If the oxygen switch wasn’t done correctly, even one breath of regular air would be enough to contaminate my system, and I’d have to start all over. Trouble was, there would be no starting over. We didn’t have the time. It was a one-shot deal.
The sergeant puffed oxygen from my tank to purge the regulator and made the switch. The readout on my visor blinked from Standby to 100%. All good. I had twenty minutes of oxygen, and the countdown had already started.
Even though I was being dropped from 42,000 feet Pressure Altitude, my LZ was 6,292 feet above sea level. That meant I would have to open my main chute at 8,792 feet Pressure Altitude, which was actually 2,500 feet Absolute Height Above Ground with an Elapsed Time after jumping of four minutes and fifty-six seconds. This was not a give-or-take situation. Give-or-take meant you were squashed against a mountaintop like a bug against a windshield. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but that was no way to go.
“Okay, Mr. Conlan,” Dooley said. “Six minutes, and we’re going to open her up.”
The sergeant gave me the once-over, and I gave him a thumbs-up. The jump light on the bulkhead panel glowed red.
Six minutes. My mind looped through the commands drilled into me by the Black Hats at jump school in Fort Benning. The one that stood out was: “Don’t get all amped up. You’re only going one hundred twenty miles per hour. A walk in the park.” The Black Hats were renowned for their sarcasm.
Six minutes: get ready!
Six short minutes; 360 seconds that tightened my nerves like a ratchet. My mouth went dry, but my heart rate hadn’t jumped two beats. Nice, easy breaths. Nothing too deep.
I did a slow, methodical equipment check. Not that I wasn’t confident in Dooley’s handiwork. But it was a good way to pass 360 seconds.
I stepped through my mission. The Iranians had made an art out of hiding the key components of their nuclear weapons program. You could apply only so much science to ferreting out hidden factories and industrial plants. The way to crash any well-orchestrated shell game was to dig under the shells. You did that with boots on the ground and people. The plan was to link up with the MEK inside Tehran, but the operation had been plagued with double crosses from the start. So I turned to a back-up plan, one that I would stitch together on the fly, using a guy whose life I’d once saved from an ambush perpetrated by one of the most ruthless drug dealers ever to invade American soil.
Charles Amadi. Nephew of Abbu Amadi, known publicly as the prime minister of the Republic of Iran; known privately as an ardent foe of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Charlie was just as ardent, and I planned to tap his zeal.
Charles hadn’t followed his uncle’s footsteps into politics. Charlie had spent a few years in America running errands for the Iranian drug cartel in the 1970s and had returned to his native land after the revolution, intent on maximizing the black market that was the inevitable result of a nation run by a tyrant. Over the years, he’d built an underground network that smuggled and sold everything from electronics and booze to hard cash and information. Charlie wasn’t picky about what he sold as long as the bottom line was drenched in black.
He and I hadn’t seen each other in years. No matter. He would listen to my pitch because that’s how men of honor acted when it was time to repay a debt.
Dooley disconnected the umbilical cord that connected me to the airplane’s electrical power. He switched off our handheld comms and relieved me of mine. Now the static inside my earpiece went silent and the drone of the C-17’s turboprops replaced it. The console battery had thirty minutes’ worth of juice to power my GPS system and to heat my suit and gloves.
A battery of servos groaned. The hull at the back of the fuselage cracked apart. A pair of thin, bright lines connected together by a quirk of physics appeared. The lines widened into a parallelogram framed by the aft cargo doors and ramp. The sky shone white and brilliant, like a glimpse into a different dimension.
I blinked and felt my adrenaline surging. The plan was to land in predawn darkness. This was more like the glare of an early-morning sunrise, the kind that made driving east a royal pain in the ass. The split second of alarm passed as quickly as it had come when logic set in, and I realized we were forty-two thousand feet above my landing sight. Up here, dawn was already a reality. By the time I’d enjoyed the ride of my life and deployed my parachute, I’d be nicely masked by twilight.
The ramp descended until it was level with the cargo floor. The sergeant held up an index and middle finger. Two minutes.
