“Don’t understand,” Yossi said. “They side track, make detour. Make unexpected stop. Why?”
Wallets considered for a moment, thinking it through out loud: “We were just thinking a two-part plan, mating triggers from Esfahan to nuclear fuel from Nantanz. But this is a three-part plan. Like you said, a detour.” Wallets traced the route and, yes, pure speculation: “So maybe they railed some lead boxes packed with radioactive product from Nantanz, so we couldn’t see it from space. Whatever they’ve got refined. Twenty pounds, a hundred? Didn’t have a signature. Just a moving train, provided we even had satellite cover. Then trucks from Esfahan with some kind of trigger mechanism met the train in Kermanshah, where they mated the mechanism to the payload—as we surmised. But now what?”
They watched the vehicles roll into the quarry, through the gate in a chain-link fence, which opened automatically and closed behind them. Men got out and began to wrestle with the nearest pile of drums, opening them up. The men wore military-grade protective radiation suits, hoods, and gas masks, thick booties on their feet. They moved slowly in their gear, wrestling four drums open and carefully placing the drumheads on the ground. Besides the automatic gate, the place was surrounded by a high fence, twenty feet at least, topped with razor wire and capped with klieg lights pointing both inside and out. The first thing Johnson noticed: “No guards.”
“Don’t need them. No one would want to go there,” Wallets told him.
“Looks like landfill. A waste dump?”
Wallets was impressed. “TRU waste. Transuranic. Meaning ‘between Uraniums.’ Neither here nor there, get it?”
“Not really.”
“There’s a lot of waste when you process fissionable material. You can’t use it, but you can’t flush it down the toilet either. You can put it in a New Jersey landfill or stick it in asphalt-lined drums out in the middle of—”
“I get it,” Johnson said. “So those are asphalt-lined disposal drums. With waste inside.”
Like slow-moving robots, the men moved stiffly in their protective suits, hoods, and filter-masks. The Iranians shoveled some of the contents from each drum, about half into a wheelbarrow, and then dumped the contents in a nearby pit, until all four were half empty. Then the top robot motioned to one of the others leading him back to the truck. He lifted up the flap in the back, and the two men lugged out what looked like a yard-long tube wrapped in some kind of protective metallic covering. Three other tubes inside. The protective covering fell away from the tube for a moment, and there was a glimpse of titanium—the tube shiny silver metal. Then the protective covering was wrapped back in place.
Laboriously, they slid yet another bag around the tube, but this one was thick canvas, with handles so they could carry it. A kind of cradle. You could tell the object or device was heavy, eighty or a hundred pounds. Other robotic drones came to assist.
“What in the world?” Marjorie wondered out loud.
“Those tubes are bombs,” Wallets said softly. “What kind of bombs I don’t rightly know.” He thought for a moment. “Something we haven’t seen before. My guess is some kind of mini-bomb. There’s a trigger assembly and detonation device at one end, igniting a payload.”
Now the men placed one titanium tube into an open waste drum to see if it would go in smoothly—like they wanted to see how well the tubes slid into the drums. And how much waste to remove from the drum to get a snug fit.
The slow-moving men hefted one titanium canister in its cradle from the truck. At the first drum, they paused, lowered the covered tube into the half-empty drum. The cylinder vertical, sizing the hole. Did they take out too much waste? Too little? No, just right. Thence onto the next drum. Carefully they lowered the tube into its new cocoon—making sure the hole would comfortably accommodate the canister. Then took it out again. As each titanium cylinder was the same size, they only used one for their “fitting.”
Satisfied that the poisonous drums would accommodate each of the tubes at last, they slid the now contaminated canvas cradle free of the last tube and dumped the cradle unceremoniously into the pit. The sizing tube they returned to the truck.
Marjorie nodded. “Say it’s something simple. Say the trigger at the top of the canister has fifty pounds of C-4—enough common explosive to take out a bridge or a building. But they’ve added a little bullet of highly purified plutonium—this they manufactured at the trigger place, Esfahan, the really guarded place. Say the remainder of the tube is filled with semi-refined material from Nantanz, an even larger radioactive wad. The tic-toc tube goes boom, driving an ounce of plutonium into a hundred pounds of hot, semi-refined uranium. 70 percent or 80 percent pure.”
