The Disciple

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Motoring through the night streets of Tehran in an Iranian army self-propelled, tracked howitzer drew no attention from anyone, a circumstance that caused Joe Mottaki to smile grimly. The possibility that someone might steal a howitzer in order to do evil, nefarious things obviously seemed so remote as to be ludicrous to people living in a police state, which Iran certainly was. One of the reasons, doubtlessly, was the certain knowledge that anyone caught doing so would have a short, grim life expectancy as an enemy of God.

Joe Mottaki certainly didn’t suffer from illusions about the Muslims, who in the Middle East often taught their children that Jews were cursed by God, who would never again be satisfied with them. What the Iranian holy warriors would do to a Mossad agent, if they caught him, was something that couldn’t be printed in a family newspaper. To be sure, Joe had no intention of being caught; the pistol he carried was not for shooting nasty Iranians but himself. Or his two Mossad colleagues, if it came to that.

Tonight he directed the man at the wheel with short commands as the lightly armored vehicle rolled through the streets at 25 mph, well short of its top speed. Unfortunately, it was leaving a trail in the soft asphalt that a blind man could follow; tracks were notorious for that. So far, no one was following. That would soon change, and Joe knew it.

He had the driver stop the Raad- 2 in an intersection on a low hill, over a mile from the Defense Ministry, which was just visible between the buildings. This was almost point-blank range for the artillery piece. Joe Mottaki glanced at his watch.

He growled at the gunner, who swiveled the barrel of the 155 mm howitzer and adjusted his aim with the telescopic sight.

“There’s two tanks in front of the building,” the gunner said. “Look like cold iron. Military sculpture, maybe.”

“The crews are around, someplace,” Joe Mottaki said. After thirty years of life, he was a confirmed pessimist. Which was good-as everyone in the Middle East well knew, pessimists usually lived longer. If nothing else, they got a running start. “But our target is the building,” Joe told the gunner. “Tell me when you are ready.”

“Ready now,” the gunner said.

Mottaki checked his watch. “One minute,” he said. Then he grinned again.

George Washington Hosein and I put on small radio headsets and clipped the transmitter/receivers to our belts. We tested them as we drove up to the Defense Ministry.

He let me out of his car on the empty sidewalk by the ministry. The heat of the day had dissipated some, but the sidewalk still radiated the heat. I opened the rear door of the sedan, pulled out the duffle bag and hoisted it to my shoulder. Then I walked over to the side of the building, which was also still warm. It was built in the shape of a giant U, and we were adjacent to the southern wing. The main entrance was on the crosspiece, which faced west.

Ghasem Murad had drawn me a crude map, and I had committed it to memory. Fifteen windows from the east end of this wing, he suggested, might be best. Despite congenital paranoia, which I had assiduously cultivated from puberty onward, I believed him.

I counted windows, then stepped to the proper one. The window was at least ten feet off the pavement, perhaps eleven, and the wall was poured concrete, ugly as hell and smooth, without a handhold.

I glanced at my watch. Thirty seconds.

Fortunately for me there wasn’t a soul out and about except for me and my friends, all three of whom were standing near their cars holding their submachine guns, ready to kill somebody. The sight of them bucked me up a little.

I pulled the rope and grappling iron from my bag-it was right on top-and flaked it out. Tied the end of the rope to the bag.

Ten seconds. I counted them down.

At zero nothing happened. Uh-oh.

Just when I was ready to toss my trash back in the car and boogie, something big crashed into the building. Sounded like it hit the main section. Then I heard a deep, muffled boom, a heavy weapon some distance away. I didn’t know where Joe parked his howitzer, but he sure knew how to shoot it.

I twirled the grappling hook and threw it through the window over my head. It smashed the glass and went in. I tugged and it came right back out. Threw it again… and this time it caught on something. I steadily tightened the rope, the hook held, and I went up the rope hand over hand.

Got through the window and found myself in an empty office.

Something else crashed into the building. I could hear running feet, shouts.

I grabbed a good handful of rope and began pulling the duffle bag up.

