Tom Clancy Support and Defend

9

United Airlines flight 951, a Boeing 777 flying from Brussels, touched down at Washington Dulles International Airport at one p.m. in a driving rain. The first to deplane were the first-class passengers, and within this group was a small man with short black hair and a boyish face.

If any of the deplaning passengers noticed him at all they would have presumed him to be a foreign exchange student, perhaps from Turkey or Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. His backpack was sleek and trendy, his jeans were designer, and he certainly looked no older than twenty-three or so.

In truth he was thirty-five, and he’d not come to America to study.

The man’s name was Mohammed Mehdi Mobasheri, but the documents he presented at immigration control said something altogether different. They claimed him to be a young Lebanese diplomat, flying from Beirut via Brussels. A call to the Lebanese embassy in the Woodley Park neighborhood of D.C. would have confirmed his travel and his bona fides, but no call was necessary because his diplomatic visa appeared to be in order.

But while it was true his flight had originated the day before in Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Airport, the Lebanon-to-Belgium leg of his journey was, in fact, the second leg, and not the first. He had flown into Beirut early the previous morning from Tehran on a military transport, and he’d received his Lebanese documentation only in a guarded room at Rafic Hariri a halfhour before wheels up to Belgium.

And now he was in the immigration line in Dulles. He stood with a pleasant, if somewhat tired, smile on his face while he was cleared for entry into the U.S. He passed through quickly, and then he breezed through customs with nothing to declare.

During the flight over, Mobasheri had sat by himself in the first-class cabin, but four more men tasked with serving him were on board UA951. The four had traveled all the way from Tehran, as well, though they had stayed apart from one another since deplaning the military transport in Beirut. They flew in coach, carrying Lebanese identification, though their documents claimed them to be businessmen and not diplomats.

Mohammed left the airport terminal on his own, and he was met by a limousine from the Lebanese embassy in the arrivals cue at Dulles and whisked away, and the other four were picked up in a Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows.

Mobasheri had earned the privileges bestowed upon him. He was a member of a special elite unit within the Iranian Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, more commonly known as the Revolutionary Guards. The four men who traveled with him in a clandestine fashion were Quds Force, Iranian foreign intelligence operations. They had all come from Iran via Lebanon because Iranian intelligence used the Shiarun Lebanese government as a proxy when necessary to pass men and materiél into nations where teams of declared Iranians government agents might otherwise raise red flags.

The five reunited one hour later in a safe house in Falls Church, Virginia. Here they met with more Iranians, two operatives who lived and worked in D.C. These were official cover intelligence officers from the Iranian embassy, and they worked for yet another group in Iranian intelligence, MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The two MISIRI men were known to American counterintelligence, and the FBI did their best to keep tabs on all Iran’s spies here in America, but these MISIRI officers were professionals. This stood to reason; only Iran’s very best intelligence operatives were sent to work in the land of Iran’s greatest foe, and only after they had proved themselves in many other hostile stations abroad. The two MISIRI officers here in the four-bedroom suburban Falls Church home were experts at shaking surveillance, and they’d arrived here free and clear after a several-hours-long surveillance-detection route.

Mohammed Mobasheri and his four subordinates sat for a briefing from the two “local” officers. Information integral to their mission here in the United States. Not that the MISIRI officers knew anything about these new men or their mission. They knew the young-looking Revolutionary Guards operative only as Mohammed, which was more common in Farsi than John was in English, and all they knew about his operation here was that he was traveling here with four Quds Force “body” men on a special task, and he was to be extended every courtesy and afforded every resource he needed.

All on the orders of Tehran.

The spies from the embassy knew this to be highly unusual. They didn’t much like the fact that this stranger from another organization was working on their turf, but it didn’t much matter what they liked, because he had sanction from the Supreme Leader, the highest level of Iranian government. That they weren’t read into his mission was bewildering, but that really wasn’t the strangest part of their day.

Mohammed himself was the strangest part.

The MISIRI spies had worked with many Revolutionary Guards officers in their careers, of course, and they knew them all to be, by necessity, strong and confident and powerful alphas. No one could rise through the ranks of Iran’s military in any capacity whatsoever without possessing leadership prowess and intrinsic personal dominance.

But immediately upon meeting Mohammed they thought him to be something of a strange bird, not a typical Revolutionary Guards officer at all. He was clearly highly intelligent and intellectual, and he seemed to be in fair physical condition, but he was smallish, somewhat baby-faced, and his demeanor was shy, introverted, and almost pathologically mild-mannered. His voice was thin, and he seemed unsure in his actions around the MISIRI officers, almost as if he was intimidated by their presence.

