Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2)

by E. L. Pini

  Digital Albert, who was in the command center set up by Nora in one of the facility’s structures, easily penetrated the Tehran traffic cam CCTV used by the police, but had some difficulty taking over the city’s traffic light system, which was – as ridiculous as it may sound – primitive enough to defy the specialized hacking tools in his disposal. Instead he took over the municipal power grid, so we at least had the option to shut down the traffic lights if necessary.

  “Go over the plan?” Uzi asked and stretched his arms, popping his knuckles.

  “Uzi, if you think I’m fucking up, push back as hard as you can.”

  His eyes widened and he raised a hand like a traffic cop. “Wait, this isn’t the plan approved by the DM?”

  “Similar to it,” I said, and explained that I was unwilling to give Mordechai full access to all stages of the plan. Uzi looked at me and nodded.

  “Okay, go over the plan?” he asked, rescuing me from the need to explain further, and I thanked whoever raised this boy and did such a fine job of it.

  “All right. We hit him in the evening, on his way home from work. According to the pattern there’s over a ninety percent chance that this happens some time between six thirty and seven thirty. It’s just him and the bodyguard, no Ali and no Faiza. He comes out from here,” I pointed at the department of engineering building at the Shahid Beheshti campus, “which means we’ll need a lookout in a vehicle here. His bodyguard picks him up here, at the bottom of the physics building staircase, and they leave from gate 10. Then he crosses Shahid Square and turns onto Daneshju Boulevard. Our lookout follows and reports his location.”

  I slid down the digital map we were crouching over. “He takes a right, here, into Ostad Nejat street. Here we change vehicles. After that he passes the Lebanese embassy. Keeps going.” I slid the map down again.

  “About twenty-five minutes, then our first vehicle takes over again. Here, on the corner of Razashi, near Bamdad Café, Sa’id and Mustafa from the Kurdish team will be waiting in the van, trying to revive their dead engine. Sa’id will signal the professor to stop. The professor won’t have much of a choice because the van will be blocking the road and creating a bottleneck.

  “Sa’id miraculously fixes the engine and drives the van onto the road just before the professor’s Mercedes. He takes a right here, on Tajrish. Once he finished the turn, Jojo comes in here,” I moved my finger accordingly, “with the heavy truck, and lodges himself right in the Mercedes’ ass. Jimbo is parked on this corner here with his Toyota. The minute Jojo moves past him he moves in close to him, so no one else can get in front of the truck and get between it and the Mercedes. He can park it in the middle of the road for all I care – no one gets past that Toyota.

  “By this point the professor’s in his final sandwich. Miriam and Muhammad the paramedic are sitting in a nearby café. He has appropriate training and experience in administering injections. They will walk hand-in-hand, slowly, so that they can reach the professor’s truck just as he gets rammed from behind by Jojo’s truck. By this point, it’s up to Jojo’s momentum – if it’s enough, at this point the professor will be departed. Either way, Miriam and Muhammad will run to the rescue – the syringe is tiny, small enough to fit in Muhammad’s palm. That’s it, more or less. Miriam and the historian stay there, try to resuscitate him, and stay to provide the cops with some very unreliable witness accounts. Jojo, Mustafa and Sa’id leave their cars there and escape through this back yard, into the park – Jamil will be waiting there with his cab, and they head westward. Jimbo will back out his Toyota and take this road east. If Albert manages to shut down the traffic lights for the duration, it’ll take them hours to realize what happened, localize it, get a tow truck in there and move the truck.”

  Uzi was listening intently.

  “Another small thing,” I added. “First here and then here, on the adjoining roofs in the corner of Zafaraniyeh and Tajrish, Fatima will be waiting with her SR-25 marksman rifle. She’s been training here in camp and shot some nice clusters from 550 and 850 yards. And here she has… what? Twenty and twenty-five yards? The Raven’s down here with his RPG in case our buddies from the VAJA or the Basij decide to make an appearance. What’re your thoughts?”

