Khorasahn Province, Iran
April 15
7:30 P.M. Local Time
After the discussion in the depths of the underground hideout, they ate a small meal. Then the three spies either packed or destroyed all of their useful equipment in the cave. The old man who had opened the door for them earlier came down as well. They told him to dispose of the vehicle when he thought it was safe.
Once the preparations were done, they led Karl through a long dark tunnel that seemed to take them deeper into the mountain. It felt like something out of a JRR Tolkien novel. Karl half-expected to encounter a race of subterranean dwarves or ogres as they descended into the depths of the earth. When they had gone about a hundred meters, the tunnel opened into the mouth of a cave situated on the northeast face of the mountain. The cave’s entrance turned up slightly, spilling out to the rock-strewn desert floor. It opened to a brilliantly lit early evening sky already full of stars that illuminated the desert almost as brightly as the sun that had only just fallen below the horizon a short few minutes earlier. Along the western edge of the sky, straggling bands of orange and red lay across the earth’s edge, fading upward to a smooth purple.
In the back of the cave, Liam and Gilles went to a dark corner and tugged at what Karl had initially thought was a protrusion of stone. A large black tarp fell to the ground revealing a dirty white, four-door Nissan SUV.
“Okie dokie, gents. Let’s mount up and hit the road. Gilles, did you pack the fishing poles?” asked Kharzai. “Oh, wait, never mind, there are no lakes for hundreds of miles around here. Guess we’re going to have to go cannibal tonight. Liam, let’s have your leg this time, mine is running out of good bits of meat, and Gilles...well, he’s just too stringy.”
Liam chuckled. Gilles ignored the foolishness and acted as if he heard nothing, mechanically going about his business. They loaded the supplies they had brought from the hideout into the back of the vehicle.
The Irishman said, “Hey, don’t you be concerned about having to eat each other’s flesh there, my fuzzy Persian friend. Gilles brought some nice pita and lamb sandwiches that the old man gave us. Besides, in the event that we run out of food, I saw some good-looking fat lizards out there in front of the cave.”
“Lizards!” exclaimed Kharzai. “You catch them, you cook them, in a whole lot of vinegar, and tell me they are just chicken and then maybe. Unless, of course I see them, smell them, or have any kind of dream that they are what they really are, then the whole deal is off. You snake-eater types can have all the lizards you want.” He looked at Karl and scrunched his face up as he said, “I hate lizards, ugh! Those slimy little things are nasty, they give me horrible gas, and the taste sticks with me for days.”
Gilles motioned to Karl to put his survival bag in the back with the other equipment. He hefted the bag into the compartment next to two, twenty-liter cans of petrol and several plastic ten-liter water bags. Gilles closed the tailgate of the SUV; its rear window had a crack that ran from one side of the glass to the other.
Karl got into the back seat next to Liam. The man’s broad shoulders filled half the space designed to fit three average adults. Karl was amazed at how large the Irishman was. His body was not just wide. He was thick. The man reminded him of the character Ben Grimm, the orange giant “Thing” of the Fantastic Four comic books he had read as a child.
Each of the three operatives held a Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine gun in their lap. An extra magazine of ammunition was taped to the side of the one that was loaded in the weapon. Karl felt the cold hard butt of the pistol stuffed in his belt press into the side of his body. In spite of the Persian’s constant joking, the seriousness of his situation lay heavy on his mind. This was not a movie, nor was it a game. They were in it for real, and people, maybe even a lot of people, were going to die.
The evening sun descended, its final remnants glowing like embers in a blackened fireplace, as they drove out of the cave and onto a nearby road. They headed due north. Liam laid his large round head back on the headrest and fell asleep almost as soon as they were in motion. He snored softly as the SUV sped down the dirt road, vibrating and bouncing with the rough contours of the ancient track. Kharzai stared out the windows of the vehicle, keeping watch from the passenger seat, while Gilles drove steadily onward, eyes on the road ahead.
As they moved along the seemingly endless terrain, Karl’s mind reeled over the events of the day. It was all still a shock to him. So many things had happened in the last twelve hours. He kept hoping that, any minute, the alarm clock would start buzzing so he could awaken from this dream.
At midnight, U.S. Mountain Standard Time, he had been sitting on a launch pad in Arizona, preparing to shoot his small low-orbit craft into near space with narcissistic Hollywood movie star Soren Stagel. The former World Ultimate Fighting Champion turned big screen action hero seemed to be under the impression that the world rotated because he willed it to. TV cameras, reporters and barely clothed bimbos were all present in great numbers. The paparazzi were shouting to the star, trying to get him to look their way. The incessant, blinding flashes of the cameras and flagrant jiggling of the scantily clad young women made life very uncomfortable for Karl and his launch crew as they meticulously went through the pre-launch final checklist and prepped the ship for take-off.
