The Ayatollah's Money
Page 14
Chapter 15 – The Big Guy’s Eyes Open Wide
Colonel Aliaabaadi wasn’t sure what the flunky was trying to tell him with all the facial contortion stuff: the wiggling of the eye brows and the twitching of the head, etc. The Colonel hadn’t gotten to where he had in the Revolutionary Guard Corps by being a candyass, so he grabbed the guy by the shoulder and said, “What is it, moron?”
The flunky again jerked his head towards The Ayatollah’s quarters and whispered, “Watch your ass.”
Nobody in the Colonel’s battalion ever told him to watch his ass, so this captured his attention, coming even as it did from a central compound domestic flunky. He wondered what was up with The Big Guy as he walked across the hall to the door and knocked.
“Yes?”
He entered, closed the door, and said, “Your Holiness, I have important news from the border.”
Nothing happening at the border could possibly be as important to The Big Guy as figuring out where his money went, but he realized he had to maintain a pretext of national concern and leadership. Roughly he said, “What is it?” If this had been a normal morning, automatically he would’ve sorted through the possibilities: a convoy of his had been blown up by one of the opposition forces; a convoy had been blown up by an American cruise missile fired from a depth of 500 feet by a sub somewhere near New Zealand; the Colonel’s boys had gotten hold of another CIA drone and were wondering what to do with this one; one of their mobile missile launchers camouflaged as a herd of camels had a nose cone out of which was leaking some radioactive substance; or the Guard boys had found some Israeli commandos who had crawled three hundred kilometers through the desert on their bellies, trying to infiltrate one of Iran’s nuclear sites, and were asking what the hell to do with them.
If it had been a normal morning, he would have been moderately interested in which of these possibilities the Colonel had brought to him for consideration. Now, he wasn’t interested in any of them, even slightly, but he had to pretend he was. The Colonel sensed he needed to watch his ass, just as the flunky had warned. Hesitantly he said, “We’ve captured some Israeli commandos coming across the border on their bellies. We think they were heading for the Ardekan site.”
“How far is Ardekan from where you found them?”
“About 150 kilometers.”
“They were going to crawl another 150 kilometers through the sand, and then try to get into the site?”
“That’s what we think, Your Holiness.”
“How far have they crawled so far?”
“No telling, Your Holiness. Those guys come out of nowhere.”
“How were they going to get into the site, after crawling all that way through our stinking desert?”
“They had shovels, Your Holiness. Each guy had a shovel.” The Colonel started to worry about the direction of the conversation. The dialogue didn’t sound as good now as it had earlier when he prepared mentally for the briefing.
If it had been a normal day, rather than a really bad day, The Big Guy might have found the conversation to be weird, too, but he was distracted. “So what do you want me to do? They’re soldiers, and you’re a soldier. I’m a holy guy. Shouldn’t you deal with this?”
“If they were another Islamic sect, against us, I’d deal with it. But them being Jews, and Israelis, that’s a different ballgame. That’s touchy.” He wanted to say, 'Isn’t that what you get paid to do, deal with this kind of international hot potato?' but he didn’t, remembering the ‘watch your ass’ admonition from the flunky.
The Ayatollah dragged his mind away from his missing $100 million, and asked, “What are our options?”
Aliaabaadi again thought, ‘That ain’t my job,’ but said, “We can kill them and bury them in their tracks. We can offer them in a prisoner exchange for some of our guys they have over there. Or we can turn ‘em around 180 degrees and make ‘em crawl back where they came from; pretend the whole thing never happened. Hope they wear a little more skin off their elbows and knees.”
Normally, being the bloodthirsty bastard he was, The Big Guy would have chosen the first option. But now, having been thinking of retirement, and worrying that his retirement was jeopardized by the loss of his money, he said, “Let them go. Turn ‘em around and kick ‘em in the ass, and tell ‘em to go back to our land in Jerusalem. Tell ‘em they’ll be seeing our tanks there soon.”
The Colonel, also being a bloodthirsty bastard, was a little disappointed with the decision, but at the same time, sensing something serious was going on here in the central core of the compound, he figured he didn’t need to antagonize anything or anyone by calling attention to some Zionist commandos who’d gotten pinched. Let crawling dogs lie. He said, “Yes, Boss,” and got his still intact ass out of there.
With that distraction dealt with, The Big Guy got back to serious business. His bad business. What the hell had happened to his money? Who had done this? How? Was this some mistake, or was it real?
His problem was that he didn’t have anyone he could trust to figure this out. He didn’t have a technical financial guy that could do a forensic assessment of his computer and his bank accounts, and figure out what had happened. The guy who had set up the accounts in the first place and transferred the money from the national oil accounts into the account on the Caribbean island that was named ‘St.’ something, now peacefully was sleeping with the fishes in the bottom of a well out in the Iranian hinterlands. So The Ayatollah had no go-to guy. What was he going to do?
What he did was go back into his bedroom and ring the bell for the flunky, who came running. “Yes, Your Holiness?”
“Send in one of the terrestrial virgins. The one with the big knockers.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”