The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  The Chinese driving the Lada cried out and yanked the steering wheel to the right, but the momentum of the two cars speeding toward each other was too much to overcome.

  Mark put his arms out and braced himself against the rear of the front seat.

  35

  DECKER EYED THE couple who’d picked him up. Both early twenties, he figured. The driver wore sunglasses and a tight red ski sweater. He’d combed his longish jet-black hair straight back, exposing a high forehead. The young woman wore makeup and had plucked her eyebrows. Her green headscarf had slipped down to her shoulders, revealing long brown hair that framed a pretty face.

  It pained Decker when she looked at him with such horror.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He glanced out the rear windshield. They’d left the guard who’d been running after them behind. But that guard would have sounded the alarm.

  “Where do you come from?” The driver spoke in heavily accented English. A tape cassette of a woman singing a plaintive song in Farsi played on the stereo.

  “Canada.”

  “I never go to Canada.”

  “I was robbed.” It was hard for Decker to speak. All his words came out so raspy that he didn’t even recognize his own voice. “I was hitchhiking and they beat me and robbed me.”

  “Maybe because you show the thumb. Here, that is like, how do you say? F-U-C-K you. Some of the people in the mountains are not so smart, maybe they think you insult them. For hitchhiking you must wave the hand. I hitchhiked once in California. You need a doctor.”

  “No.” Decker shook his head. “No doctor. I’m OK.”

  After an uncomfortable silence, the driver said, “Maybe the police can find these people who beat you. We will take you to the police.”

  Decker looked out the rear window. They passed a roadside kebab restaurant. A few modest houses lined the steep banks on either side of the road. He wished the guy would drive faster, but when he looked he saw the gas pedal was already pushed to the floor. At the next cluster of houses he’d have them stop, he thought. Maybe he could steal a car. He thought of trying to steal the car he was in, but didn’t feel up to overpowering its current occupants.

  “No. No police. Do you have anything to drink?”

  The driver lifted up a ski jacket from the space on the front seat between him and the woman, revealing a six-pack of Coke. The woman handed Decker one, but when he tried to open it, his swollen fingers couldn’t do it. The woman’s eyes widened when she saw Decker’s mutilated hands. Decker looked back right at her, thinking, let it go.

  He handed her the Coke. “Could you open this for me?”

  His voice trembled. She popped the can open and handed it back to him. He tried to take a big gulp, but the liquid was cold. His throat convulsed and he spit it up into his hands.

  He felt like an alien.

  “I’ll go soon.” He looked out the rear window again. A street sign said Fasten your seat belt in English. Between the Coke and the sign in English, Decker wondered whether he was going crazy.

  “Doctor,” said the girlfriend.

  “No.” Decker took another sip of the Coke, and this time the liquid went down, so he took another sip, and then another until he’d finished the can.

  The girlfriend opened another and handed it to him. Decker finished that one too. The car came to a long ridge, and Decker turned to look behind him. He could see the better part of a mile or so of the road they’d just climbed. Two lanes wide, it wound down through the steep brown hills. An electric power line, with gray metal towers spaced every few hundred feet, paralleled the road.

  A green Peugeot was about a half mile behind them and gaining fast, accelerating through the curves.

  At the end of the ridge, at a spot where there was a ravine not unlike the one from which he’d escaped, Decker said, “Stop.”

  “A town,” said the driver. “Three kilometers. We’ll take you. We’ll stop there.”

  “Here,” said Decker. He should have gotten out at the cluster of houses he’d seen back down the road. He wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “Three kilometers. The town will be better.”

  By then the green Peugeot would have caught up. Decker gripped the driver’s shoulder with his wounded hand and gave a violent squeeze. “Here, goddammit! Here!”

  The car slowed to a stop and backfired.

  “I’m sorry,” said Decker.

  “American?” said the woman.

  “I need the rest of the soda!”

  “Get out,” said the driver.

  The girlfriend quickly handed Decker four more cans of Coke, along with a large bag of sugared almonds. Decker mumbled his thanks and opened the door. As he was stumbling out of the car, she pulled out a half-full bottle of Smirnoff vodka from underneath the passenger seat.

  “Na!” said the driver to his girlfriend. The look on his face said no way in hell are we giving him that.

  “For face,” said the girlfriend, looking at Decker. “For clean.” She touched her face, as if swabbing it with a cotton ball, and pushed the bottle of vodka into his hands.

  36

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  WHEN MARK REGAINED consciousness, he was in the front seat of the Lada, his face mashed up against the dashboard and surrounded by shattered glass. A police car, its hood reduced to an accordion-like crumple, lay a couple of feet in front of him.

  A strange silence persisted, as though time had stopped. For a moment Mark wondered if he’d been rendered deaf.

  Broken glass tinkled as it fell to the asphalt.

  Someone groaned. Mark lifted his head. The Lada hadn’t been equipped with airbags and the seat belts had been removed, so the two Chinese who’d been in the front seat had been thrown outside—one lay facedown on the pavement, the other sprawled awkwardly on the hood of the police car. Both were motionless and bleeding, their bodies twisted into unnatural positions. Thompson was unconscious in the back of the Lada, slumped in a kneeling position on the floor. The groaning had come from the Chinese who was still in the backseat next to Thompson.