The movie star had paid extra for a night launch because his producers wanted to get better shots of the rocket’s jet engines flaming into the dark sky for his next movie. They had also scheduled a press luncheon for the next day at noon, and Soren wanted to get a short nap before speaking to “his people.”
Ninety minutes later, the movie star who had convinced the world that he was an indestructible super-man died of a heart attack, bits of vomit still stuck to his square, muscular jaw. By two a.m., Mountain Standard Time, half past noon Iran time, the spacecraft had crash-landed in the desert a few hundred kilometers east of Tehran, Iran. That landing acted as the impetus for the first strikes of the next world war. This was not where Karl had imagined himself forty years ago when he dreamed of being an astronaut.
Born August 23rd, 1961, in a central Ohio hospital, Karl Benjamin Alexander had lived a fairly boring childhood. The oldest of four children in an average white-collar middle class family, he grew up under hazy gray skies in the midst of endless green rolling hills and cornfields between Dayton and Columbus. The only things young Karl knew with any certainty were that he wanted to be an astronaut, and that he did not want to live in the Midwest when he grew up.
As a boy, Karl pored over comic books, novels, and encyclopedias full of tales depicting ancient warriors, futuristic space travelers, and scientists. They depicted a universe full of life and vigor. That universe seemed incredibly distant from his small, semi-rural suburban world, with its similarly shaped houses, similarly minded people, and same old routine day after day.
He had never played sports. This was not because he lacked a desire to. At the age of fourteen, he begged to play in the fledgling soccer league in his high school. His parents said they didn’t have the time. Nor did they have the money or patience to run him around to practices or matches.
In high school, he saw a Marine Corps recruiter at a career fair. The tall muscular man with the high and tight haircut and steely blue eyes impressed young Karl. Gold sergeant’s stripes and the blood-red trim on the dark blue uniform spoke to Karl of the legends and stories he had read of ancient heroes. The man spoke as if he knew what was required of him and made no pretentious promises or sales gimmicks to the teens who came to his table to inquire about joining the Marines. The man had no doubt seen distant lands and done exciting things. He had lived what Karl had only dreamed. He was the epitome of what Karl yearned to be.
“If you think you have what it takes,” the Marine Corps recruiter said, “maybe you can be one of us.”
His parents were totally opposed to the thought of their son joining the military, especially the Marines. It was 1979; Viet Nam was still vivid in the nation’s mind. They were shocked that he would even consider something so drastic as joining what they perceived to be little more than a bunch of cutthroat adventurers with big muscles and no brains.
“Your Uncle Bert joined the military and look at what happened to him,” his mother would say. “Fifteen years in the Army, half of that overseas or in Vietnam. It ruined him! Ruined him, I tell you. He had so much potential; he was going to be a stockbroker before the war, you know. He could have been rich by now. But now look at him. He works at that homeless veterans’ shelter with those filthy bums instead. It was the military that ruined him, you know. Now he’s just a waste. And that’s what you’ll be if you don’t get a superior education!”
But Karl liked his Uncle Bert. Bert had often told the young man how much he truly enjoyed his time in the Army. Karl would listen for hours to stories of faraway places and exotic people. Tales of beautiful women and brave men and moments when a man’s soul was tested by fire swirled in his dreams after every visit with his uncle.
“If it wasn’t for this,” Bert would tap the thick, gnarled scar that ran from his collarbone and across the right side of his chest, “I’d still be in.”
Bert gave Karl the kind of advice he hoped would lead him to more than just a career. He was more interested in helping his nephew become a good man than a good businessman.
“There are a lot of great people in the military, Karl. In my opinion, it’s the best place to start your adult life. I learned a lot there, but the most important thing I learned was sense of duty. How important it is to take care of the needs of others above your own desires, even above your own desire to live and be safe. I hope you learn those traits one day, son.”
After high school, Karl reluctantly obeyed his parents and went to Ohio State University in Columbus. He majored in physics with a minor in history. His grades were in the top five percent of the class. Despite the myriad of possibilities spelled out for him by his parents and teachers, who measured his future in terms of academic achievement and potential net worth, he wasn’t satisfied with any of the options that life seemed to be offering him.
One gray late winter afternoon during his senior year of college, a Marine Officer approached him with an offer to fly jets. He could serve his country by helping stop the Soviet expansion that was creeping up from Central America and would almost certainly get to travel the world. The recruiter told him that fighter pilots had a much greater likelihood of being accepted to NASA’s astronaut program. Karl leaped at the opportunity without even telling his family.
