by Jack Mars
Kurt rubbed his forehead. “I thought you guys really hit it off.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
5:45 p.m. Tehran Time (9:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
The Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Tehran, Iran
“Is that all she told him?”
The man stared out a large bay window at the snow-capped peaks of the Alborz Mountains. To the west, the last of the day was fading, the weak yellow light playing on the white of the snow and ice.
His name was Mohammed Younessi. He was tall and thin, completely bald, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the famous actor Yul Brynner. His title, translated into English, meant Director of Accountability. It was not internal organizational accountability, however, that he was in charge of.
“No,” the man behind him said. “He also said she told him that America would destroy the weapons themselves, if we won’t do it.”
Younessi smiled. It would be a tall order for the Americans to destroy the weapons, if they existed. First, they would have to find them. Their location was one of the most closely held secrets in all of Iran—Younessi himself did not know where they were, or if they had ever been built in the first place. It would take a very skilled spy to unravel these secrets.
“Have there been any infiltrations?” Younessi said.
“None that we are aware of.”
“That we are aware of?” Younessi did not like it when underlings spoke in a way that lacked certainty.
“Forgive me,” the man said. “There are American unmanned drones patrolling at the edge of our territory twenty-four hours a day. A few have strayed into our airspace, then quickly exited again, likely testing us. But we are monitoring them closely. The Shiite tribes move back and forth across the border with Iraq, but they are tight-knit and it is very unlikely there are infiltrators among them. We watch the mountains to the north and the Caspian Sea approaches. Our ground checkpoints on the border of Kurdish-held territories are very tight. The east is secure. Is it possible an infiltrator could slip in? Difficult, I would say, but not impossible.”
Younessi shrugged. “And of course we know who the suspected collaborators are.”
He did not turn around, but he could tell the man behind him nodded. “Of course.”
“Watch them carefully,” Younessi said. “If any activity seems strange, or even slightly unusual, eliminate them. But keep them alive long enough to set a trap for their friends from abroad.”
“Yes, Director,” the man said.
“And watch the skies. Double our jet patrols along our western flank.”
An idea occurred to him then. The situation with Israel and America was tense, high pressure. But there might be a way to raise the stakes even further. He thought of imagery from the old times, 1979, when the students stormed the American embassy and seized the hostages. In his mind’s eye, he could see the Americans with blindfolds on their faces, being led in front of the cameras.
“If at all possible, I would like to capture an American or Israeli spy. I would like to parade such a person in public for the world to see.”
“Captured alive?” the man said.
Younessi nodded. “Yes. With a written confession that they can recite on television and radio.”
“And if no such spy becomes available?”
Younessi shrugged. “A collaborator will do. Even someone already in prison.”
“Of course.”
Younessi spun around. He pointed at his employee. “But don’t discount the possibility of a spy. To destroy the weapons, they must find them. To find them, they must infiltrate. Spies are coming, if they aren’t already here.”
“Yes, Director.”
Younessi smiled. He cracked his knuckles. He enjoyed hurting people—it was part of his job. It would be a tricky thing to do to an American, because of all the international organizations watching. But there were ways of hurting people that did not leave lasting physical marks. Then it was your word against theirs. And if the person was a deep cover spy, and your enemy America denied that person’s very existence?
My, my, my. Then you could do anything you wanted.
Younessi stared hard at his underling, the man who worked for him. “If you catch a spy, bring him to me first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
9:45 p.m. Tehran Time (1:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)
The Skies above Eastern Iraq
Luke breathed pure oxygen through a mask affixed to his face.
He sat on a long bench inside the plane. At one end of the bench sat a young man, who for lack of another name, Luke was starting to think of as Ari Meil. At the other end sat Ed Newsam.
The two hadn’t spoken again since their fight at the secret Israeli airbase. Indeed, during their stopover at the American base in Basra, while Luke and Ed went into the PX for a bite to eat and took naps in a guest barracks, the Israeli disappeared again.
It wasn’t good. Luke was going to have to find a way to bridge the gap between them. Not just between Ed and the kid, but between Luke and the kid as well.
Luke checked the altimeter on his wrist. They were flying at close to 29,000 feet, not far from the border between Iraq and Iran. They would drop another few thousand feet before they made the jump. They were visible to the Iranians up here, without a doubt. But the sky was full of planes and drones patrolling this airspace, so this one plane shouldn’t be that obvious. And when they jumped, they’d be too small to pick up on radar.
The jump door was closed, but it didn’t matter. Luke was cold, despite the special polypropylene jumpsuit that covered him nearly head to toe. Outside the door’s window, it was full-on dark. Away on the northeast horizon, there was a glow of light coming from the ground. He didn’t even have to guess—that was Tehran. It was a big city.
He stood and stepped over in front of Ed.
Ed leaned back on the bench, resting against the wall. His eyes were closed, and his face was covered by an oxygen mask, same as Luke.
His giant combat pack was belted to the front of him, his legs spread out around it. Ed had been busy acquiring weapons in Iraq. He had an MP5 submachine gun belted to one side of him. Strapped to his other side was his favorite weapon—the M79 grenade launcher. There were handguns mounted to his waist. Ed was strapped with guns, just the way Luke knew he liked it.
