They would not die lying down. Hadn’t Afghanistan or Iraq taught his clients anything!
Sitting in the semidarkness, Drexel couldn’t help but think of what one of his early partners had told him the first time they had plotted to bring a foreign government down. “If you go after the king, make sure that you have the weapons to kill him. Don’t just take a knife, take an Uzi and a shotgun and an M-1A Abrams tank. Take every weapon you can assemble. And be ready to run.”
Drexel shook his head, flicking a piece of brown tobacco from the tip of his tongue.
His clients were going after the king. But were they powerful enough to kill him before he came after them?
He wondered . . . yes, he wondered.
It could go either way.
Washington, D.C.
He dreamed it again.
It was a clear summer day. The air was clean, almost crisp, the sun bright and warm. He stood in the middle of a great field, the grass stretching for miles in every direction, a great ocean of green that didn’t seem to end. There were no mountains, no trees, no hills, fences, roads, power lines, no nothing, just the endless grass and the blue sky. Two colors. One horizon. The two met perfectly. And it was quiet—oh, so quiet. It almost pounded in his ears.
The sun slipped behind a sudden shadow and he looked up to see a line of beautiful clouds, a billowing cluster of thunderstorms that seemed to appear from out of nowhere. They loomed before him, growing with incredible speed. A nearly perfect black anvil blew out in front of the storm, which was dark blue with white edges illuminated by the low sun. The backlighting tinted the clouds in deep purples and pinks and cast random shafts of sunlight on the green grass below.
The first time he’d seen the clouds, he thought they were beautiful. But now his stomach tightened and he took a quick breath, feeling his heart start to beat faster.
The fear was pushed away by the infinite nature of the scene. The sky was so huge, and he was so small. The grassy field rolled for miles, and the monster clouds billowed overhead.
Then the storms turned black, and lightning flashed from the sky. He knew that this would happen, and he covered his head. It was dark, the wind blew, and he felt a deep, sudden chill.
Then he heard it, a silent whistle. He lifted his eyes in time to see the white burst from the nuclear core. The flash grew into a white-hot mushroom with deep orange and black edges where the air had been vaporized. Another explosion, then another, on his right and his left. It seemed the whole world was exploding. He saw a blast wave move toward him from the closest mushroom cloud, a black wall of fire and heat that emitted from the mushroom core. It moved across the green grass, a wall of superheated air bloated with smoke and flying debris.
Then he saw a figure walking calmly into the coming storm. He was young and broad-shouldered. He didn’t turn around, but he looked so familiar: the clothes, the brown hair. The dreamer knew that he knew him. But he couldn’t quite see.
The stranger kept walking, slowly moving toward the advancing fireball. The wall of destruction screamed toward him, and the young man disappeared, swept up in the advancing debris.
* * *
Neil Brighton woke suddenly, his heart slamming in his chest. He sat up, his face sweating, his hands clenched against the sheets. His breathing was labored, and yet Sara remained sleeping on her side of the bed, her face in her pillow, her hair spread across the white sheets. He sat there in the moonlight that illuminated the room, staring straight ahead, trying to focus his eyes. He didn’t move. He didn’t dare. The terror had not gone away.
The mushroom clouds. The young man.
Who was he? Why so familiar? Why couldn’t he see his face?
He swallowed the lump in his throat, then rolled to the side of the bed.
It was only a dream. But no, he knew there was more. A line from his patriarchal blessing seemed to roll again and again in his head: God will always warn you of danger. He will provide a way. There will come a time in your life when you will have dreams, but from these dreams, you will be warned.
That was the reason the nightmare had such a powerful impact on him. He had never suffered from dreams. He had always slept peacefully, waking with only thoughts of the coming day. But he’d had this dream several times now, and it was always the same.
He thought, his shoulders slumping as he sat on the side of his bed.
There will come a time in your life when you will have dreams, but from these dreams, you will be warned.
