“When this is over, you gotta get the hell out of this country,” I told her. “One way or another.”
“There is no way out.”
“Remember that guy from Oklahoma.” I got out of bed and began dressing. “He’s out there somewhere, and he’s got a life to offer you. A life.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t have a life for myself, much less a woman. The kid from Oklahoma. He’s the one.”
“Have you ever been to Oklahoma?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s it like?”
“It’s flat. Rolls a little here and there, but mainly it’s flat. Despite the flatness, good people live there. A person can live any way he or she wishes in Oklahoma, and the law leaves you alone. They’ve made the leap to toilet paper-you’ll like it.”
I sat down on the bed. She was lying atop the sheets, her head on the pillow. In the light that came through the window I could just make out her features.
She sat up, reached into her tiny purse for her cigarettes and matches and lit one. After she blew out a cloud of smoke, she said, “After the MOIS beat Grandfather to death, Ghasem became a different person. I always knew they were capable of any crime, but perhaps he didn’t. Or if he did, he refused to think about it.”
She made a gesture of irritation, got out of bed and began dressing. The cigarette dangled from her lips, and smoke curled up around her head.
“The Supreme Leader says the MOIS and the Qods Force work for him,” she said, “and he will ensure they obey God’s laws. So they beat an old man to death, a scholar and philosopher who did no one any harm.”
She pulled on her skirt, worked it around her hips into position and fumbled with the top button. Ash from her cigarette fell to the carpet, and she ignored it. I couldn’t help noticing that she had a really nice set of legs. Actually, everything was very nice. Trim, taut, athletic… perfect.
“There is a serious problem with people who think they are doing God’s work,” she said bitterly. “Once moral ambiguity is eliminated, every human equation evaluates to infinity. Without moral ambiguity, people become capable of anything-any arrogance, any conceit, any gross stupidity.”
Still naked from the waist up, she took a drag on the cigarette and blew smoke around while she eyed me. “Any crime, any atrocity. Mass murder? Nuclear war? Believe me, our holy men are perfectly capable of pulling the trigger.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Georgetown had several dozen funky restaurants, and Professor Azari liked most of them. Small and intimate, they had an ambience he found pleasant; the staff always had a smile and kind word, and if he ordered carefully, the food was usually excellent. A man could ask for no more.
Today he sat outdoors in a small courtyard at a table in the shade of a tree. This was, he supposed, one of his favorite restaurants, and he amused himself by tabulating the ones he liked the best. He ordered a salad with a flavor he thought would be unique. The waitress, who had served him for years, had prevailed upon him to try it, so he had thrown caution to the winds and said yes.
With the salad he ordered a dry white wine. He marveled at the exquisite taste of it and took the tiniest sips he could, to make it last.
When a man he knew came in and sat across the room, Azari ignored him. He finished the wine before the salad and gave in to temptation-he ordered another glass. The salad, when it came, was indeed superb.
He had finished his meal and paid the bill and was sipping a cup of coffee when the man he knew rose from the table where he had lunched and departed. Azari rose, too, smiled at the waitress and made his way out.
The man was walking up the street. Azari followed him, half a block behind. After two blocks, the man paused to read a historical sign on a building-one of many such signs in Georgetown-and Azari caught up with him. He, too, paused in front of the sign.
“The CIA has bought it. Iran is at least a year away from operational nuclear weapons,” Azari said. “The man who talks to me is named Grafton. He says various people high in the government still refuse to believe there is a weapons program. However, the government is trying to formulate a policy, in the event the CIA is right.”
“Who in the government?”
“He did not say. ‘Highly placed people’ was the phrase he used.”
“Very well,” the man said. He turned and walked away.
Azari turned toward the university, which was five blocks away in another direction. A block from the university a man sitting in a car rolled down the window and motioned to him. He got into the passenger seat.
“You did well,” Jake Grafton told him.
“You got it, then?”
Grafton nodded.
“How did you know he would want to talk to me?”
“Just a hunch.”
“How do you know he didn’t follow me toward the university, to see if I talked to anyone?”
Grafton picked up a walkie-talkie from the seat beside him. “We’re keeping an eye on him. You’re clean.”
“You people are watching me day and night,” Azari said accusingly.
Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “This isn’t a gentleman’s game we’re playing, Professor. Lives are on the line, including yours. Keep that fact firmly in mind.”
Grafton eyed Azari, then continued. “Better be on your way. Wouldn’t want you late for class.”
The professor got out of the vehicle, closed the door firmly to ensure it latched, then walked on toward the main entrance of the university. He didn’t look behind him.
I was unlocking the bike in front of the party house when Davar’s cell phone rang. She listened a moment, glanced at me and muttered something into the instrument that I didn’t catch.
She turned off the phone and said, “Ghasem wants to talk to you. I suggested that we meet him at the metro station at Azadi Square.”
“Okay.”
Was the MOIS listening to these cell conversations? Were they watching any of us? Were they incompetent, or were they giving us enough rope to hang ourselves? I wondered how much more time we had.
