The Twelfth Imam

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “Now you do.”

  “But you cannot be in the ambassador’s office. You must be kidding.”

  “I am not.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Look in the telephone directory and find the embassy number,” the woman directed. “Then dial extension 8209 for the ambassador’s office.”

  There was a long pause. Charlie turned to Claire to see how she was doing. But she didn’t return his gaze. She was fixated on the radio, almost as if in a trance. A moment later, the radio announcer could be heard flipping through a directory, then dialing the phone. It rang. And then . . .

  “You have reached the United States Embassy in Tehran,” a woman’s voice said, first in English, then in Farsi. “The embassy is presently closed. Our office hours are from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Sunday through Thursday. The consulate is open for visa requests from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Sunday through Thursday. If you know the number of the person you are trying to reach . . .”

  A moment later, the announcer had dialed through to the ambassador’s office and got the same woman back on the line.

  “So it is true,” he said, astonished.

  “So it is.”

  “This is serious news. Okay, what is your message?”

  “I have a communiqué,” the young woman said calmly.

  “Very well, proceed. Let us hear it.”

  “Communiqué Number One: In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate . . .”

  She then quoted from a statement Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—had said just the day before. “. . . it is incumbent upon students to forcefully expand their attacks against America and Israel, so that America will be forced to return the criminal, deposed Shah.”

  Then she read a lengthy statement prepared by the students. Several lines jumped out at Charlie.

  “We Muslim students, followers of Imam Khomeini, have occupied the espionage embassy of America in protest against the ploys of the imperialists and the Zionists. We announce our protest to the world, a protest against America for granting asylum and employing the criminal Shah while it has on its hands the blood of tens of thousands of women and men in this country. . . .”

  When the propaganda piece was finished, Charlie asked, “Where’s the utility box?”

  “Why?” Claire asked.

  He asked again, ignoring her question.

  “It’s in the closet,” Claire replied. “But what do you need it for?”

  He gently pulled away from her, headed into the closet, fished out a steel case about the size of a carry-on piece of luggage, and began to leave the bedroom.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, a bit too loudly, an edge of panic now in her voice.

  Charlie turned quickly and motioned for Claire to lower her voice. Then he took her by the hand and proceeded to the kitchen. There, in the tiny, windowless room, he moved aside a pitcher of pomegranate juice and several glasses sitting in the center of their table for two and set down the utility box. He dialed in the lock combination and opened the case. It was the first time Claire had ever seen what was inside, and she gasped as Charlie pulled out a sidearm and ammunition.

  “Charlie, what—?”

  “It’s just a precaution,” he tried to reassure her. “I’m sure this will all be over soon.”

  She didn’t look convinced. And why should she be? Claire Harper was no idiot. She held a master’s degree from Harvard and had graduated summa cum laude from the business school; Charlie had managed only cum laude honors from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Though Claire was presently on sick leave because of her challenging pregnancy, she had been assigned to serve as the embassy’s deputy economic attaché. Her Farsi wasn’t as fluent as Charlie’s, but everyone they knew at the embassy was impressed with how much progress she had made in such a short time. She wasn’t ready to give a speech yet, but she was certainly conversational. Indeed, she was already building a friendship with, swapping recipes with, and learning to cook from the wife of the Iranian cardiologist who lived in the apartment next door—the woman who made such mouthwatering Persian stew. Claire and Mrs. Shirazi had made a pact to speak only Farsi when they were together. It was challenging, but it was already paying off.

  Charlie now removed from the utility chest a small box that looked like an alarm clock along with a set of simple headphones.

  “What is that?” Claire whispered.

  “It’s a radio.”

  “We already have a radio.”

  “This one’s different.”

  “How?”

  Charlie paused. There were secrets in his job he wasn’t authorized to share, even with his wife. But with events moving so rapidly, it was time to loosen the restrictions a little.

  “This one lets me listen in on the frequency the Marines are using inside the embassy.”

  Claire had no poker face, and her eyes betrayed the fears rising inside her. She wasn’t a fan of secrets. He wasn’t much of a fan either. But the simple fact was that his position in the Foreign Service was decidedly different from hers, and that difference just might keep them alive.

  Charlie set up the specialized radio, plugged in the headphones, and began listening to the cross traffic. His pulse quickened instantly as he immediately heard gunfire, cursing, and shouting.

  “Bravo Six, this is Tango Tango; what’s your twenty?”

  “Main vault, Tango.”

  “How many?”

  “I’ve got nine with me—there’s ten of us total.”

  “You guys okay?”

  “Negative, Tango. I’ve got one with a bullet wound to the leg. Several with serious lacerations on their faces and hands from shattered glass.”

  “Bogeys?”

  “Dozens, sir.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Pounding on the door with sledgehammers, sir. They’re demanding I let them in or—”

  “Can you hold your position, Bravo Six?”

  “I don’t know, sir. We have no food or water.”

  “What about the documents?”

  “Shredding them now, sir. But it’s going slow.”

