If the journey was unscheduled, the stop was really off the charts, way out there on the long southern curve of the main line from the oil-refining, flame-belching city of Ahvaz. The locomotive was about four miles from the little station at Ahu, when it quite suddenly slowed, gently came down to walking pace, and then came to a halt. Up ahead were lights on the track, and alongside was parked a truck bearing the insignia of the Iranian army.
Altogether there were sixteen armed military personnel alongside the train when it stopped, but the greetings were cheerful. Both train drivers, upon closer inspection, wore army uniforms, and they disembarked and moved back down the freight cars to assist in the operation. The truck was backed up just a couple of feet from the railroad, and a gangway was placed from its flatbed rear end across to the freight car.
In the still of that almost silent Iranian night, a mechanical winch in the truck began to haul the first of the twenty-seven unmarked crates out of the train and across the little steel bridge. The crates were five feet long and weighed three hundred pounds. It took four men to manhandle each one into a stack, and the whole operation took two hours.
When it was completed, the men shook hands and said their farewells, and the train pulled away, heading south down to Khorramshahr, still heavily laden with Diamondhead missiles, all of which were scheduled for a long sea voyage down the Persian Gulf, out through the Gulf of Hormuz, and on to Afghanistan, to the waiting Taliban warriors.
The truck on the plain of Khuzestan headed due west, nineteen miles, to the border with Iraq. The landscape was rough, cross-country all the way to the sharp right angle where the frontier zooms into Iran, away from the wide flow of Iraq’s Tigris River. But for the last four miles the route became treacherous, marshy, with deep water on either side of the track, and it needed expert scouts to find a safe route to the Iraqi line. Fortunately, the Iranian army had at its disposal many such men.
These lands were attacked, hit with missiles, and occupied for two years by the marauding armies of Saddam Hussein during the 1980s war. These days, however, they were quiet, still the grazing grounds for the herds of the plain’s nomads, but very safe for the Iranian army to run armaments to both the beleaguered al-Qaeda and Shiite terrorists in Iraq.
Iraqi troops patrol this border, but it has for centuries been the weak point of the unseen line that separates essentially implacable enemies. Beyond this border, to the west, lie the ancient lands of the Madan, the Marsh Arabs, which for hundreds of years provided a safe haven for escaped slaves, Bedouin and others, who had offended the state. These historic Arab marshlands are accessible only to boats. No army has ever operated successfully in the treacherous swamps. Indeed, the marshes were such a supreme irritation for Saddam, mostly because of deserters, that he drained hundreds of square miles, all the way down to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. He drained rivers and built two enormous canals to carry away the water. Saddam destroyed an entire ecosystem, reducing the marshes to silted-up, arid flatlands, devoid of wildlife and water birds. After thousands of years, the Marsh Arabs were obliged to leave, some heading north, others east. Saddam then laid down huge causeways to permit his heavy armored vehicles to roll to the Iranian border and then to attack.
However, after the overthrow of the dictator in the opening years of the twenty-first century, the Americans and the British restored the flow of water, and the Marsh Arabs began to return. Tonight, as the Iranian missile truck drove through the eastern marshes to the frontier, the dark wetlands looked much the same as they had in biblical times. But the unseen modern frontier was engraved upon those desolate lands, and the Iranian guards came to a halt with about six GPS bleepers issuing a warning.
The guards stepped out to scan the area with Russian-made night glasses. They were secure in the knowledge that this country was just about impossible to patrol, but the hair-trigger tensions between the two nations were never far from anyone’s mind.
On the Iranian side of the border there stood one stone bunker, not much different in appearance from those Hitler’s generals constructed on the coast of Normandy. It was low, made of solid concrete, but with a lookout, or patrol, area on the roof. However, to its northern side was a long, deep storage bunker, underground and hard to detect. Into this cunningly concealed space, the Iranian guards loaded twenty-five of the crates, using the truck’s winch to control the speed of each one as it slithered down the ramp into the cellar.
It was 0330 on the Iranian captain’s watch when the twenty-seventh was secured underground. Only then did a small donkey cart driven by two young Arab men, Yousef and Rudi, come slowly down the track to pick up the last two crates. Both boys were Bakhtiaris, pastoral nomads from the foothills of the nearby Zagros Mountains, but somewhat displaced in the modern world after various governments of Iran tried to discourage their nomadic way of life.
The cart was loaded with bales of wheat, and swiftly the soldiers pulled them off and placed the two crates, end on end, in the flatbed. They piled the bales back, all around the missile boxes, and immediately the donkeys began to walk steadily to the west, crossing the border within the first hundred yards. They were now three miles from the wide Tigris River that needed to be crossed. It was essential they made the riverbank before first light.
Yousef’s cry of encouragement, and the sharp swish of his whip, urged his donkeys on toward the tiny boatyard where Iraqi fisherman kept their dhows. They were there by 4:15, and the two crates were off-loaded and lifted onto two flat-bottomed riverboats.