I rode along thinking about a wall and a blindfold and a firing squad. Of course, this far east of Europe firing squads were probably obsolete; in these climes some holy warrior would merely put a pistol against your skull and pull the trigger.
Perhaps I should cut and run right now.
I was mulling the possibilities when I realized Davar was talking about the people at the party as she rode along behind me. She was speaking loudly, so I would hear. One of the lawyers, a woman, was a women’s rights activist and a political force to be reckoned with. She had been arrested several times for political reasons and had led a campaign to prevent the legislature from passing a proposal that would have allowed a husband to take a second wife without the permission of the first wife.
On she chattered, detailing the careers, prospects and political aspirations of many of the prominent young people of Tehran, most of whom she knew, and all of whom she admired.
“Iran is not a nation of religious fanatics out to murder anyone who doesn’t believe as they do. Iran is a nation of young people, seventy percent of whom are under thirty-five years of age, trying to find their place in the world and make a contribution. Someday we will defeat the fundamentalists. Then this nation will bloom and take its rightful place in the world.”
I had no answer to that. It looked to me as if the God Squad had a pretty firm grip on things around here. They were arresting people for political protests and convicting them of treason, executing women by hanging and stoning… All in all, the place looked like I imagined Nazi Germany looked in the 1930s, complete with goon squads and Gestapo. They even had a dictator with a direct telephone line to God. All they needed to do to make Iran perfect was to declare war on the rest of the human race, and it looked to me as if Ahmadinejad just might do it.
I didn’t say any of this to Davar, of course. I didn’t have the heart.
In the Pentagon the plans for con
ventional strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were coming together slowly. There were a lot of problems, as Jake Grafton expected. The reactors were easy to hit, but the uranium processing facilities, the bomb factory and the missile factories were all underground. Many of the key facilities were under Tehran. The distances involved meant that all the strike planes, including navy planes launched from aircraft carriers, would have to be refueled, some of them twice, a few three times. Tanker assets would have to come from all over the world.
And since it was assumed that Iran would be launching cruise missiles, some of them armed with nuclear warheads, a lot of fighters would need to be in the air to shoot them down and protect the strike birds from Iranian fighters.
Ballistic missiles that flew up and out of the atmosphere, then reentered on a steep dive to their targets, were an entirely different problem. Fighter aircraft lacked the weapons to knock them down.
The officer in charge of the planning was an air force major general, Stewart Heth, and he had officers from all the American armed forces to help him. He had the targets laid out on one wall chart, aircraft required on another and weapons on a third chart. A fourth chart showed assets, where they were located and the missions they would be assigned to. Staff officers were busy measuring distances and calculating times. Others were examining satellite reconnaissance photos and computing GPS coordinates.
Today Jake Grafton found General Heth huddled with two army Special Forces officers, one a general and the other a colonel. Heth looked up at Jake when he saw him and motioned him to join them.
“We have problems,” Heth said after he had introduced Jake to the army officers. “There is no way we can crack some of these bunkers. We’re going to have to put boots on the ground and blow the bunkers from the inside. All the centrifuges, the laser separation facility, the heavy water plant, all of that stuff is at least a hundred and sixty-five feet under bedrock.”
“Opposition?” Jake murmured as he looked at the chart on the table in front of them, a chart with the locations annotated.
“Lots of it, and if they are going to launch nukes, the guard troops will be on full alert. The only way we have a chance is to target the troops on guard, blow them to holy hell and put the Spec Forces guys right into the smoking craters before they have time to regroup. And they will regroup. Here around Tehran are several armored divisions and a couple of infantry divisions. These guys aren’t the Wermacht, but there are so many they’ll be tough to handle.”
“If their leadership is even halfway competent,” the Special Forces general agreed. “To be brutally honest, I don’t know if we can do it with paratroops or Special Forces. We may need armored columns punching in from Iraq. Battles are won with firepower.”
“Casualties?”
“I would expect to lose at least half my troops,” said the Spec Forces general. “Maybe more. The real problem is that our guys will have limited firepower, and once they go through what they have, it’s going to get really exciting. Air support will have to come from a thousand miles away, and I don’t care what anybody says, that’s too far.”
“Extraction?”
“We were discussing that. After the teams do their mission, they would have to egress to an airport where we can actually pick them up. And flying transports in will be a whole other problem.”
Jake spent a few more minutes with them, then left to go look at the large map of Iran posted on the wall. Iran was a damn big place, about three times the size of France. Over a hundred million people lived there. A lot of it was inhospitable deserts and mountains, much like Arizona, so most of the people were crammed into urban centers where they tried to earn a living.
In 1980 the military had tried to rescue American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They had flown helicopters north through the desert; the mission failed when one of the helos crashed trying to land in a cloud of dust and dirt. Iran was huge and inhospitable, yet the American military had learned a lot about desert operations since 1980.
Jake was standing there scrutinizing the map when he felt someone at his elbow. He turned. Sal Molina.
