The Colonel's Mistake Read online

  “This bomb,” said Mark. “Don’t tell me you actually built it?”

  “It’s just a big tube, gun-style detonator. We jury-rigged it with Iranian penetrator bombs, stuff that’s easy to trace. It won’t work, but when it becomes clear that the Iranians tried to nuke one of our aircraft carriers, there’ll be a cry for war.

  “That’s when Aryanpur will act. The Revolutionary Guard was set up to guard the Islamic Revolution itself. Aryanpur will declare that Khorasani’s reckless command of Qods Force has threatened the revolution. He thinks the Assembly of Experts will accept his leadership.

  “Once Aryanpur’s been installed as Supreme Leader, he’ll probably be as faithful to the Islamic Revolution as the Chinese are to communism. It’ll be a new Iran. Not perfect, but a country we can do business with.”

  Mark was all for seeing Ayatollah Khorasani tossed out on his ass, but it occurred to him that the one constant in Iranian–American relations was that whenever Washington came up with a plan to gain the upper hand—whether it was installing the Shah, or backing Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq war, or selling the mullahs arms in 1986—it somehow always wound up making things worse.

  Decker vaulted into the surveillance hole.

  “Daria’s gone. I did a complete perimeter sweep. There was a car outside the farmhouse. It’s gone too.”

  Amato cradled his head in his hands.

  Mark said, “We need to double back, pick up the Iranian who’s down, and interrogate him.”

  “Firemen already grabbed him,” said Decker.

  “You’re sure the second guy on my team doesn’t have her?” asked Amato.

  “Your second guy was trying to track me, not Daria.”

  Mark turned to Amato. “Why do you care so much what happens with Daria?”

  “None of your damn business.” But then Amato appeared to think better of it and said, “I know her parents in Washington, they both work for the State Department.”

  “So you’re just a good Samaritan, a guy who’s had a change of heart?”

  “A man like you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  “She was never supposed to have been a target. No one in the MEK or CIA was. That was all Aryanpur, trying to cover his ass so that when he assumed power no one but Ellis and me would know how he did it. He started killing everyone.”

  “Not Minabi.”

  “Ellis insisted she be spared, but he’ll kill her soon too. I tried to help Daria by sending Campbell to warn her, by the way, and I tried to get someone to help her in Esfahan.”

  “And you did this because she was the daughter of friends.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  Mark stared at Amato for a moment. Showing that kind of sympathy was the way a normal person might act. But Amato hadn’t gotten to where he was in life by thinking like a normal person.

  “You’re full of shit, dude, but whatever.”

  “I want to help find her.”

  “That much I believe.”

  “Aryanpur will have her killed, but probably not before his men interrogate her, to find out who else she’s told about the stolen uranium. We still have time. I’ve severed all my ties to Ellis and the Security Council but Aryanpur doesn’t know that. There’s a chance he’ll tell me where his men are taking her.”

  “You’re telling me you could pick up a phone and talk to General Aryanpur? Like now?”

  “It would take more than a single call.”

  Mark thought about that for a moment.

  Amato said, “Sooner or later—probably sooner—people in Washington are going to figure out that I’m not playing their game anymore. When that happens, those two ISA soldiers working for me out there are going to be ordered to take me into custody. Let me call Aryanpur before everything goes to hell.”

  “You’re not using a cell phone until we’re in a car, moving fast enough that we’ll be hard to intercept even if we’re tracked,” said Mark.

  Decker had the Hyundai stashed nearby. Mark got in the driver’s seat, Decker sat right behind him, and Amato sat across from Decker.

  Mark turned right when he got to the main road. After a mile he handed his cell phone back to Amato. “You’re up.”

  Amato fumbled the phone because his hands were still cuffed, but he eventually managed to dial the right number. Following a long wait, he spoke in Farsi for a minute and then hung up. “Someone will call back.”

