The Trojan Horse

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tehran

Iran, Day 53

It wasn’t the first time that Albert Cunningham had been to Iran, although he’d never been to Tehran. The Iranians had been running weapons and supplies to insurgents and political groups within Iraq and Special Forces teams had been deployed to stop them, often engaging their Iranian counterparts in sharp small-team engagements that had never been officially reported. Over the years, Albert had mastered both Farsi and Arabic, as well as developing a capability to operate while undercover, posing as an Iranian. It was a set of training and experience that stood him in good stead, now that he’d been sent out on a near-suicide mission. If nothing else, the Iranians would never expect it from the United States.

The trip from the Gulf to Tehran had been surprisingly easy. They’d bribed a smuggler to carry them from Basra to the Iranian coastline and then made their way inland, posing as Iranian Revolutionary Guards on detached duty. One distant advantage when it came to operating inside a tightly-controlled country like Iran was that no one dared question government messengers on official missions. After all, anyone who dared show any initiative might be targeted for government attention as a possible dissident. Iran’s dissidents had been ruthlessly squashed time and time again, along with anyone else who even looked suspect. Like most people, all Iran’s population wanted was to live in peace and security. Their government couldn’t give them either.

According to the newspapers they’d picked up just after they’d found lodgings within Tehran — all undercover, to prevent the government or religious police from taxing the owners — the aliens were due to send a representative to Tehran to discuss economic support from the Galactic Federation to help save Iran from bankruptcy. The arrival of fusion power — and advanced car batteries — had undermined Iran’s oil industry, leaving the government with a massive cash-flow crisis. It didn’t help that the Chinese and Japanese had started mass-production of advanced car batteries, or that Russia had lost interest in assisting Iran now that the United States was pulling out of the Middle East. Iran’s economy was on a slow fall to nowhere — and when it came crashing down, the shit would really hit the fan. The protesting crowds in the streets would multiply until the entire city seemed enraged, intent on tearing apart the religious leaders who’d turned the most prosperous nation in the Middle East into a nightmarish place to live. Already, there were signs of unrest in many parts of Iran. Given enough of a push, Iran might fragment into chaos.

He scowled inwardly as he caught sight of a number of men in army uniforms, marching through the streets in a show of force. The Iranian Army was, in theory, behind the Mullahs; in practice, no one knew what would happen if the Mullahs ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowds. Behind them, fanatical revolutionary guardsmen followed, watching the soldiers for any sign of disloyalty. If the soldiers balked, the guardsmen would fire on them, starting a civil war. Rumour — which flew through Tehran faster than the hot desert wind — suggested that much of the Army had been recalled to barracks, keeping them locked down in case the public turned on their masters. Albert hadn’t seen any reason to doubt it, although rumours could never be trusted. Another one claimed that the aliens were nothing more than a CIA trick. The CIA seemed to be blamed for everything in the Middle East.

“Bastards,” Sergeant Philip Bainbridge muttered, beside him. He nodded towards a woman wearing a headscarf. She was being berated by two burly religious policemen, who seemed offended that she hadn’t been wearing a full veil. Albert ground his teeth in silent rage as one of the policemen slapped the woman to the ground, before kicking her in the ribs. It was evil like that that needed to be stopped, yet if he killed them both he would blow the mission. “Filthy fucking bastards.”

The woman crawled away, blood dripping from her mouth. Her tormentors laughed and headed off, seemingly unaware of the cold anger being directed at them from the crowd. One day, perhaps soon, they would find themselves on the receiving end as the population turned on them, but until then no one would hold them to account. Albert shook his head in disgust and led the way through the streets to their vantage point. It had cost nearly two hundred American Dollars to hire the room and he didn’t want to lose it. Without it, completing their mission would be much more dangerous.

They slipped through the crowd, ignoring the press from men and women alike, until they reached their building. The owner appeared to be in negotiations with another man, but he broke off long enough to wave the two Americans through the door and up the stairs. Albert suspected that he thought that the two men were homosexual — which was punished by death in Iran — but he didn’t care. As long as he thought that, he wouldn’t wonder why they wanted a room with an excellent view of the alien landing site. Shaking his head, Albert opened the bag and produced the Dragunov sniper rifle. Designed in Russia, it had become the weapon of choice for terrorists, not least because there were so many of them washing around the world that it was impossible to trace them back to a single source. Iraq had produced thousands of them and an unknown number had fallen into the hands of terrorists. Albert had lost buddies to snipers using similar weapons.

