Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
– Charles Bukowski
Approximately two hours later, the two Iranians returned in the same car. The engine continued running as Anahita stepped out and red dust swirled in front of the headlights.
“What happens now?” Crocker asked, shielding his eyes with his hand.
Her figure cast a huge black shadow over the plant. “Danush is going to take you to a place five minutes from here. When you get there, our friend will transport you in a truck.”
“Let me make sure I understand. You’re saying your friend is going to drive us to the movie theater?” Crocker asked.
The veins on her forehead shone in the car’s lights. “It’s extremely dangerous,” she replied, “but he’s going to try.”
“Good. Thanks. What’s this man’s name?”
“You can call him Rahman.”
“You know him and think you can trust him?”
She nodded and retied the scarf around her head. “Yes.”
“Are you coming?” Crocker asked her.
“No, I’ll wait here and worry. Maybe I should pray.”
“Pray, but don’t worry,” Crocker replied. “This is what we do.”
Akil sat in the passenger seat next to Danush. Crocker, Ritchie, and Mancini tried to look inconspicuous in back. The car rumbled past the steel plant and turned onto a paved four-lane road with little traffic. The gas flares from oil wells danced against the night sky ahead.
In an attempt to break the tension, Ritchie asked Danush if he’d ever been to the United States.
“No, but I would like to some day.” His English seemed to improve the more he spoke.
“If you go, what’s the first place you want to visit?”
“Miami,” Akil suggested. “I’d recommend Miami. South Beach, hot chicks, great clubs.”
“No, the Big Apple. New York City.”
“Why?” Ritchie asked.
“To see all the millions of people from all over the world living together in tall, tall buildings, riding in subways underground. And I want to go to Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks. They’re my favorite basketball team. I watch them on live streaming on my computer.”
Danush turned the Toyota onto a dirt road and wound past a hill to a place that smelled like rotten eggs. Crocker saw three trucks parked at odd angles fifty feet ahead. Danush stopped, shut off the engine, and got out.
“Where are we now?” Crocker asked.
“This is a garbage dump. I have to talk to Rahman.”
“Is it okay if Akil goes with you?”
Danush considered for a moment and nodded. Akil left his submachine gun on the floor in front.
Crocker watched them disappear behind the trucks. Fifteen long minutes stretched by, according to his watch.
“Wasn’t Rahman the name of that blind cleric who helped plan the first World Trade Center attack?” Ritchie asked.
“Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman,” Mancini answered. “He was an Egyptian cleric who ended up preaching at some mosque in Brooklyn. In his sermons he told fellow Muslims it was okay to rob banks and kill Jews. He said Americans were descendants of apes and pigs who had been feeding off the scraps from the tables of Zionists.”
“I had a feeling you’d know that,” Ritchie said. “Where’s that blind camel-fucker now?”
“Living in Ahvaz, Iran,” Mancini answered.
“Very funny.”
Mancini: “Last I heard he was serving a life sentence for conspiracy at some federal pen in the U.S.”
“Nice.”
Crocker saw the dark outline of a man climb into one of the trucks. The engine started. Then he noticed Akil waving from the back. When the headlights came on he saw that it was a Scania garbage truck for industrial bins, with a front loader arm and hydraulic lift that rested on top of the cab.
Crocker turned to Ritchie and said, “Go see what Akil wants.”
Ritchie ran back two minutes later. The pupils of his dark eyes were drawn tight. “The truck is going to take us. Bring the gear!” he shouted through the window.
Rahman was a short, squat, thick-armed man with thick black hair, a mustache and goatee. He looked like a wrestler, and wiped sweat and dust off his face with a blue bandana as he conversed with Akil.
Akil: “He wants us to ride in the back, and he wants to cover us with garbage.”
“Garbage?”
“To hide us,” Akil explained.
“Tell him to make sure it’s dry,” Ritchie commented. “I don’t want any liquids or toxic chemicals dripping on me and burning into my skin.”
“Since when did you grow a pussy and become a Kardashian?” Akil asked.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Guys. Guys,” Crocker said, cutting them off and aware that they were all getting revved up. “Okay, Rahman’s driving us to the theater. Does he think he can get past the guards on the street?”
Akil nodded. “He believes so. Yeah.”
“Then he’s the man. Load in!”