Luke himself was going skinny on this trip—a couple of handguns, a couple of knives strapped to his calves, a few Israeli grenades. They were going to be sneaking around. It was probably better to be quiet than loud. Whatever other weapons Luke might need, he would try to acquire as he went.
He smiled down at Ed—with his eyes closed, he looked a lot like the little boy he once must have been. The guns were his security blanket.
“Ed.”
He gave Ed’s leg a light kick.
Ed’s eyes opened.
“Almost there, man. You want to do your checklist?”
Ed nodded.
Luke knew the list by heart, but he pulled a small piece of paper from his breast pocket. It was hard to handle the paper with his thick gloves on, and he had left it hanging half out of the pocket. That way he could at least get a grip on it.
Luke began the protocol. “Altimeter?”
Ed patted the fat watch on his wrist.
“What’s your reading?”
Ed tapped a button on his watch and looked at the reading.
“Twenty-seven and change.”
Luke glanced at his own altimeter and got the reading: 27,348. They were dropping. They had told him to expect a jump at just below 26,000 feet.
“Check.”
“Parachute.”
Ed touched the parachute on his back. “Check.”
“Helmet.”
Ed tapped himself on his hard, molded-plastic head. “Check.”
Luke went through the list, working his way carefully to the end. Each time he mentioned an item on the list to Ed, he let that serve as his
own check.
“How’s your breathing?” Luke said.
“Feels good.”
“Dizzy, any nausea or tingling sensations?”
“No.”
“Exhaustion, sleepiness, unexplained tiredness?”
Ed shrugged. “I left the US twenty-four hours ago. I’ve been sleeping in two-hour increments. I might be a little tired.”
“Anything that will affect your jump?”
“No, man. I’m good.”
“This is a HAHO jump. High altitude, high opening. How do you feel about that?”
“I love it.”
Luke smiled. “When we jump, we’re going to pull cords at twenty seconds. We’re still over Iraq, but very close to the border with Iran. We’re following the kid’s lead. I know you don’t love that, but it’s what we’ve got. We’re steering east and north as much as we can—we’re hoping prevailing winds will push us east. We’re shooting for at least twenty miles in country before we land. As always, no lights, no sound. No radio contact. It’s going to be dark out there, so keep your eyes open. Got it?”
Ed nodded. “Got it.”
“If the bad guys spot us and we take ground fire, or God forbid, aerial fire, we cut our primaries, drop hard at terminal velocity, and open our secondaries low. Watch for eighteen hundred feet, then pull. If that happens, the trip is scuttled. When you land, don’t wait around. Head west into Iraq by any means necessary. No prisoners, brother. Just make it home alive.”
“Roger that,” Ed said.
Luke nodded. He tapped Ed on the helmet. “Cool. Good man.”
He made his way to the other end of the bench. The kid was here, sitting across from the closed jump door, staring at it. His pack seemed huge between his legs.
“Ari.”
The kid looked up. Through his oxygen mask, Luke could barely see his face. All that was visible were his eyes.
“You want to run a checklist?” Luke said.
Ari shook his head. “Not necessary. I’ve done this many times.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I will.”
Luke sat down, a few feet away and just across from them. In a moment, he would have to go and strap his own combat pack on. For now, he made a triangle with Ed and Ari, in a spot where both of them could hear him.
“We need to work together on this thing,” he said.
The kid shrugged. “You guys do your job. I’ll do mine.”
Luke looked at him, then looked at Ed. He paused for a moment. The kid gave him second thoughts about this whole mission. The kid was a second thoughts factory, generating new second thoughts around the clock, three shifts a day.
“You have a lot of friends back home… Ari? People enjoy this attitude of yours, do they?”
The kid shook his head. He stared at Luke, then looked down the bench at Ed. “You guys don’t get it, do you?”
Ed shook his head. “No. We don’t.”
“I don’t have any friends. I don’t have a family. No parents, no siblings, no wife and daughter. I don’t have a name. I don’t have a home. I can’t have these things. It’s too dangerous. Not for me. For them. You don’t know my name, not because I don’t want to tell you. If you were captured and tortured—and rest assured, in Iran you would be tortured—they would get my name from you. That can’t happen. Because my family would die. Security is paramount in Israel, but believe me, the Iranians can reach inside when they want to. And if they find out who I am, they will want to.”
“What have you done?” Luke said.
“I’ve killed people.”
Luke shrugged. “We’ve all killed people.”
The kid was quiet.
“You’re an assassin,” Ed said. It wasn’t a question.
The kid stared at the closed doorway.
“I am a member of Kidon,” he said.
Kidon, Luke knew, was the most secretive branch of Mossad. These were the killers, the ruthless, the merciless, and the most capable people in Israeli intelligence.
“Tell me,” Luke said.
“Hassan al-Laqis was considered the father of Hezbollah’s missile program. He convinced the Iranians to trust Hezbollah with increasingly advanced weapon systems. He also raised money through Hezbollah’s drug trafficking, and purchased heavy anti-tank gunnery, and chemical weapons, from a Russian arms dealer. The Iranians don’t approve of chemical weapons, so he went around them. He was a very dangerous man. He was gunned down on a Beirut street corner two years ago. The case was never solved.”