  They were hurtling east, on a dark road that led through farmland. Both of Mark’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. “You speak Farsi well,” he said, as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Ever been to Iran?”

  Amato took a long time to answer. “A long time ago. Before the revolution.”

  “Not during?”

  “I saw some of it.”

  “You deal with the hostage situation?”

  “I got out just when that hit.”

  “What were you doing there in the first place?”

  “It’s really not relevant.”

  It was dark outside and even darker in the car. Mark glanced in the rearview mirror. Amato’s face was little more than a sinister black shadow.

  “Daria had an uncle—Reza Tehrani, he was Minabi’s advisor. I believe you know him.”

  Amato didn’t respond. Deep in thought, Mark let the car drift toward the shoulder.

  “Watch the road,” said Decker.

  “Just for the record, I know why you’re here,” said Mark. “I know who you are.”

  Mark glanced in the rearview mirror just as Amato flashed him a nasty look.

  “Daria’s uncle is dead,” said Amato. “Aryanpur had him killed two days ago.”

  Mark’s cell phone rang and Amato answered it. After five minutes of heated conversation in Farsi, he clicked the phone shut and announced that he’d been talking to Aryanpur. “Daria’s being flown out of the country.”

  Mark took his phone back and shut it off. “Can you stop them?”

  “I said we had a team here that could interrogate her. But Aryanpur doesn’t trust us when it comes to interrogations. He’s having her taken to an offshore base in the Caspian, on Neft Dashlari.”

  Oil Rocks, thought Mark. That was the literal translation. It was a huge Azeri oil-production outpost in the Caspian Sea, a byzantine maze of stilt roads, leaky pipes, bleak communist dormitories built on landfills, and endless oil derricks. Fifty years ago it had been the pride of the Soviet Union. Now the place was a decaying and rusted embarrassment, and much of the infrastructure had succumbed to the rising sea waters. It was still pumping out oil in places, but the BTC pipeline had overshadowed it.

  “I know it,” said Mark.

  “The Azeris have been leasing out some of the derricks.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Mark had also heard that the big players hadn’t been interested. It was too much of a hassle, dealing with the Soviet’s god-awful mess, for too little oil.

  “An Iranian oil company Aryanpur controls is leasing extraction rights near the southern end. Aryanpur’s been using it as a military base.”

  “Can we intercept them before they get there?”

  “No. Aryanpur’s men are going through a rapid extraction contingency plan. Aryanpur hasn’t even talked to them and won’t until they’re off French soil. He just knows where he’ll order Daria taken once his team contacts him.”

  “And you think Aryanpur was being straight with you?”

  “I gave him an incentive to tell the truth.”

  Mark waited for Amato to elaborate.

  “I told him my men had captured you. Because I knew he’d want to interrogate you and Daria together, so your stories could be matched against each other.”

  “So you offered—”

  “To bring you to him.”

  “To Neft Dashlari. To be interrogated.”

  “I don’t expect you to actually come,” said Amato sharply. “I don’t expect a damn thing out of you, S
ava. I told Aryanpur what I had to so he’d tell me where he was taking her.”

  “But you’d go if I let you? With or without me?”

  “Of course.”

  “How would you get there?”

  At Le Bourget Airport, Amato said, just outside Paris, a government plane was waiting—assuming Washington hadn’t figured out what he was up to yet. If Mark were to drop him off there, he’d arrive in Baku around the same time as Daria.

  As he drove, Mark thought about Neft Dashlari. It was a wretched place. The rotting detritus of an old empire.

  He wondered how Nika would react if he were killed there. Would she mourn him? At this point, given all she’d been through on his account, she might be relieved.

  He considered the rest of his ties to the world. His students at Western University could easily be taught by someone else. His mother had committed suicide over twenty years ago and he hadn’t spoken to his father since, so ties to parents weren’t an issue. He was on good terms with his two younger brothers and older sister, there was real love there, but he hadn’t seen much of them since joining the Agency.