There’d been some debate on just what kind of bullet to use. One theory had been that the aliens would use personal force fields, ensuring that they couldn’t be harmed at all by anything humanity could throw at them. Albert personally doubted that possibility, not when there was no evidence to suggest that the aliens were that advanced. A second problem was that no one knew anything about alien biology. They might have looked humanoid, but their brains might not be in their heads. A shot through the head would be lethal to a human, yet there was no way of knowing if it would kill an alien, or if it would merely be a cosmetic wound. Eventually, they’d settled on explosive bullets, even though soldiers tended to distrust them. They would inflict maximum damage on the alien body.

Albert quickly field-stripped the rifle and reassembled it, testing it carefully to be sure that it worked. Many of the terrorists he’d faced in the early years of operating in Iraq hadn’t bothered to keep their weapons in working order, something that had probably accounted for how few Americans had died under their fire. Others — the smarter, deadlier terrorists — had learned, often surviving long enough to pass on the lesson to newer terrorists. And some of the insurgents they’d faced in Afghanistan were deadly. Behind him, Bainbridge pulled out both AK-47s and pistols, checking and rechecking them both to ensure that they were usable. If they had to fight their way out, they were ready, although Albert knew that the odds were vastly against them. They’d done the best they could to ensure that Iranian security forces would be diverted, but there was no way of knowing how well it would work until they actually tried it. And then it would be too late to make adjustments.

“Here they come,” Bainbridge commented. “Beats a chopper any day.”

Albert could only agree. The boxy alien landing craft had appeared over the city, escorted by a flight of Iranian fighter jets. They had never been particularly good at maintaining the fighters they’d inherited from Saddam Hussein or the Shah, but they’d definitely worked hard to ensure that they had a working force to escort the aliens. Albert doubted that the aliens were impressed. Whatever the Iranians did, they couldn’t match the feat of travelling across the galaxy; to the aliens, the Iranian fighters probably appeared primitive, almost laughable. But then, the United States had had to learn that primitive weapons could be deadly, in the right circumstances. The aliens would have to learn the same lesson too.

Down below, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was going to work, pushing back the crowds from the landing site. Much of the demonstration had been organised as a show of public opinion, Albert suspected, although there was no way of knowing if the aliens would be impressed. Why should they care about a bunch of humans shouting abuse at them? It wasn’t as if Iran could actually strike at the alien starships, high overhead, let alone reach the alien homeworlds. They could exterminate the entire Iranian population without exerting much effort at all.

The alien craft started to lower itself to the ground as soon as there was a space big enough to hold it. Down below, the Iranian President had come into view, protected by his own squad of heavies. The Mullahs who actually ran Iran were still inside the government buildings, forcing the alien to come to them. In some ways, they reminded Albert of Imperial China, where the Emperors had expected the Westerners to prostrate themselves in front of China’s glory. They had no real conception of the power of Western weapons, nor of the fact that the only thing preventing them from Western wrath was Western unwillingness to use their weapons. Destroying Iran would be easy, but immoral. One day, the Mullahs would go too far and discover that the first rule of morality was survival.

He picked up the rifle as the alien craft touched down. The racket of the crowd grew louder as the hatch opened, revealing the alien representative. Some of the crowd seemed to want to back away, others seemed intent on pushing forward. Albert saw fights breaking out below between various groups, with policemen and soldiers trying to separate them without using their weapons. The whole scene was rapidly becoming a nightmare. If the aliens noticed, they gave no sign. Their representative walked down the ramp, showing commendable nerve, and stepped up to the President. The Iranian President stared at the alien, as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and then held out a hand. The alien took the hand and shook it with icy dignity.

Albert took the rifle and pointed it down at the alien. He’d earned his badge in sniper school, but he hadn’t had as long to learn to use the Russian-designed rifle than he would have liked. The alien’s face appeared in the scope, a green scaly mass with eerie red eyes. Albert took aim, tightened his finger on the trigger and fired a single shot. The alien staggered as the shot embedded itself in his neck, and then exploded as the bullet detonated. A moment later, there was a second, much larger explosion. Albert found himself blown across the room by the blast.

“Fuck me,” Bainbridge said. “What the hell was that?”

“I’ve no idea,” Albert said. “Come on!”

Leaving the rifle behind, he caught up the AK-47 and started to run down the stairs and out of the back entrance. The building’s owner was nowhere to be seen. Albert pulled a radio transmitter out of his pocket and jammed his finger down on the single button. The devices they’d scattered over Tehran exploded, adding to the chaos. It would take the Iranians some time to realise that no one had been hurt in the explosions, suggesting they’d been nothing more than decoys. By then, Albert wanted to be well away from Tehran.

He glanced towards the square as they ran out onto the streets. The crowd was fleeing, those who could flee. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, had been injured or killed by the second explosion, the one that had destroyed the alien’s body. They had to be nervous about losing a body where it could be examined, Albert told himself. There had been no way to know that the aliens had wired their own bodies to blow in case of death. It didn’t stop the guilt from gnawing at him as they joined the crowd in flight. No one took any notice of their weapons. The policemen and soldiers seemed to be fleeing too.

