Excerpt from A Colder War by Charles Cumming, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"How long do you think we'll have to wait?" Landau said. He was chewing noisily.

"As long as it takes."

The American sniffed, broke the seal on one of the packets of cigarettes. There was a beat of silence between them.

"You think they'll stick to the plan or come down on the one hundred?"

"Who knows?"

Wallinger stood at the window again, sighted the mountain through the binoculars. Nothing. Just a tank crawling across the plain: making a statement to the PKK, making a statement to Iran. Wallinger had the Mercedes license plate committed to memory. Shakhouri had a wife, a daughter, a mother sitting in an SIS-funded flat in Cricklewood. They had been waiting for days. They would want to know that their man was safe. As soon as Wallinger saw the vehicle, he would message London with the news.

"It's like clicking refresh over and over."

Wallinger turned and frowned. He hadn't understood Landau's meaning. The American saw his confusion and grinned through his thick brown beard. "You know, all this waiting around. Like on a computer. When you're waiting for news, for updates. You click refresh on the browser?"

"Ah, right." Of all people, at that moment Paul Wallinger thought of Tom Kell's cherished maxim: "Spying is waiting."

He turned back to the window.

Perhaps HITCHCOCK was already in Dogubayazit. The D100 was thick with trucks and cars at all times of the day and night. Maybe they'd ignored the plan to use the mountain road and come on that. There was still a dusting of snow on the peaks; there had been a landslide only two weeks earlier. American satellites had shown that the pass through Besler was clear, but Wallinger had come to doubt everything they told him. He had even come to doubt the messages from London. How could Amelia know, with any certainty, who was in the car? How could she trust that HITCHCOCK had even made it out of Tehran? The exfil was being run by the Cousins.

"Smoke?" Landau said.

"No, thanks."

"Your people say anything else?"

"Nothing."

The American reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He appeared to read a message, but kept the contents to himself. Dishonor among spies. HITCHCOCK was an SIS Joe, but the courier, the exfil, the plan to pick Shakhouri up in Dogubayazit and fly him out of Van, that was all Langley. Wallinger would happily have run the risk of putting him on a plane from Imam Khomeini to Paris and lived with the consequences. He heard the snap of the American's lighter and caught a backdraft of tobacco smoke, then turned to the mountains once again.

The tank had now parked at the side of the mountain road, shuffling from side to side, doing the Tiananmen twist. The gun turret swiveled northeast so that the barrel was pointing in the direction of Mount Ararat. Right on cue, Landau said: "Maybe they found Noah's Ark up there," but Wallinger wasn't in the mood for jokes.

Clicking refresh on a browser.

Then, at last, he saw it. A tiny bottle-green dot, barely visible against the parched brown landscape, moving toward the tank. The vehicle was so small it was hard to follow through the lens of the binoculars. Wallinger blinked, cleared his vision, looked again.

"They're here."

Landau came to the window. "Where?"

Wallinger passed him the binoculars. "You see the tank?"

"Yup."

"Follow the road up.…"

"… Okay. Yeah. I see them."

Landau put down the binoculars and reached for the video camera. He flipped off the lens cap and began filming the Mercedes through the window. Within a minute, the vehicle was close enough to be picked out with the naked eye. Wallinger could see the car speeding along the plain, heading toward the tank. There was half a kilometer between them. Three hundred meters. Two.

Wallinger saw that the tank barrel was still pointing away from the road, up toward Ararat. What happened next could not be explained. As the Mercedes drove past the tank, there appeared to be an explosion in the rear of the vehicle that lifted up the back axle and propelled the car forward in a skid with no sound. The Mercedes quickly became wreathed in black smoke and then rolled violently from the road as flames burst from the engine. There was a second explosion, then a larger ball of flame. Landau swore very quietly. Wallinger stared in disbelief.

Excerpted from A Colder War by Charles Cumming. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Cumming. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.