Wallets nodded. “Pure enough to get . . . what would we call it? A semi-reaction? So when the C-4 nuke tube goes off, not only will it level a building but will drive the little bullet into the larger wad inside the canister and blow the cocoon of the waste drum for a mile in every direction. A radioactive cloud. Fallout. The ultimate dirty bomb.”
Already the other slow-moving handlers set about sealing the half-empty drums, pounding the tops back, then crimping the lids tight with heavy pincers. Finally, they hefted them on hand-trucks, wheeling them up an aluminum portable ramp into another truck. Soon all four drums were inside. The men wriggled out of their protective gear, leaving them on the ground, then climbed into their vehicles. The trucks’ engines gunned, belching exhaust, and they rolled out the automatic gate.
Marjorie completed the circle. “So they came here right on the border to insert the device in a drum. Step three: make it fit. Sink your tic-toc tube in Transuranic waste, all inside a fifty-gallon asphalt-lined waste drum. Take it out again. Ship it in pieces. Reassemble and arm it near the intended target.”
“And . . . hide it?” She glanced at the Turk, with a touch of doubt. “What do you think?”
Yossi stared into his laptop. A satellite shot. The quarry glowed, but the trucks didn’t. “Asphalt-lined drums, no signature. Silver tubes, no signature either. Shielded.”
Wallets nodded his head. “Right. When you’re back in civilization, match it up again. Deliver it by panel van. Take out a building? A city block? Leaving twenty blocks in every direction poisoned. Fallout for twenty miles. People exposed would take from two months to two years to die. Forty thousand casualties?”
He looked from Marjorie to Yossi. Plausible?
“Pick your city,” the Turk growled. He turned the key in the ignition, and the car crawled off the overlook as the sun sank into the hills. They drove the rest of the way to the border, a mere few miles into the mountains, in silence. And somehow the last twenty minutes of their trip seemed longer than any that went before.
Dusk came on fast. But Johnson could still see quite a bit as a three-quarter moon rose in the east. They had finally come to some kind of plateau at the end of a paved road in a tragic state of disrepair. Of all things, an abandoned drive-in movie theater nestled into a forest of trees, the kind of outdoor entertainment that went out of date forty years ago, even before the Shah’s time. The projection booth sat in ruins. The high billboard screen had been shot through with gaping holes and plastered over with a huge banner of the Ayatollah Khomeini—now so faint and faded he’d be unrecognizable if it wasn’t for his power-mad eyes, his bitter beard, and the cruel twist of his mouth. A large black bird sat on the billboard screen and cawed once as if to mark them.
So this was where civilization’s road ended. Beginning as a shiny bauble of Western decadence, mutating in anger to an outdoor stadium where the faithful chanted “Death to America, Death to Israel,” then dying in obscurity, only to be born again as a smugglers’ camp. The Crow of history’s last harsh laugh.
Teams of horses and pack mules stood tethered to a few of the metal poles that once held the window speakers. Now most of the poles were gone, metal and wire too valuable to simply lie around to rot. Groups of men stood by their horses, quietly talking, waiting for the night to close in. But no lit cigarett
es, no camp fires. Below them and across a shallow valley lay the small city of Piranshahr, blazing and lit up like a toy town with far more bright lights than Johnson ever imagined in such a remote place. The hills behind the city were strung with lights as well and reminded him of the favelas, the slums of Rio perched on their clay-chiseled hillsides overlooking the swank hotels and beach at Ipanema. But here there was no beach, just a rundown drive-in movie theater from the Shah’s 1950s heyday, sitting on the edge of a forest below the mountains. He could see Yossi and Wallets haggling with some men.
“Seeing a man about a horse?” Johnson wondered.
Marjorie nodded, “A mule more like it. But you get the idea. It’s for you. We’ll walk. See their packs?”
“No.”
“That’s the whole point. They don’t have any. They’re vice merchants. They smuggle in liquor and cigarettes by horseback, but not much goes the other way, except guns and bombs. Iran has nothing worth exporting that doesn’t go bang. And that’s what they’ll think we are too, just another gang of cigarette smugglers.”