Yousef and Rudi, Iranians on a dangerous Iraqi shore, turned away, and the sound of the donkeys’ hooves were all that was heard as they clip-clopped across the hard sand, away into the night, having made possible a truly lethal missile delivery.
On the far bank of the Tigris, now between Iraq’s two great rivers, the crates were loaded onto yet another donkey cart and again piled with bales of wheat. This one would travel even less distance than Yousef’s, just far enough to reach one of the first small navigable waterways of the Marsh Arabs.
Right here, on this slippery, reed-choked riverbank, eight men, four of them terrorist commanders, sweated, strained, splashed, and heaved the crates on board two long, slender poling canoes, the Marsh Arabs’ legendary mashuf. This is probably the only vessel ever built that could run through these long lagoons and shallow lakes so efficiently that no one has changed the design in six thousand years.
The three-foot-wide crates would not lie flat and needed to be propped diagonally between the gunwales of the narrow boats. Once the crates were packed and tied down, the boatmen slipped their moorings and began their long journey, poling ever northward, through the almost hidden waters of the overgrown marshes, guided only at night by the bright light of the North Star.
Even with modern GPS it would be impossible to navigate through here. Long waterways suddenly became six inches deep, and quite often it was impossible to turn around. The Madan, with thousands of years of history and navigational knowledge behind them, knew every yard of their territory. They could pole those boats blindfolded, and for this immense skill they were rewarded by the al-Qaeda cutthroats with ten U.S. dollars a day. A four-day journey up to the northern end of the marshes, 125 miles, thus earned each boatmen forty dollars, which was not much considering the value of their cargo—three hundred thousand dollars. But with four voyages per month, a father and son were paid more than either they or any of their ancestors had ever earned in any one of the preceding six thousand years.
Out to the east the sun was rising above the Zagros Mountains. The canoes slipped through the reeds, with the morning light astern. There were times when the boats were completely invisible from only thirty yards away, as they floated past small clusters of sarifas, houses set on poles above the water, with strangely ornate latticework entrances. At this time in the morning the boatmen cast long shadows, but they were miles from the Iraqi road system, and the great overhanging reeds of the marshes camouflaged the insurgents’
deadly missiles well.
No noise betrayed them as they slipped through the water, just the soft splash as the poles came out at the end of each long push. The boats would scarcely slow until they reached al-Kut at the north end of the marshes. From there the two missile crates would travel in an old farm truck to the southern suburbs of Baghdad, stacked between a cargo of dates and driven by former disciples of Saddam Hussein.
This was the tried-and-trusted route of illegal arms from Iran to Baghdad—as elusive to the Western military powers as Saddam’s nuclear program and chemical weapons had been. Elusive but no less real for that—hidden in the endless sand-swept wilderness, transported from one site to another, and finally across the desert to Syria.
Mack Bedford and Harry Remson met at eight o’clock in the shipyard office. There, over coffee and danishes, the ex-Navy SEAL tried to explain his grave misgivings about the conduct of the Forces of Justice, and in particular that of Raul, the headman. “Harry,” he said, “I am just not used to the goddamned shenanigans of civilian life, and I guess I better get used to it if I am going to survive. But I have just categorically dealt with a man who tried to rip us off for a million dollars. He made a deal and broke it. When I said we’d walk away, he collapsed, which means he was just trying it on. But I’m damned if I think it’s a great idea to entrust this fucking villain with a million bucks that we have no hope of getting back.”
“You know, Mack,” replied Harry, “it may not have been that bad. He was just trying to up the price when he thought he had us eating out of his hand. It happens all the time.”
“Not where I come from,” said Mack. “I recently retired from an organization where it was considered damn near illegal to tell a lie.”
“Mack, he didn’t lie, did he?”
“No, but he reneged. We had agreed on the project, agreed on the price, a kind of handshake over the phone. And then he backed down on that agreement, with no thought for the project, or our bond of trust. It was just a shitty little attempt to gouge more money out of us.”
“And for that you want to fire him? Because you’d never quite trust him again, and you don’t want to hand over a million bucks in case he goes AWOL, knowing we don’t dare come after him?”
“Correct.”
“Okay. I can’t really argue with that. A million greenbacks is a lot of cash to mislay. What do we do now?”
“I have another old buddy who went into some foreign-based security outfit. I’m going to try to find him.”
“And what about Raul’s fifty grand?”
“I sorted that out last night. He’ll have his money by now, and I took accurate notes on the information he gave me about Foche and his hometown and all that. Give me twenty-four hours, and I’ll see if I can get something moving.”
“Let’s have another cup of coffee,” said Harry, and then he reached into his drawer and pulled out a magazine. “Someone sent me this,” he said. “It’s a London magazine. A big article on Foche. It’s interesting. Give it a read later, and let me know what you think.”
Mack took the magazine and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He sipped his coffee and admitted, “Harry, I’m in this a lot deeper than I ever wanted to be. Which I guess is inevitable, since there’s only you and me, the only two people in the world who know what’s going on. But it’s a worry, and I don’t really want to get in much deeper.”
