Oath of Office

41

Reza Kazem sat behind the wheel of the stolen Fath Safir — Iran’s answer to the Jeep CJ 4x4—and shielded his eyes from the sun as the gigantic plane crabbed into a stiff wind over the makeshift airstrip. A woman in her fifties sat in the passenger seat, hunched over a small notebook in which she made frequent notes with a pencil she kept behind her ear. She wore red lipstick and dark eyeliner, but the pencil appeared to be her only jewelry. A lock of steel-gray hair escaped the scarf and blew across her face, but she left it there, engrossed in whatever she was doing. She hardly ever spoke, except to herself — with whom she carried on many lively conversations that she noted in her little book.

Overhead, the Il-76’s engines screamed as it came in on final approach. Carved out of the desert in the valley east of Mashhad, the runway provided an adequate, if not ideal, landing spot for the Ilyushin. The strip was fifteen hundred meters — a thousand meters short of what the airplane would need to take off again had it been loaded to maximum weight.

Reza Kazem didn’t care about that. In a short time, it would be some seventy-four thousand kilograms lighter.

The woman in the Safir’s passenger seat looked up suddenly at the sound of the engines, startled from her stupor.

“Tell your people to take great caution putting the missiles inside the launch tubes.”

Kazem drummed long fingers against the steering wheel. “Two hours and thirty-six minutes until the next American satellite passes overhead. It is better the Great Satan does not see what we are up to, don’t you think?”

“This is true,” the woman said, her voice dripping with condescension. “But the great accuracy we require will be lost if the components are damaged even in the slightest way. Secrecy will not matter if we cannot hit what we are aiming at.” She went back to her book for a moment, then suddenly looked up.

“Do you shoot?”

Kazem nodded. “I have, on occasion, fired a weapon.”

“Are you very good?” A professor of engineering, she spoke bluntly, unaware of any possible consequences for the words that escaped her lips.

“I suppose,” Kazem said.

“I want you to think of this,” she said. “Imagine one of your friends fires an average mortar over your head. This round travels at, say, sixteen hundred meters — or approximately one mile — per second. You are tasked with shooting this projectile out of the air with your Kalashnikov, which shoots a projectile that travels at approximately seven hundred meters per second. The mortar is a larger target, but traveling over twice as fast. You’d want the best bullet possible, would you not?”

“That is exactly what I would want,” Kazem said.

“Then please,” the woman said, “be careful with the missiles. The analogy I posed is not far off from what you propose we do.”