One after the other, the SEALs climbed up the tall sides into the hopper and hid between the hydraulically powered moving metal wall and the rear panel of the truck. Rahman and another man covered them with stacks of cardboard boxes.
When Rahman said something in Farsi, Akil laughed.
“What’s funny?” Crocker asked.
“He told me a joke. He asked me, What do you call a Persian woman who knows where her husband is all the time?”
“What?”
“A widow.”
“Fuck, that’s bad.”
“Iranians aren’t known for their sense of humor.”
“Let’s hope this isn’t his idea of a sick joke,” Ritchie said.
There was nothing in the hopper to hold on to, so each time the truck hit a bump, they flew into the air, and each time it turned, they rolled into one another. The experience reminded Crocker of a ride at an amusement park, minus the sodas and cotton candy. Half an hour of jostling and bouncing later, the truck stopped and Ritchie threw up.
“Hold your breath,” Crocker whispered when he heard someone climb the metal steps, then poke into the boxes overhead. Tense seconds passed with fingers on triggers and safeties open. Any moment Crocker was expecting something sharp to slice into him.
The four SEALs exhaled together as the footsteps descended. Ritchie stunk to high heaven.
The truck lurched forward, turned right twice, then started backing up. It stopped abruptly. Ten minutes passed before someone slapped the side of the hopper twice. Akil climbed out to look. He slapped the side three more times, and Crocker and the other two SEALs pushed off the boxes and got out.
Each man took some welcome breaths of fresh air as they squeezed past green dumpsters and entered the dark rear of the theater. Crocker, Mancini, and Ritchie climbed up to the third-floor landing where they waited for Akil and Rahman.
When Rahman arrived, he opened a metal door with a key on his belt and led them through a dark lobby that smelled of butter and popcorn. They followed him into a dark movie theater. Using a flashlight he borrowed from Akil, Rahman found the place on the wall where the connecting door to the neighboring building had once been.
Akil turned to Ritchie and whispered, “That’s it.”
Ritchie felt along the wall, tapped on it, and put his ear up to it. He whispered, “No way I can blast through that without causing a big commotion.”
“How big?” Crocker whispered back.
“Real big,” Ritchie answered. “Anahita told us the whole wall had been reinforced with metal. I think there’s metal plates behind here, too.”
Akil carried a rough sketch of Quds Force HQ that Danush had given him, and he now unfolded it. He said, “Our main targets are on the fourth floor,” referring to Alizadeh and Suleimani.
“This isn’t going to work,” Crocker said.
Ritchie: “What do you mean, boss?”
“Not this way, it isn’t.”
“But-”
“Quiet,” Crocker said, as anxious looks were exchanged. Turning to Akil, he said, “Ask Rahman to show us to the roof.”
Akil translated. A game-looking Rahman nodded. They climbed quickly behind him, holding their weapons and seventy-five-pound packs on their backs.
Breathing hard in the tight space, Akil said, “Rahman is going to turn off the building’s alarm system, so if we want to hide on the roof, we should do it now.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got about thirty seconds to re-engage it.”
Crocker asked, “How long will it take him to get to it?”
“A few seconds.”
“Tell him to go now.”
Rahman waved his arm and muttered something. Akil translated: “First, he wants to know how we’re going to get out.”
“Tell him we’ll manage. And thanks.”
Rahman grunted a sound of disapproval.
“What’d he say?”
“He says he’ll drive one of his trucks to the back of the theater in the morning.”
Crocker: “Tell him that’s not necessary.”
Rahman grabbed Crocker’s wrist and pointed to his watch.
Akil: “He wants to know what time.”
“Tell him ten fifteen.”
Mancini whispered to Crocker. “Chief, I need Akil to record something for me first.”
“Make it quick.”
The two SEALs went off into a corner while Crocker removed his pack, knelt, then gave Rahman the signal to go. The second he left, Crocker started to count the seconds in his head. At sixteen he pushed through the door and did a quick recon of the roof, which was flat and covered with thick black tar. To the right of the door sat a seven-foot-high metal cooling unit painted white.
Crocker got on his belly and crawled ten feet from the back of the unit to the edge of the building. He guesstimated a four-foot gap and a six-foot fall-off between the roof of the movie theater and that of Quds Force headquarters. Sticking out from the HQ roof near the front of that building was a rectangular cement structure that looked as if it housed a stairway, cooling unit, and guardhouse. Two soldiers with automatic weapons stood outside it.