  It really didn’t say great things about his social abilities, he thought, that the only person in this world who had any real need of him was Daria.

  “I’ll go with you to Neft Dashlari,” he said to Amato. “But going in is pointless if we don’t have a decent plan to get her out.”

  As the C-37A circled over Heydar Aliyev International Airport, Mark had the sense that he was coming home. From up high the polluted Absheron Peninsula didn’t look so dreary, and there were even wide patches of deep green interspersed among the ribbons of road and gray blocks of industry.

  Flashes of white reflected off the sea in the Bay of Baku. The long promenade that ran along the sea was clearly visible and, using the promenade as a landmark, Mark was able to pinpoint where his apartment building must be. As the plane descended, he saw cars moving along the highway and it suddenly struck him that none of what had happened since the night he was brought to Gobustan Prison was really relevant to the lives of the vast majority of the people below. If the United States and Iran wanted to claw each other to death, what did they care? Even if the Azeri’s crown jewel, the BTC pipeline, were to be rendered obsolete, the average person wouldn’t be affected much. Despite a state oil fund that had been set up to combat corruption, most of the money was going to the government elite anyway.

  Two black Mercedes were waiting for Mark on the tarmac when the plane touched down, the result of a series of calls he’d made while airborne.

  He was driven through downtown Baku, with Amato and Decker trailing in the second car, and then up through the Yasamal Slopes section of town, past modest apartment buildings and houses that predated the Soviet period. Just past the green-domed Taza Pir Mosque, in the shadow of one of its minarets, the car stopped.

  The streets were crowded with worshippers who had just finished the morning Fajr prayer.

  A long black Jeep Commander with dark windows pulled up next to the Mercedes.

  “Get out,” said Mark’s driver.

  Mark did so and then looked behind him. The car that was supposed to have followed with Amato and Decker was nowhere to be seen. A rear door opened on the Jeep Commander. Mark climbed inside.

  Orkhan Gambar wore a dark blue suit with pinstripes and smelled of aftershave. The air conditioner was going full blast and it was excessively cold. “Welcome back to Baku,” Orkhan said, frowning, in a tone that Mark sensed was faintly hostile.

  “I know who killed Campbell.”

  He told Orkhan everything, or nearly so.

  Orkhan never questioned the truth of the story. Nor did he seem particularly surprised. Violent plots, gross deception…that was just the way the world worked.

  “Of course, even if this coup in Iran was to succeed, Aryanpur would never give up Iran’s nuclear weapons, any more than Khorasani will,” said Orkhan.

  “Of course not. Ellis and everyone else at the NSC are deluding themselves.”

  Iran was sitting on the world’s fourth-largest reserves of oil in an unfriendly locale. The United States was at their door in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia to the north was always a worry. Aryanpur would want the weapons for the same reason Khorasani and the Iranian people did—for protection, pride, and power. To really get rid of the weapons you had to address those issues. Which deposing Khorasani wouldn’t do.

  Eventually Mark came around to explaining what had happened to Daria, and that she was being held prisoner in Azeri waters.

  Orkhan said, “If what you say is true, then we will evict the Iranians. They have no right to station armed forces at Neft Dashlari. As for your compatriot, I grieve for her.”

  “I didn’t come to you looking for sympathy. I came for help.”

  “Then I fear you will leave disappointed.”

  “I was hired by the CIA to find out who killed Campbell and took out our station in Baku. I found out. And on the flight from Paris, I told my former division chief what I just told you. Bottom line is that the CIA got slaughtered because of something our National Security Council cooked up with Aryanpur. The CIA won’t take that lying down. They certainly won’t let Aryanpur seize power. He’s toast.”

  “Toast?”

  “Finished. As good as dead. I guarantee you the Agency will try to shut down the phony attack on the USS Reagan. But even if it goes off you can be damn sure they’ll find a way to fix it so that Aryanpur never gets his chance to rule Iran. They’ll expose his ties to the National Security Council and once that happens, the Iranians will kill him themselves. There’s nothing either you or I can do about it. But meanwhile, Aryanpur’s still operating in Azerbaijan, right under your nose. Which means you’re backing the loser in this game and it will come back to bite you.”

