Subtly adjusting his throttles and trying not to move the stick, David Quereau kept his F-22 in formation on the MiG’s right wing. Both planes flew with their noses pointed up at steep angles, riding their exhaust gases like rockets, teetering on the edge of stalls.
Yet the MiG pilot was not decelerating anymore. The pilot must have sensed that he was as slow as he could go, and the loss of another knot or two would result in a departure from controlled flight. He was at the far left edge of the performance envelope.
On the other hand, the American pilot had a few more he could scrub off, if he wished. If he did, he would fall behind the MiG and could eventually put a cannon burst into the Iranian, when he finally began to accelerate again.
The MiG pilot looked over at Quereau, who of course was looking at him as he flew formation. Quereau saluted with his throttle hand, then pointed east, repeatedly, jabbing his finger. Then he waved good-bye.
He saw the MiG pilot acknowledge the salute and gesturing. The MiG-29 accelerated smartly, and the nose dropped so altitude could be quickly converted to airspeed. Flaps coming up, both men stayed in formation a moment as their speed increased and wings and controls bit solidly into the air.
Then, with a little wave, the Iranian lowered his left wing to turn east and dropped his nose even more. He raced away in a descending left turn.
Quereau watched the MiG until it was lost in the vastness of the sky; then he turned a complete circle as he checked his radar picture and threat indicators. He saw the B-2s’ symbols and the lead F-22. With a grin he lowered his nose to help him accelerate and headed west.
He savored the past few minutes. Whatever else it is, squirting missiles is not dogfighting. The thought occurred to him that he might have been in the very last dogfight in the history of the world.
He and that Iranian pilot were the only guys who knew about it.
Cool.
Every muscle I had screamed in protest. I sat up, found that nothing was broken and slowly worked my way erect. The others were tearing bare-handed at the rubble. I joined them. We dug until we found a trouser leg, then dug more frantically until we finally uncovered Larijani’s head. He was dead, with dirt in his eyes and mouth. I kinda figured that the bullets killed him, but maybe it was the collapse of the building.
I straightened up as I looked at him. Another unnecessary death. I felt tired and sore. I turned and walked slowly, painfully, over to the technical. I felt like I was a hundred years old.
In a moment Davar joined me. She was trying to wipe the tears and dirt from her face. “Why did he follow me?” I asked her.
“He didn’t want to live anymore,” she said. “Couldn’t you see that?”
We left him there and piled into the technical. I didn’t even look into the massive hole, which was still giving off visible smoke with an acrid odor. G. W. got behind the wheel and fed gas.
He didn’t waste any time getting us going. Nobody wanted to be here when the Iranian army eventually showed up to see what happened.
I leaned forward and shouted, “Give us a look at the secondary tunnel on the other side of the ridge.”
A helicopter went right over us as we roared up the access road toward the boulevard, a Hind. It circled the crater, then landed beside it. A figure stepped out and walked over to the edge.
Grafton!
I reached though the gap where the rear window in the pickup used to be and grabbed G. W.’s shoulder.
“Go back. Go back,” I shouted. “It’s Jake Grafton!”
G. W. slammed on the brakes, made the turn and roared back.
Grafton watched us come. He must have recognized us, because he waved at the Hind pilot, who lifted his machine off and flew away. Grafton threw his duffle bag into the back of the technical and climbed in. G. W. peeled out.
Grafton grinned at me, grabbed my hand and said, “Jesus, you look bad, Tommy.”
I lay down in the bed of the pickup and tried to sleep. Amazingly, I dropped right off. It had been a long night.
General Martin Lincoln called the president to report that all the Iranian missiles had been shot down and all the launch sites seemed to be out of business. “We have drones over the sites monitoring them, and the people inside the tunnels have been dribbling away. Most of the tunnels seem to be abandoned, and both entrances to the executive bunker in Tehran have been sealed.”
“So it’s over,” the president said, his voice pregnant with relief.