His recon completed, Crocker turned, crawled back quickly, and waved the men through the door. They made it just in time.
The SEALs sat with their backs against the cooling unit and waited. As the sun started to light up the sky, Crocker heard a man from a nearby mosque call out the morning prayer known as Fajr over a microphone. His high, pleading voice echoed through the streets.
“What’s he saying?” Ritchie asked in a low voice.
“God hears those who call upon him. Our Lord, praise be to You,” Akil answered. “Glory be to my Lord, the Most High.”
Richie nodded. “I’m cool with that. It’s only when Allah starts telling them they’ve got to kill other people that I have a problem.”
Akil: “Allah never tells us that.”
“Why?” Ritchie asked. “Because he doesn’t exist, or people deliberately misinterpret what he’s saying?”
“Quiet!” Crocker whispered.
A warm breeze blew in a cover of low gray clouds. A cool light rain started to fall.
“How much longer are we gonna wait?” Ritchie asked, wiping the precipitation off his forehead.
“Yeah, boss, what’s the plan?” Akil echoed.
Crocker looked at his watch: 0732. “I figure by 1000 hours whoever is coming to work today will be in the building,” he whispered. “That’s when we’re going to launch. Akil, you and I will go first. We’ll take out the guards. Mancini, you and Ritchie take the stairway and head down one flight to four. Look for Alizadeh and Suleimani. They’re our primary targets.”
“Then what?”
“We grab whatever hard drives, thumb drives, or CDs we can find and fight our way back to the stairway.”
“Then?”
“Then…we get the fuck out of Dodge.”
“Everybody’s gonna need to wear earplugs and a gas mask when we get inside,” Mancini said.
“Why?”
“I got something planned.”
The whole scenario seemed damn unlikely as Crocker articulated it and played it back in his head.
Maybe it would have been better to wait for another opportunity to hit them at the arena.
It was too late to second-guess himself, so he stopped, looked up at the sky, and let the little drops of water pelt his face, which felt like some sort of cleansing.
He’d been challenging himself since he was a teenager, doing crazy stunts on motorcycles and trying to outrun the police. He’d broken practically every bone in his body during one scrap or another but had always managed to escape.
Crocker said a silent prayer asking God to look after Holly, Jenny, his father, sister, and other relatives and friends and keep them safe. “If you find it in your heart to deliver me from this, too,” he added, “I promise to always be your faithful servant, never back away from danger, and do what I believe is right.”
At 0955, he screwed the silencers on the ends of both of his weapons, then saw a flash of light illuminate the sky. Thirteen seconds later thunder rumbled overhead, and he slapped Akil on the shoulder and pointed to Quds Force headquarters.
Crocker went first, on his belly, until he got within four feet of the edge. From that angle he could see three Iranian soldiers with their backs toward them and automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They stood under the front lip of the guardhouse, smoking cigarettes and looking down at the street.
Lightning flashed again, and just as his uncle had taught him to do when he was six years old, he counted the seconds on his watch until the thunder came. Ten seconds. It was moving closer.
“Next time there’s lightning, I’m gonna jump,” Crocker whispered into Akil’s ear. “If the soldiers don’t notice me, give me a couple of seconds to start around the other side of that structure, then start taking them out.”
Akil nodded.
With the next flash, Crocker got his feet under him, cradled his weapon across his chest, ran to the lip of the roof, and jumped. He hit the Quds Force HQ roof, flexed his knees, slid on the gravel, and somersaulted over his right shoulder as lightning cracked overhead. Springing back up onto his toes, he knelt behind the base of a satellite dish on his left.
When no shouting or gunfire ensued, he continued to the back of the sand-colored cement structure. As he reached the back left corner, he heard the phewt-phewt-phewt of suppressed automatic fire.
Crocker spun and continued to the front corner, knelt, aimed, and fired. A stream of nine-millimeter bullets cut down an Iranian standing with his back to him. Another bent over his wounded compatriot beyond the opposite corner. Crocker squeezed the trigger and took him down, too.