  “We are backing no one.”

  “Aryanpur is running his operation from somewhere on Neft Dashlari. In Azeri waters. People will conclude that you are backing him whether you are or not. I’m doing you a favor by helping you to pinpoint his base. Instead of having an international incident explode under your nose, you can get ahead of the game, take out Aryanpur’s men yourself, and then sell all the intel you collect back to the Americans. Not a bad deal for you.”

  “And you expect what, in return for this…favor?” A mean, but not entirely unfriendly, smile formed on Orkhan’s face.

  Mark told him.

  Orkhan appeared deep in thought. After a time he said, “Go back to your car. I need to speak with Aliyev.”

  The aging Russian Mi-2 charter helicopter that transported Mark and Amato to Neft Dashlari was piloted by an Azeri Air Force captain who wore Levi’s jeans and a T-shirt that said San Francisco Sucks.

  The two Azeris crewing the helicopter were also dressed like Americans; both were armed with M16 rifles.

  Amato was wearing the same suit he’d had on since leaving Washington. He’d combed his wild gray hair, but his five o’clock shadow had grown into a stubbly beard. Around his waist he’d strapped a military belt with a large Glock semiautomatic pistol. He was a big man, and the juxtaposition of the gun and the business suit and the unshaven face made him look more than a little unhinged—and dangerous.

  They flew east, screaming along the coast to the end of the Absheron Peninsula, and then over open water for another thirty miles until Neft Dashlari came into view. From the air it looked like a giant mutant spider, with a central mass of buildings surrounded by a vast snarl of stilt roads that led to oil derricks. Even from the air, Mark couldn’t see the eastern end of it.

  The helicopter banked right and for five minutes followed a derelict stilt road that occasionally dipped below the shallow water. They shot past a few dilapidated industrial buildings, some on stilts, some on small landfill islands. But then they hit a section where the road had been repaired and there were a few bright new buildings clad in yellow-painted steel and emblazoned with the names of oil companies Mark didn’t recognize.
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br />   The sky was overcast and threatening rain.

  Amato held a GPS locater in his hand. “We’re close!” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the rotors.

  Mark turned his back to Amato and allowed himself to be handcuffed.

  Minutes later, a floating helipad came into view. A large white circle surrounding a yellow bull’s-eye had been painted on the black rubber surface.

  Mark reminded the pilot not to even touch down and the pilot flashed him a thumbs-up. A small guard shack sat in one corner of the landing pad. A man emerged from it and shot off a single flair.

  “Good to go!” said Amato.

  As the helicopter hovered a few feet above the landing platform, Amato grabbed Mark by his shirt collar, raised him to a standing position, and shoved him out the bay door. With his hands secured behind his back, Mark couldn’t steady himself. So when he stumbled onto the landing pad he fell on his face.

  For a moment the roar of the helicopter was deafening and the wind intense. But soon the noise died down to a point where Mark could hear the lonely sound of the sea lapping up against the floating platform. He felt the butt of Amato’s gun on the back of his neck.

  A second man emerged from the guard shack. Both he and the first carried AK-47s and were dressed like soldiers, but with no identifying marks on their uniforms.

  Amato spoke to them sharply in Farsi. One of them raised what appeared to be a digital camcorder. He focused on Amato’s face, and then Mark’s. Not long after, the soldier with the camera received a call on his radio. Mark understood enough to realize that he and Amato had been positively identified.

  He was led to the little guard shack where they stripped him naked, cutting away his shirt because of the handcuffs. They searched every pocket and inch of fabric. Then one of the men cold-cocked him on the side of his head. Mark thought he blacked out for a moment.

  “Open your mouth!” ordered one of the soldiers.