Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “I don’t think so,” Badi said. “They told us other interesting pieces of information—such as some of them were captured by your men.”

  “My men? I came to Orumiyeh to preside over a stand-up ceremony for a border defense unit—I didn’t bring any men. I didn’t even bring…”

  He didn’t hear him coming until it was too late. While Buzhazi was distracted, Badi’s bodyguard had closed the office door, withdrawn a metal baton, and swung it full force, striking him in the right kidney area. Buzhazi’s vision exploded into a cloud of stars, and all he could hear was the terrifying sound of a freight train out of control rushing at full volume in his ears. He gasped at first until the full shrieking tsunami of pain rolled over him, and he cried aloud and dropped to the carpet, writhing in agony.

  “If I didn’t know you better, Hesarak,” Badi said, “I’d say you captured those prisoners and are secretly interrogating them.” Buzhazi didn’t hear him until Badi repeated himself a few moments later after the roaring in his ears had subsided. “What do you have to say to that, General?”

  “I…I’d say you know me pretty well, Muhammad, my old friend,” Buzhazi said through the choking clouds of pain.

  “Where are they? I want them.”

  “Of course you do, you piece of shit—because they’re Pasdaran, aren’t they?”

  Badi’s eyes widened in surprise and his mouth dropped open in confusion, but only for a moment, and then the crocodile’s smile came back. “Very clever, Hesarak. Did you know, or did you just guess?”

  “I suspected it, but when you showed up here, I knew,” Buzhazi groaned. “It’s the only logical reason why you would come down here and interrogate me personally. You sent Pasdaran Special Forces disguised as Kurds to attack fellow Iranian soldiers? Why, for God’s sake?” Badi didn’t answer—but his eyes told the whole story. “You’re shitting me, Badi—you did it because you thought the Internal Defense Forces would replace the Pasdaran as guardians of the revolution?”

  “Your units were good…almost too good,” Badi said. “You stood up that base at Orumiyeh for a tenth of what it would cost the Pasdaran, and in less time than anyone would have guessed. Yassini and the Supreme Defense Council were starting to take notice. A few on the Council argued that paramilitary forces couldn’t take the place of the Pasdaran, that they would flee at the first sign of the enemy—I just took his suggestion and staged a little raid. Your men didn’t run, I’ll give them that, but they were completely unprepared. It was easier than I ever could have hoped…”

  “Except for some of your men being captured, you mean?”

  “Before long you will be terminated, and soon after so too your Internal Defense Force project,” Badi went on, “and the Pasdaran’s budget and border security responsibilities will be fully restored—perhaps even increased, as they should be.”

  “You’re nothing but a sick, egomaniacal bastard, Badi,” Buzhazi said. “You can’t stand to be subordinate to anyone, so you stayed quiet about Tufayli’s incompetence as captain of the aircraft carrier Khomeini, and then after he was dead you blamed the whole defeat on me. I never would have thought you’d stoop so low as to kill your own people to advance your career.”

  “Why not, Hesarak? Your career certainly isn’t going anywhere. You could have raised the Prophet up from the dead, and you’d still be known as the one who lost Iran’s regional military domination to a numerically inferior Western force. And since Yassini is such a proponent of this idiotic Internal Defense Force idea, he’ll go down too…”

  “And you’ll be promoted as chief of staff and remain head of the Pasdaran.”

  “Why stop there? If I can plant enough false memos and directives, I might implicate the president in the whole Internal Defense Force scheme and take him down too—and I can slip into that position as well.”

  “All I have to do is trot out your Pasdaran agents captured in the raid wearing Kurdish terrorist outfits, and your game is up.”

  “Not if I can get to them first, Hesarak,” Badi said menacingly. “That’s why you’re going to tell me where they are.”

  “Screw you.”

  “General, I’m going to take great delight in watching you be tortured by my man here,” Badi said, nodding to the very large man standing over Buzhazi. “He’s going to do it the old-fashioned way—not with unpredictable drugs, but with good old-fashioned physical torture. You’re too old to resist it. My man is an expert on knowing exactly how far he can take old geezers like you through the corridors of pain, to the very thresholds of coma and death, without crossing over. All of your Shock Trooper training from thirty years ago won’t help you one bit.”

