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muzzle on my—”
    â€œHey!” the Colonel shouted. “Am I interrupting something?!”
    Pancho became silent.
    â€œBecause if I am,” the Colonel continued, “I’ll stop interrupting!”
    The three Outcasts sat silent. “Please, we’re ready for the brief,” Alex said.
    â€œGood!” The Colonel switched his projector and notebook computer from standby to run, then began his PowerPoint presentation. “Gentlemen, this is the real deal. The Iranian government is continuing its work on building nukes. STUXNET, the cyberattack that shut off the electricity to their centrifuges, slowed them down, but it didn’t stop them.”
    The world knew about STUXNET now. A bunch of computer geeks in the United States and Israel created an electronic worm that actually sped up the Iranian centrifuges under the very noses of the Iranian scientists. While speed was often a good thing, in this case it served to destroy the centrifuges. Once the Iranians caught on they developed countermeasures and repaired the damage. What happened next wasn’t known worldwide.
    â€œDelta have gone in more than once and blown up power lines, disrupting their enrichment process and mangling more centrifuges,” the Colonel said. “Due to certain political factors that I won’t get into here, a government not ours has taken a more direct approach and assassinated several of Iran’s nuclear scientists.”
    Alex looked around the group and saw knowing smiles.
    â€œThe success of these efforts has given the Iranians pause. We have intel that they are seriously concerned their nuclear enrichment program, also known as ‘weapons,’ won’t pan out. And so they’ve created a backup plan.”
    The smiles vanished. This was something new.
    â€œAn asset code-named Leila has told us that the Iranians havebeen recruiting bioweapons experts from the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and other countries and set up a lab deep in the Lut Desert. One of the NSA’s satellites picked up radio conversations confirming the lab. The NGA used their satellite to photograph a site that is two hundred klicks northwest of a small town called Abadi Abad. The lab appears to be well guarded.” The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency photographed a site that was 124 miles northwest of Abadi Abad. When Alex first joined the Navy, the military mixing of metric measurements with U.S. measurements seemed confusing, but the military used metrics to standardize operations with NATO countries, especially ground distance. Other measurements, such as altitude, remained unchanged. Now that he was a veteran, the metric mixing seemed natural.
    The Colonel continued. “We aren’t sharing this with our allies in the region at this time.”
    Pancho raised his hand. “Sir? Why not? The Israelis would have no trouble airing out a few biologists,” Pancho said.
    The Colonel shook his head. “Should an unnamed government get wind of this site there is a high probability that they would launch a strike against Iran just like they did when they hit Iraq’s nuclear plant in 1981.”
    â€œOperation Opera,” Alex said, remembering the details. “A bunch of F-16s and F-15s flew in and bombed the Osirak reactor just before it went online. Pretty much a success. One of the pilots even went on to become an astronaut.”
    â€œThis isn’t a game show,” the Colonel said, huffing. “But yes, that strike was successful, most of all because it didn’t set off a massive war in the Middle East. If a certain country were to try that again, however, the chances of the Middle East going up in flames are a lot more likely. And that, gentlemen, is something we’re trying very hard to avoid, which is where you come in.”
    The Colonel clicked to the next screen, which revealed a map of Afghanistan.
    â€œWe’re flying to Afghanistan, where