The Colonel's Mistake (21 page)

Mark checked his watch again.

They’d been lounging around by the side of the road since dawn had broken about twenty minutes ago. He was beginning to feel like a piece of bloody chum thrown out to attract sharks.

Even this early in the morning it was frighteningly hot out, just shy of a hundred degrees. Across the road, behind more swirls of abandoned concertina wire, a couple of boys were playing in what
looked like an old guardhouse. The roof had caved in and there were no longer any windows.

Mark wondered how long it would take the boys to announce to the neighborhood insurgents that a couple of American tourists were waiting to be sacrificed. One of the boys was staring at him, so Mark waved and the kid waved back.

Then his phone rang.

“Hey, boss,” said Decker. “Guess where I am?”

Before Mark could answer, Decker said, “Paris, man!” and launched into a play-by-play of his daring escape, and bus trip to Baku, and—

“Well, I’m glad you made it,” said Mark. “That’s awesome, buddy. We’re on track too. Keep us posted.”

“All right. I’ve never been to France before, kind of wild, I can see the—”

“Really kind of tied up right now, Deck.”

“OK, OK. Well, we’ll talk soon.”

After Mark clicked his phone off, Daria said, “You still trust that guy?”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t know. He left Yaver’s cell phone on after you told him to shut it off.”

Mark considered himself a pretty good judge of people. And all his instincts, plus the two minutes he’d spent back in Baku Googling Decker’s name, were telling him that Decker was on the level. Then again, his instincts had also told him Daria was on the level.

“People make mistakes,” he said.

Five minutes later Decker called again.

“Hey, boss, remind me again, what’s the name of Daria’s uncle?”

“Tehrani.” Mark spelled it out.

“And where was the MEK headquarters?”

“Auvers. On Saint—”

“Saint Simon Road, got it.”

A reasonably new-looking white Toyota pickup truck pulled up and skidded to a stop. The MEK contact Daria had lined up, Mark assumed.

“You good now?” Mark asked Decker. “Because I have to go.”

“I’m gonna shoot up to Auvers today.”

“Fantastic. Be careful.”

“Should I call you when I get there?”

A middle-aged woman with tobacco-stained teeth rolled down the window of the pickup truck and spoke to Daria in Farsi.

“Why don’t I call you.”

“OK, that works. When do—”

“Deck, I have to go.”

This time, after shutting off his phone, Mark switched out the SIM card.

They drove absurdly fast, first along a dirt road and then down a two-lane highway. The engine whined at a high pitch and the wind roared through the open windows, so no one talked. Mark sat in the passenger seat and Daria sat wedged between him and the driver. The land was arid and flat and there was little to see except other cars and an occasional convoy of military vehicles.

On the outskirts of Baqubah they stopped at a service station and parked behind a row of rusting gas pumps. The woman with the tobacco-stained teeth got out of the pickup and opened the back of a nearby white refrigerator truck. She removed some cartons of processed chicken parts from it, and beckoned to Mark and Daria. When they climbed up into the back, they discovered a trapdoor
that lay flush to the floor. The woman pulled it open, exposing a long shallow smuggler’s compartment, and gestured for Mark and Daria to climb in.

They lay down as instructed, squeezed up next to each other. The trapdoor was lowered. When the chicken parts were stacked back on top of it, the inside of the trapdoor just touched Mark’s nose. The air was cold but he found it preferable to the heat outside. The darkness was absolute.

Daria gripped his hand. “We’re close now,” she whispered. “This is just to get us past the gates.”

They drove for maybe ten minutes before the truck came to a stop, at which point Mark heard the muffled sound of Iraqi soldiers talking outside. Which told him they’d arrived at Camp Ashraf, a plot of land Saddam Hussein had given to the MEK decades ago. More recently it had been limping along as a diplomat’s nightmare, with four thousand or so rabidly antiregime Iranians huddled inside and no country willing to take them off Iraq’s hands other than Iran—to kill them. The Iraqis had wanted to shut the place down for years but had defaulted to treating it as a refugee camp/prison until someone figured out what to do with all the MEK soldiers.

The Iraqi soldiers standing outside the truck posed a series of routine questions—what was the truck carrying, where was it coming from—and then asked for documentation. Mark heard the back door open and observed a sliver of light as it widened around the perimeter of the trapdoor. Then all was darkness and the truck started moving again.

Two minutes later, it came to a stop. This time the engine was turned off and Mark heard people pulling out the chicken cartons. When the trapdoor was finally pulled open, he saw that he was in
a warehouse, surrounded by an unimpressive cadre of unarmed soldiers. They were clad in olive-green uniforms and gathered in a big clump behind the truck, frowning and looking nervous. Half were women.

A squat, ugly woman stepped forward. She wore a headscarf and prescription glasses that magnified her eyes so that they looked unnaturally big.

“Sister Daria,” she said, opening her arms. “It has been too long.”

Her expression conveyed genuine warmth but was tinged with worry. And maybe fear, thought Mark.

“Welcome to Ashraf,” she continued. “I rejoice that you reached out to us in your hour of need.” When she turned to Mark, her expression turned hard. “And who is your friend?”

Mark wondered whether this was another of Daria’s double-cross deals.

Within minutes of getting to Ashraf, she and the squat, bespectacled woman—who turned out to be the camp commander—left to meet privately while he was taken to the other side of the camp, possibly as a prisoner, to have tea and cookies with a couple of grim-faced MEK soldiers.