When I had it inside, I untied the rope and dropped it. G. W. and his guys were in their cars going down the street. They would return in ten minutes, I hoped.

I lifted the bag to my shoulder, got the silenced Ruger out and pointed forward, just in case, and set out for the basement, where the Targeting Office was located.

After the gunner sent the third round toward the ministry, Joe Mottaki had the driver put the Raad- 2 in motion. The crew stopped in another intersection a hundred yards along and swiveled the giant gun to point at the ministry.

“Any time you’re ready,” Joe told the gunner, who pulled the trigger ten seconds later. The recoil rocked the vehicle and the noise nearly deafened them, even though they were wearing intercom helmets that were supposed to muffle the blasts.

The door to the Targeting Office was locked. Only one lock-and an American one at that. I guess ol’ Habib Sultani never thought anyone would be wandering around in here trying to go where he shouldn’t.

Wearing my miner’s headlamp, I attacked the lock with picks. About that time another howitzer shell smashed into the building and exploded, sending a tremor through the structure and causing a power failure. The corridor I was standing in became dark as a grave.

Ah yes, a dark building, a lock on a door, me standing in front of it with a torsion wrench and a pick-this was the story of my misspent life. I tried several picks before I found the one I thought would do it.

The seconds ticked by… how many, I dunno. I always think these delicate operations take longer than they do. Two more howitzer shells exploded in the masonry above, one far away, one closer. I hoped the guardians of this fine building had evacuated and taken cover, as G. W. and Joe Mottaki and I intended. In this stubborn age it is difficult to get people to behave the way you want them to. No doubt Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Devil’s disciple, would agree with that sentiment.

Bang-I got it. The lock turned. I tried the door. As I did, I heard the sound of running feet in the corridor. Boots slapping on concrete. I snapped off the miner’s light.

The door opened when I twisted the knob. I pulled the silenced Ruger from its holster, got a good grip and opened the door. Grabbed the duffel bag, stepped in and pulled the door closed behind me and turned the knob on the lock.

Standing there in the absolute darkness listening to my heart and the feet pounding the corridor, coming closer, I confess, I was nervous. Scared, even. What a hell of a way to make a living!

The running men-I thought there were at least three-went pounding by the door without slackening their pace. When the sounds of their feet had faded, I keyed my radio and told G. W., “I’m in.”

“Make it snappy,” he said. “Joe’s shooting into a hornet’s nest.”

I snapped the miner’s light back on and took a look around.

I was in a large office with four desks and a large safe. Three of the desks had computers on them. The entire wall on the side away from the door was covered with a black curtain. I stepped up to it and pushed it aside, revealing a map of the Middle East.

All of Iran was there, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel… and the northern half of Arabia. There were stars all over Iran and numbers. Triangles here and there. I examined Tel Aviv. A heavy black triangle was penciled over it, with numbers beside it. The same for our airbases in Arabia and Iraq. I suspected that everything Jake Grafton wanted to know was right here on this map, and if I photographed it and beat feet, we would have Ahmadinejad’s Jihad plans. But I couldn’t be sure. I wanted the info from the computers, too.

Those computers-planning flight paths for nine hundred conventional cruise and ballistic missiles, and for a dozen nuclear-armed ones, from known locations to precise targets, without interfering with each other in flight or when the warheads detonated, was not a task for the ignorant or careless. It would take a lot of calculating by someone who knew his stuff. Ghasem Murad had told me about the head targeting guru, a mathematics PhD from one of the local universities, and assured me he was competent and capable. Again, I believed Ghasem.

I checked my watch. I’d been in the building for four minutes.

I turned to the safe. First I turned the dial gently in the hope that whoever had closed it last had failed to lock it. Well, they hadn’t. Working as quickly as I could, I got out a small computer and several rods, which I clamped to the door of the safe. Put six electronic sensors around the combination lock, then hooked them to the computer. Finally, I clamped a small electric motor with a set of jaws protruding from it to the rods over the combination dial and tightened the jaws over the dial. The last lead went to a twelve-volt battery, the heaviest thing in the duffle bag.

