The Disciple

CHAPTER TWENTY

Four MOIS agents came for Mostafa Abtahi at two in the morning. They found his passport, examined the American tourist visa, then handcuffed him and settled in to search the apartment. They trashed it as Ghasem Murad dressed, then watched. He knew better than to try to leave or to object. He merely stood and watched, expressionless, as he tried not to think about what was in store for his friend Abtahi.

Arresting people for political reasons was an old story, as old as kings and dictators and tyrants, yet that made it no easier to endure. Ghasem watched as Abtahi bit his lip to keep tears from leaking out.

Ghasem also bit his lip. He well knew that this might be the last time he saw Abtahi alive, a man whose only crime was that he wanted to go to America and had actually scored a tourist visa.

As they were leaving, Abtahi tried to say something to Ghasem, but the MOIS men slapped him into silence and pushed him out the door.

Ghasem looked at his watch. They had been there an hour.

Jihad Day was precisely one week away. Seven days. On that morning the missiles would rise from their launchers and Israel would cease to exist. Israel or America would probably retaliate with nuclear weapons. Ghasem could envision Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanding that the Muslims of the world unite against the Great Satan to avenge the martyrs of Tehran, may they rest in peace.

Ghasem locked up his apartment-he paused at the door for a last look at the stuff strewn everywhere-and went downstairs. His car was where he had left it.

He drove to the ministry and went in. The guards didn’t ask to see his pass; he merely walked by them.

The light was on in the minister’s office. He saw his uncle on his prayer rug, bent over. His uncle didn’t seem to notice that he was in the room.

Minister of Defense Habib Sultani was doing a lot of praying these days. As he had all his adult life, he started by reciting passages from the Koran, which didn’t take much thought. He merely put his mind in neutral and the words flowed out.

Tonight, though, the words slowed to a trickle and finally stopped as images formed in his mind of missiles roaring into space and flying a huge parabola, finally turning slowly to fall straight down toward the earth, like a spear hurled at the earth’s heart. Then the missile became a fireball that grew and grew until it consumed everything. Everything… cities, people, buildings, the sky, the earth…

Afterward… there was nothing. It was as if the world and humans had never been.

In his mind’s eye were only images. Horrible images.

When he could stand the images no longer, Habib Sultani opened his eyes and levered himself to a sitting position on his prayer rug.

He was drained, yet the images in his mind refused to fade.

“Are you all right, Uncle?”

The voice was Ghasem’s.

Sultani looked around slowly. His familiar world appeared intact, undamaged.

He reached for a table and touched it. Its solidity reassured him.

Ghasem was standing there with a worried look on his face.

“Yes,” Sultani said, slightly surprised by the sound of his own voice. It seemed to be coming from a great distance away.

When he was a young boy, Habib had loved birds, had tried to imagine what it would be like if he could fly with the birds. He could feel himself flying along now, looking down, the birds accompanying him, looking down at the buildings and people, who were staring up at him and pointing, as the missiles fell toward them.

“Uncle, what is the combination to your safe?” Ghasem again.

He heard the words and understood them, but he was still aloft, still flying along as the missiles fell, missiles with warheads that he had helped create. He could turn his head and look up and see them coming down, closer and closer and closer…

“Uncle, you must concentrate,” he heard Ghasem saying. “You must tell me the combination to your safe. I need to know that combination so that I can open it.”

By great force of will Habib Sultani formed the words for the first number and uttered them aloud. Then he saw the missiles falling again.

“Now the second number,” Ghasem said.

The second number… oh, what was it? Something with a three… oh yes, thirty-two. He made his lips move, forced the words out.

“And the third number?” Ghasem said softly. He was right there, near him, even though he was suspended in midair, but his words were coming from so far away. Soon Ghasem would be dead, and his cousin Davar, and Khurram and the daughters of Israr Murad, dead, as if they had never been, because he, Habib Sultani, had created the missiles and warheads to murder everyone on earth.

Now he felt a hand on his arm. And another on his back. Ghasem again, whispering about a third number. Even though he was far away, Habib heard the whisper, heard the urgency, the pleading, the desire to know.

“Fifty-six,” he said, forcing his lips to form the words and his diaphragm to push air out around them.

“Thank you, Uncle.”

Ghasem Murad left his uncle sitting on his prayer rug and turned to the safe. He spun the dial and carefully stopped it on the first number. Back the other way…

When he had put in the third number and turned the dial back until it stopped, the heavy latch lever clicked. He seized it and applied steady pressure. He felt the locks move. Then he pulled on the door of the safe. It opened.

