Those three words were the end of his input. He listened for exactly ten and three one hundredths seconds before the line went dead. Nurin put down the handset, and said, “Have the Hawker ready in twenty minutes, fueled for Central Europe. I want a car now—and tell Veron to meet me at the airport!”

As he hurried toward the exit Nurin considered the two calls. They were completely unrelated, but like the good spymaster he was, he immediately began incubating ways to join them in his favor. As Nurin trod down the central hallway, however, his clever schemes went adrift. The map of Iran fixed in his mind, and his calculating nature succumbed to a rare turn of reflection as he wondered, Where do we find such men?

Chapter 56

FIFTY-SIX

Yaniv Stein sat against his rock—after twenty days anyway, he thought of it as his—contemplating whether crushing the scorpion near his sock-clad left foot was worth the effort. The creature wasn’t a threat. Not on the big scale of things. There was perhaps some food value, but food was not his problem. He was out of water. A man could survive for a long time in the desert without food. Water, on the other hand, was nonnegotiable.

In the harsh morning light Stein looked down at his shattered leg. In a way the injury had saved him three weeks ago. The grenade he’d thrown into the truck that night had set off a large secondary explosion—how was he to know that was where they stowed their munitions? Shrapnel from the blast had ruined his leg, but the explosion also proved his salvation—it created smoke, fire, confusion, and most fortuitously, an Iranian corpse that was burned beyond recognition. Nearly delirious from the pain, Stein had removed his outer uniform and done his best to dress the victim as an Israeli commando. He’d then shoveled flaming embers onto what was left of the body until the poor grunt was smoldering again. Finally, in the most painful two hours of his life and under cover of a frenetic night, Stein had crawled eighty yards to this spot, a tiny cavern in the side of a low ridge.

The next two days he spent bettering his camouflage and watching from his hole. Bands of Iranian soldiers came and went. They carted out bodies—first his three comrades and later their own—and then began kicking boot toes through the gory aftermath. The final groups looked more like tourists, senior officers mostly, one of whom nearly made it to his position. Stein was prepared to take the man with his only remaining weapon, his trusted Glock, knowing it would start an exchange that he would not survive. Then the colonel with the big gut had stopped ten paces short and taken a whiskey flask from his pocket, emptying it before heading back to his jeep.