“These hoodlums in Marseille have no idea who or where we are, do they?”
“Definitely not, so long as your space-age cell phone holds up.”
“Look, Mack, I know that in the end, this is my problem, and I guess you’ll never know how much I appreciate what you’ve done so far. All I can say is, if I have to, I’ll go it entirely alone. But any help you can give me, I’ll never forget it.”
“It’s just that right now I’ve got a whole lot on my plate,” said Mack. “Tommy’s so ill, Anne’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the bank won’t help me, and the insurance company is out of the game when it’s a foreign clinic.”
“Hey! I just solved it,” chuckled Harry. “Why don’t you pop across to France and hit Foche between the eyes with a bullet, and then I’ll give you all the cash, and we can save Tommy?”
“Great idea,” said Mack. “Can you save something for Anne and Tommy to fly over to Paris and visit me in the fucking Bastille, where I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life like the goddamned Count of Monte Cristo?”
“Mackenzie Bedford,” replied Harry mysteriously, “may I remind you, the Count got out.”
“And may I remind you, the Count was fiction,” laughed Mack. “And the one thing we know about this Foche character, is, he’s real. And I have to get moving.”
“Okay, Mack, great to see you. Do your best, and if you could just get me the phone number, I’ll go the rest of the way by myself.”
Mack made a dismissive gesture, which meant, Get out of here, Harry. I’m still in your corner.
He drove back through town, picked up the mail, and arrived home in time to see Tommy and hand over the car to Anne for the drive to the hospital.
“I wish I’d seen the game with you last night, Dad,” Tommy said. “I just saw the paper—the Red Sox beat the Yanks by 15 to 1. That must have been great.”
“Guess so. I only lasted through the seventh, and they scored twelve runs in the final two innings. Didn’t finish ’til way after eleven o’clock. Too late for you.”
“And you, right?”
Mack laughed and picked up the little boy. “We going fishing tonight?” he asked. “Save Mom buying our supper.”
“Sure. You want me to catch another one of those blues?”
“Darned right I do. So does Mom.”
“Hey, what happens if there’s no fish? Does that mean we don’t get anything to eat?”
“Hell, no. Not us. We’ll just dig out a bucket of clams and get Mom to fry ’em.”
“Can we get french fries as well?”
“I bet we could, if we ask her nicely.”
Mack carried Tommy out to the car, lowered him into the backseat, and fastened the seat belt.
“See you around noon,” said Anne. “I’ll bring sandwiches back from the store.”
Mack wandered disconsolately back onto the screened porch. He could see there was a letter from the bank, which was not a regular statement. He opened it with dread, and the news was bleak. After due consideration, the directors felt that Lieutenant Commander Bedford’s was a case in which they could not intervene. The bank’s normal policies must be upheld in accordance with Federal Reserve guidelines—no loans for customers with little possibility of repaying the money.
His heart sank. This was their last hope. All they could do now was to wait for some kind of a medical breakthrough, some miracle cure that would arrest Tommy’s ALD, the satanic disease that seemed to be eating him alive. All he could do this morning was to hope to hell the news from the hospital was better. Whether it was or not, he would have to tell Anne the bad news from the bank, and he was uncertain how much more bad news she could take. Anne was on the edge. Anyone could see that. If Tommy died, he did not know how she could ever recover. Come to think of it, he was not sure how he could recover himself.
He leaned back on the comfortable wicker furniture and absentmindedly turned on the radio. He was just in time to hear the precise kind of news bulletin he did not wish to know about:Twenty-three U.S. military personnel were either killed or injured in the northern suburbs of Baghdad last night. A U.S. marine convoy making its way back to base after a successful mission against insurgents was hit by two tank-busting missiles. Reports coming in suggest several of the men were burned to death.
The missiles, which hit two armored vehicles, were believed to be Diamondheads, the ones banned six months ago by the United Nations Security Council. This is believed to be the fourth instance of Iraqi insurgents opening fire on U.S. personnel with a weapon that the UN unanimously declared to be a crime against humanity.
/>
The supply line is believed to lead from southwestern Iran across the Tigris and then to Baghdad. The missile is French made, and the Pentagon is uncertain whether there were stockpiles in Iran or whether there has been an illegal new delivery.
Last night the French Ministry of Defense stated that export shipments of the missile have been deemed illegal in France, and, so far as they know, there have been no shipments leaving any French airport, or seaport, for many months. Certainly not since the UN ban was formalized.
U.S. military commanders in Iran confessed they were mystified by the continuing onslaught of this missile. But they were perhaps even more mystified about their own inability to locate and break the supply line if such a system exists.
A U.S. Marine colonel, unidentified because he is still serving in Iraq, last night stated, “This is the fifth or sixth time we’ve been hit by this outlawed weapon, and every time, I guess we think it’s the last of them. And every time they come back at us with more. I can say that the U.S. High Command in Iraq is convinced there are still Diamondheads coming into Baghdad. But we don’t know whether there is a large supply still in Iran, or whether new ones are coming in from elsewhere.”
Diamondhead Page 20