“The shooting, anyway,” Lincoln admitted. “The Israeli missiles were destroyed over Jordan, so there may be a serious fallout problem there.”
“Bomb the Iranian reactors,” the president told him.
“Radioactivity will be released. The environmentalists will howl.”
“That’s unavoidable, but we’re not doing this again. Bomb the reactors.”
“Yes, sir,” said General Lincoln. After he hung up, he gave the appropriate orders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jake Grafton had an agenda, which should have been no surprise to me, but to tell you the truth, I hadn’t been thinking much beyond the vaporization of Tehran or sealing the executive bunker. Call me shallow.
When I awoke from my nap in the back of that old pickup, I saw Grafton in the passenger seat talking to Davar, who sat between him and the driver, G. W. Hosein. Haddad Nouri was standing tall behind the machine gun, and Ahmad Qajar was sitting in the bed of the truck, cradling his broken arm. Haddad passed me a canteen; I guzzled some water. Actually drained most of it.
Finally I took a look around. Not a soldier did I see on the streets, nor were there very many people or vehicles.
“The empty city,” Ahmad said, grinning.
Hosein took us to the embassy annex. He, Ahmad and Haddad got out. “You stay here,” Grafton said to Ahmad. “They’ll set your arm, and you can stay until we arrange for transportation to get you home.”
Grafton shook hands with the three of them, then climbed behind the wheel. We finally came to a driveway that went into what appeared to be an old estate. The building was a huge, ramshackle place, with bricks and ivy and lots of windows. The truck pulled up right in front; Jake Grafton got out, then helped Davar out. She was almost as much of a mess as I was, filthy from head to toe.
Jake Grafton paused and grabbed my hand. He looked me in the eyes, grinned and said, “Thanks, Tommy.”
Then he released my hand and took Davar’s elbow. They went in, and I trailed along. About a hundred things bubbled up that I wanted to ask Grafton, but I sensed that now wasn’t the time. He did murmur to me that this place was a mental institution.
They conferred with the man on the desk, who led them away. I located a men’s room and tried to wash some of the dirt off.
When I came out, the lobby, if that’s what it was, was empty. I found a chair and sat in it.
About a half hour later Grafton and Davar came back with a medium-sized fellow wearing a bedsheet. He seemed somewhat dazed. Grafton introduced me. He was General Habib Sultani. “General Sultani has been a patient here,” Grafton said, “and he wants to see the bunker.”
We piled into the truck. Grafton got behind the wheel, and Sultani sat in the passenger seat. Davar sat between them to act as translator.
Away we went. I was feeling better by this time. My head was clearer, and every muscle I had hurt like hell, but I was alive and I felt pretty good about it.
Grafton drove us along the ridge where Joe had parked the tank, then downslope toward the bunker’s back entrance. We found the holes where the bunker busters went into the ground, two hundred yards upslope from the entrance, twenty feet apart. They were in the center of a gentle depression. The earth had subsided, filling the tunnel below, sealing it.
We went back to the Mosalla Prayer Grounds. Several dozen young adults in civilian clothes, men and women, were staring into the hole. Grafton parked as near to the remains of the collapsed mosque as he could get and led Sultani and Davar across the loose eart
h and rock to the edge. I trailed along. The four of us stood on the berm of earth that marked the rim and looked in. The crater wasn’t very deep; the bottom was full of packed dirt and rock, yet fumes were still wafting up. Maybe the bombs had ruptured the ceiling of hell.
“Iran has a choice,” Grafton told Sultani, through Davar, as the other spectators looked at us curiously. “You can dig Ahmadinejad and his po litical and religious allies out of there, if they are still alive, and he will use his thugs to retake control of the country, make some more bombs and rant on about ‘Death to America’; or you can see that he stays in that hole and let the politicians who remain aboveground rechart the nation’s course.”
I looked around, in all directions. There wasn’t a single soldier in sight. The other kibitzers were whispering among themselves as they surveyed the scene. Maybe they sensed that something terrible had happened here. Or something hopeful, depending on your point of view.