  “Seems pretty solid,” said Uzi. “I’m mostly concerned about the injection. A syringe can fall, it can break. I think we need to consider potential issues with that, think about where he can jab him without getting noticed, a course of action if the professor’s car starts, or other people come in from the street to help and Muhammad doesn’t have time to administer.”

  “Yes, well noted – you’re a credit to your trainers. That’s why we have these guys,” I pointed at the roofs.

  “The Raven can fire directly at the Mercedes, at about 90 yards it’s a sure hit. It’ll be louder and messier, but the professor will be neutralized.”

  We went over communication protocols and primary and secondary escape routes, tying up any loose ends. After about thirty minutes, Uzi looked up from the screen and declared, “I think we have it all. Beer?”

  “Beer!” I said, and pulled a cold American six-pack from the fridge. I left the money for Jesus on the counter and we headed down to Nora and Albert’s command center.

  “Check out Uncle Sam over here,” Nora teased as I handed her a can. She opened it and asked, “How may I help you, good sirs?”

  “A black-out window,” I said, “for tomorrow. Get me one.”

  * * *

  9Some gibberish along the lines of “motherfucker, baby girl”.

  10Order of Battle. The hierarchical organization, command structure, strength, disposition of personnel, and equipment of units and formations of an armed force.

  11In the IDF, shoulder-mounted missile launchers are nicknamed “Ravens.”

  9.

  Nora found our window, and we took off, Uzi and I and the team. The Iranian border was swarming with the finest radar and aerial defense systems the Russians had to offer, but a low-altitude stealth aircraft, taking a meandering course through the peaks and valley of the Zagros, should do the trick.

  O’Driscoll’s MH-60 Black Hawk sliced through the desert gloom almost soundlessly. The insanely low sound signature of this stealth helicopter created the eerie impression of an airy, weightless sort of floating, as if the monotonous roar of the rotor and engine was what gave the helicopter its fortitude.

  The passengers were quiet, withdrawn, as if they feared that the helicopter would be thrown off balance by the sound of their voices. So unlike the racket on the flights back home, where seconds after taking off into enemy territory, the commotion starts – nervous jokes, banter, continuing until the chopper reaches the border of the destination country, and then slowly dying down when the mission leader takes charge and for the millionth time, goes over the rules of engagement. We’d had considerable help from the locals during the division’s previous operations in Iran, but never such an assortment of Pêshmerga, Kurds and Mujahedin Khalq Iranian students. The silence that filled the helicopter only stressed their discomfort, their estrangement.

  Forty minutes into Iranian territory. Our pilot, Crazy Jule, raised his hand to signal a “ten,” followed by a “five,” “three,” “two,” and “one.” A light quickly flickered on the surface, on and off. Jule glanced back at me. I nodded and he began his descent. Someone on the ground – hopefully Jimbo, who had gone out a day ahead of us – turned on an IR marker and Jule went down toward it. Another flicker confirmed he was landing in the right spot. Uzi came out first, jumping out of the helicopter with his weapon ready, and make a quick sweep. The rest of us came out following his all-clear. The chopper had landed some eighty yards from a complex of dilapidated sheds, which probably used to belong to some farm in the vicinity that had long since dried up and eventually been abandoned. There was a huge harrow that had been eaten by rust and toppled over, and now looke
d like a dinosaur skeleton.

  “Welcome to Iran!” Jimbo boomed, and came away from the dried-up tree he had been crouching by, flickering briefly with his flashlight. We all lowered our weapons and Uzi went toward Jimbo and shook his hand. Jimbo pulled him in for a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek. Uzi quickly recovered and kissed him back. A diesel engine rattled into life somewhere, and a battered Toyota Hilux emerged from one of the distant sheds and stopped near the helicopter.

  “Okay, men, let’s get this gear unloaded!” Uzi said.

  “There are men here?” jeered Fatima.

  “Not for you,” Jojo said, “you’ll have to settle for the Kurds.”

