The Colonel's Mistake (18 page)

“Holy shit,” said Mark to Daria, who had followed him down the steps.

“This isn’t MEK stuff,” she said slowly. “I mean, we had a few weapons, but nothing—nothing like this.”

“Did the Astara MEK know this basement even existed?”

“I know I didn’t. I thought this was just an auxiliary site. It was used as a safe house for Iranian defectors. Yaver arranged it all.”

Mark pulled out a couple of canvas duffel bags from under the stainless-steel tables. He stuffed everything in them except a few beat-up AK-47s and hauled it all back to the Land Cruiser.

Yaver was in the rear seat, lying on his back between the two doors. His feet and hands had been bound together with duct tape and tied to the armrests. But his eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. Decker was taking his pulse.

“Is he dead?” said Mark.

Decker shook his head. “Not yet. But give it a few minutes and he will be.”

“He’s not faking?”

Decker pointed to the sizable pool of blood collecting on the seat of the Land Cruiser and dripping onto the floor. “I can’t completely stop it, I can’t get enough pressure on his gut.”

“Shit,” said Mark. He suddenly felt lightheaded. God, what a mess, he thought. What a world.

“We lost our chance to interrogate him,” said Decker, sounding slightly accusing. He gave Daria a look.

“I did what I had to,” she said.

“There was a reason I just tagged him in the leg.”

“Then you were playing with fire.”

“Leave it be,” said Mark.

He placed his hand an inch away from Yaver’s mouth. He could hardly feel the man’s breath.

“Listen, buddy! Last chance here. Tell us who you report to and we get medical help. Hold back on us, and you’re screwed.”

Daria translated what Mark had said into Farsi, but Yaver was beyond hearing.

Decker, who was looking through the duffel bags, said, “I gotta say, some of this is crap but a lot of it reminds me of what I used to carry.” He pulled out something that looked like a piece of scuba equipment. “This is a Draeger rebreather. You can dive without releasing bubbles. Standard SEAL gear.”

“Would Qods Force use it?” asked Mark.

“They might.” Decker picked up the Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this gear was lifted from our guys who’ve gone down in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Pack it back up, we gotta get out of here.”

Mark climbed into the driver’s seat, Daria slid into the passenger seat, and Decker got in back. After picking up the rest of
Mark’s cash from the trunk of the Lada, they started hauling ass toward the coast, bouncing all over the rough road and skidding through a few curves.

But they’d only gone a couple of miles when they heard the distant thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Mark.

“It can’t actually be coming for us, do you think?” said Decker.

Mark swerved off onto a narrow trail that paralleled a tea field and dead-ended at a dense grove of oak trees.

He backed the Land Cruiser into the trees, raised his binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the sky. He saw nothing. Suddenly there was silence.

“They touched down,” said Decker, who’d opened the back door of the Land Cruiser and had been listening intently.

“At the farmhouse?”

“Could be. Yeah.”

“They’re looking for us,” said Mark.

He continued to search the sky as a breeze rustled the leaves behind him. Daria stood on the other side of the car, silently scanning the tea field and the surrounding sky.

He considered the logistics of getting a helicopter to a rural part of Azerbaijan within what—ten minutes? Whoever they were dealing with had access to some serious resources.

In the backseat, Yaver was dead. Mark dragged him out of the car and let him flop to the ground. Then he picked up some downed branches from the forest floor and piled them on the roof of the car.

“We’ll lay low here for a while,” he said. “In the meantime maybe Daria will finally deign to tell us more about what the hell is really going on.”

“No more lies,” said Daria. “No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” Mark agreed.

“No, look at me. I mean it this time. I tell you what I know and in return you don’t bullshit me, like saying you sent Decker away. Or telling me you were a CIA analyst.”

“I was an analyst. For six months.”

“Over a twenty-year career.”

“You never asked for how long.”

“I mean it, Mark. We come clean with each other for real now or no deal.”

“Fair enough,” he said, although in truth he was thinking that any opportunity to reestablish mutual trust was long gone.

Daria glanced around her, as though someone might be eavesdropping even in the middle of the woods. “So this is the deal—as part of that pipeline agreement I told you about, the Chinese gave the Iranians help with their nuclear program.”

“What kind of help?” Mark said slowly.

“Enriched uranium.”

“High grade or low grade?”

“Most of it low. Around four percent uranium two thirty-five.”

Good enough for a reactor but not for a bomb, thought Mark. Besides, the Iranians were already making plenty of 4 percent 235 on their own. “And the rest?”

“Some at sixty percent uranium two thirty-five, some as high as eighty. Not the ninety-plus percent considered weapons-grade, but—”

“Eighty percent is concentrated enough to be used in a weapon. Not a very efficient weapon, but a weapon that might work. I can’t believe the Chinese would have been so fucking reckless.”

But he actually did believe it. The Chinese hadn’t balked at arming the genocidal government of Sudan in return for access to oil, or dealing with the deranged generals of Myanmar in exchange for an oil pipeline; arming Iran would be right up their alley.

“The low-enriched uranium was given with the understanding that the Iranians would use it to produce electricity. The rationale was that, with the Chinese buying so much of Iran’s oil, the Iranians would need the extra energy capacity.”

“And the highly enriched uranium?”

“Supposedly for use in a research reactor and in two nuclear-powered subs the Iranians want to build to patrol the Persian Gulf.”

