I licked my lips and used my toe to nudge the door open. I wasn’t afraid of smaller explosives like Semtex. Ghost was trained to sniff them out and warn me. I glanced at him. He wasn’t barking but he was shivering and his hair was standing out in all directions. Not as comforting as I would have liked. I clicked my tongue and he flinched. Then he shook his body like he was shaking off cold water and he looked up at me with troubled eyes. I wished he could talk because the information his senses were processing were probably going to be pretty crucial to my survival over the next few minutes. But only Lassie can explain complex predicaments with a bark; Ghost was merely a dog.

Letting the barrel and flashlight lead the way, I stepped out of the bloody bathroom and into a narrow passage with rough stone walls. The same kind of stone as the wall in the picture Rasouli showed me. Rough, gray white. A little whiter than the walls behind the metal stairs I’d climbed down. A different mineral composition this far down.

I moved down the hallway. Ghost, as silent as his name, was right behind me. The corridor turned and turned, making sharp rights and lefts and then tilted as it angled down deeper into the underbelly of the desert bedrock. The air moved past me, flowing up from below. The stink of death was still there.

I rounded the last turn and the hallway ended at an open doorway beyond which was a massive chamber. There were stacks of wooden crates in uneven rows, but this was clearly not a storeroom. I stood in a vast cavern whose ceiling was a mass of dripstone stalactites that hung like the fangs of an infinitely large dragon. Water dripped seventy feet to the concrete floor, where it pooled around broken stones, fallen rock, and the corpses of at least two dozen men.

They were piled into a mound, their bodies torn and slashed, their skin crawling with maggots and cockroaches and vermin that skittered away from my flashlight beam. The stench of all that rotting meat was dreadful.

I moved cautiously forward. All of the bodies were male, and some of them were naked. No way to tell if they were Iranian, but that was my guess. Many of them were tough-looking, well-muscled, in their twenties and thirties. From the uniforms of the clothed ones I could tell that they were refinery roughnecks and security people. Some of the naked ones probably were too; the killers had likely made them strip off their uniforms before the killing began. I wondered if one of the killers was wearing a major’s uniform.