Working quickly, he began hunting through the contents of the safe. He found a file labeled jihad missiles. Opened it. The third document in the file was a list of twelve locations defined by latitude and longitude, numbers a GPS guidance system understood. The list was headed targets for jihad missiles. Someone had written in pencil the names of the cities or military bases that the coordinates defined. Two of them were Tel Aviv. One was Tehran, and the rest were American military bases in Iraq, Qatar and Kuwait.

Staring at it, Ghasem realized he was holding a copy of an original document. The names of the cities appeared to be in his uncle Habib’s handwriting. He scrutinized the paper. Yes. It was a copy, with no number; apparently someone ran a classified document through the copy machine and handed out copies, probably to people who were not cleared to see the original.

Perhaps that someone had given a sheet to Habib Sultani. The Minister of defense might wish to know where the missiles were going to go, but arguably, he didn’t need to know.

Ghasem was stunned by what he saw. He expected Israel or America to retaliate against Tehran with a nuclear weapon if Ahmadinejad destroyed Israel and these American bases, but no. Ahmadinejad was going to launch a missile at the city. Ahmadinejad was going to destroy Tehran and blame it on the Jews.

One of the warheads would detonate over the city. Two hundred kilotons of nuclear energy would form a fireball above the city hotter than the sun, a fireball that would expand until it almost touched the ground. The thermal pulse would cremate the people under it, set mud and wood, brick and concrete and steel afire, and the concussion would push over everything as it rushed away. Then, as the fireball rose and cooled, air would rush back into the vacuum in a tidal wave that would destroy any buildings or bridges or other structures still standing and carry thousands of tons of combustibles into the center of the fire, which would rage uncontrolled, destroying everything that would burn, even dirt.

Ghasem Murad hunted through the file. Where are these damned missiles? Where will they be launched from? And when?

He found no piece of paper to answer those questions. None. Not a scrap.

Ghasem glanced back at his uncle, who was still seated on his prayer rug, staring fixedly at nothing.

It beggared belief that the minister of defense would not know where twelve missiles armed with nuclear warheads were stored. Or where they would be launched from, which was the other side of the same coin, since all the missiles were on transporters and hidden in hardened tunnels carved from solid rock.

The information had to be here, in this safe. Ghasem carefully folded the target list with the cities’ names in pencil and placed it in his pocket. He replaced the jihad missile file in the safe and checked the name of every other file.

When he couldn’t find a file that looked hopeful, he began randomly flipping through the folders, looking for… anything.

Damn!

If Sultani didn’t have the information, then the minister of weapons of mass destruction might. Hosseini-Tash. That fool.

After Ghasem replaced all the files in the safe, he used muscle to swing the heavy door back into the closed position. He turned the great latch lever, then spun the dial until the safe locked again.

If Habib Sultani were to be sent to a sanitarium, Ghasem’s access to the building would be terminated. He needed to get the information Tommy Carmellini wanted, or get Carmellini in here to crack a safe, before that happened.

Ghasem stood staring at his uncle, who was sitting rigidly on his prayer rug, lost in his own private hell. Sultani’s eyes were completely unfocused.

Ghasem pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the empty waiting area trying to think.

Ghasem knew that he didn’t have any more time. Sometime later today people would discover that Habib Sultani had suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Now. He had to get Carmellini in here now to open the safe in HosseiniTash’s office.

If you’ve ever contemplated how a condemned man might feel as he stands against the wall puffing his last cigarette, with the firing squad at order arms ten paces away and the officer holding the blindfold standing nearby looking at his watch, then you might have a fair idea of how I felt those days in Iran.

I woke up that morning, looked out the window at the eastern sky turning pink, wondered if I would be dead in a week or wishing I were and sat on the edge of the bed contemplating my toes.

There were ten of them. This was not due to any virtue of mine or choice that I made but was dictated by the human genome. I assumed my genes were also heavily influenced by the fact that my parents and grandparents apparently liked people with ten fingers and ten toes and chose mates accordingly. Or maybe the people they liked just came equipped that way. I made a mental note to ask Charles Darwin about that if I ran into him anytime soon.

I put on my running duds and pulled socks over those ten little masterpieces.

I put on my fanny pack, stuffed diplomatic passport, hotel room keys and car keys in there, and let myself out into the empty hallway. No one else was stirring at dawn in Tehran.

The lobby was empty. At this hour, even the MOIS man was still home in bed.

I was out on the street working up to cruise speed when a car slowed beside me. I glanced over and saw Ghasem Murad at the wheel. He jerked his head, telling me to get in.

I glanced around to see who was keeping tabs on me. I knew in my bones that someone was, and that someone would report seeing Ghasem and me together. I got into his car anyway.