  “Fuck you, Badi.”

  “It’s going to take us a few minutes to get set up, Hesarak. We’ll let you think about what is about to happen to you. If you talk, and if what you say is true and my men are recovered, I’ll kill you quick and painlessly. Otherwise, you will experience levels of pain that you can’t imagine. And it won’t be continuous or cause unconsciousness—it’ll be slow, lingering, sharp, and unexpected. Before long you’ll be screaming information at me and begging for mercy. You can end any such unpleasantness by telling me what I want to know. I know my man here will be disappointed by not performing his tricks on you, but he’ll get over it, I’m sure.”

  Badi rose from the desk, grabbed Buzhazi by the hair, and said in his face, “You’ll be taken to an interrogation room, Hesarak, and prepped. You’ll be ‘wired for sound,’ as they say—your tongue, your testicles, your heart, and your entire nervous system will be plugged into a nice big electrical transformer that we can precisely control. But there is no ‘volume control’ on this device, Hesarak—just an ‘on’ and ‘off’ switch. It’s full voltage every time. It’ll be interesting to see how you do. I strongly recommend you tell me what I want to know, now, before the fun really begins.”

  “I said, go screw yourself, Badi,” Buzhazi said. “By the time you get anything out of me, my men will have changed locations a half-dozen times. If I’m dead, my men will trot out those captured Pasdaran commandos and release their videotaped confessions. The warrant for your arrest will be issued shortly after that. You might as well start getting out of the country now. May I suggest South America?”

  “At the very least, we can find out what else you might know,” Badi said. “As I said, as we go on, you’ll be most anxious to tell us all sorts of things. This I guarantee. Good-bye, Hesarak. This will probably be the last time I see you with all of your faculties still intact.” Badi patted Buzhazi’s face, then motioned to the bodyguard. “Have the general taken to an interrogation room and prepared for his ‘debriefing.’ Have them notify me immediately when he breaks.” The bodyguard nodded and opened the door for the general…

  …and Badi saw a man in light gray fatigues, desert combat boots, and the blue beret of the Iranian Air forces standing in the doorway. Behind him stood three soldiers, similarly dressed, carrying automatic rifles. “What is this?” he shouted.

  “Greetings, General Badi,” the first soldier said—and in the blink of an eye he raised a sound-suppressed Russian Makarov automatic pistol, fired three shots just past Badi’s left ear and directly into the torturer’s face, then pushed Badi inside and closed the door, leaving his three soldiers to guard the outside. The soldier dumped Badi to the carpet with a kick to the side of his left knee. The Pasdaran general screamed aloud at the pain and shock of the sudden attack. “Who in hell are you?” he cried.

  “You don’t recognize me, General?” the soldier asked. “You took great delight in ruining my career about eleven years ago.” He tossed a set of handcuff keys to the Pasdaran commander, then pressed his pistol against his forehead. “While you’re thinking, release General Buzhazi, now.”

  Badi crawled over to Buzhazi and unlocked the handcuffs; Buzhazi grabbed the keys and released the waist chain. “Now I remember…Sattari. Mansour Sattari, Buzhazi’s chief of staff.”

  “Very good, Gen
eral,” the young officer said. After the handcuffs were removed, Sattari had Badi place them on himself, then helped Buzhazi to his feet and waited until the injured general was able to stay on his feet by himself. “If the general is injured, Badi, you die right here and now.”

  “Killing me won’t help you get out of here,” Badi said. “There are over a thousand armed Pasdaran guards here.”

  “Your security force here at Doshan Tappeh is exactly three hundred and fifteen soldiers per shift, Badi,” Sattari said. “I brought a team of just a hundred lightly armed Internal Defense Force soldiers and killed or captured every one of the guards on duty already. Your day shift got too cocky and overconfident, Badi—they obviously thought no one ever wants to break into a Pasdaran compound, especially at daytime.”

