Rock and Roll, Part Four.

I woke up staring at a white tile ceiling, listening to something beep rhythmically. My head was fuzzy.

What happened?

"Where am I? Kahlan? What happened?"

"You got shot, Soren. We're in a Catholic hospital in Azerbaijan."

"You're here?"

"Yeah. Bushwackers's here too."

"Bro, what happened?"

"You nearly completed the mission with that fuckin' nuke of yours."

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah, so apparently the Ayatollah was hosting a party that night at Khomenei's mosque. That bomb you dropped leveled the building, took out 11 of the 23 Islamists we were paid to hunt. PJ's team hit one of the safehouses the next night, got 6 more."

"Why are you here?"

"I got called in to keep an eye on your until they can move you. Wut's team went in two days ago, they're still in-theatre with PJ's team."

"How long was I out?"

"You've been in a medically-induced coma for three days. You got winged by a fuckin' Ma Deuce on your right leg. You nearly bled out on the plane, and these nuns put five pints of blood into you while they stitched on your leg. Then that shit got infected, and you nearly died again. You're still sick, but I told the doctors that we're moving you out of the area before news of our presence leaks to the press."

"Well, all that from a near miss. If it had hit me, it would have blown me in half."

Bushwacker yanked the the blanket off the bed. My leg was bandaged, but it was obvious I'd have a huge, puckered scar for the rest of my life. The round had definitely hit me, but another two inches and it would have missed me entirely. He grabbed the chart from the foot of the bed.

"You damn near lost your leg, asshole."

"How long until I walk again?"

"You start PT as soon as the doctors say the muscles have healed enough." He took a deep breath. "Soren, that's going to be nearly a month. You're going to be off active duty for a couple months at the least. You're going to have a limp, and running may never be possible."

I started laughing. "Well, that's not too bad. I was worried this was serious."

Kahlan looked at me worriedly, then Bushwacker chuckled.

"The Mad Hatter's going to be fine, ma'am. If he's alive enough to laugh, he'll pull through."

"Mad Hatter?"

"Just another name we have for this asshole."

I fell asleep again.

Panamajack's team had inserted flawlessly. Splashing into the resevoir in a line 150 yards long, they'd regrouped and come onshore in a well-rehearsed manner. Sneaking into the utility yard at the dam itself, they'd stolen a utility van and driven into Tehran at night. There they'd selected a storage facility from a list of predetermined safe houses, backed the van in, and slept.

News of the bombing had greeted them with their morning communiques from the Chateau. Locally, they'd been able to determine who'd been killed, and had relayed to the Chateau that almost all of the primary targets had been wiped. Along with the continuing PR fallout from the porn video, Iran was erupting in chaos.

They'd hit the primary safehouse the following night, taking the chance that the Islamic leadership would hunker down there the first night, then move on. They were right, they'd gotten six more of the bastards. All of them had been executed, on their knees. The message was simple: They died like weaklings, not in battle.

Along with the primaries, they'd also recovered some intelligence that none of us had wanted to find. Not only had Iran been pursuing nukes, which everyone knew, they'd actually made some. Not in the megaton range, thankfully, nor especially small, but they had at least three Little Boy-type bombs. Small enough to put in a moving van, big enough to wipe out a city, simple enough that an idiot could set one off.

That information had been passed on to the US almost immediately, who had thanked PBE, then given prompt orders to find and kill the last six guys and then work on the nukes. Luckily for us, PBE's second team was ready to go, and was inserted the next day, although they had to swim in from the Caspian.

The decapitation of Iran's Islamic leadership had caused the US military to advance it's airstrike timetable by two days. Anything made of steel started getting bombed the night after Wut's team was inserted. By the third day, Iran's air force was reduced to scrap, and US fighter-bombers were given free reign to kill anything they wanted, any time they wanted.

That's a nasty environment for a pair of 8-man tactical teams to work in. Air force pilots simply don't give a shit if they kill some mercs, most of them view us as amoral assholes who profit from war. Consequently, instead of being able to do their job, they hunkered down and waited for the flyboys to calm down.

That turned out to cost us. Realizing that there were assassination teams in the area after the first safehouse had gotten hit, the Islamic leadership had abandoned it's plan to run from house to house, and instead hooked up with a detachment of the Quds Force for safety. The only thing worse than hitting a moving target is hitting one protected by a detachment of an elite unit.

The troopers suddenly found themselves tracking a moving target that they couldn't come close to defeating.

On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot easier to find a group of 80 than a group of 8. The Islamic leadership had traded concealment for cover, and it was going to cost them. The Americans had started the ground war the day the air war quieted down, and the imams were going to run out of space to run around in damned soon.

It was Wut's team that came up with the idea to draw them out. He'd realized that they'd run unless Quds force could be drawn into attacking them, and if they could be baited enough to commit, we could drop the hammer on them like Thor fighting a serpent.

The biggest, shiniest thing left in Iran was the nuclear enrichment center at Natanz. The US was planning on taking it intact, they wanted proof that Iran had nukes. The couldn't bomb anywhere near it for political reasons, the last thing they could afford was to irradiate part of the country they'd decided to free the shit out of.

A pair of white delivery fans left Tehran the next morning, and drove to Tehran. As scenic drives go, it was rathe boring, they passed little but bombed-out military buildings and burning vehicles. Four hours later, they pulled off the highway a few miles short the Natanz Nuclear Enrichment Facility, or whatever the Iranians were calling it.