Upon graduation from the university, he went directly to the yearlong Officer Basic School at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. There he was forged into a Marine. Once commissioned, he was accepted to the Naval Aviators School. He cruised through the combat flight program as if it he was born to pilot jets. He spent a few months flying FA-18s before being transferred to the newly commissioned Harrier Jet fighter squadron on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Pacific.
At age thirty, he was accepted into the Astronaut training program and began the next phase of his career as a shuttle astronaut. After seven shuttle missions, the maximum any shuttle astronaut had achieved before him, the StrataCorp Personal Space Flight Corporation approached him. They offered him a gig flying a short mission twice a month for about ten times the salary he made with the government and there were no nerdy scientists using him as a research assistant once he was in space.
Nine years and seventy missions later, he found himself bouncing in an SUV across the mountainous eastern Iranian wasteland with a team of commandos on a mission to wreak havoc on a hostile nation’s infrastructure.
“Is this even real?” Karl wondered aloud. “Just a few hours ago, I was having my morning coffee in Phoenix and prepping my ship for another two-hour flight around the Earth with a snotty millionaire actor. And now, here I am, the newest recruit in the Persian Resistance Army. God help me, but I can’t stop thinking this is all just a terrible nightmare.”
“It is a bad dream, my friend,” replied Gilles. He had spoken so little since they met, Karl had almost forgotten what he sounded like. “It is most certainly a bad dream, but it is the dream we all live in. Whose dream is it? I do not know, but we have little control over what it brings us to. We are merely phantoms in our world.”
Kharzai turned his head and stared open-mouthed at the Frenchman. “Gilles, you are seriously, freakishly, in a not normal way, entirely too contemplative for an assassin. You should’ve been a philosophy teacher or a psychiatrist or something instead. Or maybe a mime...yeah...you’d make a good mime.”
Gilles did not respond.
At ten p.m. local time, they stopped at a nearly empty stretch of land. A small stone and mortar building stood by itself on the rocky terrain. They had seen no other building in three hours of driving. Karl saw no other signs of civilization nearby. If they hadn’t come to a stop in front of this one, he would not have noticed it was there. The structure was the same color and texture as the ground that surrounded it. It had probably been built from the very stones and dirt on which it stood. It looked ancient.
Liam got out of the Nissan and walked to the building. He was cautious in his movements, scanning the surrounding shadows. Kharzai and Gilles both stayed in the vehicle, but rolled down the windows, holding their weapons at the ready, their diligent gazes methodically floating over the area to both sides of the road.
Liam ducked inside the darkness. Karl saw a dim glimmer of light illuminate the inside of the structure. It was quickly extinguished. A moment later the Irishman returned and climbed back into the seat next to Karl.
“We’re good to go,” he said, “at least we were as of a few hours ago according to the message.”
Kharzai turned to Karl and explained, “Lesson number two. That little hut is our low tech manually operated answering machine slash email system. Maybe ‘wall mail’ is a better way to describe it. I am sure you’ve seen things like it in the movies. One spy leaves a mark on the wall pointing a certain direction, the next comes in and makes a scratch on another pre-selected wall, maybe a piece of graffiti or a word. The enemy thinks it is just a scratch and a piece of graffiti. But we decipher the code. Anyway, the message Liam read tells us that within the last few hours, our field unit had verified that residence two was safe for us to enter.”
“Lesson two? What was lesson number one?” said Karl.
“Lesson one? That was back at the cave. Lizards? Bad gas? Dude, weren’t you paying attention? There will be a test, you know.”
“Oh yeah. Guess I’d better start taking notes,” Karl said. “Sounds like you have a pretty intricate system here. How large of a rebel group do you guys have in operation?”
“Oh, I’d say we have a few hundred actives and a potential group of thousands of recruitables,” Kharzai replied. “Plenty to stir things up a good bit and keep the Ayatollah’s minions busy putting out fires for a while until the main troops arrive.”
“As long as the leaks are stopped,” injected Gilles.
“Yes, well, leaks are always an issue in this kind of work. But don’t worry...we’ll catch him, or her, as the case may be.” Kharzai took on a dramatic old-fashioned radio voice. “Because the good guys always get their man!”
“I thought it was the Canadian Mounties who always get their man,” Karl said.
“Oh yeah, that is their saying, isn’t it.” He looked around the cab of the vehicle. “Dang! We don’t have any Canadians with us. Looks like we’re screwed!”