For a long time he sat motionless, resting his face on his palms, staring at the dark floor. Finally Sara rolled over, and he looked at the clock. Almost four in the morning. Time to get up anyway. He had a meeting with the National Security Staff, and he had things to prepare.
* * *
General Brighton got a call on his office desk phone a little after ten in the morning.
“Neil,” a husky voice boomed through the nonclassified line. “Aaron Statskily. You got thirty seconds?”
Aaron Statskily. Chief of Staff of the army, thin, bespectacled, a marathon runner who had won more purple hearts out of the Gulf War than any other man. He and Neil had gotten to know each other at War College, the interservice advanced training school for up-and-coming officers, then lost touch for a few years before hooking up again in D.C. Not close, but professional, they respected each other and spoke frequently.
Neil glanced at his watch. He had a 10:15 meeting at the Pentagon, and it would be tight, but the good news was that when General Statskily said thirty seconds, that’s about what you got. He, like General Brighton, was a man crunched for time, and he milked every second out of every minute he had.
Outranked by two stars, Brighton was deferential to his friend. “General Statskily, I always have time for you,” he said in a friendly tone.
“Cut the crap, Neil, I know how busy you are. You’re juggling more fur balls than a constipated cat.”
Neil smiled. Aaron Statskily mutilated or created more awkward metaphors than anyone he had ever known. “Okay,” he answered with a light laugh. “We both are busy, General. So what’s going on?”
Statskily coughed. “Professional courtesy.” His voice was not booming so much anymore.
Neil hesitated. Professional courtesy. He knew what that meant. Off the record. General to general. A private conversation among close friends. “Gotcha,” Brighton answered, sitting on the edge of his desk.
Statskily went on. “I got a call from Colonel Dentworth, an old friend who runs our manpower shop, you know, the flesh peddlers down at the army’s Military Personnel Center. He told me something interesting. Seems some of the Cherokee guys have been looking at your kid. They’ve been watching him. They like him.” The general hesitated. “They like him a lot.”
“Really,” Brighton answered, feeling a sudden jab at his gut.
“Yeah. Sounds like they want to bring him into their group.”
Brighton gritted his teeth. But he kept his voice even. “Well . . . ” he started to say. “That’s very . . . cool. Not surprising. Sam’s a very good soldier.”
“Apparently so. Now, I’m sure you know the reason I’m calling, but let me state the obvious. We want to know how you’d feel. You know the Cherokees. You know what they do. They fall directly under the National Command Authority, as you certainly know as well, since you’re the guy at the White House who tasks them all the time. It seems to raise the question: Is that going to be a problem for you? Would it make it more difficult for you to do your job, knowing your son is going to be assigned to the most aggressive and high-risk unit in the army?
“So I’m asking straight up. Do you want me to kill this? If you do, everyone understands. One word from you, Neil, and we put this thing to bed. Your son will never be disappointed because he’ll never know. Not so much as a whisper. You have my word.”
The four-star general fell quiet. Brighton stood and paced back and forth, pulling the extension cord with his hand.
The truth w
as, he was proud. Scared. Terrified. But proud all the same. The Cherokees were the absolute best of the best. The tip of the sword. Nothing like them anywhere.
But what they did was so dangerous.
And Sara would have a fit if she knew.
Could he deny Sam the opportunity at the most coveted assignment in the army? Sara would be furious, and it would make his work more difficult, but Sam had joined the army to do something good, and there was no way in the world Brighton would deny him this.
Chapter Six
The Khorramshahr refugee camp was named after the Iranian city that was half a day’s walk to the south. One of Persia’s major ports, with a huge, smoking oil refinery sitting on a small island in the middle of the Karun River, Khorramshahr had been an early target when the Iraqi army advanced during the opening weeks of the Iran/Iraq war. Virtually the entire Iranian population had fled the city, leaving an empty shell behind for the Iraqi army to loot. Devastated during the fighting, the city remained a ghost town after the Iraqis withdrew until, in 1983, relatively confident they would not be overrun by the Iraqi army again, Iranian citizens slowly began to return.