  “You won’t get out of here alive, Sattari.”

  “We’ve got units monitoring the eight other Pasdaran bases in the city, and if they move on us they’ll be neutralized as well. We’ll be out of here before any other security forces arrive—and you’ll be long dead.” He raised the pistol.

  “Wait,” Buzhazi said. He took the pistol from Sattari’s hands. “I think it’d be better to put him on trial for the murders of all those men and women in Orumiyeh. We have positive proof that the men we captured alive were Pasdaran?”

  “No question, sir,” Sattari said.

  “All your evidence could’ve been faked with ease,” Badi said. “Besides, the Supreme Defense Council won’t accept any evidence you give them. They’ll blame it all on internecine rivalry and warfare and send us both on our ways—except the Pasdaran will be after you and all the traitors who joined you as soon as the Council adjourns. You might as well use this temporary advantage to flee the country, Buzhazi, before you are publicly executed for treason—by me.” Sattari and Buzhazi looked at each other—obviously the very same thought had crossed their minds. Iran was no place for them now, and it was too late to turn back. “The Basij have no hope of eliminating the Pasdaran, Hesarak. It was created solely as a means of providing the Pasdaran with cannon fodder so the Iraqis would waste their bullets on them and allow the Pasdaran to attack during the War of Glorification. Your Basij forces will always be nothing but cannon fodder.”

  “We took your headquarters with little trouble,” Sattori said.

  Badi ignored him. “With you in temporary control of this base, you can hijack an aircraft that will easily take you to Africa, Europe, or Asia. Better get out now, while you can.” He smiled as he watched Sattari silently pleading for Buzhazi to agree, and he saw Buzhazi’s eyes start to dart back and forth as his mind examined his options over and over again…

  …milliseconds before Buzhazi said, “No, Mansour. We continue as planned,” then fired three bullets into Badi’s brain.

  Sattari spit on the nearly headless corpse and nodded. “Good riddance. That should’ve been done years ago.”

  “We’re committed now, my friend,” Buzhazi said, checking the pistol, accepting a full magazine from Sattari, and reloading it. “Let’s avenge the deaths of our brothers in the Internal Defense Forces, and then let’s get this revolution started.”

  CHAPTER 2

  OVER THE HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE

  WEAPONS CENTER, ELLIOTT AIR FORCE

  BASE, GROOM LAKE, NEVADA

  WEEKS LATER

  Boomer always thought that it felt like hitting the water on the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland, bumpy and noisy amidst the sudden shock of deceleration—except the feeling lasted eight minutes, not two seconds.

  With a one-hundred-eighty-degree x-axis turn and a ninety-second burn from the Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System, the XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane slowed down to about five thousand miles per hour and immediately began its descent through the atmosphere. Once slowed down, Hunter Noble used the spaceplane’s maneuvering rockets to turn forward again, then lift the nose slightly to the proper altitude to expose the heat-proof carbon-carbon underside of the Black Stallion to the worst of the friction. He followed an electronic cueing system displayed on his primary multi-function display, similar to a terrestrial Instrument Landing System—as long as he kept the crosshairs perfectly centered in the middle of the display, he was on course and on glidepath for atmospheric reinsertion.

  “Boomer, check your flight control computers, they’re not engaged,” the crew mission commander, First Lieutenant Dorothea Benneton, call-sign “Nano,” said from the forward compartment. Benneton was a high-energy, type-A personality, barely contained by an engineering degree and an Air Force commission—she liked to party and she liked being in control of every situation. She had to take a deep breath and force her words from her mouth through the high G loading during re-entry. “Did they pop off-line?”

  “No, I just didn’t engage—I thought I’d hand-fly this re-entry,” Boomer replied, his voice shaky and hoarse as well.

  “Don’t you screw with my test parameters, Boomer, or I’ll kick your butt,” Benneton warned only half-jokingly. “Stay on glidepath.”