“It is possible to be a Muslim nation,” Grafton continued, “tolerate dissent, argue about the political choices the nation faces, and sell oil to the world and use the proceeds to build a new Iran. Instead of spending money on nuclear reactors and weapons and a comfortable life for the mullahs, build schools, roads, sewers, factories and hospitals, loan money to entrepreneurs who will build companies to manufacture goods for domestic use and export, build a brighter future for every Iranian. The choice, quite simply, is up to you.”
I didn’t know where Sultani had been emotionally these last few months or weeks, but as Grafton talked I could see him mulling the possibilities.
“Regardless of our personal wishes,” Grafton continued, almost talking to himself, “it isn’t possible to withdraw from the world. Nor is it possible to remake the world into what we want it to be; that’s a fool’s errand. We must accept the world as it is and live within it as best we can, as our conscience dictates.”
Sultani said little and promised nothing. He kicked a rock or two into the hole, watched the fumes leak out, and finally asked to be taken to the Ministry of Defense.
We dropped him off in front. The central wing of the building was half demolished, but he didn’t even look at that. He got out, glanced at Davar and said something to her, then turned and walked into the building without a backward glance. Only one soldier was stationed at the door, and to his credit, he stiffened to attention and did a Present Arms as the minister, still wrapped in a bedsheet, passed him and went inside.
Then Grafton drove away. Davar was in the front with him. I sat in the bed immediately behind the cab, which had no rear window, and listened to Grafton. Mainly he wanted to know which politicians in the political opposition he should talk to. Davar was full of names, and Mir-Hossein Mousavi led the list.
Finally he turned and spoke to me. “Tommy, I am going to drop you and Davar off at her house. She needs to clean up, change clothes and so on. I will pick you up in about two hours.”
“That might be a real bad scene for Davar,” I said.
She glanced at me with those big brown eyes.
“I will be all right, Tommy,” she said.
There wasn’t a car in the driveway. No staff. The house was apparently empty. Davar lowered her head and walked inside, with me right behind her. Grafton fed gas and drove away. Fortunately the front door was unlocked, so I didn’t have to crawl though a window to unlock it.
She walked into the house and took the stairs for her room. I knew where it was, but I had never entered this way.
I trailed along, just in case.
Four flights of stairs later, she opened the door to her room under the eaves. The place was trashed, with every book, sheet of paper and scrap of clothing lying in the middle of the floor.
A lean young man in his twenties, with a short beard, was prying boards off the back of the bookcase with a crowbar. He looked startled to see us.
“I thought you were in the bunker,” she said.
“I’m looking for a book.”
“A book? Which one?”
“The blasphemous manuscript that Grandfather wrote. I know you and Ghasem had it. The Basij didn’t find it in his apartment, so it must be in this house. Where did you hide it?” He took a step toward her with the crowbar in hand.
“You were the one who betrayed Grandfather to the MOIS,” she said evenly.
He paused, and I could see by the look on his face that she had said the truth.
She turned and grabbed the butt of the pistol in the holster on my belt. She was trying to get it out when I stopped her.
“Who is this guy?” I asked with my hands on top of hers.
“Khurram,” she hissed. “My brother.”
“Who are you?” he roared at me. “Who are you to come to my house with my sister and enter her bedroom?”
“It isn’t here,” Davar told him. “Ghasem and I sent the book to America to be published.”
That rocked him. He looked from her to me, back to her.
“You slut! Whore!” His voice rose to a shout. “Grandfather was possessed by the devil. He insulted the Prophet, insulted everyone who believes with blasphemy, heresy, apostasy.” He took another step toward her and raised the crowbar threateningly.
“Whoa,” I said. “Why don’t you let Allah worry about all that? You’ve got a full plate right here. And lay off your sister.”
He turned toward me. “Who are you?”
Truthfully, I had had enough. It was time to send Khurram on his way.