  Jimbo shoved Fatima aside and pressed his handgun to Jojo’s forehead, “If it weren’t for the Kurds you’d be – “

  “He’d be what?” snarled Rassan, his own gun resting against Jimbo’s ear.

  Uzi followed the exchange nervously, seeming hesitant. I stepped in between Jimbo and Jojo and took Jimbo’s Glock, then Rassan’s.

  “Anyone who has a problem can get on the chopper and go back to base. If you’re here to work, then get to work. We have gear to carry.”

  “Nobody lays a finger on my gun,” Fatima declared and hurried to pull out the aluminum case of her new rifle. Rassan shrugged and went digging for his RPG, Jojo hauled the bomb rack, and the others unloaded the explosives and the wooden crates containing the frag grenades, some car bombs and three bags with IEDs that I had added with the intention of activating them from the getaway vehicles if a car chase were to ensue. The Hilux’s shock absorbers had been replaced with gas-charged fox absorbers that made it 4 inches higher, allowing for a metal plate to be attached to the undercarriage, creating a hidden cavity. We wrapped up the weapons and ammo in old wool blankets and hid them in there, smearing the undercarriage with grease and cow dung. The back of the truck was loaded with crates of green and red bell peppers covered in an old canvas sheet. Jimbo joined the driver and they headed to Tehran, to the wholesale vegetable warehouse in the east of the city, where the weapons and ammo would be stashed until needed.

  Muhammad went to the nearby shed and returned in a white University of Tehran van. Rassan got in the driver’s seat, and the rest of the group followed him. Uzi told Rassan to get out of the car and wait. Rassan said that would be a waste of precious time, and Uzi reminded him again that we’d agreed to space out the departure of the vehicles by at least 30 minutes, to separate the team and the weapons as much as possible. Jule retrieved a cooler from the helicopter with a cold six-pack of Budweiser and some ham and cheese sandwiches. “Eat up before we leave,” I suggested, but they were too tense to eat. I opened a beer and reinforced one of the sandwiches with the content of another. Miriam lit a cigarette, and Uzi practically lunged at her to put it out, and ordered her to go smoke in the shed, which she begrudgingly did.

  At this point, I was starting to get genuinely worried. This build-up of unprofessional behavior and poor discipline, combined with the already existing alienation between the teams, could easily turn this into a clusterfuck. If conditions were different, I would call off the op, disassemble the teams, and reorganize. But we were dealing with a live nuclear arms deal – this could be over in days or in hours. Postponing was out of the question. Hamdani must be neutralized, now. The operation wasn’t even a particularly tricky one; but every time I went over the plan, his kid Ali popped up in the frame like an overused extra in a crappy movie.

  “Shall we?” asked Uzi.

  “You shall, Uzi.” His gaze met mine. “Go on. I’m gonna go with them.”

  “What? You… you’re kidding. You can’t – it won’t –”

  “I know it won’t, but it’ll have to. I’m not leaving this mishmash militia unsupervised.”

  “But you said they were ready. You said they’d perform as good as we would. Better.”

  “Yes. Those are all words that I said.”

  “Is this you taking them back? Were they wrong? Rassan and Jojo and Fatima – we know these guys, they’ve carried out more than enough projects for us to earn our trust.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Yeah but what?” urged Uzi, whose tone was beginning to rise.

  I shot him a hard look. “I’m not leaving them to their own devices. I’m going.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Mi’a fi almi’a.” I grinned, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Okay, you’re going. I’m going with you.”

  “No you’re not. I need you at the command center.”

  “You’re cooking up a mess here not even Froyke can unravel. You know that, right? This is a mistake.”

  “Sometimes the mistake is the only option.”

  Uzi got to his feet. I reached out a hand, and he pushed it aside and hugged me.

  “This is about the kid, isn’t it? You want to keep him safe.”

  “Get going, Uzi!”

  He nodded and signaled Jule, who was sitting off to the side and cleaning his pipe, and then shook my hand goodbye.

  I sat in the back seat of the van next to Miriam, who was already dozing off.

  “Go!” I said to Rassan.