He asked relevant questions, so he wasn’t a bumbling fool, but he looked to the experienced MISIRI men like a grown-up kid who’d never left his parents’ house before being sent to the U.S. on a mission of obvious national importance.

What the fuck was that all about?

During a cigarette break in the backyard, one of D.C.-based MISIRI officers said to the other, “If he is fucking scared of us, his own countrymen, what the hell is he doing here around real enemies?”

The other quipped, “That little lamb has flown a long way just to go to the slaughterhouse.”

The men who arrived with Mohammed, by contrast, were typical Quds. While they dressed like businessmen and would pass as such to the uninitiated, to the MISIRI officers they were appeared to be ex-military, special operations forces, perhaps commandos from Takavar, elite handpicked operators who then endured a special twenty-month training program before being put into the most dangerous combat and missions around the Islamic Republic.

These men would have made the cross-border runs into Iraq during the war there, bringing materiél and expertise training Iraqi Shiites to engage coalition forces and destroy them. They would have fought Israelis in Lebanon, they would have worked with militias in Pakistan and insurgent groups on the Afghanistan border.

The Iranian spies knew enough about Quds Force to recognize they were in the presence of some seriously scary dudes.

But the four stood in stark contrast to their mild-mannered leader, who looked like he’d probably not held a gun since his mandatory army service, which would have begun on his eighteenth birthday.

The embassy spies were correct on all counts. Mohammed Mobasheri was not an ex-commando like the rest of his team. He’d been a young computer geek, the son of well-connected government employees, when he went into compulsory military service. There he was trained how to stand and march and in the use of weapons, but then he’d left infantry operations and moved into something that utilized his existing skill set, a special program for computer operations.

As the MISIRI men had guessed, this was Mobasheri’s first time in the United States, but he spoke English well. His father was ex-MISIRI himself, a general in the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of Iran, and these D.C.-based MISIRI would have all but bowed down to this boy-man if they’d known his true identity and his parentage.

Young Mobasheri learned English in school in Tehran as a child, then spent several years living abroad in Australia and in Ireland and in the United Kingdom, following his father’s cover postings as an agricultural official.

It was his father who pushed him into computer operations in the military, mostly to protect him from the dangers of combat but also because Mohammed had shown interest and aptitude with computers as a child. Moreover, General Mobasheri was a forward-thinking spy, and he knew much of the espionage of the future would involve computerized information systems, and he wanted his son involved in a growth industry that also served the Islamic Republic.

After compulsory military service Mohammed was sent to study computer science at Imperial College London. He returned to Iran with a doctorate and ideas about the future of IT and its application to intelligence, and by his late twenties he was a chief strategic planner for the Revolutionary Guards’ fledgling offensive cyber-ops division.

Over the next few years he developed offensive cyber ops capabilities for his nation, and he started a forward thinking unit called the Markazi Digital Security Team, one of the most elite offensive cyber hacking groups in the world.

Most Americans are unaware that Iran’s military has such robust computer-hacking capabilities, but Mobasheri had been one of the leaders of this all but unheralded success of the Islamic Republic. He and his team of hackers had broken into American defense networks, and had placed infiltration agent programs into U.S. wireless companies that had taken years and tens of millions of dollars to clean out.

His power grew in the Revolutionary Guards, and the Supreme Leader himself took special interest in young Mobasheri’s operations, clearing the way for him to expand into plans that were more and more audacious.

Which led him all the way to Falls Church, Virginia. Now, after months of preparation and groundwork, Mohammed Mobasheri was here in the U.S. on a special operation with a powerful sanction.

Mohammed was disarmingly calm and polite, even shy, especially when compared to the hard Takavaran around him. But he’d not made it this far in his organization by exhibiting weakness. He was a man with big ideas, high aspirations, and he was certain he’d be reaching out to Tehran via encrypted means soon enough, asking for — no, demanding — approval to add to his mission parameters.

The MISRI men from the embassy thought their support of this team working out of Falls Church would be limited to information, perhaps some vehicles, and documentation. But Mohammed made it clear, in an offhanded and almost apologetic manner, that he would require a surveillance team first thing in the a.m., and they might be put to work for several days straight.

And guns. The little man who looked like a college student gave a handwritten sheet of paper to the MISIRI officers, and on it was a list of pistols, shoulder holsters, ammunition, and sound suppressors.

The MISIRI officers were not happy, but they were compliant. This mild-mannered oddball had the backing of the Supreme Leader, after all, so they had no choice but to do whatever the hell he demanded, as if the Supreme Leader himself was standing before them giving the orders.