by Tom Avito
CHAPTER 17
London - (England), 01/17/2012 08:37 A.M.
-“Jackals” –
There were a few knocks on the door.
“Mr. Vestwood?”
“Yes, come in,” he answered.
“We just received some new information, we intercepted an SMS coming from an unknown foreign cell phone. It was destined for our confidential Ermes number, it was sent from a southwestern area of Iran, within a range of no more than two hundred kilometers from Al-ʿAmārah. It was never received, the Iranian network is screened, but luckily the folks at the Al-ʿAmārah Interception Unit were able to record it.”
The man was wearing a white shirt and a tie and his hair was impeccably combed. He had to be a newbie, just graduated with flying colors, ready to conquer the world with his ambition. With the smug look of the student who completes an assignment first, he handed over the piece of paper where a few lines were printed, and stood still in front of the desk, in the hopes of receiving a small sign of praise for the result he had achieved.
“Al-ʿAmārah in Iraq, Sir,” he added.
“Rollings, I’m perfectly aware of where Al-ʿAmārah is. Thank you, you may go,” Vestwood dryly dismissed him.
Chris Vestwood read the message, then he stood up, thoughtful, and walked to the large window in his office that overlooked the Thames. The gloomy sky perfectly matched the color of the river’s water, flowing languidly in its bed, while the intense but orderly traffic on Vauxhall Bridge confirmed rush hour on a regular weekday.
The British headquarters of CIIS had been set up at Vauxhall Cross. The Military Intelligence Section 6 shared a small part of the western wing of the famous building with the new body of the Coordination International Intelligence Services. Chris Vestwood was working at the Foreign Office when he was offered a position as supervisor of this project. The new body, much wanted by the G8 member states, with the exception of Russia, was supposed to act as an element of unification and coordination for the foreign intelligence services of Western countries. In a scenario where Islamic terrorism was expanding and growing stronger, where the rate of both well-planned, large-scale attacks and small destructive actions by makeshift cells of lone wolves was constantly increasing, a close-knit collaboration and a constant exchange of information between the various national intelligence services were crucial. The overriding yet laborious goal was to contrast this phenomenon, that many identified as a true “hybrid and asymmetrical” war, fought in small pieces all over the world. Considering his history in the Mi6 as an operational officer in the Middle Eastern area, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported his nomination to chief supervisor of the British Agency and the Intelligence and Security Committee only confirmed his position. The central headquarters, from which the various branches that acted as a connection with the national services forked out, were located in Berlin. The heart of the CIIS was there, the peak to which all national emanations had to refer, the brain on which all directives falling onto the single services of the member states had to depend.
But as usual, good intentions are one thing, and actions are quite another. Beyond the various jealousies that existed between the security bodies and organizations inside the single countries, the independence of action, the importance and power achieved by some of them such as the CIA or the Mi6 itself would never be set aside, and no supranational body would ever have the prerogative to impose their own decisions on them. The thought itself was pure utopia.
Still on his feet, he picked up the receiver and dialled an internal number: “Rollings. Come in,” said Vestwood, and hung up without waiting for an answer.
After a few seconds, the young man walked in and closed the door behind him.
“Who did you tell about the Ermes message?”
“Noone, Sir. I came straight to you with the message the Al-ʿAmārah unit sent us just minutes ago.”
“OK. We did the right thing to alert them after the Black Scorpion debacle,” Vestwood acknowledged.
Then he added, “Get Phil Sanders in Langley on the phone, and then the people at the Al-ʿAmārahh Interception Unit. Who’s the boss down there?”
“Starley, Sir,” his collaborator promptly replied.
“Good. Make the two calls from the anonymous protected line. And Rollings… Don’t forget, not a word.”
“Certainly, Mr. Vestwood. I’ll get to it immediately,” he said as he left.
A minute went by before his phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Sir, I’ll put you through with Sanders,” Rollings informed him.
“It must be really important for you to call me from this line,” said the American on the other side of the ocean.
“It is. I have news, our friends are in Shahrak Bakhtiari. A tiny village in SouthWestern Iran.”
“How do you know that?” The CIA man asked.
“He managed to get in touch,” the British man replied.
“He’s good, that rookie you recruited”
“We weren’t expecting it either. He’s a tough one.”
“Are we sure that it’s him and that he’s with the others, too?” Said Sanders, expressing some doubt.
“So it seems. Do you have a free contraption to go check what’s happening down there?” Vestwood asked.
“Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be able to tell you what color the sheep’s eyes are in that village.”
“I hope my instinct is wrong,” Vestwood continued, unconvinced.
“Give me the time to orient it to the right coordinates and we’ll find out.”
“Sanders…” Vestwood added, sounding concerned.
“Tell me.”
“I haven’t told Berlin yet. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Vestwood confessed.
“You know, though, that if the situation is compromised, we’ll intervene,” Sanders replied, reminding him of the possible consequences of an irrecoverable situation.
“Yes, I know. It all went wrong, starting from Black Scorpion, and when things start off bad, they usually end up worse.”