This gizmo could open most of these older safes, given enough time, which was in short supply tonight. An electrical current induced into the door created a measurable magnetic field. The rotation of the tumblers inside the lock caused fluctuations in the field, fluctuations that the computer measured and displayed on the screen. Finally, the computer measured the amount of electrical current necessary to turn the dial of the lock, an exquisitely sensitive measurement. Using both these factors, the computer could determine the combination to the safe and open it. I manually zeroed the dial and started the computer program.

I didn’t have time to watch it work. These other computers might have information we could use. I pulled a battery-driven saw from the duffle bag and attacked them, cutting them open and removing the hard drives, which I placed in my backpack. I had all three hard drives in about two minutes.

I checked on the computer opening the safe. It had one number already.

Satisfied that the magic was initiated, I went back to the wall map and snapped off a dozen pictures with my Cyber-shot. Time was marching right along, and I heard a few more howitzer shells smash home.

I hoped those shells were beating hell out of the top of this building. Mottaki had assured me they would.

I went back to the safe. Second number was up. The dial was slowly turning…

“Lots of military milling around the front of the building,” G. W. told me. “It’s just a matter of time before they come down the street where you went in.”

I clicked my mike twice in reply.

I opened the duffle bag, which contained twenty pounds of C-4 explosive, fused, with a detonator attached. I cranked the detonator around to ten minutes and flipped up the guard on the on-off switch. Turned the switch to on. The red light illuminated.

I had just stuffed the duffle bag under the big boss’s desk and stowed my camera in my backpack when I heard noises in the hallway. The footsteps stopped at the door, and someone rattled the knob.

Muffled voices. There were at least two of them, maybe more.

I hunkered down behind a desk and pulled the Ruger from its holster. Turned off the miner’s light and stowed it, then put on the night vision goggles. The world turned green.

“They are firing up the tanks,” the gunner told Joe Mottaki.

“Smack ’em,” was the immediate answer.

Mottaki was in his third position, still on the ridge looking down another long avenue at the Defense Ministry, which was now on fire. The howitzer shells had done their work. Glancing through the IR scope, Mottaki could see the heat from the fire as white light. He was studying it when he saw the first tank, coming toward them up the boulevard.

The self-propelled howitzer was covered with very light steel, just enough to stop rifle bullets and shrapnel. A tank shell would go through it like a bullet through paper. Not having armor plate on the vehicle made Joe Mottaki feel naked. On the other hand, the howitzer was an artillery piece, and the shells in the vehicle were general purpose. In theory, they should penetrate a tank’s armor. If the gunner could hit it.

He could. The gun bellowed, the tracked vehicle rocked from the recoil, and the tank on the boulevard, almost a mile away and head on, coming straight for the howitzer, disappeared in a tremendous flash.

When the IR scope cleared and Joe could see, the tank was not moving. The gun barrel was pointed down and to the left.

“Where’s the other one?” he asked the gunner.

“Dunno.”

Joe looked at his watch. Eight minutes had passed since the first shot. Carmellini wanted ten.

“Put another one in the ministry. Shoot at something intact.”

“Roger that. By the way, we only have seven more rounds.”

“Counting the one in the breech?”

“Yes.”

The gunner bent to his weapon as Joe Mottaki wondered about the second tank. Where could it be? He used the IR scope to scan the avenues he could see… and found them empty.

The footsteps receded. The tiny whine of the electric motor on the safe door had stopped.

I checked. The combination was there. I took the apparatus off the safe door, took a deep breath and tried the handle. It gave. I pulled the door open.

Oh yes! There was a laptop in there. I grabbed it, pulled out stacks of paper and threw them around. If there was another computer in there, I didn’t want to overlook it. No, there was only the one. I added it to the backpack, pulled the straps around my shoulders, went to the door to the office, put my ear against it. Silence.

There was no way around it-I had to go through that door. Since the office lacked windows, that door was the only exit.

“Hurry up, Tommy!” That was G. W.

I pulled the goggles back on, looked through the door to see if I could make out figures in infrared. The hall appeared empty.

