The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  So, Professor Fouraz’s information had been spot on. “Okay. What else?”

  “Listeners picked up chatter bouncing between major players”—meaning all branches of the Iranian military—“which means the clock is seriously ticking.”

  I wanted to say, It’s been seriously ticking for the last eleven days, General, but I didn’t. Instead, I said, “It’s showtime. What else?”

  “Ever since we got your note about The Twelver’s pond, we’ve been keeping tabs on the area,” Tom said. “And there’s been an increase in traffic there, just like Bluebird said there would be.”

  The Toad’s pond: Tare Ankaboot. The secret facility where Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were set to ride out a nuclear exchange. “The Toad and his friends are on the move. Chickenshit bastards,” I said. “How much time do we have?”

  “Safe to say that the margin of error between success and catastrophe is thinner than thin,” he said. “Yoda has ordered Big George.”

  So the president had set the wheels in motion on Tom’s attack plan. And it went without saying that if we missed the window to hit the launch sites, any number of the Sejil-2 nukes would get away. I ran their target cities through my head: Tel Aviv. Rome. Vienna. Istanbul. Athens. Nuremberg.

  “ETA on the party?” In other words, when would our bombers be in the air?

  “Six hours.”

  “What’s my data exchange?”

  “We’ve got a link that will route you through the listeners and right to the eagles and owls,” he said. “Hey, do me favor, will you? Try not to cut it too close.” He hung up.

  Six hours. So I had provided enough intel to set a preemptive operation in motion, but not the most important piece of the puzzle, the one that could save how many millions of lives? Well done, Jake. I shook my head in disgust. Get your ass moving.

  I jogged back to the van, threw open the door, and jumped in. “How we doing?” I said to Giv.

  “We’ve got our coordinates. A warehouse on the edge of the Pameran district. We’re fifteen minutes away.” He showed me a map as Zand urged the van forward. “We have to come at it from the south. Across the railroad tracks from the public market and over this bridge.”

  He jabbed a finger at the map. A two-lane bridge ran parallel to a footbridge spanning a river that apparently wasn’t large enough to warrant a name, at least not on Giv’s map. I didn’t like the bottleneck created by the bridges, but the next crossing was a half mile east.

  “How well do you know this guy we’re meeting?” I asked.

  “His name is Aiden. His driver is Sui. We’ve known them both forever. I trust them with my life,” Giv said.

  I hated when people said that. I trust them with my life. Trust was one of the greatest gifts on the planet, but it was also one of the most abused. Trust gave you a license to be careless and sloppy, and careless and sloppy got you dead.

  “I don’t care how much you trust them,” I said. I pointed to the AK-47s. “We go in armed. And we go in expecting the worst.”

  “Got it,” Giv said.

  I vouchsafed Zand with the coldest eyes I could muster. “Got it, Zand?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t go anywhere unarmed, monsieur,” he replied.

  We rumbled toward the Old City. The nervous tension in the van wasn’t a bad thing. The hard part was finding a balance between raw nerves and heightened senses. I had made an art form of it for nearly three decades, which was damn near longer than the two guys in the van with me had been alive. The diamond-hard resolve I was feeling grew even harder with every passing block, and the resolve also fueled a growing sense of calm.

  The problem with the MEK was that they were used to creating conflict, not confronting it. They were two entirely different ball games. I saw Zand’s viselike grip on the steering wheel: he could have been riding a bucking bronco. I watched Giv’s head swivel, taking in every building and every window as if they bristled with binoculars and video cameras and rooftop snipers.

  “Relax, boys,” I said calmly. “The fun’s just about to begin.”

  Tehran for the most part was a juxtaposition of the modern against the ramshackle. Brand-new high-rises and four-star restaurants stood cheek-to-jowl with shabby apartment buildings and decrepit shops. But the Old City was a grand pile of neglect with no pretense of gentrification; that’s what happens when you have mosques from the Qajar era, tombs from the thirteenth century, and churches from the 1700s. Were there Islamic fundamentalists obsessed with the fall of mankind back then? I didn’t think so.