  Suddenly Charlie felt the color draining from his face.

  Claire saw it. “What is it?”

  He just stood there shaking his head in disbelief.

  “What? What’s happening?” she pressed.

  “There was just a massive explosion,” he whispered. “People are screaming. I’ve never . . .”

  “Who? Where?”

  “Rick, Phil, Cort—I’m not sure who else. They’re hiding in the main vault, in the chancery. But I think the students just blew the doors off.”

  Charlie slowly took off the headphones and handed them to his wife, but she refused to put them on. She had neither the training nor the stomach for this.

  “It’s all going to be okay, isn’t it, Charlie?” Claire asked. “Like February. It’s going to be like the Valentine’s Day thing—short and done, right?”

  Charlie said nothing. He knew in his gut this wasn’t anything like the February 14 event, dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Open House by the other Foreign Service officers. Just nine months before, a much smaller group of students—a few hundred, perhaps—had briefly jumped the embassy’s fence, stormed into a few buildings, held them for a couple of hours, made a fuss, made their point, and then gone home after the Khomeini regime insisted that they do so.

  Claire was right; the Valentine’s Day incident had been short-lived. It had all happened before they’d arrived, but it was obvious that the effect on the decision makers in Washington had been enormous. Rather than inserting more Marines and engineers to harden and defend the American Embassy—thus sending an unequivocal message that such an assault against American sovereign territory in the heart of Tehran would never be tolerated again—the bureaucrats back at the White House and State Department had pa
nicked. They’d reduced the embassy’s staff from nearly a thousand to barely sixty. The Pentagon had shown a similar lack of resolve. The number of U.S. military forces in-country had been drawn down from about ten thousand active-duty troops to almost none.

  The only reason Charlie had been sent in—especially as green as he was—was because he happened to be one of the few men in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps who was actually fluent in Farsi. None of the three CIA guys on site even spoke the language. How was that possible? The whole notion of State Department and CIA personnel being inside a country whose language they didn’t speak seemed ludicrous to Charlie. How could one government understand another—much less build a healthy, positive, long-lasting relationship—without at least being able to talk in the other’s heart language? It couldn’t, Charlie knew, and now Washington was about to pay the piper.

  3

  “Get the suitcases,” Charlie ordered.

  Claire looked at him as if he’d just slapped her in the face.

  “That’s crazy,” she shot back, barely in a whisper. “What for?”

  “Pack one for me, one for you,” Charlie continued matter-of-factly. “Just essentials; keep it light.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, moving curtly to the sink and beginning to wash their breakfast dishes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Ten minutes,” he said calmly. “I’ll gather our money and personal documents, get the car, and meet you at the back entrance.” Then he left the kitchen and headed to the bedroom.

  “Charles David Harper, have you completely lost your mind?” she shouted after him, her voice taut with anger. “I’m not going out there, and neither are you. It’s not safe. We’re better off staying here.”

  Charlie came back around the corner as Claire turned to the sink again, pulled her hair into a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes, and continued washing their matching maroon U.S. Embassy in Tehran coffee mugs.

  He turned her around sharply and put his hand over her mouth. “We are leaving now,” he said as quietly as he could but with an intensity he knew Claire had never heard before. “Don’t you get it, Claire? Khomeini’s thugs have the entire embassy. They have the vaults. They have the files. They know who I am, and they’re going to want information I can give them. Right now they’re taking a roll call of every employee. When they find we’re missing, they’re going to look up our address. If it’s been destroyed, they’re going to put a gun to the head of Liz Swift. If she doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill her in front of everyone else. Then they’re going to ask Mike Metrinko. If he doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill him. Then they’re going to turn to John Limbert. And they’re going to keep killing people until someone breaks. I don’t know who it will be. But someone’s going to give them our address, and then they’re coming for us. And what do you think is going to happen next, Claire? Do you think they’re going to torture me?”

  Terrified, Claire shrugged, her big brown eyes filling rapidly with tears.

  “They’re not. I’m a six-foot-two, hundred-and-seventy-pound, former all-American point guard who speaks Farsi and has a Colt .45 on the kitchen table. No, they’re not going to torture me. They’re going to torture you, my love,” he said, “until I start talking. . . . And if they find out you’re pregnant . . .”

  Claire was trembling.

  “I would never let it get to that point,” Charlie assured her, his own eyes welling up with tears. “I couldn’t. I’d tell them everything. But honestly, I fear they’d still torture you anyway. That’s who we’re dealing with. I’m sorry, sweetheart. But there’s no way this ends well. Unless we leave—right now.”

  He paused a moment, then let go of her mouth and wiped his eyes.

  Claire immediately grabbed him and held him tightly. After a moment she stepped back and looked intently at her husband. She had been trembling, but now she seemed calm. “Ten minutes?” she asked.

  Charlie nodded.

  “I’ll be ready,” she promised.

  Ten minutes later, Charlie eased their black Buick Skylark onto Ferdowsi Avenue, dubbed “Embassy Row” by local diplomats.