They continued to drive another hour into the desert until they arrived at a small town comprised of one- and two-story buildings with flat roofs. The village rose from the rolling terrain, looking almost surreal in the barren surroundings, like a dreary version of the city of Brigadoon. In the old movie, the characters danced, sang, and fell in love. Karl felt no love emanating from these buildings and certainly had no urge to dance.
He could not tell how old the town was. Outside of the largest cities, the architecture of this part of the world had changed little since the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great in 500 BC. This place could have been twenty-five hundred years old. It could just as easily have been entirely built in the past decade.
It was shortly after eleven p.m. The town was dark. There were no lights on anywhere as far as he could tell. No cars were parked on the streets. No people enjoying the nightlife. The silent stillness of the place made Karl feel uneasy.
Pulling into the town, they rolled down all of the windows in the vehicle. Karl heard the metallic click of the safeties being switched off on the other men’s weapons. They drove slowly down the main street. Each man kept his eyes wide open, scanning every building and shadow. They held their weapons just out of sight beneath the edges of the Nissan’s windows. Karl felt a heavy weight of tension bearing down on all of them.
Gilles drove the Nissan into what looked like the town center. They stopped in a large round court about one hundred feet in diameter, surrounded by small canvas-topped booths spread in rows in front of nondescript two-story buildings. It looked like a bazaar, where the locals gathered to do their daily business. The bright moonlight cast deep, black shadows that stretched from the booths towards the center like dark fingers reaching towards the SUV.
If Karl had hair on the back of his neck, it would have stood up straight. Something about this place made him nervous. A sense of impending catastrophe loomed in these shadows. Kharzai got out and stood there with the vehicle door open, one foot still inside on the floorboard, and shouted something in Farsi. A moment later, a reply came back, and Kharzai looked down into the SUV with a smile.
“We’re in business, fellas.”
He spoke in a singsong manner as he rolled up the window and shut the door. He left his weapon on the passenger seat. Liam opened his door and rose to get out of the SUV. As the giant man stepped out of the Nissan onto the dirt floor of the bazaar, a sharp crack broke the stillness of the night.
Kharzai’s body slammed into the side of the vehicle. His lips were still stretched in his trademark grin, but his expression paled. He blinked rapidly then his eyes rolled up behind the lids. He slid down the side of the SUV, his face making a grotesque streak across the window, and then he crumpled to the ground. Liam turned towards the direction from which the shot had come, raised his MP5 to shoulder-height and fired a return burst. He leaped back into the open door of the Nissan, bouncing the whole vehicle as he landed on the seat, eyes wide with urgency.
“Drive! Drive!” he shouted. Gilles smacked the transmission into gear and floored the accelerator. Dirt and rocks flew out from behind the vehicle as they sped forward. He aimed the SUV back onto the road heading out of town. Flashes of gunfire erupted from several open windows as they fled along the dirt street.
Karl was wide-eyed with terror. He looked back towards where Kharzai had fallen and saw his body sprawled on the ground in the bazaar. He turned back to the open windows, gripping his pistol and pointing it out to the passing buildings. Everything was a blur; it was impossible to identify any targets to fire at.
He turned towards Liam and shouted, “What about Kharzai?”
“He’s dead!” replied Liam
“How do you know that?”
“He’s dead, his spine was blown apart!”
“There must be something we could do! I mean we can’t just leave him behind.”
“There’s nothing we can do, he’s dead! Besides, there isn’t a hospital for a hundred miles from here. There is nothing we could’ve done.”
They sped as fast as the vehicle could carry them over the rugged trail. No one spoke. Most of an hour passed before they stopped in a different range of mountains. Karl judged it to be about sixty kilometers east of the town where Kharzai had been killed. Gilles parked the SUV in a small opening between outcrops of rock. It was a little past midnight. Karl exited the vehicle, stretching his long limbs in the cool night air. He ran his hands over the stubble of his closely cropped hair. He looked up at the heavens in deep contemplation.
Large round dots of sparkling white shone brightly overhead in the clear desert sky. There were no city lights to diffuse the glow of the stars, which filled the sky from horizon to horizon. The constellations were clearly visible and Mars showed bright red against the eternal darkness of the far beyond. A shooting star streaked across the scene high above the edge of the world. It almost felt like being in space. The thought comforted Karl. The place reminded him of his home in the desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
Liam got out of the Nissan. He slammed the door as he stormed away. He paced like an enraged bull, kicking up dirt and rocks and swearing at the world.
Gilles appeared calm. He rose from the vehicle and leaned his long slender frame against the SUV. He pulled out a cigarette, lit it and casually took a long drag. The smoke curled out from his nostrils, lending him a dragon-like appearance in the shadow cast by the moonlight. The tall expressionless Frenchman stood very still, watching Liam as he paced and talked the situation out.