  A wide boulevard fronted the area like a moat. Dilapidated buildings sagged against one another like weathered cardboard boxes. Zand guided the van onto a street with mixed commerce and apartment living that seemed more like a funnel with crooked walls that might teeter over on us, like the last stand of a house of cards.

  Tangles of electrical wires crisscrossed the street. Rusted marquees and hand-drawn signs dangled from storefronts. Knots of pedestrians strolled along uneven sidewalks. Bearded old men sat inside open windows, nursing cigarettes and watching the world like grizzled house cats. The air was saturated with the funk of musty blankets, stale tobacco, dust, diesel, and rot. Which fit perfectly with the infestation of pollution that hung like a pall over Tehran day and night.

  Our van joined a procession of carts piled high with produce and a flock of sheep on the way to slaughter. The mist hung over the open market directly ahead, and Giv made a quick gesture to his map.

  “The warehouse is just beyond the market,” he said. “Three, maybe four minutes.”

  “Let Mr. Bagheri know where we are,” I said. “And make sure he keeps Charlie Amadi in the loop, hear?”

  Three, maybe four minutes. I was thinking about the bottleneck at the river. I should have been thinking even further ahead than that, because in the next ten minutes Giv and Zand would both be dead and everything I had worked for over the last eleven days would be on the verge of falling apart.

  CHAPTER 28

  TEHRAN. THE OLD CITY. SIX HOURS AND COUNTING …

  Dusk.

  The worst possible time to be moving through the streets of Tehran’s Old City.

  A half mile stood between me, a warehouse, and a memory stick containing the launch sites. The trouble was, dusk made that half mile seem like a marathon. Too many shadows. Too much broken light. Not enough people in the streets. Or too many if I decided to use the street bazaar for cover, which was exactly my plan.

  An hour later and night would have been my ally. Too bad I didn’t have an hour to burn. The mission would be over in a matter of hours, or I’d be dead. I didn’t plan on being dead. General Patton had it right when he told his troops, “No dumb son-of-a-bitch ever won a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making the other dumb son-of-a-bitch die for his country.” Yeah, I’ll try to remember that, George. Great advice.

  Until then, I would follow my three golden rules: take nothing for granted, expect the worst, and trust no one. That included the two MEK agents riding with me in the broken-down piece-of-shit van that was supposed to deliver us to our warehouse.

  “Park here!” I shouted to my driver suddenly. I used Farsi even though Zand understood English a whole lot better than I spoke his native tongue. When I saw the confused look on his face, I pointed to a gravel lot wedged between a machine shop and a plumbing-supply house a half block from the local bazaar. “There! Right there.”

  “Why here?” Zand didn’t wait for an answer. He jammed on the brakes, cranked the van’s wheel, and found a spot between a flatbed truck loaded with plumbing supplies and a pickup truck that had more rust around its wheel wells than our van did.

  Zand looked into the backseat at me. He opened his palms. “We’re four blocks from the bridge.”

  “We walk from here,” I said calmly. I rested a dirty white headdress on my head and wrapped a scarf loosely around my neck. I had already mapped out our approach to the warehouse using the bazaar as cover, but I hadn’t told Z
and or Giv. “Bring your weapons. Put them under your coats. We’re going shopping.”

  I didn’t wait for a reply. Zand apparently liked to argue; I didn’t, especially when there wasn’t anything to argue about. I threw open the door and jumped out. Zand shrugged his shoulders in the direction of his younger companion. They both jumped out behind me and quietly closed their doors. Giv’s dark face gave nothing away, even as he slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and threw on his jacket. By all rights, Giv should have been chasing girls instead of fighting in the underground, but this was his life. He’d probably been carrying a gun since he was twelve.

  “Ah!” Giv said, as the smells of the bazaar filled his nose: curry, boiled lamb, damp textiles, sheep dung, exhaust fumes. He nodded his approval. “The market. Good cover.”

  “Not so good if someone starts shooting,” Zand replied glumly. Unlike Giv, he looked like a traditional academic, with a Sarbards wrapped around his head and a wrinkled black sports coat over a denim shirt. His coat wasn’t bulky enough to completely conceal his automatic rifle, but it would have to do.