  The driver’s side door of the police car opened. Daria unbuckled her seat belt, pushed away the deflated airbag, and stumbled out.

  The Chinese next to Thompson groaned again, so Mark aimed a foot at the man’s head and kicked him as hard as he could until Daria climbed onto the hood of the car. “Gotta get out of here, Mark.”

  She pulled him out through the front windshield. His face and hands scraped against the broken glass. He rolled off what was left of the hood of the car and hit the pavement on his knees.

  “Can you stand?” asked Daria.

  Mark forced himself to do so. The world was spinning. He felt nauseous and had an unsettling feeling that his head wasn’t properly attached to his neck.

  “I’m good.”

  Quick footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see a single Chinese embassy soldier sprinting toward them with a worried look on his face and an automatic rifle slung across his back.

  Mark stumbled to the Lada, pried open one of the back doors, and grabbed a pistol from the Chinese he’d been kicking. Gripping it with both hands, he swiveled and fired a warning shot.

  The embassy soldier stopped short. He’d clearly been expecting to help with an accident, not become a part of a firefight.

  Mark fired another shot above the guy’s head.

  Daria screamed out something in Mandarin Chinese. The soldier let his rifle slip off his back and sprinted back to the embassy gate. He’d return within a minute, Mark knew. With reinforcements.

  Daria retrieved the soldier’s rifle. “We’re outta here!”

  “Thompson.” Mark’s head was pounding. Blood from little cuts on his head dripped into his eyes.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. “No time.”

  “Help me get him out.”

  Daria face registered exasperation. “You get him out, I’ll get us a car.”

  Mark pocketed the gun of the Chinese who remained
unconscious in the Lada and dragged Thompson out of the backseat. Thompson was a thin but tall man, and Mark struggled with the dead weight.

  Fifty feet behind him, Daria commandeered a Volga sedan at gunpoint from a man who had stopped to gawk at the accident. She pulled up next to the ruined Lada and skidded to a stop.

  Mark yanked open the rear door, clasped his hands around Thompson’s chest, and heaved him into the backseat of the Volga.

  37

  Washington, DC

  “AIM POINT ONE, Arak.”

  A satellite image appeared on an LCD monitor. The monitor was embedded in a sound-dampening fabric wall at the far end of the conference table in the White House situation room. A PowerPoint slide with a series of bullet points popped up on an adjacent monitor: 40 megawatt heavy water reactor, air defense protection, onsite government housing, collateral damage risk: low.

  “Accepted,” said the president’s national security advisor. The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the commander of CENTCOM, and the secretary of state—all members of the principal’s committee—concurred.

  “Confirmed,” said the president. He took a big sip of his black coffee. It was six in the morning. He’d made his decision.

  “Aim point two, Natanz.”

  The satellite image showed a lonely collection of buildings right where the desert met the Zagros Mountains.

  The bullet points on the PowerPoint slide said: Uranium enrichment site, 9000 centrifuges confirmed, heavily fortified, collateral damage risk: low.

  “This slide bears some additional explanation,” said the secretary of defense. “Note that the armaments slated for the first attack include three twenty-two-thousand-pound MOAB bombs to clear the surface, followed by four of our thirty-thousand-pound bunker busters. When those go off in quick succession, it may cause enough of a seismic event that the Russians and Chinese will assume we’ve hit the Iranians with a tactical nuke. We’ll have to have our diplomats ready to shoot that theory down pronto before it gets out of hand.”

  “Understood,” said the secretary of state.

  “Also, there could be a decent amount of both low and highly enriched uranium at the bomb site, which will complicate onsite confirmation of complete destruction. The cleanup team that goes in will have to be prepared for the radiation factor.”

  The CENTCOM commander said, “They are. But when it comes to Natanz, everyone needs to understand that heavily fortified means that the two main centrifuge halls we know of are both protected by two-point-five-meter-thick walls made of reinforced concrete, are buried at least ten meters in the ground, and further protected by a thick surface layer of concrete. Even with the new bunker busters, those underground halls are a tough aim point. The only way the air force feels comfortable guaranteeing their demolition is with an actual tactical nuke.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” said the national security advisor.

  “We’ll hit it with the bunker busters until we get the job done,” said the president. “If the SEAL team we send down to confirm destruction needs to finish the job, then that’s what they’ll do. We’ll need boots on the ground to take out Fordo anyway.”

  “Target accepted with conventional armaments,” said the national security advisor.

  The rest concurred and the president confirmed the decision, as he did the decision to hit Fordo—a heavily fortified uranium-enrichment site that the Iranians had built under a mountain—with a combination of conventional armaments and a Special Forces cleanup team.

  “Aim point four, Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor.”

  “Obviously this is a tough one,” said the secretary of defense.

  The satellite image showed a red dot in the middle of an urban area in northern Tehran.