“I’ll keep you posted as soon as we manage to figure out what’s happening, in the meanwhile I have to prepare a possible intervention. I’m sorry but I must alert the King Khalid Aviation in Arabia.”
“Do what you must, Phil, we’ve done all we could to get them out of there. The stakes are too high for us to dawdle,” the British man concluded, disheartened but resolved.
What the Americans saw of Shahrak Bakhtiari through the reconnaissance satellite was a village under siege. It had completely surrendered to the military forces, the Wharzes and Nino wouldn’t stand a chance. After a phone call to his superior, Sanders got the go-ahead.
Seven minutes later, an F117 Stealth took off from the King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia. A thousand kilometers away, on the Persian Gulf, the tanker was already in flight, waiting to refuel in order to allow the fighter-bomber to complete the mission and return to the base. In its inner cargo bay, the Nighthawk carried two laser-guided bombs weighing over a thousand kilos each, with an overall destructive potential that would have been enough to wipe any trace of the whole village from the Iranian ground.
An hour and forty minutes after Vestwood’s call to Langley, Shahrak Bakhtiari was burned to the ground. No one had the time to realize what was raining down from an altitude of a thousand meters. It all disappeared in a whirlwind of fire and incandescent gases as innocent souls ascended to the skies for the only fault of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The man who had taken the role of executioner in the name of an inescapable cause was just another mortal soul. According to some, he was in the right place, at the right time.
As he feared, an hour and forty five minutes after his call to Langley, Vestwood received Sander’s follow-up call informing him of how the Shahrak Bakhtiari matter had ended.
“Vestwood?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“It’s all over,” Sanders confirmed, his voice s
terile and cold.
“I imagined as much. We’ve lost track of the cell phone. The one we received the message from. It’s no longer emitting a signal.”
“This is how it was supposed to go, Vestwood, we were prepared, we knew,” Sanders said, almost as if he wanted to console the British man.
There was a moment of silence in which they both spared a thought not so much for the people, but for their own actions, the mistakes they had made. In that time, cynicism took over any form of feeling, provided that they’d ever had feelings.
Vestwood went on: “Will the Iranians be able to trace the disaster to who and what caused it?”
“No. Our backs should be completely covered. The devices are designed with materials that shatter into pieces upon exploding and melt at high temperatures, so that tracing the remains back to the builder and the sender is impossible. It will be just as difficult to pinpoint where they’ve come from, the trace left by the Nighthawk on Iranian radars shouldn’t be more noticeable than that of a pigeon.”
“They’ll blame Israel, as usual,” Vestwood added.
“One more, one less… it won’t make much of a difference to them,” Sanders said.
CHAPTER 18
In the proximity of Sendal (Iran), 01/18/2012 3:00 A.M.
-“The Minotaur” –
He kept them moving through the night, only allowing for a short stop in which they zeroed the supplies of water and rancid cheese donated by the old man in Shahrak, who was now just a picture embedded in the memories of a few people. For the first few hours they moved on foot to relieve the tired, hungry animals; the last quarter of the waning moon made the night dark and the scarce visibility forced them to advance very slowly.
He noticed that the ground was becoming steeper; as soon as he found a spot where it wasn’t as arduous he stopped and turned to Alexander.
“Gehirn, wait here, I’ll go see if it’s possible to walk down further.”
A grumble from the exhausted scientist was the only answer he got and the only thing he heard before taking the next step.
“Dammit! It’s so dark that I can’t even see what’s under my feet.”
He moved on cautiously. The dry bed of a wadi could easily become a death trap, especially in that season, when rare but sudden thunderstorms could cause real cloudbursts. The wadi could fill up quickly, the water sweeping over everything in its wake - being in the wrong place could be fatal to unprepared wanderers.
Nino assessed this danger but decided to lead them down into the stream bed anyways. They walked along it, keeping close to the left bank that provided a welcome shelter from the cold wind. As long as the wadi’s path went in the same direction as their own, they wouldn’t leave it. It was the only hiding place, the only shelter the place could offer; considering that the sunrise would soon come and leave them in plain sight, that risk would be the lesser evil.
“Professor, will you explain something to me?” Nino asked, noticing he’d addressed him by his title and not his name. He wasn’t aware of the reason, but he seemed to be moving back and forth between one and the other, maybe in this circumstance it was a sign of the great respect he held for such a clever mind.
“If I can,” the German answered.
“What in the world were you working on that was so important as to cause such an uproar?”
“Are you a physicist, Nino?” The professor asked, not out of conceit, but with the sole purpose of understanding how much technical detail he could go into.
“No, unfortunately.”
“I’ll try to explain as simply as I can,” Alexander added, motivated by a strong sense of liberation in finally being able to speak about the topics that had been the source of so much misfortune. Sharing them with Nino meant sharing a small part of his discovery and letting go of something that had started out as a source of great gratification and had become an insufferable burden.