Then he hurried to the wounded soldier, who was holding his chest. The man started to shout a warning that was cut off by the two bullets Crocker pumped into his head.
Seeing another flash of lightning, he entered the structure and located the door that led to a metal stairway. Akil limped up behind him holding his ankle and wearing a gas mask.
Crocker pointed to the steps. Akil slapped his arm and pointed to his ears.
Crocker had forgotten his earplugs and mask. He quickly fished them out of his pack, along with another thirty-round magazine for the Kashtan that he stuck in the back pocket of his pants. Ritchie and Mancini ran up behind him with masks in place and guns ready, pushed past, and entered the dark stairway.
Their footsteps echoed off the metal steps down to the fourth floor. At the landing Crocker squeezed past them and entered a hallway with Akil at his elbow. About fifteen yards away he saw an older man in dark pants and a white shirt who was holding a brown folder. Mancini rolled a grenade across the carpeted floor that exploded and obscured everything with thick purple smoke. They were in.
Crocker felt his way along the wall in the direction of the office in the far corner-the one that, according to the diagram, belonged to General Suleimani. Another grenade went off. Even with the mask in place, he caught a whiff of a sickening smell, then passed a kitchen of some sort where he saw a woman doubled over, puking against the wall.
A siren blasted so loud it literally stopped him in his tracks and hurt his chest. He heard what he thought was Akil’s voice announcing in Farsi that there was an emergency that required everyone to evacuate the building immediately.
Someone stumbled into Crocker, who bashed him in the face with the butt of his weapon as the siren produced by a black fourteen-by-fourteen-inch device Mancini had brought continued to screech in ungodly 150-decibel short blasts.
Crocker continued toward the target office and felt his skin burning, thanks to another device Mancini had deployed-a compact NLW microwave emitter that penetrated clothing and caused water molecules to vibrate at high speed under human skin.
Crocker took a more old-fashioned approach, kicking in the door to Suleimani’s office and firing at the two men hiding behind the big wooden desk. Their bodies flew back. Blood splattered against the window and the wall and started to seep into the sepia-colored carpet.
Crocker rushed forward to see whether he could identify Suleimani when something hit the back of his head. Since he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he staggered for a second, then wheeled and released a stream of bullets that tore apart a bald man’s neck and chest and sent the metal lamp he was holding flipping in the air and crashing to the floor.
Crocker felt a lump on the back of his head and a trickle of blood. Stepping over the writhing body, he hurried down another hallway to the front of the building. Gunshots ricocheted and echoed. He practically smashed into Ritchie, who was running the other way. Ritchie said through his mask, “The floor has been neutralized. We’re grabbing shit and heading for the stairway.”
“You find Alizadeh?”
“We killed everyone we could find. It’s hard as hell to see.”
“Go ahead! Don’t wait for me.”
He entered the square office that faced the avenue below, saw a big photo of Ayatollah Khomeini on one wall, a large blue-and-white Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution flag on the other. On the desk sat a framed photo of a girl kneeling beside a German shepherd that looked like Brando’s little brother. Behind him stood tall shelves filled with books in Farsi.
The edge of one of the stacks of shelves stood out farther than the others. He pushed on it, and it clicked into place. Looking for a button or lever, he found one under a nearby shelf. He pulled it and the stack sprung open. Inside the wall was a little dark room, at the end of which he found a circular stairway filled with smoke.
Crocker took a deep breath through the mask and climbed down one flight to another dark space. Here the stairway ended. Sweating profusely, he felt along the wall, found a door, and pushed it open a crack. A helmeted man stood with his back to it. Another uniformed man was talking excitedly. A third man out of view was saying something, too.
Crocker reached into the side pocket of his backpack, grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, counted five seconds, then opened the door, rolled it forward, and quickly closed the door. The explosion shook the walls and hurt his head.
Readying the Kashtan, he plowed through the doorway into the smoke-filled, red-misted room, where men were moaning and screaming for help. He saw one figure on the floor holding his mangled leg. A chunk of plaster from the ceiling fell on Crocker, and he slipped and fell, hitting his chin and ripping off the mask.
Part of the ceiling crashed onto a metal table, and someone opened fire. Gas burning his eyes, Crocker rolled left past the legs of a chair and under the table. Bullets ricocheted throughout the room. Seeing a man’s booted foot, he grabbed hold of it and pulled.