“I’m an American spy,” I told him evenly. “I work for the CIA.”
He swung the crowbar at me as if it were a cutlass. It whacked the ceiling but kept coming at my head. I caught it and pulled him in, then used my right elbow on his chin. He went down amid the trash, out cold. I laid down the crowbar and hoisted him over my shoulder.
“You bathe and get dressed,” I said to Davar. “Pack some clothes. I’ll get rid of this.”
I took him down the stairs, all the way to the ground level. Carried him out onto the lawn and tossed him down.
The sun was well up, a nice breeze was delaying the summer heat, and a thunderstorm was building to the north, over the mountains.
I squatted in the shade and waited for Khurram to awaken. Got out my pistol, unloaded it, checked it for dirt, worked the action and blew through the barrel, then reinserted the magazine and chambered a round.
Finally Khurram stirred. He sat up and shook his head and rubbed his eyes and his chin. Then he saw me.
I pointed the pistol at him. “If I kill you,” I said conversationally, “who do you think will care?”
He tried to get up. Got tangled in his feet and sat down hard. Then he tried again and succeeded. He stood swaying, looking at me and the pistol.
“You won’t be anything but dead,” I said.
He massaged his jaw, which didn’t appear to be broken.
“Leave, and don’t come back. Go. If you return here, I will kill you.”
He walked out of the yard onto the street. “Hazra al-Rashid will take care of you,” he shouted and shuffled off in a trot.
I watched him until I lost sight, reholstered the pistol and went back inside.
Davar packed a suitcase. She and I were sitting on the front steps when Jake Grafton rolled up. G. W. Hosein was standing at the machine gun, and Hadad was sitting in back, cradling an AK-47.
There was more traffic on the streets. Some of the families that had evacuated last night were trickling back; it looked as if they hadn’t even unpacked their vehicles. Rolling along a boulevard, Grafton said, “I talked to the chargé at the American Interests Section. She had some names she thought Davar should talk to. We are going to drop you there, Tommy, and the chargé will arrange for you to get on the next Air France flight out. I think you said something about Paris.”
“Yeah,” I said, so overwhelmed with relief that I couldn’t control my face. “Yeah. I’m ready to go.”
So that is what they did. On the sidewalk in front of the S
wiss embassy annex, I handed my pistol belt to Jake Grafton, shook his hand again and had a brief moment with Davar.
“You are staying?”
“For a while. Admiral Grafton wants me to introduce him to people I know.”
“You deserve better than this, Davar.”
She passed a hand across her face.
“Remember that guy in Oklahoma, who wanted to spend his life with you.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she whispered and kissed me on the cheek.
I eventually wound up at the airport, waited twelve long hours, and that night found myself in a window seat heading to Istanbul, then Paris.
I called a woman I knew, Marisa, and she came to the airport to get me.
After I had been in France for three days, I finally picked up a newspaper, which was full of the goings-on in Iran. The Parliament met and elected Mousavi as interim president. He had the full backing of the minister of defense, Habib Sultani, who was using the army to disarm and disband the MOIS and the Basij. The first act of Parliament was to renounce the nuclear weapons program and invite international inspectors to Iran.
Jordan and Iraq had nuclear contamination problems. Most of the plutonium from the destroyed warheads had landed in uninhabited desert, but the areas were sizable. Several nations had agreed to participate in the decontamination efforts.
All that was very far away from summer in France, with lunches in the garden and mornings and evenings in bed with a beautiful woman whom I adored. Perhaps even loved. If there is a heaven, and if I ever get there, I hope it will be like that ten days I spent in Paris.
In odd moments I thought about leaving the agency, moving on to the next chapter in my life, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine what it would be. So I stopped thinking about it and let my time with Marisa just happen.
When I finally got back to the States, my apartment was so empty I almost cried. Then the telephone rang.
“Tommy, this is Jake Grafton. I heard you were coming home.”
That Grafton-he knew everything.
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