  I slid past a flatbed truck and peeked down the street. The bazaar filled the entire square and spilled out along the narrow side streets to the east and the west. Throw up a table, put up a tent, and lay out your wares: everything from beaded jewelry and woven blankets to handmade musical instruments and cane baskets, tripe and canned olives to freshly baked bread and wind chimes. I estimated two hundred merchants and five times as many people. Perfect. Or at least as perfect as a bad situation could be.

  The upside was that markets like this one were only moderately policed. The security polise and the Revolutionary Guards relied on informants instead. The locals had learned: don’t talk politics in the square. They’d seen too many of their compatriots hung up by their necks in the streets. Save the rhetoric for discreet coffee shops and underground meetings.

  I glanced back at my companions. “Take your time, but hurry. We rendezvous at the fish market.”

  The MEK agents understood what I meant when I said, “Take your time, but hurry.” I didn’t need to explain.

  I entered the flow of people pressing toward the bazaar. I knew Giv and Zand would follow suit, a dozen or so paces between them and headed for different sides of the square. I hated the feel of the headdress and scarf, but the last thing I wanted to look like was a tourist. My mustache had grown in nicely and a three-day-old beard sprinkled my sunburned face with traces of black and gray, and this helped.

  I needed to add to my disguise, so I stopped at a fruit cart. I threw down ten thousand rials in exchange for a net sack filled with undersize apples. I plucked one from the sack, took a bite, and kept walking. All for show.

  Halfway across the square, I paused at a stall selling hand-stitched leather satchels. Beautiful; my wife would have loved them. Funny how a guy just hoping to escape with his life can have such random thoughts; but then, maybe it was the random thoughts that kept you sane.

  I glanced back and saw that Zand had purchased a woven poncho and thrown it over his shoulders. Good, I thought. Smart. Now the AK-47 was completely hidden. Giv was sidling along the other side of the square and seemed far too tense for my liking. I shook my head and looked away; nothing I could do about it.

  I squeezed through the crowd, saw a pair of riot policemen coming my way, and ducked into a tent selling chelo and kebabs and doing a landslide business. I put my hand inside my coat pocket and curled my fingers around the Walther’s handle. I watched the entrance out of the corner of my eye, expecting the worst, but it didn’t happen. The polise passed with little more than a glance. I loosened my grip and followed two women back into the square.

  I didn’t stop again. Take your time, but hurry.

  When I reached the fish market on the north side of the square, Giv and Zand were already there, lingering at stalls thirty feet apart. We made eye contact for an instant. Then the three of us joined the stream of people following the lights toward the river and the railroad tracks. The sun dropped below the horizon. A blustery wind kicked a dust devil into the air. Night descended.

  The men guarding the bridge were Revolutionary Guards, the worst of the worst and the bane of every man, woman, and child in the country. I followed the crowd onto the footbridge, munching another apple. A stream of cars and trucks exiting the market was consuming most of the Guards’ attention, and abandoning the van looked more and more like the right decision.

  My feet hit the pavement on the far side of the bridge. Like everyone else who wanted the Guards as far behind them as possible, I picked up my pace. I crossed the railroad tracks before looking back over my shoulder for Giv and Zand. In evening’s last light, they were just part of the crowd, two Iranian men heading home after a long day. So far, so good. I kept moving.

  A quarter of a mile from the river, a cluster of warehouses played host to panel trucks and flatbeds, cranes and forklifts, and freight cars as massive as small houses. I heard the voices of the dockworkers before I saw them.

  Giv moved up next to me. He pointed to a squat brick building made red by the setting sun and crouching like a little brother between two larger buildings with busy docks. “That’s the place,” he whispered. A sign that read CRIMSON FREIGHT COMPANY in three languages—Farsi, French, and English—hung across the gate, but the warehouse looked like it had been abandoned for at least a year.