One hundred twenty seconds. Okay, I’d successfully navigated for four minutes and Mother Nature still hadn’t called. I guess I was up the creek if she did. Dooley was still staring at me, waiting for some sign that I had gotten his message, so I gave him a brief nod.
He gestured toward the ramp ominously hinged to the cargo deck. The gesture meant: Take your position. Dooley stepped up to the door and stood beside me. He put one hand on my shoulder, and we both stared at the jump light.
My heart rate spiked—ninety-one beats per minute by my calculations—and I found myself breathing too deeply. Settle down, Jake. You’ve done one hundred six jumps. What’s one more? Other than the absolute need for pressurized air, the subzero temperatures and the fall from eight miles above the earth into the lap of America’s most vehement enemy, hell, this was a cakewalk.
Dooley gestured. Thirty seconds!
Adrenaline pumped into my muscles and made me hyperaware of the details around me. The rhythmic drone of the engines. The hum of the cargo deck. Lights blinking. The sweat glistening on the sergeant’s face. The way his eyes were pinched in concentration. Oh, yeah, and the void of space staring back at me like a black hole.
I saw the jump light blink from red to green. Dooley slapped my arm and pointed out the aircraft. Go!
With so much gear, there was no graceful way to navigate to the edge of the ramp, so I resorted to an exaggerated waddle. I peered out at the glistening blue black of a new day. The earth below was a big gray ball.
I tapped the button on the instrument console to start the Elapsed Time stopwatch, then raised my arms and leaned forward. I tumbled out into space. I arched my back and stretched my arms and legs into a rigid cross position. There was a momentary whooshing sensation as I passed from the plane’s sphere of influence; the calm that followed was total and complete.
I steadied myself in weightless free fall. I used my hands and feet to weathervane around and give the C-17 a farewell glance as it shrank farther and farther away. If I never saw another high-altitude plane again, it would be too soon.
I spun around until the visor readout put me on a straight shot to my destination. Into the lion’s den, Jake. Let’s do this.
I don’t know where the music came from. But there it was, ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” pounding in my head. The music was usually a heat-of-battle thing. Then again, if this wasn’t the heat-of-battle, then what the hell was?
Clouds blanketed the ground. No matter. I navigated using my GPS. I drew my arms into a V shape, steered with my feet, and maneuvered by twisting my body. I’d been dropped twenty miles north from my LZ, and the body position I’d assumed allowed me to track two miles more or less horizontally for every mile that I fell. The sensation was like an out-of-body experience, but I didn’t have time to enjoy it. I’m not sure I wanted to. Just get on the ground and go to work.
Pressure Altitude: 38,924 feet and whistling through the air at two miles per minute. My heart raced in time to the numbers scrolling on the readout.
I tracked on course and plunged through the clouds. White vapor masked my visor. I felt the chill against my face. All I could see were the yellow digits of the instrument readout shining on the inside of the visor.
In what was essentially the blink of an eye, I had suddenly punched through the clouds and was streaking through a layer of air so clear and clean that I stopped breathing for a split second. It was like being reborn.
The sun rolled below the horizon and I was ins
tantaneously shrouded by twilight; it was as if I had stepped into a time machine and been transported back in time. In a way, I guess I actually had been.
Pressure Altitude: 22,956 feet. Time Elapsed: one minute, thirty-nine seconds.
I followed the GPS reading as it counted down the Distance to LZ. 16.8 miles. I sliced through another bank of clouds.
Altitude: 17,217 feet. Absolute Height Above Ground: 10,925 feet. Time Elapsed: two minutes, fifty-four seconds. Distance to LZ: 8.3 miles.
I kept on track until my Distance to LZ read one mile. I checked the terrain against the geo maps I had memorized. My landing point was a shallow draw five hundred yards northwest of a hilltop that looked down on the fork in the Fasham–Tehran Road, a ribbon of asphalt that traversed the rugged Alborz Mountains. The tops of the hills were light gray and serrated—like broken teeth—and the valleys between them were black and forbidding with dense vegetation. Lights twinkled from the village of Fasham, just north of the fork. Smoke plumes vented upward, straight as the strokes of a crayon, meaning no wind.