  During re-entry the air around the spacecraft got so hot that it ionized and disrupted normal radio communications, so the team normally used a laser radio system that bounced laser beams between satellites to communicate with the spaceplane. But the message they received was actually over the normal encrypted UHF radio channel: “Stud Two, this is Control, how do you hear?” radioed Air Force Colonel Martin Tehama, the commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, from his headquarters at Elliott Air Force Base.

  “Three by, Control,” Boomer replied. He turned to Nano and gave her a wink. “Looks like your gadget is working, Dottie.” Enough heat was being sucked away from the skin to keep the air from ionizing, permitting regular radio communications.

  “Why aren’t you on auto control, Two?” Tehama asked. “I show the flight control system in ‘STANDBY.’ Is there a problem?”

  “Now I’m getting the nagging in stereo,” Boomer said. Reluctantly he switched on the autopilot, keeping his hands on the controls until he was sure the system was responding properly. “Everyone happy now?”

  “Why do we bother writing up a test flight plan if you’re not going to follow it, Boomer?” the commander asked. To Benneton he said, “Nice job on the protection system upgrades, Lieutenant. Looks like it’s working pretty well.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Nano responded, grunting through the G-forces. “I’ve still got some higher than expected temperatures in the cargo bay, but it looks like the temperature’s holding—Boomer hasn’t fried anything yet.”

  As they continued their descent the aerodynamic flight controls took greater and greater effect, and soon they were executing some lazy-eights and steep-banked S-turns across the sky, which helped to slow and cool the spacecraft even more. With the outside thermal protection layer temperatures now below 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—the safe structural temperature limit for the spacecraft’s titanium-vanadium skeleton—Boomer was clear to maneuver as he pleased, and he headed straight for Elliott Air Force Base’s 23,000-foot long runway on Groom Lake in south-central Nevada.

  It was not Hunter’s best landing. He turned toward the runway late and landed about three hundred feet short, on the overrun—fortunately the overrun, while not stressed as highly as the main runway, supported the Black Stallion’s weight adequately. He noticed fire and rescue trucks racing toward him as he zoomed down the runway, then slamming on the brakes and reversing direction as he zipped past the preplanned stopping point. He used almost every foot of the three-mile-long runway to stop, but he safely turned off before reaching the end and headed for the hangars.

  “The cargo compartment monitors shut down—probably due to high heat,” Nano said as she monitored the computerized shutdown process. “If my experiment is trashed, Boomer, I’m going to give you a smack in the head.” Noble didn’t respond. As soon as the onboard data was collected, the spacecraft completely shut down, and the inspection stand rolled into place, she hopped out and c
limbed up onto the platform to look at the cargo bay passenger module.

  Hunter had a bad feeling about the outcome when he saw daggers flying out of Nano’s eyes, aimed directly at him. “What?” he asked.

  “Black streaks coming out of the seam in the bay doors,” Benneton said frostily.

  “The whole spacecraft is black, Nano. How can you…?”

  “It’s built-up heat and oxidation, Boomer,” she said. “I’m going to slit your throat, I swear.” A few minutes later, with firefighters and paramedics standing by, they opened up the cargo doors—and an undulating, shimmering gray cloud of smoke and heat rolled out. Nano was shaking her fist in the spaceplane pilot’s direction as she stared into the cargo hold. “Boomer, wait till I get my hands on you…!”

  It took several long, agonizing moments to move a crane into position to lift the passenger module out of the cargo bay and onto a cradle in the hangar. Luckily the cradle was covered with heat-resistant materials, because the module was definitely hot, like a fat steak fresh off the barbecue. As expected, the electrical door opening mechanisms didn’t work, so the ground crews started to work on the mechanical locks. By the time the locks had been twisted free, a small crowd had gathered at the hatch, morbidly curious as to what the insides looked like. Nano herself grabbed a pair of insulated gloves and grasped the latch…but before Benneton could open the hatch, the levers moved and the door swung open from the inside.

  “About time, Doc,” the electronically synthesized voice of Air Force Brigadier General Hal Briggs said. A wave of heat rolled out through the open hatch. “We thought you guys forgot about us.”

  “For God’s sake, General…are you all right?” Benneton asked breathlessly.