With the Ruger in my hand, my thumb on the safety and the backpack on my back, I twisted the doorknob slowly and pulled the door open.

Nothing happened.

I looked across the corridor at the blank wall, then eased my head out so I could see down to the left. Pulled the door completely open and looked right. The hallway appeared empty. Of course, the darkness was Stygian, but the goggles allowed me to see in IR. What I saw was a corridor empty of humans.

No more impacts from howitzer shells, so the big building was relatively silent. I hoped and prayed all the people had bailed.

The staircase I had descended was two doors down on the other side of the hallway. I took a deep breath and came slowly out of the Targeting Office, pulled the door shut behind me and walked along the corridor toward the stairs. I paused there, looked up the stairs… empty. Empty all the way to the landing. There I would have to turn 180 degrees and climb another flight to the ground floor, where I had come in.

Perhaps I should go back, put the C-4 against the outside wall. It would blow a hole I could pop through to the sidewalk. Where I might be gunned down by someone at one of the building’s windows.

When that C-4 went off, I decided, I wanted to be as far from this building as possible and running for the toolies. And it would go off very soon. The clock on the detonator was ticking away. Just when it was going to blow, I didn’t know. I certainly couldn’t read my watch with these goggles, and I wasn’t going to take them off. Of one thing I was sure-time was running madly on.

I started up the stairs. Got to the landing, stood and listened… and heard nothing. So I went around the corner-and found myself staring at the business end of an AK-47 held by a soldier sitting on the stairs.

He wasn’t wearing night vision goggles, but he had that weapon pointed right at my belly button and he was staring straight at me. He said something in Persian that I didn’t catch.

I froze. For about half a second I thought about shooting him, but the thought didn’t get far. The Ruger fell from my grasp and made a metallic clank as it hit the steps.

A flashlight illuminated me. The holder of the light was at the top of the stairs. That much, at least, I could see in the goggles.

The sitting soldier turned on a flashlight, studied me for a moment, then rose and picked up the Ruger and helped himself to the Kimber 1911, which he pulled from the holster on the left side of my web belt.

The man at the top of the stairs said something loudly, then came down, carefully keeping his light pointed right in my face.

One of them pulled out handcuffs while the other stood on the second step up, about five feet in front of me, with his submachine gun leveled on my belly button. He gestured with the barrel for me to raise my hands higher.

I wondered if they were told to bring me in alive regardless, or to shoot me dead if I resisted.

The other came down the stairs and approached from my right. He released his weapon, which hung on a strap slung over his neck and shoulder, and reached for my right wrist. Snapped one of the cuffs over it, then reached for my left.

I drove my left hand under his chin as hard as I could, with the fingers curled back halfway. Drove my knuckles into his Adam’s apple with all the force I could generate, which was quite a bit since I had enough adrenaline in my blood to run an Olympic athlete for a month, and I managed to turn a little, getting my weight into the blow. I tried to drive my fist right through his neck, intentionally not trying to stop the punch. I heard his Adam’s apple snap, crushed, as he fell away from me.

“Tommy?” I heard G. W.’s voice in my ear; then I lost the headset.

I didn’t let my guy fall. I had him with my right hand now and pushed him with all my strength toward his pal, who had tried to back away and tripped and was now sitting on a stair. He triggered a burst right into the guy’s back.

I followed the handcuff man right onto the gunman, who went over backward even as he tried to get out of the way.

I was on him like a cat, pushing the gun barrel aside and smashing him with my right fist. The first blow shattered his nose, sending blood flying everywhere. I hit him again and again as fast as I could. The third punch snapped his neck. I felt it go and released the body.

I got up breathing hard. This whole encounter had taken no more than fifteen seconds. As I groped for my pistols, which were on the floor, another shell exploded in the building and the windows rattled.

A police car pulled up fifty yards from the Raad-2, and the man at the wheel jumped out. He had an AK- 47 in his hands and ripped off a burst. The bullets pinging against the armor alerted Joe Mottaki to the cop’s presence.

