The Command

by David Poyer

  It moved up alongside the roaring, smoking truck, and he took his foot off the gas, dropping back even farther as one of the komiteh leaned out, looking it over. Then relaxed as the police vehicle pulled off and vanished down another street.

  The driver wasn’t from Mashhad, but he’d driven the route several times, practicing, in the sedan. Still in the near darkness, threading among the groups of pilgrims as they gradually converged on the huge tomb and mosque complex, he drove slowly, at no more than thirty miles an hour. Then, a quarter mile short of the golden dome, the truck pulled to the left and descended a ramp.

  The Datsun kept straight on, passing the central square. Malik peered through the windshield. Thousands of pilgrims gazed up at the glowing bulbs outlining minarets and domes, the colonnade, and the arched portal that led to the interior and ultimately to the holy burial chamber in a sparkling wonderland of light and beauty.

  He’d visited that chamber. Had entered, men separating from the women as they did so. Had checked his shoes and strolled in stocking feet through the marble paved courts, the silver balconies of supplication, examining the inlaid tiles and mirrors, the intricate inscriptions. Had prostrated himself before the magnificent golden zarih that protected the ancient tomb. Had watched the other pilgrims with sad eyes, noting as they entered from this direction and that.

  And had smiled, heart racing with excitement, as he realized how it could be done.

  THE truck was underground now. The three sat crowded together in the cab. One reached under the seat from time to time, stroking the steel buttplate of an assault rifle. He kept hoping for the tranquillity that was supposed to come to the martyr. But only touching the gun seemed to give him any comfort. The driver concentrated on driving; the one sitting in the middle held a hand-drawn map on his lap, directing him. It had been drawn by a man on the second team, who’d taken a job inside the shrine, repairing the plumbing in the pilgrims’ washrooms.

  The tunnel road circled the immense complex, leaving the spacious courts and open areas at ground level free for the pilgrims to enter and congregate and wander from porch to porch and shrine to shrine. It was a service access, the walls neither enameled tile nor fine marble but rough concrete spaced with fluorescent tubes covered with yellowing plastic. Signs pointed to various exits from the ring.

  “Dar al-Sa’adah,” said the man with the map suddenly, pointing. The driver pulled off, and the truck twisted into a maze of smaller passages. At last he downshifted to first gear. The motor slowed, laboring as it pulled its weight up a short, steep incline.

  ON the porch between the Golden Balcony and the dome of Hatam Khani some three hundred women and small children were gathered, waiting.

  The porch—actually an enclosed hall of access—gleamed with semiprecious stone and shining gold. The floor was smooth, brightly colored marble, scrubbed and waxed to spotlessness. A shallow trough showed where millions of feet over the centuries had passed through a golden door. The walls were covered to head height with thousands of intricately carved tiles incised with verses from the Holy Qur’an. Above that, across the upper wall, the sixty-six couplets of the elegy Malk-ush-Shu’ara Saboori Mashhadi had pronounced over the murdered imam were inscribed in the lovely intricacy of Nastaliq script. The whole interior was brilliantly lighted by hundreds of bulbs nestled in immense nineteenth-century chandeliers of the finest Bohemian crystal.

  The golden door, closed now but about to be opened, led into the Zari-i-Mutahhar, the Holy Burial Chamber itself. The women peered toward it, praying and speaking in hushed voices. An infant cried out, but was hastily rocked and kissed back into a restless, fidgeting silence.

  THE bearded man in the gray suit coat stepped on the accelerator again. The minarets, the lights fell back in his rear view. He drove south, careful to avoid the throngs that spilled now onto the streets. They were singing. The words came indistinctly through the closed glass. Glancing again at his watch, he turned on the radio. Leaned to tune it to a local station, and increased the volume till it drowned out the hymns. He examined the mirrors again, looking for police or any sign of interest in him. There was none.

  Lighting a cigarette, listening to a discussion on the radio about milk production, he drove slowly and carefully out of town.

