False Flag

by F. W. Rustmann Jr.

  The two of them pushed the car up a few feet until it was fully parallel to the road. It was harder to do than either one of them expected. Santos had to give his chest frequent breaks from the pressure of pushing, and MacMurphy had to navigate a slight limp.

  MacMurphy said, “Make sure we’re not seen. We need to clean up and get rid of everything. Go get that other guy and drag him over here behind the car.”

  Another car approached from the north. They heard it before they saw its headlights. Both of them took cover behind the assassins’ car. MacMurphy groaned as his bad shin landed on a fallen branch. The car drove past and disappeared down the road, tires crunching on broken glass.

  Santos leaned his rifle against the car and hurried across the street to where Abu Salah lay. The .38 revolver lay in the grass next to Abu Salah’s hand. He carefully picked it up and stuffed it in the corpse’s pocket. Then he grabbed a handful of shirt behind the neck, braced himself against the pain in his chest, dragged the lifeless body across the street, and dumped it behind the car.

  MacMurphy had already pulled the Iranian out from behind the wheel and stuffed him into the back of the car on the floor. “You can put that asshole on top of this one in the back,” said MacMurphy. He found the trunk lid button and pressed it. “I’ll dump the lady in the trunk.”

  Moments later, they stood quietly behind the car, sweating from adrenaline and exertion. Santos said, “Stay here. I’ll get something to clean off the seats and windshield and a blanket to cover those two guys in the back. Then we need to get this wreck as far away from here as possible.”

  Santos soon returned with a blanket and a towel from the house. They started cleaning the blood off the front seats and the windshield and covering the bodies in the back. The windshield remained smudged but, fortunately, the worst streaks were on the passenger side. It would not obstruct the driver’s vision much.

  Another car passed by but did not stop or slow. They ducked out of sight—MacMurphy was more mindful of his leg this time. As soon as it passed, they policed the area of brass bullet casings and kicked glass out of the road. The casings disappeared into the trunk along with the bloody towel.

  MacMurphy said, “That’s enough. Let’s get out of here. We can finish policing up the brass in the morning. You want to drive this or Kashmiri’s car?”

  Santos said, “You know where you’re going. So you take this and I’ll follow you.”

  “Stay close. We’ll take the old Larnaca road. It runs parallel to the highway but it’s pretty quiet. If I recall correctly, we passed a wooded area near a small village when we drove from the airport to Kashmiri’s house. It’s about ten miles from here. Just a wide spot in the road. We’ll find a place around there where we can pull the car off into the woods. If we’re lucky, it’ll be days or weeks before anyone finds this mess.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Santos.

  It was early in the morning when they returned to Kashmiri’s house. The terrain was not exactly as MacMurphy remembered. They had to search for more than an hour to find a suitable place to cache the demolished Ford Focus. But once the car was pulled out of sight and into the brush and covered with branches, it was almost invisible from the road. The dark green color of the car helped its camouflage considerably.

  Back at the house they poured themselves generous portions of cognac, congratulated themselves on a job well done, showered, tended to their injuries and went to bed. The next morning they were anxious to wrap things up and get out of the country. They finished policing the brass and cleaned up Kashmiri’s house, leaving no evidence behind.

  Late in the afternoon, they drove Kashmiri’s car to the parking garage where they had left the Lexus rental and drove back to Kashmiri’s house in the two vehicles. They locked Kashmiri’s car in the garage and drove the Lexus south to the Limassol Marina. There, they handed the duffle bag full of arms, ammunition, Kevlar vests, clothing, and other suspicious items to Fotopolous on the Theano. Fotopolous was instructed to dispose of the items in any way he saw fit.

  Their next stop was Larnaca Airport where they returned the Lexus and booked a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. The last thing they did before boarding the plane was call Maggie and tell her all was well. Their mission was accomplished and they were heading home.

  Rothmann would be very pleased.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Yasmin Ghorbani enjoyed a successful career as an operations officer in the CIA. After being brought inside by the DDO, she handled Pouri Hoseini from headquarters for nearly three productive years. Pouri became a prolific and high quality source on Iran’s nuclear program, foreign affairs, and intelligence operations.

  Yasmin was later assigned overseas to a succession of increasingly important positions in Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia before returning to headquarters as a promoted member of the Senior Intelligence Service. She was awarded the position of deputy chief of the Near East Division.

  Pouri Hoseini worked as a denied area agent for the CIA for several years until her husband was promoted to a political counselor in the Iranian embassy in London. She continued to report clandestinely from London during the three years of his assignment. At the completion of the assignment, when they were due to return to Tehran, she and her entire family defected to the United States. They were resettled with new identities in Houston, Texas.

  She and Yasmin were reunited in America and remained friends for the rest of their lives.

  Hadi Kashmiri declined the CIA’s offer of resettlement in America. Instead, he continued to run his businesses and travel frequently in Europe and the Middle East, although he never again set foot in Iran or Lebanon. On one of his trips to London, almost two years after MacMurphy and Santos left his house in Cyprus, he was shot in the back of the head with a .22 caliber pistol in front of his apartment door.

  The assassin was never identified.

  Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah continues to run Hezbollah. Although his grasp on the organization was greatly diminished after the escape of the American hostage and the deaths of Abu Salah and the two Iranian operatives, he was eventually able to negotiate a firmer foothold at the expense of war-torn Syria, which resulted in even closer cooperation with and enhanced assistance from Iran.

  Hezbollah now employs as many as 65,000 fighters, making it by far the largest guerilla force in the world. It employs an arsenal of more than 130,000 rockets and anti-ship missiles, more than the combined total of all non–United States NATO member states. This arsenal could seriously threaten Israeli and American shipping in the region.

  Intelligence estimates indicate Hezbollah may also possess chemical and biological weapons. In 2016, Nasrallah threatened to launch rocket attacks at an ammonia plant north of Haifa. A hit on these tanks could create a nuclear-bomb effect greater than the devastation wrought by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.