  Giv disappeared into the shadows next to the building on the right. Zand took up a position alongside one of the freight cars. I stopped next to the docks fronting the warehouse on the left. Yousef Bagheri had placed two men inside the warehouse. They were waiting for my call. I opened my cell phone. I texted a one-word message: Clear. There were security lights burning from a half-dozen fixtures surrounding the building. Two blinked suddenly. The blinking lights were the first of our all-clear signals. The secondary signal was a half-drawn shade in an office on the first floor that rose and fell a moment later.

  When Giv saw this, he jogged to the front gate. He keyed the lock, opened the gate a foot, and gave Zand and me a quick wave.

  “Let’s move!” His voice was a low hiss, filled with energy. Too much energy.

  “Take it easy,” I said to him as I squeezed through the gate.

  We jogged to a concrete dock with three huge, sliding doors that were heavily padlocked. A set of stairs rose to the dock and a narrow door led to a small office. Giv was first in and clearly relieved. “We made it. God damn!”

  Zand followed, his AK-47 cradled in two hands just in case. “Aiden? Sui?” he called.

  “Where are you guys?” Giv said, pushing through the office and into a compact two-story warehouse littered with empty boxes and stacks of wooden pallets.

  “Wait!” I shouted, but it was too late.

  Zand had already followed Giv in, and the roar of gunfire filled the air. I heard Giv groan and Zand crumple to the floor. I barrel rolled into the room with my Walther in my right hand, saw a puff of smoke up in the rafters, and ripped off six shots in three seconds. A man tumbled from the rafters, screaming, and hit the floor with a ghoulish thud. I rolled again, came up on my knees next to a concrete support pillar, and caught a rifle butt straight in the face.

  It was a staggering blow, but not enough to put me down. A second blow, from behind, caught me right above the ear, and I collapsed in a heap. A foot in the chest drove me onto my back. Four bearded men with rifles surrounded me, all wearing the gray-and-blue uniform of the Revolutionary Guards.

  A fifth man walked casually into my line of sight. He looked down at me. He opened his hand and showed me the memory stick cradled in his palm. “Is this what you were hoping to find?”

  I lunged for him and was driven back by the hard steel of four gun barrels. “Traitor!” I shouted, my eyes burning holes into him. “You better kill me now, because there’s no place on this earth that you can hide.”

  “It will be a pleasure killing you. Mr. Moreau. Or whatever your name is,” he said.
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br />   He took a quick step and kicked. I saw the blur of his black boot coming toward my head. I turned away, felt a sharp pain, and the world went black.

  CHAPTER 29

  Here’s the problem with torture. If you want information from a guy who’d gone through the kind of training that I’d gone through since the ripe old age of nineteen, you should probably plan on a very long wait. Give up my mission? Do you really think a little shock therapy or some unimaginative waterboarding is going to make me give up my mission? You have to do better than that.

  That was the thing about the Revolutionary Guards. They were used to dealing with ordinary citizens and common criminals. Put a gun barrel up to their heads and they’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Fear had always been their greatest ally.

  I wasn’t afraid. I was prepared to die. That was a fairly insurmountable position when you’re up against the clock like the Guards were. They had resorted to pain. I’d been trained to compartmentalize pain, and it worked pretty well. But the wire cutting into my neck was on the verge of crushing my esophagus, and I had passed out three or four times by now. They’d broken three of my fingers, and they’d broken my nose, which really pissed me off.

  Ice-cold water splashed against my face. I woke with an angry, confused start. I jerked against restraints holding my arms against my sides. A headache sagged in my skull like a heated iron weight. My insides lurched like those of a man coming off a really bad drunk. They’d shot me up with something, but all it had done was make me sick.

  I heard my name. Actually three names. The three names on my passports. Green, Swan, Moreau. “Well, which is it?” The man’s voice sounded dirty and smug. Did he really have time to be smug?

  I turned my head, saw shadows, and tried to blink my eyes into focus. There was something filmy and wet pooling in my eyes. I didn’t know it was blood until it ran down my cheek and over my lips. I’d tasted blood more times than I cared to admit, and this was it. Coppery, salty, sickly sweet.