Khorasahn Province, Iran
April 15
1 P.M. Local Time
Karl was surprised that no other aircraft pursued them as they drove. He kept watching the distance, expecting truckloads of soldiers to surround them and take him away to some squalid dungeon to have his head cut off for an Internet video. Kharzai drove entirely too fast over the dusty, pothole-riddled road. After more than thirty minutes, a small village materialized at the foot of the mountains Karl had seen in the distance from his crash site. The village was not just small, it was tiny. He wondered if the collection of ancient-looking mud-brick houses interspersed with what appeared to be short stone-walled animal pens was even qualified to be named a village. It seemed to be empty with the exception of a single donkey. The motionless beast stared at them as they passed, only the last-minute flick of its tail providing proof of life. A dust devil kicked up a five-foot-high swirl of fine sand that spun across the road in front of them until it dissipated, like a bad omen.
An old man wearing a long dirty robe and worn leather sandals appeared in the door of a house ahead of them. He ran with short staccato steps towards the building next to his house. Another Land Rover, identical to the one Kharzai drove, was parked beside the mud structure. The old man tugged at the handles on a large double garage door. The two panels swung open on large metal hinges, then scraped to a halt in the dirt at wide angles to the opening. He ran into the dark interior and yanked on a rope that fed into a pulley suspended from the ceiling inside the garage-like building. As the old man tugged at the thick rope, his feet momentarily lifted from the ground, then the floor of the garage yawned upward, revealing a large, deep opening.
Kharzai drove the Land Rover into the dark, cavernous space. The vehicle came to a stop and they opened the doors of the SUV. The four men got out into the cool shade of the subterranean chamber. Karl slung the bag of survival gear over his shoulder as he rose from the back seat. He froze as the floor of the garage slowly descended over their heads. As it closed, all light faded into claustrophobic blackness.
Having been in bright desert sunshine only seconds earlier, Karl’s eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness that surrounded him like a heavy curtain. He was completely blinded, unable to discern direction at all. The astronaut put his hand on the side of the Land Rover to maintain his balance. There was a metallic click over their heads as the rope was unhooked from the false floor of the garage. A scraping sound, like someone dragging a carpet made of gravel, grated across the surface overhead. An engine revved outside the building and seconds later the tires crunched over the creaking wood, sealing them into the grave-like chamber. A bright beam of white light shone from the front of the vehicle.
“Come on,” called Kharzai, “this way. There is a tunnel that leads out of here.”
Karl followed the light. The muffled sound of the other men’s footsteps scraped over the dirt floor as they moved along the tunnel. By his count, they walked about eighty steps down a gradual sloping path when it emptied into a large, surprisingly well-lit room. Karl saw no obvious source for the light that cast a mild blue tint across the walls and floor of the cool stone chamber. He had not seen any sign of electricity in the village or, for that matter, along any part of the road they had traveled from the crash site. There had been no telephone poles or wire boxes on the sides of the buildings. With the exception of the vehicle parked in the garage, the village seemed as if it had not changed its way of life in any significant manner since the age of Artaxerxes and the Persian Empire. He heard no generator and saw no lamps in the cave. The light, he assumed, must be somehow reflected down through the fissures and cracks of the mountain above.
The four men entered the cool room and moved towards a table at one side. Gilles offered Karl a chair. The others took chairs as well and sat down. Liam reached into a small cabinet that stood against the wall near the table. The cabinet seemed, at a time in the distant past, to have been painted a clean white. Now it was scuffed and chipped and gray. Only a few remnants of the original, or at least the most-recently painted surface, hung on to the ancient wood. He pulled out a blue glass bottle stopped with a cork. He gripped the top of the cork between his teeth and pulled it out with a loud pop. Kharzai turned over several plain pottery cups that had been sitting upside down on the table. He blew each one out, clearing tiny bits of dust and debris from the interiors, then set them down on the table in front of Liam. The Irishman poured several ounces of a brownish-red liquid into each and pushed one towards each man. Kharzai picked up his cup and waved a hand towards Karl, who hesitantly followed his lead. They all raised their drinks in a salute to the others and sipped at the contents. The beverage was a sweet, somewhat figgy, wine. Karl was surprised to find that it was refreshingly cool, almost cold.
“Enjoy it,” said Liam, smiling like a sommelier who had just helped a customer select the perfect aperitif. “It is illegal to possess alcohol in this country, so you probably won’t get another opportunity to taste anything else like it during your stay.”
Karl slowly swished the liquid in his mouth, savoring the sweetness as it slid gently over his palate. As he enjoyed the wine, he studied the layout of the room they were in. It was a natural cave. He judged by the distance and angle of the tunnel they’d entered through that it was at least ten meters below the outside surface and twenty meters into the mountain at the foot of which the village baked in the sun. Against the opposite wall stood a bunk bed made of rough wooden boards crossed with hand-hewn slats. The beds were topped with thin cloth mattresses, which looked like little more than large sacks stuffed with wool and dried grass. A couple of neatly folded blankets and a dingy-looking pillow were stacked at the end of each bed.
He ran his eyes along the length of the room until they came to rest on a gap in the wall two meters past the beds. The wall extending out from that opening was a brighter hue than the rest of the room. Two distinct sections of the cave’s stone walls came together there and the surfaces folded over one another. The fissure between the sections opened to the outside of the mountain. Through the long opening, light flowed in during the day and fresh air all the time. From that same crack Karl saw a pair of thin wires that snaked along the wall and disappeared behind the small cabinet from which Liam had taken the wine. The ends of the wires reappeared on the cabinet’s chipped and scuffed surface. One of the wires terminated in a connection to a portable shortwave radio that stood alone on the wooden surface. The other wire lay loosely coiled next to the radio. Karl looked at the three men who sat quietly around the table sipping at their drinks.