He handed me a copy of the Jihad missile target list. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, although Jake Grafton told me about it. Tel Aviv, Baghdad, all those American air military bases and Tehran.

Tehran!

So Jake Grafton was right. Ahmadinejad was going to murder his own people to give himself a political boost worldwide.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked Ghasem as we rolled through traffic.

“The safe of the minister of defense. It’s not in the format of a classified document that must be accounted for. That blob at the bottom? Someone has blacked out the original document control number.”

“Where are the missiles?”

“That information wasn’t in the safe.”

“Bummer, dude,” I muttered. Can you imagine a government having missiles with nuke warheads ready to go, targets picked, the date set, and not telling the minister of defense where the missiles were? “I hope your uncle has his postretirement years all planned out,” I added. “Looks like he’s there.”

“He’s having a nervous breakdown.”

I stared. “That’s one way to spend those years, I suppose. He in the hospital?”

“In his office. I believe you Americans and British might say that he’s ‘flipped out.’ ”

I kept my mouth shut.

“You need to get into the safe in Hosseini-Tash’s office right now,” Ghasem continued. “This morning, while I still have access.”

Ransacking a safe, sorting through hundreds of files written in a language I barely understood, looking for The One, which might or might not be there, was impractical. It would take all night, and I couldn’t stay anywhere near that long. What I needed was computer hard drives…

“Where else can the information be?” I asked Ghasem. “Targets get picked, then someone must do a ton of math for the ballistic missiles, plan routes for the cruise missiles… Where do they do that?”

“The Targeting Office,” he said. “It’s in the basement of the senior officers’ wing.” He described its exact location, even drew me a map, showing me the number of doors from the end of the hallway and the Targeting Office’s location in relation to the stairwell.

“What’s on the door?” I asked.

He drew the inscription in Farsi.

“Have you ever been in there?” I asked.

“No. Access is very restricted.”

Well, it sounded more promising than the head dog’s office. Hell, Hosseini-Tash was probably just another paper pusher.

“I’ll go in with you,” Ghasem said.

I glanced at him to see if this was a serious offer or a social one. He looked serious as an undertaker, but through the years I had found I worked best alone. I told him that now.

He didn’t say anything, merely stared at the cars in front of us. When we came to a red light, he leaned forward, put his forehead on the top of the steering wheel and closed his eyes. “The MOIS took my roommate away early this morning. Mostafa Abtahi. He said you were the one who gave him his visa. For a little while he was the happiest man in Iran. Thank you for that.”

The truck behind us beeped its horn.

When Ghasem straightened up and got the car in motion, I said, “Tonight you need to be in a very public place with lots of people who know you. Now let me out at the next traffic light.”

I crawled into my telephone booth at the embassy and called Jake Grafton. I told him about my conversation with Ghasem and the Jihad list he showed me. I also told him that Mostafa Abtahi, one of the guys he finagled a tourist visa for on my behalf, had been arrested by the MOIS.

“What about Qomi?” he asked.

“I put him on a plane. He should be over the Atlantic or in America.”

“You can’t save the world, Tommy,” he remarked.

We chatted a bit about the schedule for the evening, then said our good-byes.

I sat in my little cocoon breathing deeply.

Jake Grafton hung up his satellite phone and looked across the table at Sal Molina. “Tommy is going into the Defense Ministry building tonight,” he said.

“Is that wise? If he’s caught…”

Jake Grafton reached onto the table behind him for a large-scale map of Iran. He placed it between himself and the president’s aide. Using his finger, he began pointing out symbols. “Using satellite photography and single-side band radar, we have verified eighteen sites where these people have missiles. We believe there are at least twenty-five sites. There may be more. We must know which of these sites has nuclear weapons and which doesn’t. Tommy is going to try to find out.”

“He’s going to dig through a safe for an Iranian government document which may or may not be genuine?”

“Get real, Sal. He’ll be stealing computer hard drives.”

“How do you know he’s getting the real thing?” Molina demanded. “Maybe it’s a setup. Maybe these assholes are jerking us around like Saddam did. We can’t afford another Iraq, Jake-that would sink this president.”

“There is no way on earth to be absolutely certain about anything,” Jake Grafton shot back. “If we demand an impossible standard of proof, we will only be certain that we know nothing at all.”

“You’re a fucking ray of sunshine, Grafton.”

The admiral smiled. “What are real friends for?”

When I left the embassy I didn’t go to the hotel. I spent the next two hours ditching any tails I might have; then I stood in front of an Armenian church waiting for G. W. Hosein. He was driving a battered old pickup. He was only ten seconds late. He stopped just long enough for me to get in, then popped the clutch and had us rolling again.

