Oleg had pushed the old sentra all the way to this dusty brown village called Alut. He could see a cluster of dark buildings in the moonlight. Few of them had lights. He’d arrived well after dusk, around ten, sought out concealment, and prepared to sleep. He’d taken down some of the food he’d brought with him and slugged down the water. He’d need to be careful with that, he thought, as he wasn’t sure how long he’d have to be here.
He hoped it would all be quick. He was low on food and gas. Whatever went down in the next twenty-four hours, he wasn’t sure how he was going to get back to Tehran. The Nissan had an eighth of a tank and the last gas station had been forty miles back.
He’d passed by the station because he didn’t like the heat he’d seen on the highway. Better to duck down to the random gravel tracks in the dark whenever he could, following his handheld GPS as he picked his way forward. No sense in taking additional risks with the Iranian police. His Dragunov sniper rifle was in the trunk alongside an AK-12. His GSh-18 nine-mil sidearm was under the seat, just in case he couldn’t talk his way past a nosy cop.
His satphone buzzed on the seat next to him. He angled its antenna out the window and threw an earbud in before answering.
“I’ve got the details,” Maria said.
“Horosho,” he said. It was astonishing the kinds of things Zoloto could pull off.
“Where are you now?” she asked him in a monotone.
Oleg recognized when she was in mission mode. “I’m on the outskirts of the town,” he replied. “Not much here. A few small houses, more like farms and ranches.”
“I have the coordinates for the rendezvous. Ready?”
Still connected by the earbud, he put the satphone on the car’s roof to keep the signal. He groped for a pen, scrawled the numbers on his forearm, white in the moonlight.
“Hang on while I validate,” he said.
He typed the digits into the GPS. There was total silence on the line as Maria waited.
“It checks,” he said. “About a half mile from where I am right now. When?”
“She’s set up a rendezvous window over a couple nights, beginning tomorrow, between midnight and four. Once they link up, a Special Forces team will come in for the egress. But she doesn’t have a pos on either Dale or Rahimi. Neither of them has been in touch with her for a few days.”
“She doesn’t know how Dale and Rahimi are approaching? Vehicle? Direction? Anything?”
“No, nothing. Believe me, I would have gotten it out of her.”
“What about military? Could the egress team already be in-country somewhere with ground assets? Could some of them be with Dale already?”
“No. Dale’s alone. The plan is for the commando team to come in from the west. Iraq.”
Oleg nodded. That was how he would have set it up too, given the circumstances.
“What’s she like?” he asked.
“Compliant.”
Dale was on his third amphetamine pill. He hated relying on them, but he didn’t see that he had a choice. Especially now.
His driver, Goatee, whose given name was Jamil, was starting to fade. They’d made good progress until an hour back. Things were slower now.
Up on the highway they’d seen an increasing police presence. They were on the back roads, which didn’t go in a straight line. Occasionally Dale had noticed the blinking anti-collision lights of low-flying aircraft. Once he’d even heard the crackling thunder of a fighter jet soaring by.
As they’d approached a small city called Saqqez just after dusk, they’d seen a genuine blockade in the distance. Expecting to see the blue-striped vehicles of NAJA, Dale had instead witnessed the green-and-tan military vehicles of the IRGC. Jamil had gotten extra twitchy then. So had Dale.
To keep him focused, Dale had offered an extra incentive of more money, given the unexpected challenges. That had woken the tired kid up for a while, but now he was insisting on a stop. He’d said he would need reinforcements to get through all the cops.
He had a friend in town who could set them up with supplies and help with a better route through Saqqez. By supplies, Dale assumed the kid meant drugs, most likely coke.
Dale went along with it. While he could have just stolen the car, he thought traveling with the kid would be good cover in case they were pulled over. And maybe Jamil’s friend really would know how to navigate through the town.
They were waiting on a corrugated dirt road. The kid’s head was starting to droop. Dale figured there was no real harm in letting him sleep. He wanted to check his satphone for any updates from Meth, but he didn’t want to chance that with the kid next to him.
A pair of headlights appeared over a rise, then a silvery cloud of moonlit dust, then a dented white Suzuki Samurai of Reagan-administration vintage.
Jamil woke up and smiled. “Finally,” he said, opening the door. He stretched.
Samurai and Jamil met up with a complicated handclasp. Dale watched them through the windshield, backlit by the Suzuki’s headlights. They were both grinning. The new guy was shaggy—long hair tied in waxen dreadlocks and a beard that met up with his chest hair. If Iran had a Rastafarian culture, this kid had found it. Jamil waved to Dale to come on out.
There was some small talk. Rasta wanted to know who he was. Dale made up a story, but he got the feeling that Rasta had other things on his mind. He clearly wasn’t listening. Jamil told his friend to get “the stuff.” Rasta went around the back side of the Suzuki and opened the little tailgate.
He came back with an old revolver.
He was pointing it at Dale.
“Let’s just see how much money you have, Canada,” Jamil said, smiling. The kid was wide-awake now.
Dale had wondered if flashing all those rials might lead to trouble. Now he knew.
Dale started reasoning with them. He said they could have the money. He just wanted the ride. Jamil replied with something along the lines of: no, this was as far as they were going; money please.
Dale shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “let me get it out of my pocket.”
Hopped up on uppers as he was, Dale was hyperalert. The Glock flew out of his waistband with practiced ease. Though he really didn’t want to kill anyone, moralizing at the open end of a gun barrel often proved fatal.
Dale put two bullets through Rasta’s chest before either kid understood what had happened.
The revolver fell to the road as Rasta fell back, the sounds of the automatic pistol echoing off the hills. Jamil’s eyes went wide. He went for the fallen weapon, diving to the dirt.
Oh, Jamil, Dale thought with the slightest flicker of regret. Why’d you do that?