“All right,” he interrupted the silence, “I have some questions. This whole thing seems pretty surreal to me.”
“Go ahead,” answered Liam, “we’ll try to help you understand as much as we can.”
“First off, who are you guys and what are you doing here?”
“Well,” Kharzai said, “we are, as you asked earlier, smugglers, mercenaries, and spies...sort of. I am an officer of the American CIA, born and raised in the lovely yet unendingly tedious cornfields of Indiana to Iranian expatriates who had worked for the Shah until the seventies. I’ve been in-country here for nearly three years trying to help avoid the current situation, which it seems, much to my chagrin, I have failed to do.”
He motioned to the Frenchman sitting across the table, who raised one eyebrow and gave a slight nod, a cold salutation of sorts.
Kharzai said, “Gilles here is former French Foreign Legion, le Regiment Deuxieme Parachutiste, 2nd Parachute Regiment, released a while back from his duties in Corsica and now a ‘free agent’ player. He serves as my bodyguard, extra gun, and general errand boy. A tall, dark, and scary errand boy, wouldn’t you agree?” Kharzai smiled and gestured with a wave of his hand towards the vampirish mercenary. He turned to Liam and continued.
“Liam is MI-6, a major of the British Royal Marines. He has been in the country with me for most of the past two years. Together, we three have been smuggling information and such back to our respective governments in hopes of averting a potential nuclear holocaust which you, with poetically sublime abandon, seem to have brought to the stage in spite of our years of diligence and hard work.”
“So you’re telling me that my crash has started a nuclear war?” Karl questioned, a look of disbelief in his expression.
“Yup,” replied Kharzai.
Karl shook his head and mumbled, “Soren Stagel pukes in my spaceship, and it starts World War III.”
“Now, you don’t need to blame yourself, or the late actor, too harshly,” said Liam. “While technically you did perform the proverbial kickoff that started the game, the Iranians have been looking for an excuse for a couple years, since the eighties actually. To be honest, you were just the lucky one to draw the number. At any rate, now, as I am sure you have noticed, you are here, and it would seem, stuck with us at least for the time being.”
Gilles rose from the table and moved across the room to the shortwave radio on the cabinet behind Liam. He securely attached the wire that snaked out through the crack in the wall to the radio’s antenna, turned it on, and twisted the dial until he found a clear station. Voices drifted from the box’s small speaker. Gilles turned up the volume. The voices spoke in Persian Farsi. The three other men leaned forward, listening intently. Karl glanced back and forth between them. They understood what they were listening to. He did not. He could make out certain words such as “Allah,” “America,” “Israel,” and “Iraq.” But not enough to know the context of what was being said.
Kharzai noticed his confused gaze and said, “Oops, I’m so sorry, let me translate. The newscaster here on the Iran Nightly Truth Broadcast has just announced that Tehran has launched missiles against several Israeli cities, as well as U.S. installations in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iraq in order to avert an invasion before the infidels can get off the ground, although he curiously doesn’t mention anything about nuclear.” He paused to listen before continuing. “He is now babbling about the cruel and satanic American Zionists and Jewish devils who are trying to conquer the Islamic world, yadda yadda yadda.” He paused again. “He’s proclaiming how Allah protected the innocent Iranian people from the evil attack of the Great Satan,” he pointed at Karl and quipped under his breath, “that would be you if you didn’t already know it,” then continued, “and he is now on a rant regarding the evils of Israel, who, while they actually have nothing to do with this whole thing, will soon become just another channel of the Mediterranean Sea. And...whoa...what did he just say? I think he just said something about Liam’s mother.”
Kharzai raised his bushy eyebrows so high his forehead almost looked like a black version of the McDonalds arches and looked at Liam with hands upheld. He shrugged in mock seriousness and mouthed the words, “Your mother?”
Liam dismissed the hairy man’s comedic distraction with a sideways glance and took a small cell phone out of his pocket. He wrapped the loose end of the wire that lay on the scuffed surface of the cabinet around the antenna, pressed a series of numbers with his thumb then put it to his ear. A moment later, the Irishman whispered a few quick words into the tiny microphone on the handset, listened in silence, and flipped it shut. He looked up at the others with a serious expression on his face as he waited for the radio news broadcast to end.
When Gilles switched off the radio, Liam spoke. “It’s worse than we thought. All sat-phone and hard line communications are officially cut as of now. We are on our own for a while, gents. They will get back to us as soon as possible, but all of the existing lines have been compromised. We are to move into condition Romeo Delta immediately.”
“Romeo Delta?” asked Karl.
“Operation Random Destruction, it’s where we get to run around the country blowing stuff up at will,” replied Kharzai, rubbing his hands together, eyes wide in excitement. “Kinda cool acronym for a really cool job, ain’t it?”
“How old are you, Karl?” Gilles asked, his voice throaty and flat, like a bad impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“Forty-seven, why?”
“I hope at your age that you are physically fit enough for the infantry, Karl, because that’s where you are for now, right in the middle of World War III, and starting off more than a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines,” Gilles replied.
“Don’t worry, fellas,” Liam said in a thick Irish brogue, “Eire is among you, the luck of Irish will rule the day, and I declare it by my green Leprechaun blood.” He lifted his cup in a toast. His face spread in a cold, broad smile.
“Here’s to our Leprechaun!” said Kharzai. “Now...on to the night’s revenge.”
Karl mumbled to himself, “Fiji is sounding better and better as this day goes on.”