“I was working on developing filters for the treatment of wastewater in a nuclear plant, using a groundbreaking new material made up by a thin layer, only a few atoms in width, of Germanium. I discovered that if adequately modified, and I must admit that fate dealt me a fair amount of luck in this, the filters were able to hold back not just chemical and organic pollutants, but also the particles released by radioactive sources. The results were remarkable, with all types of radioactive decay. The particles were trapped in the filters, and the water came out perfectly pure.”
“You want me to believe that you purifying some water is the reason why they kidnapped your son and you and they are risking an international conflict?” Nino interrupted.
“No, that’s not it. I went further.”
“You’ve lost me,” Nino added.
“I thought that the same principle could be applicable to enrichment and fission processes. My filters made it possible to cut in half the centrifuge times for uranium enrichment. Better yet, in fission, I employed used filters, saturated with particles that are, let’s say… compatible with the ones released during this procedure, with the end result that the initial trapped particles cancelled out the last ones. They bonded with them, absorbed them, generating a harmless stable isotope,” Wharz concluded.
“Are you telling me that you basically managed to eliminate radioactive waste from nuclear fission?” Nino asked, appalled.
“Indeed, that was the result. Zero waste. Surprising, isn’t it?”
“My God! Surprising is an understatement. We’re talking clean energy!”
“Well, the production risks would persist, but it would be possible to obtain eco-compatible energy with zero environmental impact. Not to mention the possible applications for germanene and bidimensional materials. Their uses would revolution all scientific fields, from chip technology to medicine, from biology to physics. Can you imagine, obtaining clean water from polluted sources, building super-performing batteries or high-speed microchips for quantum computers, or fighting viruses and bacteria that are currently deadly? Sadly, it’s just as clear for warfare…”
“Now I understand,” Nino said.
“I’m the one who’s lost now,” the professor replied.
“Everyone who is after you, Alexander, only has two options, one is getting you and your discoveries with you, the other is making sure that no one else will ever have access to them. That’s why they’ve tried to wipe us off the face of the earth.”
“You mean those explosions… were meant for us… to get rid of us?”
“Yes.”
“How could the Iranians know that we were in Shahrak Bakhtiari, and why should they have to burn down a whole village? They could easily have caught us. Two men, a child and two damned camels! What chances could we stand against armed men?”
“Two dromedaries, not camels,” Nino corrected him.
“We’re still talking about obnoxious beasts!” Wharz rebutted.
“These beasts might save your son’s and your lives, with a bit of luck. The thing is that the Iranians didn’t do it, professor! My friend Bagheli didn’t know where we were hiding.”
“But who did, then? Who else wants us…”
“Silence! Stop,” Nino interrupted him, picking up a patter of footsteps blending in with the wind’s hiss.
He moved closer to the professor and signalled him and Nicholas to take shelter under the bank of the wadi, where the impetuous passage of water had dug an indentation. That small gully could provide the only possible shelter in the endless stretch of rocks and sand, and all they could do was hope that it would be enough.
Fate was keeping itself entertained with this endless game of hide and seek, where the stakes were too high to give up and surrender. While the Wharzes were petrified by fear, Nino jumped off his dromedary and moved on to find a spot where he could easily climb up.
He silently peeked over the bank, looking for the source of the sound that had caught his attention. In the deep darkness that surrounded him, he could clearly make out those quick steps, too quick and too clos
e. Despite the hissing gusts of wind he could tell that they were close by, just meters away. Avoiding contact would be impossible.
Then he caught a glimpse of a few moving beings, luckily not anthropomorphic, and felt relieved. Two ungulates were a few meters away, still unaware of his presence. The goats warded off the immediate danger of being found by their pursuers; all the while, they were a sign of the presence of one or more shepherds close by. He carefully retraced his steps and approached the professor, who was holding young Nicholas in his arms.
“Don’t move. There are some goats, and surely someone is with them. Stay here, in hiding, keep still and quiet… I have plan but I need some time.”
“Alone again,” Nicholas said.
“Please, get us out of here,” added the father, relapsing into a state of terrible fear.
“I won’t abandon you, you can be sure of it. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to face the last stretch of road that stands between us and the border. We’ll make it!” He answered, stroking the head of the child who was scared by the thought of seeing Nino leave once more.
“Only step up into the open if it were to start raining very hard. And head west as fast as you can,” he whispered, pointing in the direction to follow and wondering how many meters they’d manage to cover without his guidance.
“Ok. We’ll wait for you,” the professor replied, praying that they wouldn’t have to move from the small shelter.
He climbed up the bank again, pulling his only faithful Iranian friend by the reins. Several goats had arrived in a matter of minutes, he tried to bypass them and keep them at a distance, to get away from the wadi as quickly as he could, avoiding any encounters with the shepherd. This possibility was by far preferable to having to stop and exchange pleasantries with a stranger. He knew that the life of herds in such barren and poor places was marked by daily routines, the animals were herded by a young shepherd or by an old man who lacked the strength required by harder jobs, who moved along at dawn looking for a place where the animals could feed on some shrubs. It was still dark and the herd had clearly started moving not long before; this was encouraging to him, he hoped they were coming from Sendal, the westernmost village in the borderland. That would mean they were near Iraq, damn near!