Pandora's Grave (Shadow Warriors) Read online

  Pandora’s Grave

  By

  Stephen England

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephen England

  Cover design by Louis Vaney

  Author photo by Rachel Cox

  Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Holy Bible.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Views expressed by the characters in this novel are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.

  To the men and women of the real National Clandestine Service, “rough men” standing watch in the night. Your service is devoid of glory, but not of honor, and this country is safer because of your sacrifice. It is to you that this book is dedicated. God bless you all.

  Glossary

  AFSOC—Air Force Special Operations Command

  CENTCOM—Central Command, United States Military, encompassing the Middle East

  ClandOps—Clandestine Operations

  Comm—Communications

  DCIA—Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

  DCS—Director of the National Clandestine Service

  DD(I)—Deputy Director(Intelligence)—Central Intelligence Agency

  DD(ST)Deputy Director(Science & Technology)—Central Intelligence Agency

  DNI—Director of National Intelligence

  DZ—Drop Zone

  E&E—Escape and Evade

  ETA—Estimated Time of Arrival

  Exfil—Exfiltrate, the reverse of infiltrate

  FAV—Fast Attack Vehicle

  IDF—Israeli Defense Forces

  IRGC—Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

  JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command

  KIA—Killed In Action

  Klick—kilometer

  LOS—Line of Sight

  LZ—Landing Zone

  Masjid—Arabic for mosque

  NCS—National Clandestine Service, operations wing of the CIA

  NRO—National Reconaissance Office

  NSA—National Security Agency

  NVGs—Night Vision Goggles

  PJAK—Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, militant Kurdish group

  PHOTINT—Photographic Intelligence

  SAM—Surface to Air Missile

  Sitrep—Situation Report

  Spec-ops—Special Operations

  TACSAT—Tactical Satellite phone

  VISDENT—Visual Identification

  Prologue:

  A.D. 1329, Persia

  Silence. Unearthly silence. Silence unbroken except for the shrill cries of the carrion birds, the vultures circling in the sky. Circling lazily over a city that had once been the home of thousands, the pride of the East. Rhodaspes.

  The old man sighed. Rhodaspes. She was renowned through history as a city of trade, a city of great kings. The unconquerable. In the days of his forefathers, she had stood against Alexander, the Romans, finally the hordes of Mohammed that had overrun the lands to the south. She had withstood them all, stood tall and proud.

  In his own time, the city had defied the onslaught of the barbaric horsemen from the Far East, watched as they swept around the city like waters round a rock, passing them by. They had not fallen. They had remained, a bastion of pride, a bastion of faith. For the old faith of Zoroaster had not yet died in these mountains. His own name, Adar, meant “fire.” It was a tribute to the gods.

  The last fire temple remained within their walls, the only one that the Mohammedans had been unable to destroy. Yes, they had withstood many onslaughts in their history. And they had always been triumphant in the end.

  Until now.

  He pushed open the door of his house, gazing out into the deserted streets, the streets that had once rung with shouts of laughter, the bustle of merchants. The streets where he had once played as a child, so many years ago.

  He was the last. The last of Rhodaspes. The last of his people. It was a strange feeling. He hoisted the small sack on his shoulder and went around to the side street, where his horse stood waiting. In days past, his servants would have saddled it for him, but those days were past. They were all dead, now. Just like everyone else. The stench of death filled his nostrils as he mounted his horse, kicking it into a slow trot as he rode toward the city gates.

  Dead. It had all started only a few months before, three to be exact. It seemed impossible that such devastation could have been accomplished in so short a time, but it had .

  And it had all been because of one man. A stranger. An angel of death. They should have slain him immediately, thrown his fevered body outside the gates. Anything would have been better than what followed.

  He had died. And then the family that took him in. Then their neighbors. Then their friends. The whole city. Smitten of the gods.

  Cursed for an act of what they thought was mercy. Too late they had realized that they had been interfering with judgment.

  He had thought to stop it. They had visited the temple of fire daily, beseeching Ahura Mazda for his protection, for his mercy. The heavens had been silent. There had been no answer.

  The city gates were swung open, the mighty double gates that had defended Rhodaspes for centuries, their wood coated with brass that glistened like fire in the morning sun and protected them from being burnt down. They were useless now. There was nothing left to defend. He was the only one left.

  The citizens had started burying their dead in the earth, in huge, open graves. From that moment on, Adar had known there would be no mercy. For burial—it was an abomination. For centuries, nay, for millennia, his people had placed their dead in “Towers of Silence,” where their spirits could be received direct into the sky, while their flesh was consumed by the vultures, the vultures that now circled above him, robbed of their sustenance.