  Were other Western missions under siege, he wondered, or just his own?

  The boulevard was as congested as ever, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. No protests. No demonstrations. No presidents or prime ministers being burned in effigy here, even though hideous mock-ups of President Carter were being torched just a few blocks away. It was odd. They were so close to the student mob, but here he could detect no hostilities of any kind. Still, Charlie could tell Claire was getting anxious. If they were going to get out of this city, they needed to do it quickly.

  “Where will we go?” she asked her husband.

  “I’m not sure,” Charlie conceded. “Even if we could make it to the airport, they’d never let us out of the country. Especially not with U.S. diplomatic passports.”

  “How about Turkey?” Claire asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “The nearest border is hundreds of miles away. And again, even if we could get that far without being detected, the military would never let us pass.”

  “Well, we can’t just hover here, Charlie. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just had to see . . .”

  There was no point finishing his sentence. Claire knew as well as he did that he hadn’t really needed to come to Embassy Row. The Iranians weren’t angry at the rest of the Western powers. The British hadn’t welcomed the despised Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into their country, even if it was “just” for medical treatment of an old man on his deathbed. Nor had the Turks or the Germans. Only the U.S. government had done that. Was it worth it?

  “Turn here,” Claire said without warning.

  Charlie took the advice and made a hard right on Kushk e-Mesri. He maneuvered the roomy four-door sedan down the narrow side street, knowing she was trying to get them off a major thoroughfare, where they ran a much higher risk of being spotted by uniformed police or plainclothes intelligence agents. But what she’d just done instead was head them straight into the campus of Tehran Technical School. It was an innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

  Another hotbed of radicalism in the capital, the campus and its adjacent streets were jammed with students. Just finished with their midday prayers, they were now chanting and marching. Some were firing machine guns into the air. Charlie could feel the same violent spirit that had pervaded the scene around the embassy, and he immediately slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. Jamming the car into reverse, he gunned the engine and began to back up but was cut off by a VW van filled with students that had come up behind them. The VW’s driver suddenly began screaming something about their American car, and six young men jumped out, carrying wooden sticks and metal pipes.

  “Lock your doors, Claire,” Charlie ordered, doing the same on his side.

  Wild-eyed, the students surrounded the Buick, taunting and cursing them.

  “Charlie, do something,” Claire said, clutching her purse with her passport and valuables to her chest.

  The students began rocking the car from side to side, trying to overturn it, but it was too heavy.

  “Charlie, for heaven’s sake, do something!”

  “Like what?” he shouted back, genuine fear in his voice. “If I drive this car forward or back, I’ll run over someone. Is that what you want?”

  A young woman—no more than seventeen or eighteen—was pouring something all over their car.

  “Of course not,” Claire said. “I’m just saying . . .”

  Charlie smelled gasoline. He knew what was coming next.

  At that moment, Claire cried out, doubled over, and grabbed her abdomen.

  “Honey, what is it?” Charlie asked.

  Claire didn’t look up. She was screaming in pain.

  Just then one of the students took a steel pipe and smashed the passenger-side window. Glass flew everywhere. Blood streake
d down Claire’s face. Then the student grabbed her and tried to pull her out of the car. Claire, tangled in her seat belt, screamed louder.

  Charlie was screaming too. He grabbed Claire’s arm, the one closest to him, and tried to pull her back into the car. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young woman who had poured the gasoline light a match and toss it onto the now-soaked hood. Suddenly the car was engulfed in flames.

  The heat was unbearable. Charlie feared the Buick’s full tank could explode at any moment. Seeing his briefcase on the floor by Claire’s feet, he reached for it, ripped it open, and pulled out the pistol.

  He saw another student heave a brick through their back window. More flying glass filled the car.

  Charlie pivoted, took aim, and fired at the attacker, dropping him with a single shot. Then he turned back to the student mauling his wife and double-tapped him to the head.

  Three shots in three seconds—the crowd began to scatter. But the gasoline-fed flames had now reached the rear of the Skylark and were already consuming the backseat. Charlie knew he was out of time. He threw open the driver’s-side door, jumped out, moved quickly to the passenger side, and pulled his wife’s limp body out of the flames and laid her down on the sidewalk as far from the burning car as he could. She was covered in blood. It wasn’t just the cuts to her face. Something else was terribly wrong.

  4

  Charlie feared the worst.

  He crouched beside the woman he loved, the woman who had swept him off his feet the moment they’d first met at a Harvard Crimson football game. She wasn’t moving.

  Charlie’s eyes blurred as he carefully rolled her onto her back, wiped blood from her mouth, and pushed strands of her brown hair from her eyes. His hands trembled as he held his breath and checked her pulse. Finding one startled him and gave him a shot of adrenaline. She wasn’t dead. He scanned the suddenly deserted street. He could still see a huge crowd of students demonstrating on the campus. But that was a ways off. Everyone in the immediate vicinity was gone—except the bodies of the two he had shot. The gunfire had scared everyone away.