  …

  THE man who’d kept touching the Kalashnikov pulled it from beneath the seat and chambered a cartridge. He slammed the door open, jumped down, and walked back to guard the rear of the truck.

  Inside the cab, the driver, sweat running down his face, reached behind the seat to pull a thick cable into the light. It was made up of four fuses. Each was covered by transparent plastic surgical tubing. Their ends stuck out, cut and frayed apart to expose the core. The driver flicked a lighter several times. But no flame emerged. Finally the other pressed in the cigarette lighter, on the dash. Seconds later it popped out, glowing cherry red.

  When all the threads were burning, fizzling up a thin blue sulfurous smoke, they bailed out of the cab to either side, drawing Russian-made automatics.

  At that moment the green pickup pulled up the ramp behind them. The man with the Kalashnikov saw the komiteh-men at the instant they saw him. They were armed only with heavy sticks, but they charged out of the pickup and up the ramp at him without hesitation, shouting and brandishing the clubs. He pulled the rifle close to his body and hosed out a burst. The bullets blasted them backward.

  THE bomb went off in two stages, separated by milliseconds. The first detonation, the five kilos of explosive on the right side of the truck, fired the heavy steel I-beams sideways and upward through the ancient brickwork and plaster between the underground access and the reception hall above. They crashed through bricks and lath and the thin sheathing of marble and tile on the plinth, mowing down the women who stood closest to the wall.

  Then the main charge went off. This second explosion was so powerful the plates only resisted for a time too short to measure before they gasified in the expanding fireball that stamped the truck frame down into flattened steel, and blasted apart the heavy masonry foundations, dating back to 1602. But before they disintegrated, they and the mass of heavy brick focused the blast, sending a half ton of rusty rivets and bolts through the freshly torn hole.

  Moving faster than bullets, heavier and even crueler in their jagged irregular shapes, the thousand-pound fragment-charge cut down the waiting crowd in a welter of blood and torn flesh, jewelry, cloth. They sheared off arms and hands. Smashed through faces and skulls, punctured bodies, tore through lungs and eyes and stomachs.

  Some of the women had grasped toddlers by the hand. Others carried infants beneath their chadors. These, too, were torn to pieces by the flying steel, then flayed by the shock wave, lungs and arteries and sinews torn apart in an instant and blown through windows and mirrors.

  Their surroundings turned instantly from decoration into instruments of murder. The immense nineteenth-century chandeliers disintegrated into millions of shards of impaling-sharp crystal. The inscribed tiles, cut with the holy concentration of craftsmen intent on the worship of God, became a hail of ceramic projectiles.

  A horrible bloom of torn meat, shattered bone, and bright blood sprayed out across the lovely calligraphy, across the holy words of the Prophet of Mecca.

  The shock sent a tremor through the building, popping lightbulbs, setting the walls and pillars swaying above the thousands of pilgrims. They instantly concluded an earthquake had began, and began herding out into the open air.

  In the wrecked porch, smoke billowed from a gaping hole in the floor. For a moment the terrible sound seemed to have wiped out all sound. Then the echoing silence slowly yielded. To cries, gasps, prayers. To a slowly rising chorus of terror and screams and pain.

  OUTSIDE the city the Datsun stood parked by the side of the road. Not far away uphill, lethargic sheep milled slowly in a wire pen, or lay on the dusty ground, not even blinking as flies crawled over their eyeballs.

  The man called by the name of the
angel of punishment watched smoke rising above the minarets. Listened to the wail of sirens. The radio babbled with horror. A reporter spoke urgently from the courtyard of the shrine. He wept as he described the bodies being carried out. Scores of dead. Hundreds injured. Blood. Slaughter. Death.

  He stood smoking as more sirens joined the lament. It sounded as if the Baluchis had parked in exactly the right spot. The announcer, voice shaking with outrage and fury, spoke of gunmen shot down in the ring tunnel.

  Heroes? He cocked an eyebrow. Perhaps, in their way. Simple men, who believed. Damaged men, filled with hate.

