleural space. He shifted the man’s hand aside, applying pressure to the wound as if there was a chance of stopping the blood flow.

  “You with me?” he asked, trying to elicit any response that would indicate the man was capable of answering questions.

  But he was too far gone, panting, eyes going in and out of focus from pain.

  “Doc,” Ian said, his tone sharper now, “you’d better save him.”

  Reilly removed his hands and opened his aid pouch, withdrawing a syringe and pulling the cap off with his teeth. With his other hand, he procured a small vial and drove the needle into the rubber stopper. Inverting the vial, he pulled back the plunger, watching the amber liquid fill the barrel, carefully checking the measurement hashmarks.

  Five to 10 milligrams of morphine would relieve moderate pain such as fractures or bullet wounds. An amputation warranted 10 to 15, while extreme trauma—multiple amputations, for instance, or catastrophic internal organ damage—required a dose that put the patient at significant risk for near-fatal respiratory depression, up to 20 milligrams.

  Reilly loaded his syringe with 30.

  He gave the syringe a quick flick to dislodge any air bubbles, then pressed the plunger gently to expel them. The action was automatic, rehearsed to the point that he couldn’t not do it. Without hesitation, he slid the needle through the man’s shirt and into the deltoid muscle, depressing the plunger with steady pressure.

  Injecting it would bring almost immediate pain relief, followed by hypoxia, then coma, and finally death in the most merciful circumstances now possible.

  Reilly had already killed the man when he shot him; now, he was simply putting him out of his misery.

  Ian’s voice sounded faraway, distant.

  “That was morphine, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Reilly answered, removing the needle and watching the syringe fall from his hand. Without looking over his shoulder, he asked, “Did I just fuck us?”

  “Yeah,” Ian replied, feeling a chill run up his spine. “You did.”

  Cancer asked, “Where’s Navidi?”

  “Dead on the stairs.”

  “We found a bunch of tech equipment in the left hallway, servers or something⁠—”

  Ian held up a hand to stop him.

  “I know. This, all of this, is what Navidi delivered.” His eyes swept over the room, taking in the blinking screens, the whirring servers, and the endless streams of data scrolling across the monitors.

  Ian considered how he could possibly summarize what he realized upon entering the room. He pointed to a screen with a map of the US where countless icons marked specific locations, some of which were connected by frail red lines. “Infrastructure targets—power grids, pipelines, transportation hubs, communication relays.”

  Swinging his hand to another screen, he continued, “AI algorithms. Processing information, compiling reports. Running attack scenarios.”

  “AI?”

  “And the computer systems to train and refine it,” he said, turning to face his team.

  Cancer looked like he was watching corpses rise from the dead. Hass was visibly pale, and Worthy wiped a trickle of blood off the side of his face from one of many hopefully minor shrapnel wounds. Reilly hadn’t fared much better, and was pocketing the dead man’s phone while scanning the men head to toe in the search for injuries while ignoring his own.

  Ian knew that he had his fair share of cuts and probably metal shards embedded under his skin, had felt their collective pain after the grenade blast. At the time it had been cause for alarm.

  But now, seeing the contents of this room, he just didn’t care.

  Locking eyes with Cancer, he said, “Believe me, everything I’ve just said is barely scratching the surface.”

  The acting team leader responded by addressing not Ian but everyone else.

  “Site exploitation, combat resupply,” he said. “Phones and grenades are top of the list. Make it fast.”

  Hass, Worthy, and Reilly departed at once. They’d barely left the room before Cancer took a step closer, lowering his voice to ask, “It’s that bad?”

  Ian shook his head. “It’s worse.”

  In truth, the servers weren’t just handling basic information, they were running high-level algorithms, cross-referencing massive datasets, analyzing US infrastructure, and identifying vulnerabilities. The AI was designed to map out critical sectors: the electrical grid, water supplies, internet backbones, and transportation networks. Every system was connected and Malek’s AI was pinpointing weak spots, planning cascading failures that could paralyze entire regions with a single strike.

  The AI was constantly updating, learning in real time, adjusting strategies based on new data. It had the power to coordinate multiple attacks—cyber or physical—on the most vital arteries of American infrastructure. One calculated strike could send shockwaves through the country, causing chaos that would take weeks, maybe months, to recover from.

  Or longer, if recovery was possible at all.

  Cancer threw up his hands. “Well, do your intel shit—exploit this, find David.”

  Ian let his gaze drift across the consoles, taking in the finer details in case he missed something up to this point.

 

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