Behind them, chaos spread as a riot broke out. Albert could hear gunshots, although there was no way of knowing who was being targeted, or why. It sounded as if the religious policemen or the revolutionary guard had turned on the crowd, firing on it to try to maintain order. In return, the crowd was fleeing or turning on the policemen, forcing the soldiers to choose sides. Albert hoped that they would move to protect the people. Perhaps the explosion would mark the end of the Mullah’s rule in Tehran. He allowed himself a quick prayer for the innocents slain in the blast as they reached their safe house and changed clothes. The uniforms they’d stolen should get them out of the city before they could be caught by the authorities. And then they could make their way to the coast and get out on a smuggler’s boat.

An hour later, they were in a stolen knock-off copy of a jeep, driving west from Tehran towards the Gulf. There had been no serious attempt to stop them, or any of the thousands of others fleeing the city as the chaos spilled out of control. Iran’s people had any number of grudges to pay off against the Mullahs and their lackeys — and now they had their chance. They had passed a military convoy heading into the city, but there was no way of knowing what side the soldiers were on, or even if there was a side. Albert had been on the ground during the Arab Spring. He knew that revolutions always had one thing in common. They tended to go round and round.

Bainbridge was fiddling with the radio in the jeep. The Iranian Mullahs had tried to keep their people from hearing news broadcasts from the West — or the rest of the Middle East, for that matter — but there were ways around even the tightest security. Albert knew that the United States had been quietly slipping communications equipment into Iran for years, aiding those with the determination to fight for freedom to coordinate and work together against the state. It was easy to reset the radio to pick up broadcasts from Qatar, even Al Jazeera. The Arab satellite TV channel might have been effectively an enemy broadcast station, but it did have a good track record of picking up reports from the Arab world. It even had a good reputation in Iran.

“…Coming in of a massive explosion in Iran,” the speaker was saying. It was a female voice, something that would have shocked the traditionalists. The fundamentalist terrorists and the United States might not have agreed on much, but disapproving of Al Jazeera was definitely one of them. “Early reports suggest that the alien representative was somehow gunned down in Iran, followed by terrorist bombings…”

The broadcast vanished in a hail of static. “They’ve got a few things right,” Bainbridge commented. “I wonder what else they got right…”

There was a massive flare of light, behind them. Albert acted without thought, braking the jeep to a stop and driving out to hit the deck. Bainbridge followed him, a second before the shockwave passed overhead. The noise hit them next, a thunderous racket that was almost deafening in its intensity. There was only one possible cause, Albert told himself. The aliens had nuked Tehran. They’d killed an entire city for daring to lose one of their people.

He rolled over and stared towards where Tehran had been. A massive cloud was climbing up towards the heavens, already taking on an unmistakable shape and form. It was an ominous grey mushroom, mocking the puny humans below as it loomed above them. Once, Albert had read a story where the watchers had seen a devil’s face in the mushroom cloud. It was suddenly easy to believe the story. He couldn’t escape the thought. The aliens had killed an entire city to avenge the death of one of their people. They’d killed millions of humans to avenge the deaths of one of their people. They’d killed…

Bainbridge put it into words. “My God,” he said. “What have we done?”

It was tempting to think of Iranians as a monolithic entity, to assume that all Iranians were like the terrorists he’d killed, but Albert knew that that was a lie. Innocents, thousands of innocents, had died in the blast. The aliens had finally shown their true nature, all right, and Tehran had paid the price. He wanted to go back and help, but he knew that it would be futile. There was nothing that two Marines, or even the remaining American forces in the Gulf, could do to help.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They passed the remainder of the trip in silence, circling around any large habitation to avoid any possible complications. The radio was nothing, but static; Bainbridge couldn’t tell if the aliens were jamming the signals to make matters worse, or if it was merely a side-effect of the nuke. If it had been a nuke… Albert had his suspicions about that too. The aliens wanted Earth, but presumably they didn’t want to inherit a radioactive ruin. They could simply have dropped a very large rock on Tehran and watched the fireworks from a safe distance.

Once down by the shore, they abandoned the plan to find a smuggler’s boat and settled for stealing a fishing boat from a small village. Heading out into the waters, they hailed an American warship and were picked up by a team of grim-faced SEALs. Albert had met a couple of them while on detached duty, which made identification easier. None of the SEALs looked happy, or even relived to be away from Tehran. Something was badly wrong.

“Haven’t you heard?” One of them said, when Albert finally asked. “The President has collapsed. The Vice President is already being sworn in.”