“I saw that list you sent over this morning. ‘Jihad missiles,’ no less. You didn’t make that crap up, did you?”
“Food for thought, eh?”
“Come clean. Where’d you get that list?”
“It happened just as I set it out in the cover memo.”
Molina stood looking around at the charts and maps. “Israel,” he murmured, “Baghdad, Doha, Kuwait, and-this is the part that I find unbelievable-Tehran.” He was silent for a moment. “So what do you think?” he asked finally.
Grafton took a deep breath. “We really have two problems here. One is the ballistic and cruise missiles that get launched. The other is the people who ordered them launched.”
Sal thought a little bit about that. “Okay,” he finally said.
“Some of the missiles are going to get into the air unless we do a first strike, which your boss ruled out. We need a layered defense, a defense in depth, to try to knock down as many of those missiles as possible before they reach their targets.”
“I’m with you.”
“We won’t get them all.”
Sal Molina didn’t respond.
Grafton continued. “Uranium enrichment, bomb and missile factories aren’t a threat in and of themselves. It’s the people who build bombs that are the problem. Taking out those facilities will require an invasion of Iran. I doubt that the president will approve it, even if the Iranians wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”
“Go on.”
“What we need to do,” the admiral said, “is cut off the head of the dragon.”
“A coup d’état?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“America has tried those before, once in Iran, I believe. They don’t work very well.”
“You’ll like the idea a lot better after you talk to General Heth.”
“Can it be done?”
“I think so,” Jake Grafton said and tapped his finger on the map, way up near the top, on Tehran. “Iran has a vibrant young population and a political opposition that the regime has tried to sit on. All they need is a chance.”
I spotted Ghasem in front of the metro station. He seemed to be alone, a twenty-something guy, obviously middle class, with a short beard and trimmed hair.
We rode past him once, looking for the tails. There were plenty of people around at that time of night, yet all seemed to be going somewhere. No one was standing around, watching other people or pretending to read a newspaper or book.
I assumed that if Ghasem thought he was being watched, he wouldn’t stand there like a store dummy waiting for us.
I stopped in front of him on our next circuit of the block, and Davar got off the back of the bike. “I can get home from here,” she said as she pulled off her helmet. Ghasem stared at his cousin; apparently he had never seen her on a motorcycle or wearing a helmet. Davar helped Ghasem don the helmet and fasten the strap under his chin. As he climbed on the bike, she smiled at me.
I winked at her, then eased the clutch out. I figured the park was as good a place as any, so I rode in that direction.
There weren’t many people there, which was fine with me. I parked the bike and killed the engine. We both dismounted and took off the helmets.
Ghasem looked tired and under a lot of stress. Well, hell, welcome to the wonderful world of treason.
“What is this all about?” I asked.
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down several times before he spoke. “Today,” he said, “Ahmadinejad told the top ministers that when the warheads are installed, he wants to launch the missiles at his enemies. Iran will become a martyr nation.”
He didn’t look like he was pulling my leg, but still, what if this was just a ploy to goad America and its friends into attacking Iran?
“A martyr nation,” I said slowly. “What does that mean to you?”
“That the Su
preme Leader and the mullahs will launch a nuclear strike, and Iran will die under massive retaliation. What else could it mean?”
I told him I didn’t know.
After a moment he continued, a man talking aloud to himself. “The other possibility is that they will use the twelve warheads on us, the Iranians, detonate them over Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan… all the cities-then blame the Americans or Jews.” He took a deep breath, then exhaled explosively. “They are capable of that, I think. As long as they thought the will of Allah was being done…”
I didn’t try to figure it out. What I needed to do was get this information to Jake Grafton. I fingered the cell phone in my pocket. Unencrypted, but it was doubtful if the Iranians were listening. They might be, but I didn’t think so.
Then there was the encrypted satellite phone at the embassy. All we had to do was get there and sneak Ghasem in without the usual government watchers getting a gander at his face. Of course, I could go alone, but that meant leaving Ghasem somewhere, and no doubt there were a million questions I should ask. I just hadn’t thought of them yet.
Eenie meenie minie moe… I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and dialed the number for Jake Grafton.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Yes, Tommy.”
After I repeated what Ghasem had said, I handed the telephone to him. The Iranian went through it in greater detail, then listened a while to Grafton.
Finally he handed the telephone back to me. “They will undoubtedly install the warheads on missiles spread around the country,” Grafton said. “We need the location of those missiles, Tommy. That’s your job.”
I muttered a good-bye, snapped the phone shut and smiled at Ghasem. He was my ticket.
***
When Jake Grafton came home from work, he handed a bundle to Callie.
“What is this?” she asked, weighing it in her hands.
“A manuscript. A man in Tehran gave it to Tommy Carmellini, who sent it to me via the diplomatic mail.”
She carefully unwrapped the manuscript and stared at Israr Murad’s handwriting on the first page. “I can’t read this,” she said.
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