He shot the kid in the thigh, just above the knee, shattering the femur. Jamil rolled over, screaming, clutching the wound. Dale heard a helicopter in the distance, reminding him that he didn’t need this kind of nonsense.
In between agonizing sobs, Jamil started pleading for his life. It worked. Dale couldn’t just kill this defenseless grifter. He tore a strip from Rasta’s filthy shirt. He knelt to tie a tourniquet on the kid’s leg. Jamil, to his credit, sat up and tried to attack Dale, clutching at his eyes. One last gasp. Poor kid.
Dale hit him hard twice in the face. The second blow sent the kid’s head to the dirt. He was unconscious, most likely because he was also going into shock, Dale thought. He finished tying the tourniquet, careful to avoid staining his own pants with the kid’s blood.
Alone in the moonlight now, with only the distant sounds of helicopters and the wind racing across the scrub, Dale searched the two cars. The Samurai had a full tank of gas and piles of stinking clothes. It was as though Rasta had lived in there. There was a smudged jug of water but no food, nothing else of value.
Between the aging Peugeot and the ridiculous Suzuki, Dale opted for the latter. It seemed a better fit for his drifter getup. It also had four-wheel drive.
He dragged Jamil over to his Peugeot and laid him to one side. He took the sedan’s keys and threw them into the desert. Then he found the old revolver. On snapping open the barrel, he saw that it had all of three bullets. Pathetic. Dale took them out of the gun and scattered them in the brush. Then he tossed the old pistol in the other direction.
Well, Dale thought as he drove off in the straining Samurai, at least he had his own ride now. One step closer to getting out of that shithole. And the kid had a chance, sort of.
He stopped and took a look at the coordinates he’d gotten from Meth a few days ago. The GPS said eighty clicks to go. They’d be slow ones, dodging the IRGC and all that; but he’d get there.
Kasem had spent an uncomfortable night on a makeshift cot at the school in Saqqez. He was personally supervising the search now. The prior day, he’d joined the helicopter crew on flights that went up and down the roads, looking for anything unusual. They’d come up empty.
When Kasem was back on the ground, the captain had told him of some rumors that elements of the old PDKI, the Kurdish freedom fighters, were getting back together in the hills. But Kasem had no interest in pursuing that. The man he was looking for was no guerrilla and the PDKI was probably just reacting to the heavy IRGC presence. He’d redirected the searching IRGC garrison to the border areas.
The sound of the helicopter spinning up on the soccer field woke him around midnight. He’d heard that Maloof was still furious that Kasem had defied his orders and taken the aircraft west. As he listened to the turbines whining, he thought about running out to the field, trying to stop them. But he didn’t think it would work. They knew whom they really worked for.
He was even more worried now without the helicopter. His authority seemed to be slipping away. He sat up. Sleep would be impossible. He scraped together the implements for tea and checked his phone for messages.
Nothing from Kasra. As he plugged in the electric kettle, he rationalized that maybe it was a good thing. Perhaps it was because she was incommunicado on the westbound flight across the Med. Inshallah, let that be true, he thought, wondering at his unexpected nod to Islam.
Farther down the list was a message from one of his lieutenants in Tehran. Kasem called him back.
The last time they’d spoken, Kasem had asked for a check with the IRGC Air Force on any American military presence on the Iraqi border. If he’d already missed Rahimi outside of Saqqez, perhaps he could catch them at the border. He needed to narrow the search.
“Got your message,” Kasem started, dropping a dry tea bag into a cup. He’d ordered the young officer to be ready at all hours.
“I hope you’re having a good evening, sir.”
If there was one thing Kasem disliked about his young lieutenant, it was his sycophancy. “Well?” he said, annoyance rising.
“Sir—one of our patrol aircraft picked up an American drone on radar. It was following an orbit close to the border. They said they’d never seen one that far north before.”
“Don’t you think the Americans might have increased surveillance because of all of our military maneuvers? I can’t even sleep for all the jet noise.”
“Yes, sir. I said the same thing. But they said they’ve seen the American response to exercises before. There are a lot of drones up. But this area is a new one—near the border.”
Kasem thought it over. The kettle had come up to temperature. He turned it off and poured.
The obsequious lieutenant became uncomfortable with the silence. “You said to concentrate on the border, sir,” he said.
“I did. It’s interesting. Anything else?” He stirred his tea.
“Yes, sir. The Air Defense Force monitors American flights in the area, constantly looking for cruise missile attacks—that’s how they picked up the drone. Usually there aren’t manned aircraft. But yesterday early-warning radars detected a helicopter. It came up a few miles shy of the border and turned around. I don’t know if that matters.”
“Did it land?”
“No, sir.”
Kasem sipped the scalding tea. He asked for the coordinates of the drone and helicopter pings, wrote them all down, hung up.
Alone in the classroom, he plotted the coordinates with a pencil on the chart taped to the chalkboard, stood back, and looked at the lines. The north and south points of the drone orbit came in tangent to a small jut of Iranian land that reached into Iraq like a short peninsula. The helicopter path neared it as well, perpendicular to the drone track. The two pencil lines looked like a sideways T. It was only a hundred clicks south of where he was now. The closest village was a little hamlet called Alut.
Because Kasem had conducted exfil operations himself, his intuition fired: favorable terrain, easily traversed on foot or in a Jeep; friendly Iranian Kurdistan, where the locals might not mind. Most telling, the shape of the border would allow the Americans to set up defenses on three sides without technically entering Iranian airspace. He should have noticed that before.
He pulled the map from the chalkboard and folded it to a rectangle that exposed the area around his own pencil marks. He went and found the captain, who’d been asleep in a nearby tent. He rudely shook the young officer awake.
“I need someone to drive me down to this area,” he said. “Right now.”