  He passed through the gates, kicking his horse into a gallop. He was an old man, and now he was fleeing. Fleeing something he knew he could not escape. The wrath of the gods…

  Prelude

  September 13th, Present-day

  An archaeological dig

  The Alborz Mountains of Iran

  He had felt the evil of the place from the moment they had arrived. Something palpable, something he could sense in the very air.

  And now it had manifested itself in the dead body of the young man at his feet. Young man? Little more than a boy, really. One of the college students that had followed him to this godforsaken land, chasing the opportunity of a lifetime. Opportunity…

  The Israeli straightened, rising to his feet, looking around at the few that were left. “He’s dead,” he announced flatly, stating the obvious.

  “What—I mean, what happened?”

  He looked up into the light green eyes of the young woman in front of him, eyes now filled with tears. She was on the verge of breaking. As were they all. Somehow he had to keep them together. Somehow…

  “I have no idea, Rachel,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “How about you, Grant?”

  The fifty-eight-year-old history professor from Princeton shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He paused. “Where are the others, Dr. Tal?”

  Moshe Tal didn’t answer for a moment, his mind absorbed with what had led to this point. The years of toil in Is
rael, working on other projects—Hazor, Masada, Baalbek. Mere footnotes along his life, along the path that led here. Nothing compared to this.

  Rhodaspes. Its very name lured him like a siren song—a Persian trade city poised on the trade route between the blue waters of the Caspian and the snow-capped peaks of the Elbrus.

  Rhodaspes, the queen of the east—a city that had controlled vast wealth from her mountain fastnesses, a Persian Petra.

  Rhodaspes, the unconquerable, though besieged briefly by no less than Alexander the Great on his way to India.

  Rhodaspes, a city that had been abandoned in the middle of the fourteenth-century, suddenly, mysteriously as though God himself had scattered its inhabitants to the winds. The native Farsi still spoke of the place as accursed. Now he knew why. It was…

  “I said, Dr. Tal, where are the others?”

  Grant Peterson’s voice brought him back to reality. The present darkness.

  Moshe pointed wordlessly, down the mountain path to the mass grave, the place that had started it all. One could see a few bodies sprawled stiffly by its edge. The bodies of the remaining archaeologists.

  He should have known the moment they had unearthed the grave. Should have taken it as an omen of the evil to come.

  For the inhabitants of Rhodaspes had never buried their dead. They were Zoroastrians, and the practice was an abomination to them. Never mind a mass grave.

  He shivered. His team would join them soon. Unless he did something about it. He turned to the young man by his side, the last of the college students left alive. “Get on the radio, Joel. We need to contact Tehran.”

  Joel Mullins swallowed nervously. “Right,” he acknowledged, seeming glad for something to do. “Right away.”

  Moshe went back into his tent. He had no other choice. And now he had to move quickly, before he too was stricken, before the Iranians could arrive and discover the truth…

  September 14th

  Cancun, Mexico

  It was five minutes past midnight when Angelo Calderon stepped from the entrance of the Cancun nightclub he had just visited. The weather was just as forecast, light winds sweeping off the ocean, cooling the night to a warm seventy-six degrees. He had three minutes left to live.

  Perfect, the watcher thought, standing in the shadows near the parking lot. The drug lord was flanked by two bodyguards, both of whom carried semiautomatic pistols holstered on their hips. Undoubtedly, Calderon himself was armed. He folded the compact night-vision scope into an inner pocket of his jacket and followed, a hunter stalking his prey.

  Calderon took another deep breath of the fresh ocean breeze, letting it soak into him. Another forty-eight hours and the deal would be complete. Nothing could stop him now. Five years before, his eldest son had been killed by US Border Patrol agents working in coordination with the federale s. Now the time for his revenge had come.

  Young people flitted about him as his bodyguards elbowed their way through the crowd, many of them in beach costume. Tourism had increased over the last week in preparation for the El Grito Independence Day celebrations on the sixteenth. It seemed fitting that this deal would be consummated on such a day. History would remember him as well. Perhaps not in the same company as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who had sparked the 1810 revolt against Spanish oppression, but he would never be forgotten.

  A couple of rather pretty American girls caught his eye and he smiled at them as they passed. At the age of forty-nine, Calderon was still strikingly handsome and he knew it.

  He never saw the dark-haired man moving through the crowd toward him and his bodyguards, nor the suppressed semiautomatic pistol that suddenly materialized in that man’s hand.

  A single .45-caliber hollow-pointed slug smashed into Calderon’s right temple, killing him before the cry on his lips could even be uttered. One of the girls nearby screamed at the sight. Alerted, his bodyguards turned on heel, their eyes wide with shock at the sight of their employer lying on the asphalt, blood trickling from his skull. Then one of them fell, pierced through the heart.