  Tools, to be used.

  As he’d used such tools before.

  He wondered now whether he’d put enough acid in the mix. Maybe next time he’d add more.

  In the pen, a herder or lot manager came out and began sifting feed into a trough. The animals slowly congregated, but they didn’t seem eager to eat. The small man glanced his way a couple of times; then walked over.

  “Komak bokonam?” said the Iranian.

  A northern-flavored Farsi. “Your sheep seem tired,” Malik told him, in the same language, though he knew his accent would sound strange.

  “They’ve been that way for some time. The lambs—they don’t grow like they should.”

  “You might consider feeding them something to pep them up. There are such things.”

  “Are there? I’ll have to look into that,” the herder said, bending to feel along a lamb’s flank.

  The man went back to the car. He watched for a while longer, listening to the frenzied voices on the radio. Thinking about them, and about the sheep, and about where he was bound next.

  Then only a tracing in the air of dust and smoke marked where he had been.

  8

  Norfolk, Virginia

  DAN woke on an upper floor of the Omni Hotel to find his wife already up. It was early yet. The windows were still dark, the river beyond a swatch of blackness. The shaded desk lamp was glowing.

  Not moving, not letting her know he was awake, he lay watching her.

  Blair was tapping busily on the notebook computer her aide carried around for her. The half-moon glasses she wouldn’t wear in public were perched on her nose. She worried at her teeth with a pencil eraser as she stared at the screen. The front of her hotel bathrobe was open.

  Blair Titus was as unlike his first wife as it was possible to get. Where Susan had been dark and spare, Blair was tall and pale and blond. Even now, breasts exposed by the unbelted robe, her utter concentration gave her an air of inaccessible professionalism. This, he knew, was a front. She had a passionate, even reckless side. But he’d seen her other persona, too. Fixing a careless witness or pompous general with a pointed query, which every attempt to evade would only widen the wound.

  Her relationship with authority was different from his. Where he both envied and suspected it, neither position nor rank intimidated her. She had a doctorate in operations research, a juris doctor degree from George Mason, and a stepfather who owned six thousand acres in Prince Georges County, Maryland. He could see how insecure men found her threatening and reacted with hatred that was really fear.

  They’d met on the deck of a tanker in a sandstorm, when he was exec of the foredoomed Turner Van Zandt and she the defense aide for Bankey Talmadge. And again in Bahrain, where one night had interlocked their lives like enzymes recognizing the molecule that might complete them. Agreeing the odds were against them. Until one day, as he stepped out of an isolation ward, she’d persuaded him they had to try.

  Blair had started as a presidential management intern. From there she’d gone to the House as a junior staff member, then to the Senate, tracking political favors and working the military beat. Then to the Armed Services Committee staff when Talmadge had taken over as chairman. She’d briefed the candidate on military issues during the campaign, and Les Aspin had asked for her by name for Defense. When the list came through, her job was manpower and personnel. She’d sailed through her hearings, one of which he’d managed to get down from Newport to catch.

  Taking over her Pentagon office, she’d told him, was harder. Over a hundred military and civilians and five appointees. She worried about being the first woman in the post. How she felt awkward at parades— everyone watching and she couldn’t screw up. He’d been able to give her a couple of tips; how to put military people at ease, and when to take the reins.

  It wasn’t a traditional marriage. They grabbed weekends and holidays together, scheduling meetings around each other’s commitments. Once in a while they had a few days together in the apartment she rented in Alexandria. He honestly didn’t know if it was working. They were just both so damned busy. And now here he was off again.

  Then she turned her head and smiled, and he set aside his doubts. Whatever the future brought, he had this moment. This and a few more, moments of fulfillment and love, like jewels set into an iron bracelet of duty.

  “No bad dreams?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “That’s good. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “Hell, no. It’s well past 0400. What’re you doing?”

  “The staff did a draft of my remarks, but they can’t seem to get them through the hotel’s fax.”