“You clean?” he asked.

“I sure as hell hope so,” I said. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

“We will indeed,” he said, and pointed to a backpack lying at my feet. I pulled it into my lap and unzipped it. It held a nice Kimber 1911.45 caliber automatic with two magazines loaded with jacketed hollow-point bullets-man-stoppers. I checked the slide, trigger and safety, then shoved a magazine into the thing and chambered a shell. Then I lowered the hammer. A lot of people carry these things cocked and locked, but I didn’t have a holster, just my pocket, and besides, cocked and locked is a tad too trendy for me.

“Tell me about this safe house you have in mind,” I said.

“It’s under the city,” he said, “in an old metro tunnel that didn’t get built.”

“Really?” I said. This sounded wonderful to me. Nothing stops radiation like rock and dirt.

“The Tehran police chief got arrested a couple of years ago for frequenting a whorehouse in one of these tunnels, so that got me interested. I did some exploring.” He made a gesture of modesty.

“Did you find the women?”

“No, but I found a nice hideout. You’ll like it.”

“The police chief?”

“He was fired and prosecuted. These people are so uptight.”

The safe house was actually a modest hotel, run by a German, that catered to foreign businessmen. It was on the edge of the business district and had real guests coming and going, so G. W. and I blended right in.

The German, Helmut Kremer, was, of course, in the pay of the CIA. He was working the desk, as usual-it was a small hotel-and I introduced myself with a code name. He was in his fifties, balding, with a modest tummy, and looked tired. I wondered what in the world he was doing in Iran, and he probably wondered the same about me. Hell, I asked myself that question three times a day.

Kremer glanced around to ensure the lobby was empty, then handed me a key to a room, and G. W. and I went up the stairs to find it. It was that simple.

Maybe too simple. When we got into the room I motioned to G. W. to remain silent, and I began to inspect for bugs. It was actually a nice room, with two beds and a French door that led to a small balcony. Fortunately the sewer pipes were European-sized, so unlike many Iranian hotels, this one didn’t have a basket strategically placed beside the commode to receive used toilet paper. Some people savor the adventure of a third-world vacation, but it’s really an acquired taste.

I didn’t have my electronic antibug kit with me, so I worked the old eyeballs. I doubted that Kremer had sold out to the other side, yet after a session with Hazra al-Rashid, he might have. So I checked. Found nothing.

“Where do we meet the others?” I asked G. W.

“They’ll be in the tunnel. We go in from the basement of this place.”

“Okay.” I looked at my watch. Four hours until the meet.

George Washington Hosein lay down on the bed and put his pistol on his belly. “Relax, Tommy,” he said. “Try to get a nap.”

I was too keyed up to relax. In a few minutes I went over to the window and looked out at the Tehran that Ahmadinejad was willing to sacrifice. There were maybe twenty million people, more or less, in Tehran, and Ahmadinejad didn’t give a rat’s ass if they all went up in a mushroom cloud as long as he could do it to the Israelis and Americans first. Twenty million people… and Ghasem and Davar were two of them.

I flopped on the other bed and shut my eyes. I couldn’t get Davar out of my mind. She wasn’t soft and sexy with a figure that would stop traffic, and she wasn’t one of those dazzling personalities that I always found so charming. She knew what she believed in and was absolutely convinced she was right. Not that that was a unique quality, to be sure; half the young women I had ever met thought they had life figured out and didn’t want to hear any facts that might complicate their world. On the other hand, Davar’s courage made her unique. It is easy to be brave if the dangers are unknown; yet she knew the dangers, the evil. She had lived her life with it and saw it every day. Still, she was ready to fight, to confront it head-on. Smart, committed, tough as leather, Davar was a woman to face the storms of life with.

No wonder the guy from Oklahoma had fallen for her! If I had been him…

How would a guy win a heart like hers?

As if there were time and a future in which to try…

I felt as if I were on the bank of the River Styx, and Charon, the boatman, was poling over to ferry me across to hell. Through the fires and smoke and stench of burning flesh, I could see him… coming relentlessly, mercilessly on, closer and closer.

A hole in the basement wall just large enough to wriggle through formed the entrance to the underground world. As G. W. flashed a light around, then wormed his way through the hole, I said, “I feel like we’re crawling into an Indiana Jones movie.”

“Don’t forget your bullwhip,” he muttered and climbed through to the other side. I had no choice but to follow.

There was a ladder against the basement wall on the other side, so I went down it as G. W. held the flashlight. Once on solid rock, I used my light to look around. We were in a tunnel, all right, that certainly looked as if it had been carved out for a subway. It was cool down here, and I could just feel the barest hint of a breeze on my cheek.