He had the gunner spin the howitzer barrel and depress it. With his eye on the telescopic sight, the gunner soon lined up the police car. He triggered the gun… and the shell went through the car without detonating. Didn’t matter. The impact literally exploded the car, sending pieces flying in all directions. The shell smashed into a building a hundred yards down the street and blew out half of a wall. There was so much dust and smoke that it obscured the truckload of masonry falling into the street.

The cop with the AK was hit by some of the pieces of the car and thrown for twenty feet. He didn’t rise from the pavement.

Mottaki had the gunner send one more shell into the Ministry of Defense, then turned away from the ministry and headed for the top of the low hill they were shooting from.

The third floor of the building to his left exploded, showering the street with brick and dust.

That tank! Or another one.

Mottaki looked around wildly, saw one two blocks ahead, sitting in a side street. “Gunner!”

“I’ve got him.”

As the words left the gunner’s mouth he pulled the trigger, and the howitzer’s recoil rocked the vehicle again.

Amazingly, the gunner missed. The shell might have glanced off the turret armor, but in any event it exploded in the building beyond the tank, pulverized it and made the brick, mortar and wood rain down. In seconds the tank was nearly buried and all that could be seen was the tip of the long gun barrel.

“Shoot him again,” Mottaki shouted. “You missed the first time.”

The tank was rocking back and forth, the visible gun barrel vibrating from the efforts of the tank crew to drive it out of the pile of rubble, which was still growing.

The barrel got longer… then the front of the tank appeared, and the barrel began to swing toward them.

“Let’s get with it,” Joe Mottaki growled.

The words were no more than out of his mouth when the howitzer vomited out another round, rocking the vehicle as the muzzle blast broke windows up and down the street, those that were still intact.

The tank was hidden in a fireball that grew and grew.

“Driver, any old time.”

The vehicle jerked into motion. In seconds it was clanking right along, working up to its top speed of over forty miles per hour.

The driver turned a corner and aimed the vehicle down a narrow street lined with parked cars on both sides, heading away from the ministry. The howl of the diesel engine in the tracked vehicle filled the urban canyon with thunder as curious people leaned out their windows to see what was happening. Two police cars rounded the corner ahead and slammed to a stop, blocking the street.

Revving the motor to the redline, the driver drove right through the police cars, smashing them out of the way as the Iranian cops ran for cover.

With my backpack in one hand and the Ruger in the other, I ran for the office with the open window, and my rope. I wanted out. Unfortunately, that was about the time I realized that the Targeting Office, with twenty pounds of virulent C-4 about to explode, was only a couple of doors down, on the floor immediately underneath the room where I had entered. Can I do it to myself, or what?

I threw open the door and charged in, right into an ambush. Five people launched themselves at me. I got off one shot before they piled me, rifle butts swinging. I went out under the onslaught.

The building was visibly on fire, with heavy smoke rolling out, when G. W. Hosein rolled into the street beside the Defense Ministry and coasted to a stop directly beside the broken window where Tommy Carmellini had made his entry. Haddad Nouri was at the wheel of the car behind him, with Ahmad Qajar riding shotgun.

Ahead of Hosein, on the cross street in front of the main entrance, he could see fire trucks rolling in and police cars with sirens moaning and lights flashing.

“Tommy?” he called on the radio. He received no answer.

When I came to-I don’t know how long I was out; probably no more than a few seconds-the room was lit with flashlight beams darting about. One was on my face. Someone had ripped off the night vision goggles, I guess, because they were gone.

I tried to move, but there was a man sitting on each arm and leg.

“Well, well, well, Mr. Carmellini,” I heard a woman’s voice say, filling the heavy silence, which reeked of gunpowder. “We have you at last. Oh, I am going to enjoy getting to know you, Mr. American Spy. I am going to enjoy watching you die.”

Shit! It was that bitch Hazra al-Rashid.

She started to say something else, but didn’t get it out, because the C- 4 in the Targeting Office went off with a mighty crash and the wall blew in, filling the air with dirt and dust and the stink of explosives. I felt the floor sag, and thought we were going to the basement, but we didn’t. The guards lost their flashlights, dropped and probably broken-I don’t know-and the solids in the air glowed from what little light there was coming through the window.