  “Define high collateral damage,” said the president, after reading the accompanying slide.

  “Two to three hundred civilians plus the technicians on site. Plus they use the reactor for medical purposes. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand patients a week are dependent on it.”

  “Are the heavy bombs necessary?”

  “If we play it safe and dial down the armaments, we’d probably be able to limit immediate collateral damage to the technicians on site. But if we want to be sure we’ve taken it out completely, including the tunnels we believe are buried beneath the visible buildings, then we should go with the targeteers’ recommendation.”

  “North Tehran is the stronghold of the reformists,” said the secretary of state. “If we kill large numbers of civilians there, it will only drive them to the hard-liners. Intelligence is spotty about the tunnels and what they might contain. I’ll accept the aim point, but with reduced armaments.”

  “My view is that the aim point should be accepted with recommended armaments,” said the national security advisor. “The reformists will rally around the flag the second the first bomb falls, collateral damage or not.”

  “I agree,” said the president. “Level the place.”

  The rest of the committee concurred.

  38

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  “IS HE ALIVE?” asked Daria.

  Mark sat beside Thompson in the rear seat of the commandeered Volga. He put his finger on Thompson’s neck, feeling for the carotid artery.

  “Yeah.” He gave Thompson a light tap on the stomach. “William, you with us!”

  There was no response.

  “What do we do with him?”

  Mark’s head was pounding. “The US embassy. We’ll leave him there. How did you find me?”

  Daria explained how she’d gotten the message he’d left on her phone and set up a surveillance post with a view of the arch. After the Chinese had closed in and shot the Turkmen soldier, police from all over the city had descended on the scene within minutes. One of them had left his car running, so she’d stolen it—with all that was happening in the square, no one noticed her driving off—and had headed to the Chinese embassy. “I recognized a few of the guys who grabbed you. They’re definitely Chinese Guoanbu. I knew they operated out of the embassy. So I took my best guess and drove right there.”

  “And ran straight into us.”

  “The Turkmen spent a ton on new Mercedes police cars last year. I figured the Mercedes had airbags and I was hoping you were in the backseat of that Lada.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “My options were limited.”

  Mark couldn’t argue with that.

  “I couldn’t let them take you past the embassy gates,” she added. “If that happened—”

  “You did the right thing.” He’d been planning on running, but he might not have made it. “Thanks.” He turned to face her, and they locked eyes for a moment. “Really, I appreciate what you did.”

  The US embassy in Ashgabat, a boxy, low-slung building clad in bluish-gray tiles, reminded Mark of a shower stall. The only remarkable thing about it was the massive satellite dish mounted in the rear of the property and the bristling nest of antennae protruding from its roof.

  A guy in a black T-shirt with bulging arms and a radio headset kept watch from behind the tall, wrought-iron perimeter fence. A couple of Turkmen soldiers in camouflage uniforms walked back and forth along the outside of the fence.

  Daria stopped about fifty feet from the entrance. Mark opened the rear door and dragged Thompson out onto the sidewalk. One of the Turkmen soldiers yelled at him to stop.

  Mark hopped back in the car as Daria punched her foot down on the accelerator.

  As they sped off toward the northern outskirts of the city, Daria said, “They’re going to come looking for us. The Americans. The Chinese. The Turkmen. Everyone.”

  Mark didn’t respond for a while. But as they were passing over the bridge that spanned the Kara-Kum Canal, the artificial waterway that ran almost the entire length of the country, he said, “They’ll come looking for me, you mean. You’re not on the CIA’s radar, and no one saw you at the arch. If you act now, you can proba
bly make it out of the country safely.”

  “We need to call Holtz.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “And we should call him now, before the Agency puts someone on him. He’s our only lead on Decker.”

  39

  DECKER HOBBLED DOWN the gentle slope on the right side of the road, but as soon as the couple who’d helped him had driven out of sight, he retraced his steps, climbing backward so the prints made by his bare feet would still appear to be going downhill. He couldn’t bend his left leg, but by keeping it locked at the knee, he was able to use it like a crutch.

  Fighting through the pain, he half jogged, half limped up the road a bit then began to climb the steep slope above it. About halfway up, he collapsed behind a large rock as his pursuers raced by in the green Peugeot. They would catch up with the couple soon, he knew. And when they did, the couple would bring everyone back to this place. But with any luck, his pursuers would think that he’d gone down the hill in the direction of the houses below. That’s what a rational person would do.

  He still had a chance. The mountains here were huge. Desolate and bare, but huge. All he needed was someplace safe to hole up in for a day, so that his pursuers would be forced to further widen their search and spread themselves thin. The terrain would be as unforgiving for them as it was for him.

  Decker took out one of the pruning shears’ blades and used it to stab open one of the Coke cans. He downed it all in a few seconds, carefully put the empty in one of his jacket pockets, ate two handfuls of sugared almonds, and began to climb again. The pain in his leg from the bullet wound was excruciating, but the pain in his bare feet, swollen from the bastinado and bleeding from the sharp rocks on the mountainside that had pierced his soles, was worse. After five minutes, he collapsed.