Khorramshahr was a small camp set up along the Iraqi/Iranian border. Administered by the U.N., but overseen by the Iraqi government and protected by the U.S. military, the camp sat on a small plateau looking over the Wawr al Hammar marshes that fed on the brackish waters of the southern tip of the Tigris River. One hundred ten kilometers southeast, the Tigris dumped into the Persian Gulf. Behind the camp, the Zagros Mountains rose out of the rolling plains; west and north were the salt flats and marshes that defined the border between Iran and Iraq. Built on a barren prairie, the camp was suitable—except when it rained (at which time it became a sucking mud hole), or when the wind blew from the mountains (at which time all of the tents would blow down), or during the annual locust infestations (there was no way to keep them out of the food), or during the freezing temperatures of winter or under the burning summer sun. All in all, Khorramshahr was a great location for a refugee camp—for about three weeks a year.
A “temporary” camp, which had already celebrated its twentieth birthday, Khorramshahr had originally been established to protect Iranian Balgus refugees, those who had taken the opportunity during the chaos created by the first Gulf War to flee religious persecution in their homeland. Ignorant and wildly optimistic, the Balgus refugees had hoped to enjoy a better life in a more-free Iraq once their neighbor was rid of Saddam Hussein.
Things didn’t go as the refugees had planned. Saddam didn’t fall. The Iraqi government didn’t welcome them after the war. And they couldn’t go back to Iran, not without fear of death. So they were left in the temporary camp until the geopolitical environment changed. Even after the U.S. liberation of Iraq, a fight in which, even after all these years, the outcome was still unsure, the refugees were left hanging in limbo—not welcome in Iraq until the national government was on much more firm ground and yet unable to return to Persia, even if they had wanted to.
International law guarantees refugees the fundamental right to safe asylum as well as the right of non-refoulement, meaning that refugees will not be forced to return to the country from which they had fled. But international law can’t force a host nation to absorb the huddled hordes in their refugee camps. So the Iranian refugees were caught in no-man’s land, left to live for years in the “temporary” camp.
During the early months of Khorramshahr’s existence, Iranian insurgents infiltrated the camp with members of the Absolute Committee of the Islamic Revolution, a clandestine group controlled by militants in Iran bent on punishing those who rejected the true laws of God. As a result, the Iranian refugees lived in constant fear that they would be killed or abducted by members of the ACIR. They were forced to stand guard over the children and to carefully taste their food, terrified that it might have been poisoned. Many were randomly beaten in the middle of the night. Khorramshahr was also infiltrated (with the help of the ACIR) by common criminals and thugs from Iran—murderers, rapists, deserters, and thieves, as the Iranian government quickly learned it was cheaper to send their worst offenders across the border to Khorramshahr than to take the time to try them and then keep them in jail. Worse, Iraqi soldiers, backed by Saddam Hussein, regularly launched military attacks in the area, injuring and killing refugees in order to stir up the ethnic hostilities that already existed between Iran and Iraq.
In the early days, the Khorramshahr refugees also suffered from insufficient food, water, heat, sanitation, medicine, and doctors. The summer before Saddam Hussein was driven from power, a group of human rights activists from various European countries made an inspection of the camp. Their report described Khorramshahr as hardly more than a prison camp where children died regularly as a result of infectious diseases. The report stated that malaria, typhus, and dysentery were spreading among the refugees, while many were prohibited from attending the hospitals in the neighboring Iraqi city of Al Basrah. Three-quarters of the inhabitants of the camp were undernourished due to the insufficient rations, and the drinking water was contaminated. The ACIR had stolen what little the refugees had been given, and anyone who left the camp and was stopped at an Iraqi checkpoint risked prison and torture. Many disappeared without a trace.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which the U.N. had taken responsibility for the camp, things had gotten immeasurably better. Able to provide safety and the basic necessities, Khorramshahr had become tolerable. But it was a very long way from paradise. And it would never be home.