  The crowd began to scatter like a covey of quail, panic spreading through them, a primal impulse for safety. The second bodyguard went for the Sig-Sauer on his hip, but he was dead before it could clear the holster.

  Three corpses on the pavement.

  The assassin turned, tucking the Colt into his waistband and adjusting the loose sports shirt he wore so as to cover it. Then he walked calmly back through the crowd, listening to the screams of people shouting for the police.

  His steps quickened as he moved away from the immediate area of the nightclub. A car bearing the lettering Policia passed him as he jogged along the sidewalk, lights flashing and siren wailing. A quiet smile of amusement crossed his face at the sight.

  All that bother for nothing. He reached up, switching on his earbud microphone with a motion that seemed as innocent as scratching his ear. “Chameleon to Raven. Operation BOXWOOD is completed. Conducting E & E.”

  “Roger that, Chameleon. Come on home.”

  Chapter One

  12:32 P.M. Eastern Time, September 19th

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  Silence reigned on the seventh floor of the CIA Headquarters, silence unbroken but for the noise of a small fly buzzing near the ceiling.

  A lull before the storm, Harry Nichols thought as he sat outside the office of CIA Director David Lay. It was the reason he was here.

  For the thirty-eight-year-old field officer to be invited up to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum of the Agency’s top officials, meant trouble.

  He could count on one hand the number of times it had happened before in his time at the CIA. And every time it had been a prelude to a mission. And not just any mission. Something special. In his line of work, special meant dangerous.

  He got up from his seat on the couch and crossed over to the window, gazing out over the city, over the Potomac to Washington, D.C. His nation’s capital.

  The capital of the land he had sworn to defend. No matter what the cost.

  Over the fifteen years he had worked for the CIA, he had learned the cost. All too well. The cost of missions gone wrong, the price of failure. The bittersweet taste of victory when it had been achieved with the blood of his friends, his comrades.

  To look at him, one would have never suspected who he was, what his job entailed. He stood about six-foot three, his frame deceptively lean. The build of a runner, not a weightlifter, though he did both. There was little about his physique to hint of the tightly controlled violence he was so capable of unleashing.

  Clear blue eyes smiled disarmingly from a smooth-shaven face that had been long weathered by the elements, the smile so often nothing more than a facade to conceal the man that lay beneath. A cover, like so much of the rest of his life. He had sacrificed much to serve his country.

  His hair was black and wavy, parted neatly to one side. To look at him, dressed as he was in a blue suit jacket, matching pants and a white shirt, one would have guessed him to be nothing more than a business executive, or perhaps one of Langley’s many analysts. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

  A Colt 1911 .45 automatic was beneath the jacket, carried fully loaded in a paddle holster on his hip, even here on the seventh floor of the CIA. He rarely went without it.

  The door opened behind him. A woman’s voice. “The director will see you now.”

  He turned, a smile passing across his face. “Thank you, Margaret.”

  “Go on in.”

  Director Lay glanced up from his computer as Harry entered. In his early sixties, Lay was a big man, carrying the weight of someone who had spent most of their career behind a desk. Which he had, but no one would have called the desk of DCIA easy or stress-free. His graying hair was testimony to that fact.

  “Have a seat,” he instructed. “I’m glad you could get here so quickly. I understand you’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since your arrival from Mexico City las
t night.”

  Harry shrugged, taking a chair in front of the desk. “Kinda had to catch the red-eye back. Understood something hot was on tap.”

  “There is. Good work with Calderon, Nichols,” the director said abruptly. That was all he said about the three dangerous months that had led up to the assassination of the drug lord. That was all that would ever be said. Silence was golden. “I trust you’ve had lunch?”

  “I grabbed a quick bite in the Operations Center cafeteria.”

  “Good. This will take a while.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Lay handed him a thin folder. “Recognize this man?”

  Harry flipped the folder open and briefly studied the 8x10 photo inside. “Moshe Tal,” he announced calmly, his voice betraying none of his inner confusion. “Israel’s foremost archaeologist.”

  “You know him?”

  “By reputation only. A modern-day Indiana Jones, so they say.”

  “Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re right. He’s a cowboy.”

  “So I’ve heard. Not too much regard for the conventions of the business. Where’s he fit into this picture?”

  The CIA director snorted. “He is the picture. Six months ago he obtained permission from the Iranian government to conduct an archaeological dig in the Alborz Mountains, apparently in the ruins of a medieval Persian city.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Harry interrupted. “They allowed an Israeli archaeologist inside their borders?”

  “It’s already sounding rather strange, isn’t it?”

  “You’d better believe it. How large of a team does Dr. Tal have with him?”

  “The team was very small. That’s another one of his trademarks. Fifteen in all including Dr. Tal, thirteen Americans and an Australian woman named Rachel Eliot.”