Luke and Ed said nothing.
“Mohammed Ali Sistani was a radical cleric in Iran. He had a large following among Shiites, and he hated Jews with a passion that can only be thought of as psychotic. He had a radio program that was heard throughout Iran, as well as in eastern Iraq, western Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He had opened a school for jihad, where young students were trained to commit suicide attacks. Two of his graduates destroyed a beach resort popular with Israelis outside Dar es Salaam, killing twenty-seven people besides themselves and injuring hundreds. Three other students of his attacked an Israeli youth hostel in Bangkok, killing fourteen people, including ten guests, and the owners, a couple in their early thirties, along with their two young children. When the Thai police arrived, the attackers detonated explosives, burning the building to the ground. Sistani, left to his own devices, would have continued to encourage these types of attacks, both at his school and to his large audience of listeners.”
“What happened to him?” Luke said.
The kid shrugged. “He died six months ago. Stabbed in the back as he left his radio studio in Tehran late one evening. His two bodyguards had their throats slit. They bled out very quickly. Sistani died more slowly, in an alleyway among garbage bins, and in quite a bit of pain. He was an old man and he was afraid to die. He wept, and he prayed, but he did not beg for his life. Give him credit for that.”
“Any others?” Luke said.
The kid nodded. “Yes. It’s my job.”
Suddenly Luke was suspicious. “Is this mission a front? Is it really an assassination?”
The kid stared at him. “No. Weren’t you at the briefing? We’re not killing anyone unless we have to. We’re looking for nuclear weapons. It just so happens that I’m the best we have at infiltrating Iran, so they sent me.”
The kid looked at Ed. “Are we good?”
Ed shrugged. “I guess we’re good. If you can’t tell us, you can’t tell us.” He reached a heavy gloved hand across and Ari tapped it with own.
At that moment, a buzzer sounded and a green light came on above the door to the closed door to the cockpit.
“That’s the cue,” the kid said. “We’re here.”
He worked his way to his feet as Luke went back to strap on his pack. Luke watched as the kid waddled to the door with his heavy combat pack between his legs. He wrenched open the door, then turned and looked back. He stared at Ed, who was already moving toward him.
“Hey, big man!” the kid shouted. “Ready to dance?”
Then he dove out and was gone.
Luke sighed. He looked at Ed. Ed just shook his head as he waddled past toward the open door.
“After you,” Luke said.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
2:50 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
“Iran is one of the oldest civilizations known to man,” Kurt Kimball said, his voice a deep monotone that threatened to put his audience into a coma.
“For thousands of years it was known to outsiders as Persia—the word Iran appeared in writing for the first time in the 200s AD. Iran’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed throughout history. Six hundred years before Christ, Persia was probably the greatest empire the world had ever seen.”
Susan was barely listening. She tried to think of where Stone might be at this moment. Was he safe? Was he injured? Was he dead?
She looked around the egg-shaped roo
m at the tired, sallow faces. It was a packed house. Another day, another crisis.
Susan had not made a substantial public statement yet. The cable news shows were starting to say that she was dithering—fiddling while Rome burned. Israel and Iran were having a nuclear standoff. Israel and Hezbollah were in the midst of a hot war along the Lebanon border. Nearly three hundred people had died in a terror attack at the Western Wall. Israel was bombing Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians were launching rockets into Israeli settlements, and into towns in southern Israel.
There was no end in sight, Susan was worried sick about Luke Stone, and Kurt was giving them all a history lesson on Iran.
Susan shook her head. She should never have allowed Stone to go on this mission. She should never have allowed the Special Response Team to regroup. If Stone came back from this alive, she was going to fire him.
Fire him? She was going to kill him.
Kurt droned on. “Iran was a center of science, culture, and art during the Islamic Golden Age, while Western Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. This reached its peak in the 900s and 1000s—many of the most important scientific, medical, philosophical, historical, and musical works of the era were written in Persian.”
“Kurt?” Susan said.
“Yes?”
“I know this is important information, crucial to have and fascinating to hear. But I’d like to fast-forward past the next nine or ten centuries and get to the present day. We have decisions to make here, and the Middle Ages might not have that much bearing on them. Also, I want to get a status report on our current activities, if we have one available.”
Kurt put a hand up. “Okay, Susan. Okay.”
“I don’t want to ruin your doctoral presentation,” Susan said.
Kurt smiled and shook his head. He sifted through some papers in front of him.
“May I continue?”
“Please. By all means.”
“Modern Iran,” Kurt said, raising his index finger, “is one of the most important geostrategic places on Earth. It has the largest proven natural gas reserves, and the fourth-largest proven oil reserves, in the world. It straddles the line between the Middle East and Asia, and has hundreds of miles of coastline along the Persian Gulf—including the narrow Strait of Hormuz, which requires a constant American military presence so Iran’s military can’t use it as a chokepoint to cut off the flow of oil from other Gulf countries.