They sat in the shade on a concrete patio, just outside an all-male residential unit.

The soldiers were jumpy, glancing at Mark then scanning the perimeter of the camp, as though they expected to be attacked at any minute. In the distance, across an expanse of flat, burnt desert, stood an Iraqi guard tower.

“Did my friend say when she was coming back for me?” asked Mark.

“No.”

Just past the patio lay a vegetable garden. After sitting in silence for a few minutes, one of the soldiers explained with aggressive pride how they grew much of their own food, and that the MEK had built this camp up from nothing over the years and that the Iraqis would never succeed in shutting it down. Did Mr. Sava know there was a swimming pool?

Mark had gotten a fleeting glimpse of the “swimming pool” on the way over. All the water had been drained out, and weeds were growing out of cracks in the concrete apron that surrounded it. And the vegetable garden in front of him consisted of little more than a feeble collection of green beans and rows of what looked like wilting lettuce.

Even the soldiers looked wilted. They were too slender and their uniforms hung too loosely on their frames.

No, there was nothing in this refugee camp to be proud of, thought Mark. It was a pathetic, dusty, miserable shithole-under-siege in the middle of the desert. And the people who lived here were deluding themselves if they really thought they could topple the regime in Iran. It was a testament to the folly of hanging on to a dream for too long.

He found the occasional mixed-gender squads of MEK soldiers marching by on a nearby road, going double time—as if it mattered—to be dispiriting, as he did the framed photo of Maryam Minabi, which hung from a post on one corner of the patio. She had green eyes, and her broad smile was framed by a green headscarf. Mark recalled that she’d taken over the leadership of the MEK after her husband had disappeared in the wake of the Iraq War. Now she hung out in France at the MEK headquarters, giving speeches that hardly anyone listened to.

He gestured to the photo. “She ever leave France to come visit you guys here on the front lines?”

His question was met by silence and a glare from the soldier closest to him.

“It must be difficult, not being able to leave the base,” Mark offered a little while later, after he got tired of sipping his tea in silence.

“One must be willing to pay the price for freedom,” said the soldier, sounding a bit like a robot.

“Hmm,” said Mark agreeably.

“I will show you something.” The soldier left and returned with a three-ring binder. Evidence, he said, of atrocities the mullahs had committed against the MEK and the people of Iran. The soldier flipped through photos of gruesome executions and clear evidence of horrific torture: mangled bodies, burnt limbs…

It was all true, Mark knew, all of these awful tragedies. And every one no doubt was a mini-holocaust for the families involved. But he’d heard so many similar stories coming out of Iran—and Iraq, and Armenia, you name it—that he’d become numb to the misery.

He wished Daria would show up.

A half hour later she did, moving quickly.

“Follow me.”

Daria started walking off at such a fast clip that Mark had to jog a few steps to catch up.

“Where are we going?”

“So the original camp commander, the guy who might have really known whether the uranium ever made it to Ashraf, was shot by a sniper three days ago. People are blaming the mullahs and the Iraqis. Everyone is in a panic.”

“Anybody got any evidence?”

“No. They just always blame the mullahs and Iraqis when something goes wrong.”

“This time maybe they’re right.” Mark wondered whether the sniper was still around, and whether his and Daria’s arrival had been detected.

“Anyway I explained to the new commander why we’re here and got her to check Ashraf’s records. Turns out that the day after I brought the uranium to Esfahan, one of the unit leaders here was smuggled out of Ashraf.”

“To pick up the uranium.”

“Maybe. All we know is that he came back the next day, was smuggled out again a week later, and then disappeared. In between
he apparently spent a lot of time at the repair shop. It’s our one lead.”

She gestured to the large steel-sided warehouse in front of them. “We’re here, now.”

Mark and Daria stepped into a large bay, where a few disabled armored vehicles and stripped-down Brazilian Cascavel tanks were stored, the sad remnants of what had once been a sizable battalion. One of the armored vehicles was up on a hydraulic lift. Around the perimeter of the bay were tool shelves, a large drill press, a milling machine, welding equipment, and a large waist-high electroplating bath.

Two machinists, looking slightly disheveled and apprehensive, stood in front of the tanks. Next to them the new camp commander slouched on a tall three-legged stool. Unruly strands of hair stuck out from under her headscarf and her mouth was set in a deep, tired frown.

She ordered the machinists to share everything they knew about the unit leader who’d disappeared, and in particular to explain why he’d been visiting the weapons shop in the week prior to his disappearance.

One of the machinists stepped forward. In Indian-accented English, he recounted that this unit leader, acting under the authority of the old camp commander, had ordered him to help create two replicas of a heavy block of metal.

“What kind of metal?” asked Daria.

“Depleted uranium, my sister. He brought it with him.”

“
Depleted
uranium?” said Mark.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

The machinist shrugged. “He told me it was depleted uranium. And it was very, very heavy. I could barely lift it.”

“It was just a block?”

“No, it had six holes in it, I think to accept bolts. Around this big.” With his hands, the machinist indicated it had been about the size of a large tissue box.

Mark looked at Daria. “Did the package you brought to Esfahan have holes in it?”

“No.”

“Sir, it also had the name Lockheed Aeronautics stamped onto it. This means it is from a military airplane, no? Made by the Americans?”