The man hit the floor, and Crocker scrambled clear of the table with his Chinese handgun ready, smoke and dust obscuring his view. He could see enough to tell this was a conference room, with a rectangular table in the middle, charts and maps, and speckles of fresh blood on the walls.
He fired two bullets in the head of the man he’d pulled down. On the floor he saw two other bodies. None of the dead men looked familiar.
Hearing people shouting in the hall, he dusted debris off his head and exited the room. Approximately twenty feet away he saw the backs of two soldiers who were running behind a shorter man of the same approximate shape as Alizadeh. He tore after them, steadied the TU-90, and fired. One of the soldiers spun and slid into the wall, leaving a wide ribbon of red. The other returned fire with an automatic weapon.
Crocker dove into an open doorway, waited several seconds, then poked his head out. The second soldier and the man who was with him turned right at the end of the hallway and out of sight. He’d lost the Kashtan somewhere, so he took the automatic weapon dropped by the soldier against the wall. It was an Iranian variant of a M5, called an MPT-9 Tondar-short, with a pistol grip and long curved magazine that Crocker hoped was mostly full. He ran to the end of the hall and hung a right.
He wanted Alizadeh so bad he could almost taste it. But this hallway turned out to be empty, except for discarded papers and shoes. He realized he was headed toward the back of the building. Two-thirds of the way, he saw gray smoke drifting out a doorway, then spotted a trail of fresh blood leading to a stairway.
The angry voices of men shouting in Farsi echoed from below. Out of breath and eyes watering, he hurried down. When he reached the landing and turned left, he saw another flight of steps, and past them Alizadeh and a soldier resting in the corner next to the door to floor two. Alizadeh’s foot was bleeding. The soldier was bent over him. Looking up and seeing Crocker, he reached for the weapon slung across his chest.
Crocker launched himself, firing the MPT-9 at the same time. Bullets tore into the soldier’s torso, but still he managed to squeeze off a few shots. One struck Crocker in the right forearm, causing him to land awkwardly on the second step from the second-floor landing, twist his right ankle, and crash into the soldier, whose body helped break his fall.
As he struggled to get his bearings, he felt something slice into the skin on his right shoulder. His eyes coming into focus, he saw the triumphant look on Alizadeh’s face, eyes glowing with hatred and the shining silver Swiss military watch on his wrist-the same one he’d seen in the underground prison in Barinas.
“Crocker?” the Iranian spat out as he pulled the knife out of Crocker’s shoulder and got ready to thrust the blood-covered blade into his heart.
“Yeah. Fuck you,” Crocker hissed, twisting his body to the right and pounding Alizadeh in the neck with his left elbow. He spun back and smacked the stunned Iranian in the arm hard enough to dislodge the knife, which hit the metal door with a clang.
Crocker heard men shouting from below. Their footsteps grew closer.
Alizadeh groaned and reached for the knife with short hairy fingers. Crocker grabbed the thick black-and-silver hair at the back of his head and, despite the intense pain in his forearm, smashed the Iranian’s face into the wall, shattering his nose and sending blood spraying against the wall and door.
The footsteps came closer. Crocker wanted to see his rival’s bloody face one last time. He spun him around, trapped Alizadeh’s head between his knees, and growled, “This is for all the other people you’ve hurt, you son of a bitch!” Then he pulled Alizadeh’s head forward and twisted it sharply until his spine cracked and the hatred drained out of his eyes.
On impulse, he took Alizadeh’s watch and stuffed it in his pocket as the soldiers drew closer. He saw the tips of their boots on the landing below, and for a second he thought his time was up.
But then a stubborn burst of energy lifted him to his feet and helped him limp out the door to the second floor. His body moved on automatic to the back corner office, where he kicked out the window glass, jumped down onto the hood of a parked car, and rolled off.
Crocker pulled himself to his knees and took a deep breath as the gentle raindrops cooled his face. Remembering Rahman’s promise, he limped around the back of the movie theater, where the green garbage truck was just pulling out. Rahman at the wheel saw him and stopped long enough for Crocker to grab hold of the ladder on the side of the hopper with his left hand. That’s when the exhaustion and the loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he remembered was hitting the mess of papers and trash inside and seeing Ritchie’s surprised face.