Oath of Office

54

The engineer who’d been explaining the process to Reza Kazem smiled, seemingly grateful for the opportunity to be near him, and then excused himself to return to his duties. But for the buzz of activity around the missiles and transport trucks this hidden spot in the desert would have been a calm, almost religious place. Both men wore the green uniform and cap of the IRGC, part of what Kazem and his men had stolen from the storage depot north of Tehran. The remote location west of Mashhad hid their activity from the actual military, but the official uniforms would slow any police patrols who happened to approach. It was a big enough lie that few men would have the stones to challenge him directly. No one would want to step on the toes of an official action. Even another IRGC unit would want to check with higher authority before taking any action. Kazem had a small army of his own, nearly a hundred men, all of whom believed themselves patriots, revolutionaries against the revolution, hoping for a new Iran.

Kazem planned to give them one. Just not quite what they expected.

He was a physicist, so he understood the dynamics, if not the minutia of what they were doing. He had the woman for that. She was in her late fifties and carried herself with the arrogance of a man in charge, showing little deference to even Kazem. He didn’t care. They needed each other — and mutual need brought a different kind of respect.

She was across the valley floor now, in the lee of a tall escarpment that shielded the trucks from the incessant wind. Wearing pants, her head uncovered, she shouted into her radio, holding it directly in front of her but away from her face — as if she did not quite understand how radios worked. That was the thing about geniuses, Kazem thought, the shine that came in one facet of their lives left other parts lacking. Dr. Tabrizi was among the most gifted mathematicians and aeronautical physicists in the world. She’d come within a mathematical breath of the correct solution for the Poincaré conjecture when she was an undergraduate at the University of Tehran, and might have solved it had the revolution not shunted women to the side of almost everything. She could, with nothing but pencil and paper, make the needed calculations to thread a needle with an antiballistic missile. And still, a simple mobile telephone baffled her. She could draw accurate pictures of radio waves and explain the science to them, but the buttons and knobs on the radio itself remained an uncrackable mystery.

The men on the crane and missile transport trucks leaned out the windows of their respective cabs, looking for relief from the verbal barrage of this crazy scientist. Kazem did not worry. One truck was already loaded, they only had to repeat the procedure.

Everything was coming together. Both launch tubes would be on the trucks before Ayatollah Ghorbani arrived. The tubes themselves had been relatively simple to acquire. Other missiles in Iran required launch tubes, and the manufacturing process was already in place. Orders and designs from the correct government department made it happen. The massive sixteen-wheel MZKT-79221 were also a straightforward purchase. Ubiquitous in the Red Square military parades of the Soviet Union, these huge missile transport trucks were now manufactured in Belarus under the Volat brand. As with much of anything worthwhile, the importation of these vehicles violated UN sanctions — but stripped of their sixteen wheels and broken down to the smallest components possible, they were much easier to ship illicitly than the Gorgons themselves. It took only a team of mechanics to reassemble the trucks, not a rocket scientist.

Kazem tamped back his excitement. Slowly but surely, this was all working out. He wished Ghorbani would have waited another day. But one did not argue with the likes of Ayatollah Ghorbani. Second only to the Grand Ayatollah himself, Ghorbani acted as his eyes and ears — and his contact with Reza Kazem. After all, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran could not be seen with the man the entire world thought wanted to bring it down.

The harsh chime of Sassani’s mobile phone wormed its way into his dreamless sleep. The mattress in his Herat hotel room was too soft, but it was more comfortable than the couch in his office.

“It is up and running, Major,” the voice said when he answered. “I apologize for waking you, but I thought you would want to know at once.”

Sassani sniffed and then looked around the room, blinking away the memories of the day before. “What is up and running?”

“The satellite phone you ordered me to monitor.”

Sassani sat up a little straighter at that. “At this very moment?”

“Yes,” the technician said. “And we have audio. The caller is an Azeri woman, speaking to, we believe, her mother. The caller’s name is Nima.”

“Origination?” Sassani snapped. He was on his feet now, pacing at the foot of his hotel bed.

“She is calling from Mashhad, Major.”

“Mashhad?” Sassani stopped in his tracks. “She is calling from inside Iran?”

“Yes, Major. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact address, but we are reasonably certain the phone is being used not far from the Shrine of the Imam at this very moment.”

“Bracket in,” Sassani said. “I want as close a location as you are able to give me.”

“Yes, Major,” the technician said.

“You say the speaker’s name is Nima?”

“Correct,” the technician said.

Sassani ended the call. He pitched the phone on the bed and rubbed his hands together, thinking. He wondered if Nima would make this easy, or difficult. Fatima had made it difficult. He sighed. Difficult was certainly much more interesting.