“This way,” G. W. said. He led the way, into the breeze.

We walked for at least ten minutes-I estimated we had gone perhaps a half mile-making gentle turns and climbing and descending gentle grades, when we saw a light ahead. As we got closer, I saw that it was made by a Coleman-type lantern sitting in a huge cavity cut into the wall of the tunnel. This might be a future subway station.

Three men wearing Iranian army uniforms were gathered around the lantern, and they were armed to the teeth. All wore pistols in holsters and had submachine guns dangling from straps over their shoulders. One of them was Joe Mottaki, the Mossad agent, and the other two were American covert CIA officers, Haddad Nouri and Ahmad Qajar. Nouri had been in the country for three years and was burrowed in like a tick on a dog. He made an excellent living as a computer consultant during the day. Ahmad Qajar spent his days traveling around the country updating foreign guidebooks… and the CIA database on the country.

After we had shaken hands all around, we examined the pile of equipment they had laid out in the lantern light. It had come from a stash in one corner of the room, a large cavity that had been hollowed out of rotten rock with a pick. The boards that usually covered the hole lay beside it.

Qajar handed both G. W. and Nouri simple, stamped, Russian-made submachine guns with four loaded magazines taped to them and silencers on the barrels. He offered one to me, but I refused. If I needed a submachine gun, my mission was a bust and I was doomed. Just in case, Qajar handed two grenades to each of his colleagues and put two in his own pockets. Everyone got night vision goggles. I received a backpack containing C-4, fuses and primer cord.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “tonight’s target is the Ministry of Defense. Joe, your job is to provide me with a diversion big and bad enough that you pull the Revolutionary Guards and uniformed army people out of the hallways in the executive wing. I intend to go in through a window in that wing. G. W. and his guys will deliver me there and pick me up when I come back out.”

“How much time will you need?” Joe Mottaki asked.

“Fifteen minutes, at least.”

“Dream on, fool. There is no bloody way. I can try for ten, but after that you’re solo.”

“Ten minutes, then.” What else could I say? My life’s ambition was to be a live spy, not a dead burglar.

No one asked what I was after. They didn’t need to know.

While we were discussing the night’s festivities, I stripped to my underwear and donned black trousers and a black shirt. I was wearing boat shoes tonight, with black uppers. I strapped an army web belt around my middle, one that held two pistols in holsters. One was the Kimber 1911 auto and the other was a Ruger auto.22 with a silencer on the barrel.

All of this stuff had been parachuted into the country, including a duffle bag with a t.d. marked on it.

As I rooted through it, checking to make sure everything was there, Joe Mottaki asked, “How come they used those initials?”

“The letters stand for Tulip Delany,” I told him. “She’s a girl I used to date occasionally in high school.”

“You’re really full of it, Carmellini.”

“Don’t ever forget it,” I told him proudly. I hoisted the bag to my shoulder, just to see if I was stout enough to handle it. For a short distance, anyway.

“Let’s get the rest of this stuff stowed and get on with it,” I said.

We climbed a ladder to get out of the tunnel and ended up in the basement of some kind of warehouse. G. W. led the way through the place using only a sliver of light from his flashlight. I almost tripped twice.

Behind the building in an alley was a large tracked vehicle with a humongous cannon. The engine was ticking over slowly, and I caught a whiff of diesel exhaust. A man in Iranian army fatigues carrying a submachine gun was standing by the thing smoking a cigarette.

“One of my guys,” Joe Mottaki said. “We borrowed this earlier this evening. It’s a one hundred and fifty-five millimeter self-propelled howitzer, a Raad-2, or Thunder- 2.”

“Didn’t you guys use something like this in Indonesia?”

“You are remarkably well informed,” Joe said slowly. “Let’s hope this thing comes as a surprise to our Islamic Revolutionary Guard friends.” He glanced at his watch. “You have precisely twenty minutes, Tommy, then we open fire.”

I checked my watch, nodded once, then threw my stuff into the backseat of the car that G. W. was driving. I got in beside him and he fired up the tiny motor. “Hi-yo, Silver,” I said.

He gunned the engine and away we went. I glanced behind us. The car with Ahmad and Haddad was following right along.

In truth, it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all we had.

“You feeling lucky tonight?” G. W. asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, tell you what, Kemo Sabe. You better be damn quick with the knife and gun tonight. Don’t take any chances. They waylay you in there, you’re on your own. We ain’t riding to the fucking rescue.”

“Yeah.”

“Kill anything that moves,” G. W. added.

“Yeah.”

“You nervous?” he asked, glancing at me.

“Yeah.”