“They must have had the code in the message house,” Liam said. “They had the reply for Kharzai’s question. They had everything laid out. They were expecting us.”
Liam then dropped to the ground and sat with his massive back against the Nissan. He pulled his knees up and rubbed his thick hands over his face.
“You know how this business is, Liam,” Gilles replied in his throaty, monotone French accent. Cigarette smoke swirled out of his mouth as he spoke. “It could have been anyone from the old man at the number one house to the goat herd boy at Navallat. It may even have been that girl Kharzai has been seeing in Tarfiq. He talks too much sometimes. You know that. Now with the war started, this is the time they’d want to stop us. The question we must ask now is: Who can we trust?”
Karl looked up at the stars, but he was listening intently. The Frenchman turned towards him, taking another long drag on his cigarette.
“We know the mission has been compromised,” Gilles said. Then he turned back to Liam. “We cannot just stroll into any town now and expect to get things rolling with ease. We will have to move very cautiously or we may all end up like Kharzai.”
Liam stared into space at the same stars that kept Karl’s gaze. He said nothing for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his words came out in a calm tone.
“Yes, I know. Caution. We must move cautiously, but we must move nonetheless. We need to continue on to make contact with Faisel. Once there, we can contact the others and perhaps make plans for the next step. He is one of the few we can trust for sure.” He paused as if he were going through a mental Rolodex then continued, “Yes. Faisel and Esther, either of them I know we can trust. Them and Manoosh.”
“Possibly,” Gilles said.
His voice had a deep, melancholic tone that rolled out like a dark cloud: foreboding, depressing, and unsettling. Liam closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the side panel of the vehicle. Gilles moved away from the Nissan and sat on a large rock, looking out towards the distant edges of the seemingly eternal desert. There was a long silence. None of the three of them made a sound. The moment of peaceful quiet lay on them with a weight that sank into their souls. Karl felt a slight breeze on his face. It glided softly over the sand and between the rocks, carrying with it the scent of desert plants, fresh, sweet, and clean.
After several minutes, he said, in a quiet, almost whispered voice, “So what do we do next?”
Liam leaped to his feet abruptly, startling Karl. His attitude reverted to that of a determined warrior, ready to move on to the next phase of the mission.
“On to war. There is nothing that sitting here can do for Kharzai; he is dead. He had no documents or anything with him so there is nothing compromised now that wasn’t compromised before they got him.” He slung his weapon over his shoulder. “We go to Faisel and Esther. We let them know everything that has happened tonight. Then we find out who turned on us and seal that leak. Once that’s done, we move on with a plan to gather and organize whomever we can and proceed as ordered.”
“Are you sure Faisel is a good place to go?” Gilles still spoke in a dark, monotone voice, his face solidified in an intensely serious demeanor. “He may be trustworthy, but his nephew, Manoosh...I simply have no faith in him.”
Liam was resolute in his decision. “Manoosh can be trusted, unequivocally, this much I know. There is no question of his loyalty. Load up. Let’s get moving so we can be there before sunrise.”
Liam went to the back of the SUV, grabbed a can of petrol and started filling the tank. Gilles grabbed some food from a box in the back of the vehicle. He handed Karl one of the remaining lamb and pita bread sandwiches they had joked about in the cave. Gilles sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. The Nissan’s six-cylinder engine rattled to life with a high-pitched whir, then calmed into a steady hum, and it reached its idle rpms by the time Karl and Liam got in. The giant Irishman went to the front passenger seat this time. Liam handed Karl the MP5 submachine gun that Kharzai had put back on the seat just before he was killed.
“Here, you may need this. Keep it below the windows, in case anyone is looking at us. When we come to a town with tall buildings cover it with that blanket.” He pointed to a raggedy-looking gray wool blanket on the seat.
Karl took the black metal and plastic weapon. He hefted it in his hands. An extra thirty-round magazine was attached with a strip of heavy-duty black nylon tape to the side of the one that was already loaded. The heaviness of its dreadful weight pressed into his palms as if it were a living thing nestling itself into his embrace; twelve pounds of death. He leaned his head back in the seat of the Nissan and let out a long breath.
It was half-past one a.m. Gilles drove by starlight without turning on the vehicle’s headlamps. The darkness was like a threadbare blanket. It wrapped about them, but refused to knock the chill off the desert morning. Stars sparkled with feathery light across the expanse of the sky, as if calling him, beckoning him to leave this insane world. The SUV lurched forward into the pre-dawn journey, and Karl wondered how long he was going to stay alive in this new career.