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any could get off a decent shot, it seemed a combination of all three.
    McCracken discarded the empty submachine guns, the air rich with the smells of oil and gun smoke. The clock in his head had started up again, telling him he needed thirty more seconds to execute the final stage of his plan. Cutting it close, then, even closer than he thought when he caught the sound of helicopters approaching overhead.

CHAPTER 8
    Natanz, Iran
    Blaine knew the choppers couldn’t possibly have been responding to an emergency call, not this fast. They must have been carrying replacements as opposed to reinforcements. Still, the two dozen or so troops likely to be inside the old Russian MI-8 helicopters would learn in mere moments what was transpiring and would surge from inside their cabins ready to join the battle.
    That left him with no choice other than to rush through the doors leading into the facility, waving his arms frantically to signal the choppers. In that moment, the side doors on both MI-8s jerked open, the troops ferried here already poised on the starting blocks with weapons steadied before them.
    McCracken backed away, pretending to be warding off debris kicked up by the rotor wash when his real intention was to reach the garbage truck currently emptying the first of several dumpsters lined up one after the other. The truck had turned up innocuously in several satellite reconnaissance photos, enough to give him an idea of where to find the last thing his plan required.
    A means of escape.
    “What do you mean he’s gone?” Minister Hosseini demanded of the Revolutionary Guard major in charge of security for the aboveground installation. “He can’t be gone !”
    “We’ve searched everywhere,” the major insisted.
    “But you sealed off the grounds. We’re in the middle of nowhere here with an electrified fence surrounding the complex. Keep looking, Major.”
    “But—”
    “You have your orders,” said Hosseini. “Now follow them.”
    The garbage truck rumbled down the last stretch of highway before the rendezvous point, just moments away now.
    “Gotta hand it to you, boss,” said Sal Belamo from behind the wheel. An ex-middleweight boxer who’d once fought Carlos Monzón for the crown, Belamo had the scars to prove it and experience dating back to the heyday of the Cold War where he specialized in close, professional-style enemy executions. A generation before, he’d actually been assigned to take out McCracken, but opted to join forces with him instead, which began a relationship that had endured ever since. “You outdid yourself this time. You ask me, anybody thinks you’re too old for this shit better throw away their watch.”
    “You agree, Indian?” McCracken asked the hulking, seven-foot figure squeezed against the door on the other side of him.
    “I’ve never owned a watch, Blainey,” said Johnny Wareagle, his oldest friend, who’d fought by his side in Vietnam and in pretty much every war since, mostly the ones nobody ever heard about. “I determined long ago that the passage of time has nothing to do with minutes and seconds.”
    “Guess we’re living proof of that, aren’t we?”
    Sal Belamo braked the truck and eased it off the main road toward the rendezvous point with the Israeli team who’d be escorting the three of them out of Iran. “This is a Mercedes, you know. Goddamn Mercedes garbage truck.”
    McCracken could only hope that the dumpster in which he’d taken refuge while Sal and Johnny completed the real drivers’ rounds contained no radioactive material.
    “I ever tell you I was supposed to be part of the whole Desert One fiasco back in 1980?” Belamo continued.
    “What happened?”
    “I got pulled after telling the suits in charge the plan was for shit. They took offense to that. Wasn’t one of my better days.”
    “Just like this isn’t going to be one of Iran’s better ones,” McCracken said, turning to Wareagle. “Got that satellite phone,