Altitude: 7,571 feet. Time Elapsed: four minutes, forty-six seconds. Distance: zero. I was right over the LZ and resumed the cross position to stop my horizontal movement. What a way to travel!
I rotated slowly, reconnoitering the area and separating it into grids. Along the eastern horizon, a band of azure heralded the new sunrise. To the west and north, tiny lights peppered the gloomy mountains. Headlights trickled along the Fasham–Tehran Road to the spiderweb of highways north of Tehran. To the south, far in the distance, the illuminated sprawl of the city caused a shiver to sprint along my spine. Below, my landing point centered on a gash of tawny-colored ground flanked by shrubs and trees.
I grasped my rip cord and watched the Absolute Height Above Ground readout:
3,358 feet.
2,912 feet.
2,695 feet.
2,500 feet. I pulled my rip cord.
The main chute unfolded with a rustle of cloth. The chute billowed into a square, and the harness tightened around my torso and thighs to absorb the tug of the opening shock. Spot on. I gave Dooley a quick thanks and checked my rate of descent against the horizon. All good. Grasping the steering toggles on the front risers, I swung in a wide spiral to complete my ground reconnaissance.
Still no sign of life. The LZ looked clear of rocks and fallen timber. Thank God for satellite imagery.
I unclipped my jump bag and felt it jerk against the end of the tether hooked to my harness.
I took aim at the landing point. I held my legs out, knees bent, and hips loose. It’s all about absorbing the impact, the Black Hats preached. You walk away with a broken leg, just hope the walk’s not too long. The Black Hats were full of great advice.
At the last moment, I pulled both steering toggles to flare the parachute and touched down no harder than stepping off a porch. Nicely done, Jake. But this was no time to celebrate.
Landing was the time when I was most vulnerable. If the bad guys were onto me, I was dead. I scrambled to gather the parachute, unsnap the harness and instrument console, and step free. The readout in my visor blinked off. Releasing the latches of my helmet, I gave a twist and pulled it off. Cool, humid air rushed into my nostrils, and my lungs celebrated the rush of good, old-fashioned air.
I zipped open the jump bag and dumped out the backpack with my mission equipment and provisions. I bunched the parachute and harness into a tight knot and crammed it into the jump bag. I forced the helmet in and zipped it closed.
One more detail. I extended the self-destruct lever on the side of the instrument console. A pull on the lever sent a surge of electricity that fried the circuitry and erased the software. Not something the NSA wanted laying around.
Jump bag in one hand, backpack in the other, I hustled into the trees for cover, a voice in my head shouting, “Move your ass!”
I ducked into the darkest shadows and shrugged out of my pressure suit. I had civilian clothes underneath, jeans and a shirt. I carried the Walther and an extra magazine in a shoulder holster.
I plopped onto the ground and swapped my HALO boots for a pair of black cross-trainers from inside the backpack. I slipped into my jacket—new passports in one pocket, envelopes of money in another—and put a baseball cap on my head.
Finally, I dug the iPhone from my shirt pocket and turned it on. I activated the satellite-communications app and sent encrypted text messages to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot: Feet dry.
I stuffed all the HALO equipment into the jump bag. I dragged the bag into a thicket of junipers and jammed it deep into the bramble. I camouflaged the spot with loose branches. This gear was easily worth a quarter of a million dollars. Well, no skin off my nose. If the government really wanted it back, they could send a battalion of marines in to get it.
I traversed the hill, staying in a low crouch, and inched my way to the crest. I dug into a hollow between two low-lying junipers. From there, I had an open view of the Fasham–Tehran Road and the fork that I had designated as my diversion LZ, the spot where I’d told Deputy Director of Operations Otto Wiseman I intended to land at daybreak. Thirty minutes from now.
My thirst caught up to me. I guzzled one of the water bottles from my backpack. Then I munched on an energy bar. I pulled a Zeiss digital telescope from the backpack and connected it to my iPhone to survey the area.