Just as she finished speaking, engine noise from the broken-down road rose into the air. The trucks from the waste dump site, lights blazing, entered the concrete apron of the drive-in. They pulled up side-by-side some ways off and killed their engines. But kept their lights on. The headlights blazed into the crowd of horses and mules. The haggling men turned to face the trucks, and Yossi, Wallets, and the smugglers all shouted and waved at the drivers to kill the lights. But the truck lights didn’t die. These guys weren’t afraid of making their presence known.
Instead, four armed men got out. They pointed their guns at everyone, barking orders, taking over the scene, as though used to being in charge. You could see how disgusted the muleteers were, making apologetic gestures to Wallets and the Turk, who shrugged, turning away without an argument.
“That’s it then,” Marjorie whispered to Johnson. “We lost your mules to the top lad there and his three lackeys.”
“The same truck guys.” They weren’t moving robotically anymore, free of their protective gear.
“So it would seem. Mujahadeen. Direct from the Esfahan Trigger complex, lately from the Kermanshah railhead, fresh from the quarry and with more juice than us. Unless you want to go over and tell them you’re the daring Peter Johnson and you’re late filing a story for The Crusader, so gimme your cruddy mule, you sissy Raghead. Or words to that effect.”
Johnson measured the men with the guns and thought about how poorly the damn magazine’s name would resonate with these thugs. They’d been fighting crusaders for a thousand years. Then thought about having a drink for the first time since his head popped out of the burka. His feet were still somewhat swollen, and he looked at them forlornly. Then with a little pluck, “Well I am kind of over deadline . . . ”
Yep. All the horses and mules were spoken for. The armed Mujahadeen from the trucks expropriated what they wanted—four mules and two horses. That left another four horses for the vice merchants to ride, so Wallets’ people were hoofing it out.
“I’m not worried about losing them, even in the dark,” Wallets explained, “and I didn’t expect to go faster than walking, but I did want to spare your feet. Sorry.”
Johnson shrugged. “If I faint, Marjorie will carry me.”
“Here, have a shot,” she offered. The steroid boom-boom cocktail went into his arm.
The caravan left after dusk. Johnson noticed everyone was dressed so much alike. Khakis, combat boots, and checked kaffiyeh head scarves. In the dark, nobody’d even notice Marjorie was a girl—a reverse of the gender ruse of the last few days. And Johnson and Wallets looked scruffy enough to vanish into any bazaar.
The four mules were laden with two fifty-gallon drums each. You could tell the drums weren’t totally full, as each was hefted into place by two men and sat lashed into a wooden X-cradle over the mule’s back without making the beasts strain. Across the horses’ rear ends hung two yard-long torpedo shapes, wrapped in thick padding, hung like clock weights. The titanium tubes. The men fussed with them to try to keep the things from knocking against one another against the horses’ hind legs. Clearly, the Mujahadeen considered it something to be avoided.
Before long, they’d gotten it squared away, and the string of men and animals left the open apron of the drive-in movie theater for the darkness of the trees. Wallets let them get a ten-minute head start, not wanting to trail them too close. At first the four Blind Mice followed slowly, trying not to make any noise. There was something dangerous close at hand. Then Marjorie pointed it out, across a canyon: the dark outline of a pillbox, about four hundred yards away.
“Iranian border guards. They call them the Mullahs. In a country full of them, go figure. But they’re more worried about stuff coming in than going out.”
Everyone carried an AK-47, and pretty soon the sling on Johnson’s rifle began to dig into his shoulder in awful ways. For several hours they climbed, the forest opening out, finally giving way to brush and rocks. The trail was clear enough, and when they reached a high ridge, Wallets stopped to let them rest. They could see the others still heading up, gaining distance. What looked from the abandoned drive-in like a final ridge was really just one in a series, and Johnson’s heart sank, realizing they’d be at this all night, ridge after ridge—God knows how much longer. When he stopped to rest, that’s when his feet really told him where he could get off.
Marjorie saw he wasn’t doing so well but offered nothing but tepid tea from a canteen and sympathy. Her caring eyes illuminated for a moment when she lit him a cigarette.