  “You’re coming with us?”

  “As you see.”

  “Will you be commanding the operation?”

  “You’re in charge. I’m just here to help.”

  “Wonderful! Are staying at a hotel or with us at the vegetable warehouse? There’s some nice rooms there. Great air conditioning.”

  “I’m with you guys.”

  “Good. Go take a piss if you gotta. It’s a three-hour drive, no stops.”

  He started the car and we drove into the thick darkness. The snoring that soon filled the air calmed me. Despite everything, these Phalanges had some pre-combat habits I was familiar with. “The van, why’s it Tehran University?” I asked. Rassan smiled and said that the Iranians treat universities with a sort of reverence – even the cops.

  I slipped the Blundstones from my feet and closed my eyes. Yesterday’s surveillance footage played through my head – I’d seen it three times by now and remembered it more or less by heart. 17:00 the professor comes to pick Ali up from the music academy. He patiently waits for him by the lawn. Ali comes out and runs toward his father, overjoyed – “Baba! Baba!”

  The professor hugs him tightly. They walk for a while and stop by the park. The professor dives toward the grass and Ali joins him. The professor demonstrates an army crawl and Ali tries as well. His backside is too high up and the professor tells him what to watch for – Ali corrects his posture. The professor happily moves faster. Ali scurries in his wake. The professor looks back at Ali as he crawls and slips, elbows first, into a muddy puddle. The first time I watched this, I expected annoyance, perhaps some angry cursing, but he flipped over in the puddle, covered himself in mud, then got up and ran at full speed towards a wildly laughing Ali, making various snorts and grunts. He picked him up hugged him, covering him in mud, and the two of them dropped into the puddle – intentionally this time – and rolled around in it, laughing. At some point the camera started shaking; the lookout taking the video must’ve been laughing, as well. When there was no more film to recall, Froyke came into my mind. What are you doing here? I asked. Why did you come? He hushed me impatiently with a raised finger and said, I just wanted to remind you that this lovely family man you’ve been swooning over is responsible for the death of dozens of Israeli civilians. If we let him continue… well, surely you realize where I’m going with this.

  I do. I swear I do. But just look how much his kid loves him.

  Imaginary Froyke shrugged. Even Hitler had Eva Brown, he said.

  10.

  Rasputin’s legs were up on the desk.

  “Sabah al-kheir mon General, kif halkum?”

  “Sabah a-nur mon Colonel, but why are you addressing me in Arab
ic? Allow me to remind you that, while we are Muslims, we are hardly Arabs.”

  “Of course, mon General, and the difference is clear – you are a force to be reckoned with, while those Bedouins remain whiny pussies. This is precisely the reason I am calling you with this matter. I was hoping for some advice.”

  “The great Colonel Rasputin wishes for my advice? I am honored.”

  Rasputin was forced to count to ten and muster every fiber of empathy in his possession simply to swallow the sarcasm dripping from the general’s response and continue with his sales pitch.

  “We are frankly concerned, Major General. Your Jewish friends have about – listen closely – fifty-six missiles armed with hydrogen bombs, twenty-five megatons each. Yes, that is the most recent intel – got it fresh from Naryshkin this morning. You don’t even have a single warhead at your disposal. The Jews’ government is fucked, politicians snapping at the Prime Minister’s ankles, he’s feeling the pressure, and he’s shit under pressure. Remember what Obama said about him? This chicken shit’ll make war just to save his own ass. So what are you doing about all this?”

  “You know precisely what we are doing,” said the General. “You are intimately familiar with our agenda. I understand your cyber division already has it.”

  “That’s not my department,” said Rasputin.

  “It does not matter. The true agenda was written by hand – my hand – and it is kept in a safe location.”

  “Not that warehouse in South Tehran the Jews have already looted, I hope,” said Rasputin.

  “Have you called to insult me, Colonel?”

  “Not at all. I apologize. I called to offer you a nuclear solution, ready and immediate – no research and development, no Jews, no Americans biting your head off. These zhyds are fucking the whole world.”