Exactly two minutes passed before I spotted a line of vehicles approaching from the south on the Fasham–Tehran Road. I spotted two small 4 × 4s with machine guns mounted on top, followed by two cargo trucks. They reached the fork in the road and fanned to the west about a hundred meters, a wake of fine dust marking their passage. The trucks halted. The back flaps of each were pushed aside and a squad of black-bearded Republican Guards jumped with easy steps and full combat gear to the ground. The cargo trucks retraced their tracks to the Fasham–Tehran Road and drove until they were out of sight. The soldiers melted into the surrounding brush. The 4 × 4s crawled beneath a canopy of trees that made them invisible from the air. They trained their machine guns on the fork in the road and waited.
I plugged a line jack into the side of my iPhone and fitted an earbud into my right ear. I tuned in to the radio-scan mode that the NSA techs had modified for the phone. The scan latched on to the strongest signal. The signal was close. Very close.
My Farsi was rusty. But I recognized it when I heard it, and I managed to interpret an irritated voice saying, “Okay, the sun’s coming up. Where’s the target? He should have landed by now.”
I shook my head in disgust. I’d been right all along. Somebody close to the DDO had leaked my plans; or maybe the DDO had leaked them himself. Who didn’t matter to me at that moment. I’d fended off the ultimate double cross. I was alive. The mission was still intact.
CHAPTER 13
IRAN—ALBORZ MOUNTAINS
I taped another thirty seconds of the growing frustration among the Republican Guard troops who were expecting Jake Conlan to parachute at any second into the crossfire of their machine guns. The tape would provide General Rutledge with sufficient evidence to institute an investigation into the security breach apparently infecting my operation. I would forward the audio link the first chance I had.
Either someone in the MEK had tipped off the Iranian government or someone in DDO Otto Wiseman’s sphere of influence had leaked word of my HALO drop. I still hoped I was wrong about Wiseman. After all, he and I were supposed to be fighting the same fight, right? To keep the land of the red, white, and blue safe from scumbags just like the ones hiding in the bushes not a hundred yards from me.
Of course, I was also acting under the assumption that the leak wasn’t coming from the office of my good friend General Tom Rutledge, something I could hardly bring myself to consider. But since I also knew that Mr. Elliot had no such prejudice, I would send him the same audio link. Mr. Elliot would leave not a single stone unturned, including the general’s entire staff. I told myself it was a case of better safe than sorry
and had nothing to do with my friendship with Tom.
I switched off the radio scan. I’d heard enough. I also had no idea whether or not the Republican Guard had the capability of scanning radio signals this far from Tehran, but I had no intention of giving them the chance.
I shifted positions, lying prone under the dense foliage of the junipers with only my left hand peeking out with the Zeiss digital telescope. I panned the entire area and followed the image through the iPhone. I hit the zoom function and zeroed in on the wooded area where some very serious soldiers were waiting. Bastards were in for a very long wait.
I switched modes on the Zeiss to the thermal viewer. I counted twenty red-and-orange images clumped inside the brush. As the minutes dragged on, the images became restless and shifted positions, clearly as undisciplined as they were impatient.
True, I may have escaped the Guards’ less-than-professional trap on this inauspicious morning, but now I had to consider just how much they knew about my mission. If they had any idea I was headed for the suspected nuclear weapons facility in Qom—information Chief of Staff Landon Fry had shared with me—then their security there would be on high alert. If they knew I was onto the money-laundering pipeline that ran from an online banker in Amsterdam named Atash Morshed to Sepehr Tale, Iran’s undersecretary for economic development, then they would be blanketing Tale with security. Contingencies. Always work the contingencies, Mr. Elliot preached. Make them work for you.
The sun crested the eastern hills, and an already bright sky became an incandescent blue. A helicopter thumped in the distance: a Huey with Iranian military markings. How ironic to see an American-made helicopter on the hunt for an American CIA operative. Well, hell, what would war be without the dispassionate contributions of arms dealers and defense contractors?
The Natanz Directive Page 12
