Lydia cleared her throat and glanced at me. “What exactly are we supposed to do when we find the weapons?”

It took effort to turn away from Top. “What would your guess be?”

She shrugged. “Locate and secure each nuke, de-arm the weapons, and have a meaningful conversation with anyone left who still has a pulse. Then go home and drink a gallon of tequila.”

Everyone laughed. It was all forced, though. Even Top measured out half an inch of smile. “Now you know the game plan,” I said.

Bunny asked, “Is there any kind of evacuation plan in case we drop the ball?”

“Evacuate who, Farmboy?” snapped Top. “The entire Middle East? How exactly do we do that?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Okay, we’re waiting for the go-order to hit the Aghajari oil refinery. It’ll be a quiet infil. Locate and de-arm.” I opened my tactical computer and called up the mission files uploaded by Bug. “First thing we have to do is study the layout of the refinery according to the blueprints Rasouli provided, matching them against satellite photos and intel from our own sources. I want six ways in and ten ways out.”

“Hooah” said Top. No one else joined him.

“Then I want you to pair up and buddy-test each other on the wiring schematics of the Teller–Ulam bomb and its variations. Swap teams every half hour. Everybody knows what everybody else knows. We don’t want surprises and missed cues when de-arming the nukes. Hooah?”

“Hooah.” All of them said it this time.

“After that, everyone gets rack time.”

“Sleepy soldiers are clumsy soldiers,” said Khalid, then punctuated it by quietly going, “Ka-booooooom.”

“Hoo-fucking-ah,” said Bunny.

Chapter Eighty-two

Chapter Eighty-Two

Abandoned Warehouse

Outskirts of Tehran

June 16, 12:22 a.m.

While the others worked on their de-arming drills, I read through the vampire information Circe had obtained from Dr. Corbiel-Newton. Most of it was useless fairy-tale stuff or speculation without hope of verification. Some of it, though, was more practical, taking a look at the possibility of vampirism as a natural phenomenon. That was the same ground I had covered with Hu, but there were some things here that I found very interesting. Especially about garlic. In the movies, garlic simply repels a vampire, kind of like pepper spray, but it doesn’t kill them. In a lot of the world’s folklore, however, garlic was lethal to them, especially if introduced into the bloodstream or via a mucus membrane. In something called the “ritual of exorcism,” fresh garlic was placed in the mouth of a vampire. In some cultures garlic paste was used on skin or clothes as a deterrent and could kill a vampire if one of them bit skin that was coated with it. Of course … that would require a vampire with a head cold who couldn’t smell the damn garlic.