“At least we’re going by trails,” she whispered. “If we weren’t doggin’ the Mujahadeen and their mules, we’d head west and stay off their tracks. Too easy here to meet a bad guy on the way up or down.”
They pressed on; ridge after ridge, down some, but always higher on the climb. The stars hard and clear. Up about five thousand feet, Johnson began to pant hard.
“Here, it’ll keep you breathing, but your feet won’t like it.”
“I don’t care—I gotta breathe.”
It was a little green leaf. “Chew it.”
“Coca?” Johnson wondered with a touch of awe.
“Close. Khat. Another kind of stimulant. Works about the same.”
Johnson didn’t care. The bitter tang on his tongue went right to his head and heart, and the next two ridges blew by so fast he barely noticed. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he’d pay for this big time. But it didn’t matter—the bright stars loved him; Marjorie loved him. And he loved her back. When they got out of this, they would marry, have many Mini Marge children who would all know how to shoot wild turkey in the woods. And live happily ever after. With an endless supply of Khat.
Out of nowhere a commotion erupted up the trail, and they could hear it all the way back. The lead mules and horses had met some kind of gang on their way down. A posse. Marge, Yossi, and Wallets surrounded him like clucking hens, shoving him off the path. They stumbled into the rocks, going further and further off the beaten track, while the noise of the altercation echoed off the mountain.
Thirty yards into a garden of stone pillars, they sat on him. Really sat on him, slipping the AK-47 off his shoulder without even a clink. Then split away, taking up firing positions a few yards on either side. Nobody needed to say “hush.” Wallets stared back at the trail, a pair of night goggles at his eyes. Yossi and Marjorie cautiously locked and loaded their guns, quietly hugging their boulders for cover, the muzzles pointing toward the path.
Even without the night goggles, Johnson knew the score. Men were searching. Searching for them. The posse had gotten in ahead, up above, and figured they’d catch them on the way up. And Peter Johnson deeply understood why the Sheik and Yasmine let him free. The cripple fakir in the Kasbah, the goons in the bazaar, the military police waiting in the plaza—nobody gave a shit about Peter Johnson. They cared about the real spies, just like Wallets told him back at the Burk
a Company, but now he understood the lengths their pursuers were willing to go. Even hinder the smuggling of a great weapon, risk a firefight on a blind mountainside—anything to get the deceivers in their midst.
The sounds of arguments faded; the men on the mules with their radioactive burden were free to go, the posse headed down. Yossi’s soft voice whispered, “Mule men say we just cigarette traders like them. No keep up. Must be down below. The posse gang say drum smugglers and vice merchants worthless Jew Monkeys. You just be quiet now.”
Very quiet. The sound of men, a troop clattered down the slope. They went slowly, some splitting off the path to search either side. One paused at the entrance to their stone-pillar garden. He walked in a dozen steps. Then another dozen. From his huddle under a great stone, Johnson saw the man, his face right over an edge of rock. A semi-shaven face, now with a couple days of scruff, a face that needed regular shaving. Very odd for Iran, where every man was required to grow some kind of a beard. Obviously, this group received special dispensation from the authorities to shave, so they could blend in on both sides of the border. No long beards required. Just the ubiquitous Saddam moustache. The searcher looked this way and that, peering intently. He put on his own pair of night goggles. Then looked some more. No one breathed.
A shout from the Posse Boss turned him around. The night goggles dropped from his eyes, and his footsteps faded back out toward the trail. Johnson suddenly wanted to cry Hosannas or kiss the rock. Then he found he’d wet himself. Hosanna, no razor blades.
They weren’t going up-up-up anymore but down-down-down. And he was sick and dizzy inside, and his feet throbbed. Up front, the Turk and Wallets were going slower so as not to trip and pitch themselves on their heads. A quarter mile down below, the vague outlines of the laden mules and awkward horses bobbed this way and that in the dark in and out of the rocks. They slowed to a crawl. Wallets didn’t want to catch up with the drum smugglers and the vice merchants. The landscape had also changed. No longer woody, with trees and brush, these hills were bare rock with lichen and little twiggy shrubs.
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