“What safeguards were there, so that it’s not used for a bomb?”

“Real ones? None. The Chinese want the Iranians to have the bomb, so that the US and Israel will think twice before attacking their gas station. The BS about the research reactor and subs is just so that, if this ever comes to light, they can deny that they meant to give Iran the bomb. Anyway, what it comes down to is that China got its oil and the Iranians got enough highly enriched uranium to make three small fission bombs in the ten kiloton range.”

“That’s big enough,” said Mark. Ten kilotons was only about two-thirds of the explosive power of the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima—nothing compared with the destructive force of modern nuclear weapons, but more than enough to destroy the better part of a city. “What about delivery systems?”

“They’re going for something small that can be smuggled over borders or onto a cargo ship, or better yet a cargo plane. A poor man’s version of an ICBM since their long-range missile technology sucks.”

“They’ve already built these bombs?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. And when they try to, they’ll be short some enriched uranium.” Daria’s mouth tightened into something approximating a smile. “I helped a physicist in Tehran smuggle two blocks of it out of Iran.”

“My God, Daria.” You are in way, way over your head, was all Mark could think. It occurred to him that he was now, too. “And where did this uranium wind up?”

“It was supposed to have been transferred to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The MEK wanted to use it to prove that the Iranians were lying about not developing nuclear weapons.”

“This transfer to the IAEA, was it actually made?”

“I have no idea. All I did was bring the physicist and the uranium from Tehran to Esfahan. The MEK contact I met in Esfahan was supposed to have smuggled it outside of Iran.”

“But the IAEA never broke the news,” said Mark.

“No. And now it’s been six weeks.”

“Which suggests the uranium didn’t get from Esfahan to where it was supposed to go. You stole a bunch of uranium from the Iranians and now it’s disappeared.”

“Yeah, you know, I figured that much out.”

“So have you tried to call the MEK leadership?”

“I’ve tried my uncle ten times today. He’s not answering or returning my—”

Mark put his hand up, silencing Daria as the sound of the helicopter started up again.

After a minute of listening to it wax and wane in the distance, Decker said, “They’re searching for us.”

The sound of the helicopter faded, to the point where it was almost inaudible, but then gradually it grew louder. And louder. Until suddenly it was within a few hundred feet of them, sending gusts of wind whipping down through the trees.

Mark could see portions of its black silhouette through the leaves but couldn’t make out any identifying marks. He wished he’d piled up more branches on top of the car. Then it was gone, off to circling in a new area.

Until a cell phone started ringing.

“Shut that thing off,” snapped Mark, thinking it was either Daria’s or Decker’s.

“Not me, boss,” said Decker.

“It’s not mine,” said Daria. Then she stared at Decker. “It’s Yaver’s. You forgot to turn it off.”

“No. No, tell me you didn’t,” said Mark.

“Fuck me.”

“I told you. The signal can be triangulated.”

Decker pulled out Yaver’s cell phone from his front pocket and shut it off.

“Fuck me,” said Decker again.

“Maybe they weren’t tracking it,” said Daria.

“Guys, I’m sorry.”

“Maybe they didn’t have time to get a lock,” said Mark.

Moments later the helicopter came screaming back toward them.

Decker jumped out of the car and grabbed the equipment bag. “You guys blow.”

“No one gets to play the martyr,” said Mark. “We ditch the car and run together.”

Decker unzipped the equipment bag and pulled out the Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol. “I’m not planning on a suicide mission! I’ll just keep them busy for a few minutes and then bolt. There’s plenty of tree cover—I’ll be fine. You guys take off.”

Mark quickly calculated that his best chance of finding out who’d attacked the CIA in Baku was to first find out who had stolen Daria’s uranium, because it was a near certainty that whoever had done it would be at or near the center of this mess. And that meant retracing the uranium trail, starting in Esfahan, Iran. He estimated the times and distances involved in getting to Esfahan.

To Decker, he said, “If you make it out of here, go to France.”

Decker was dragging Yaver back to the Land Cruiser. Mark saw the helicopter through the trees.

“I’ll make it.”

“Find out what happened to Daria’s uncle. I’ll call you sometime after you get there. Daria and I will be in Iran.”

Mark handed a $10,000 bank bundle to Decker, who quickly stuffed it in his pocket.

“You’ll find my uncle at the MEK compound in Auvers,” said Daria. “On Saint Simon Road a mile out of town. His name is Reza Tehrani. There’s a photo of him on the MEK’s website. He’s an advisor to the leader of the MEK, a woman named Maryam Minabi. She should be on the website too. Are you going to remember all this?”

“Auvers, Saint Simon Road, Reza…”

“Tehrani. Tehrani. Like the city.”

“Tehrani. Got it.”

“Advisor to Minabi, who’s the head of the MEK.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Just go to the website if you forget.”

Decker took Yaver’s cell phone, switched it back on, and threw it into the front seat of the Land Cruiser. With Mark’s help, he heaved Yaver’s dead body into the driver’s seat.

The helicopter was just a couple hundred feet away now, hovering over the empty tea field just past the forest, circling and searching. Decker turned on the Land Cruiser and jammed a spare AK-47 between the gas pedal and the front seat.

“Good luck,” said Mark, just before Decker threw the Land Cruiser from park into drive and aimed it through a break in the trees.