* * *
The young woman lay on her cot. Her eyes were closed, but she was not asleep and, as the darkness gave way to the early morning light, she opened her eyes and stared up.
Lying quietly on her bed, when everything was silent and the shadows were full, when her mind was not yet occupied with all that she had to do, she was just beginning the battle over her emotions. The young woman realized it was a dangerous and unpredictable time of day.
If she let her mind wander, who knew where it would go, especially after she had spent another anxious night fighting through the dark dream. She felt the thin blanket around her legs, tightly wrapped and damp, and remembered the dreadful feeling of waking in sweat.
The dream didn’t change much. Sometimes it was raining, sometimes it was dry, sometimes it took place in the mountains, sometimes down by the stream, but other than the setting, the basics were the same: the same tree, the same flames, her father, the smell.
So Azadeh guarded her thoughts carefully to keep the darkness at bay.
Over the past few weeks she had learned it was just around the corner, always lurking. The darkness. The anger. A depression so deep that if she ever fell in, she knew she would sink down forever and never come up for air. It was always there, always simmering just below her smile. It was the first thing she thought of in the morning and the last thing at night. It was the air that she breathed, a secret part of her now.
But she knew how to fight it. She had learned from her father how to keep the demons at bay. She had to keep the window closed and not let anything in. She couldn’t consider her situation, or the sense of injustice would suck the life from her soul.
So she forced herself to be happy. It was all she could do.
She would keep on believing, keep on smiling, keep on trusting God.
But sometimes she wondered what she would do if she saw him again. What would she do if she met the soldier who had assassinated her father? She could picture his face, his flat nose, greasy mustache, and dull, deadly eyes.
Some mornings she prayed to forget him.
Some mornings she prayed she never would.
* * *
Three weeks later after arriving in Khorramshahr, Azadeh had fallen into a routine. The camp provided food and shelter but very little else, and her days had become very much the same: wake on her small cot with a thin, cotton blanket over her shoulders, stand in line to wash, stand in line to eat, stand in line for dri
nking water, stand in line to speak with a U.N. refugee worker, stand in line to write a letter or glimpse a newspaper, stand in line for lunch, stand in line for another drink of water, stand in line, stand in line. Looking at the back of some stranger’s head pretty much defined her life now.
Soon after being admitted to the camp, Azadeh decided to write a brief letter to Omar, hoping against hope that he might be able to help her. As she stared at the single sheet of paper, her weekly allotment, she struggled to think of what she could say. Her mind drifted back to that horrible afternoon when the soldiers had appeared, then Omar at their back door, coming to warn them. She thought of her father’s oldest friend, his hair wet with rain, the deep curls hanging in front of his eyes. He was sweating and panting heavily, his hot breath creating puffs of mist in the cold.
“Take them!” her father had commanded Omar, pointing to the young Saudi prince and his terrified mother.
Azadeh remembered Omar’s huge shoulders and thick legs propelling his weight up the rocky trail, holding the Saudi prince like a piece of limp baggage, the young boy appearing weightless under his powerful arm. The princess clung to Omar’s shoulder while holding one hand to her mouth. The mist gathered quickly around them, and for a moment they looked like gray spirits moving through the orchard and across the wet grass. Omar had stopped and looked back, then turned and pushed them along, herding the princess and her son toward the rocky trail that led up the mountain. The group was soon swallowed up in the mist, and the sound of their footsteps quickly faded away.
Sitting on her small cot, Azadeh wondered for the thousandth time if Omar had been able to keep safe his charge. If not, her letter didn’t matter, for he was certainly dead.
But if he was all right, then where was he? Would he get her letter? Would it be safe to reply? She was just a young woman; she had no right to contact him in the first place. Such a great man as Omar, would he stoop so low as to answer her anyway?
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