  “You can do that kind of stuff off the cuff. What, are you worried about it?”

  “I like to have something in my pocket.”

  “I thought I was the only one who wasn’t sure what he was doing.”

  For that he got a glance over the glasses. “You wanted command, right? You didn’t want the staff job.”

  “I wouldn’t be right in legislative affairs, Blair. Sooner or later I’d tell them what I thought of them.”

  “Yeah. You tend to do that. So what’s the problem?”

  “I guess, this whole assignment.”

  “What about it disturbs you?”

  “Why I was selected for it, for one thing.”

  “Why would the navy possibly select you for Horn? Well, let’s see. Surely not because of your combat record. Or your sea time. Or your Silver Star and Congressional. That couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  She took her glasses off and leaned forward, and her robe fell open even more. “Dan, let me speak from the SecDef perspective. You’re something we don’t have very many of anymore. We’ve got policy wonks, and acquisitions guys, and hardware and systems and logistics types. What we don’t seem to be generating are war fighters. You can argue the reasons for that all you want. I know you’ve got opinions on the issue.”

  “I sure do.”

  “I don’t have any insight into the selection process. It’s service level, opaque to us. But I think that’s precisely why you were chosen. What’s more, you’ve got an open mind. You can give this concept of putting women in combatants a fair trial.” She bent to look out; he saw past her the first emanation of dawn rising from the river. “Yeomen in World War I. Transport pilots in World War II. The navy started them off in transports and hospital ships in the seventies. But so far, they can’t serve on warships.”

  “Because Congress says they can’t.”

  “Title 10 U.S. Code, para 6015. For years Congress said the code was there because the services wouldn’t accept women. And the services said Congress forced them to continue their exclusionary policies. But Panama and Desert Storm fixed that. Twenty-three women got the Combat Action Ribbon from the Marine Corps alone.”

  She touched the computer, keeping it awake, and went on. “Actually, they can serve on combatants, as long as they’re temporary billets. Legal officer on the Independence. If they’re civilians, they can serve in the replenishment ships that refuel the battle groups. The EEOC under Title 7 forced us to let female engineers and technicians accompany combatants on sea trials. So they can go to sea, and they do go to sea … and keeping them out of ship’s company looks more artificial every year. Now the Defense Advisory Council has called for bringing down tho
se statutes. And I agree.”

  “I sort of thought you would.”

  “It’s not because I’m a woman, smart-ass. The manpower figures say we have to. I’ve tested the waters with the chiefs. The air force chief of staff needs pilots no matter what’s between their legs. The Marine Corps’s against. The army’s divided. The navy’s the swing vote. That’s why we need a demonstration.”

  “Horn.”

  “In order to overcome a statutory prohibition, we have to do a test program. There’s policy riding on you, Dan.”

  “With what as the ultimate agenda?”

  “There’s no agenda. Maybe DACOWITS has one, but DoD as a whole does not. Or if we do, it’s to make use of women up to the point where the down side cancels out the up side. Right now nobody knows where that is. The Hill might decide there should be no statutory limits.”

  “Not even ground combat?”

  “Women are already in ground combat,” Blair said, gesturing with the glasses. “Look at the army. Women can drive supply trucks though a combat zone. But they can’t man an Abrams. If you were going to attack somebody, would it be a tank or a truck full of ammo?”

  “The truck.”

  “One soldier in Desert Storm, she was trained as a radio operator. They needed truck drivers instead. They showed her how to drive in forward gear, the sergeant told her he’d instruct her in reverse the next day. Only that night the Iraqis attack across the berm and she finds herself driving a tanker full of fuel through an Iraqi minefield, and she can only do it in forward gear.”

  She paused, looking into her screen as if into an oracle. “My deepest suspicion is that we’re not really talking about whether women can do these jobs. Everybody knows they can. If they can be street cops in New York, firefighters in L.A. And I don’t think it’s about keeping women from being killed. Women die in every war. I think some people want to exclude women from killing. And the reasons for that make very interesting speculation.”