People went tumbling, some on top of me. I fought with all my strength to get loose. I felt bodies moving, and then I was on my knees, then onto my feet, although I was having a hell of a time breathing with all the crap in the air.

Someone aimed a rifle butt at me, and I took it on the shoulder.

I heard Hazra shouting in Farsi and realized she was telling her men not to kill me. I launched myself at her. Or what I thought was her-I couldn’t see much, let me tell you. I smashed my head into her face, felt her going down with me on top. I got my right hand up and was strangling her when three or four of them jerked me off her.

They swarmed me. There were just too many of them. They cuffed my hands behind my back and finally yanked me to my feet. Someone shined a flashlight right in my face.

“Oh, yes,” I heard Hazra whisper, forcing the words out. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

G. W. Hosein was looking at his watch when the C- 4 in the Targeting Office exploded. Glass blew out of windows in the floor above, and smoke and plaster dust were ejected, as if from mini-volcanoes. Carmellini had been in the building for fifteen minutes.

He glanced at the broken windows and the crap spewing out of them, just in time to see someone stick a rifle barrel out.

Bullets thudded into the sedan, and the windows shattered as G. W. popped the clutch and jabbed the accelerator to the floor.

The guy in the passenger seat of the second sedan hosed off a poorly aimed burst at the window as G. W. threw the car into a U-turn and accelerated away in the other direction. The second sedan was right behind him.

G. W. kept the pedal to the metal as he shot along the nighttime streets of Tehran with the wind rushing in through the shattered windshield. The sedan with his two colleagues followed faithfully a hundred feet behind. G. W. knew precisely where he was going; he and Joe Mottaki had a rendezvous.

Police cars were converging on the area. G. W. saw one racing in from a side street with siren blaring and slowed to let it cross the intersection ahead of him. It went through from left to right and kept going. The traffic light changed, and G. W. ran it anyway.

At the top of the boulevard he saw a tank and two police cars. As he approached, the tank blew up. Pieces showered the street. A big piece of the turret flew lazily through the air in his direction-and G. W. Hosein swerved just in time as it crashed into the street and shattered into three pieces.

He glanced in the mirror. The other car made it by, too.

Ahead were the police cars, both out of action. Iranian police were bailing from the car as he raced up and threaded his way through the wreckage. Behind him, several of the police decided to shoot at Nouri and Qajar, who leaned out the windows and hosed them with several bursts from a submachine gun.

Then both cars were through and running as fast as their drivers could make them go.

When they topped a gentle rise, they saw the howitzer trundling along. Then it turned left, onto a smaller street.

G. W. swung the car into a high-speed turn onto a parallel street. Nouri stayed with him.

Suddenly a police car roared up alongside Nouri and Qajar. Qajar aimed his submachine gun at the front tires and squeezed off a burst. The driver fought the wheel, then crashed into a parked car.

At the next big boulevard G. W. swung right and found himself right behind the Raad-2 howitzer. One of the crewmen was standing up, manning a tripod-mounted machine gun.

They didn’t have far to go. The streets were narrow and lined with parked vehicles. The sidewalks were also narrow, with buildings towering three or four stories over them.

The howitzer slowed and turned into an alley. G. W. and Nouri pulled in right behind it. All the men bailed out.

In front of the howitzer were two old SUVs, a Land Rover and a Chevrolet. Joe Mottaki jumped behind the wheel of the Land Rover, which was in front, and G. W. got in beside him. Ahmad Qajar got in the rear seat; the other men got into the Chevrolet. In seconds they were out of the alley on the other end and driving at normal speeds through the streets.

“They got Carmellini, I think,” G. W. said.

Joe Mottaki muttered an expletive as Qajar handed G. W. the rucksack containing the satellite phone.

“They’ll get the location of the safe house from him,” Joe said, “and he’ll tell them about us.”

“Not for a while,” G. W. said. He had the satellite phone out of the bag and was getting it set up. “Carmellini is tough. But eventually…”

“Find an open area and stop,” G. W. directed. “I’ve got to report in.”