The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  I got my bearings. I was propped up in a chair. The chair was wired to a concrete pillar. My torso, legs, and arms were wired to the chair. A garrote wired my neck to the pillar. My arms were locked behind the chair. My hands were wired together. The memorial bracelets on each wrist cut into my skin. My elbows and shoulders had gone completely numb. How much time had passed?

  “Mr. Moreau,” the voice repeated.

  He loomed before me, one light-colored shape in the middle of four similar silhouettes in the deep gloom.

  I backtracked. My MEK compatriots and I had been lured into an ambush at the warehouse across the river from the street market. Giv and Zand had been shot dead. I’d taken a boot in the head, care of …

  Ora Drago. The MEK’s second-in-command in Amsterdam. And the traitor Charlie and I had been tracking since I’d arrived in Tehran. We’d been so close. But close doesn’t count for much in a counterintelligence op. Close got you dead or captured. Dead may have been the better alternative in this case.

  But it occurred to me that the situation wasn’t hopeless. They’d kept me alive. And they wouldn’t have done that without a very good reason. Obviously they needed to know how much I knew. And just as obviously, I hadn’t given them anything yet. Okay, so the odds weren’t exactly even, but long odds were better than none.

  I’d trained with some of the toughest sons of bitches who’d ever served Uncle Sam—U.S. Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon, Air Force Pararescue, Delta Force—and I wasn’t about to stain their reputations by giving in to a bunch of lowlife thugs. Oh, yeah, and then there was Mr. Elliot. I couldn’t imagine what he would think if I knuckled under, and I didn’t want to find out. He’d know by now that something was wrong. He’d have pulled out all the stops, trying to find me. That was our deal. I go in; he makes sure I get out. A good guy to have on your side.

  I willed myself past the headache and the nausea, tried to lift my head, and nearly choked myself to death on the neck wire.

  “I bet you’d like us to loosen that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Moreau?” The accent was Persian, but there was the hint of a European influence. I clenched my eyes and filled my lungs with a slow breath. It felt like my insides were on fire, but when I opened my eyes again, my vision had cleared enough for me to make a split-second assessment of the situation. I was in a warehouse, but not the one where the ambush had occurred. The room was large and dank and made for this kind of thing. I saw a water tank. I saw an electrical generator. I saw a table lined with surgical equipment like scalpels and clamps and hypodermic needles.

  A viciously bright light poured down on me from the exposed beams in the ceiling, and Drago and four black beards hovered just outside the light.

  Drago glowered, the set of his narrow face as menacing as a truncheon. His eyes were hooded by wiry and expressive eyebrows that cinched together like the ends of a frazzled cable.

  “Turncoat!” I was proud of myself for getting out at least one word before a fist shot out from the shadows and exploded against my cheek.

  “How imaginative. You’ve gone from traitor and rat to turncoat.”

  I didn’t remember calling him a rat, but that sounded like me. “How does snake in the grass sound?” I hissed.

  “Show him,” one of the Guards said. He stepped forward, shading the light, as if he wanted me to see him. I blinked away the blood and squinted. He was the slightest of the four Guards, with an equine face, bulbous nose, and uncomfortably black eyes. “Show him.”

  Drago held a bundle of documents in his right hand. He held my iPhone in his left. I was more interested in the memory stick I’d been after when all hell broke loose. The locations of the Sejil-2 missiles and their warheads were all that mattered. Every other piece of intel I’d provided had been confirmed and verified. Why was it that the most important piece of the puzzle was always the last piece? Without that, all the bunker busters in the world wouldn’t be enough to stop Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear offensive. Armageddon. Our worst nightmare.

  Two of the Guards closed in on me. I could smell their sweat, and that was probably the idea. Intimidating the prisoner as the interrogation intensified—or so they thought.

  “Let us start with the phone,” the skinny man with black eyes said. Drago aimed the screen of the iPhone at me. At least now I had the chain of command: Drago was someone the Revolutionary Guards would use, and when he had nothing left to give them, he would end up hanging from his neck in a place where every member of the MEK could see him. “What is the access code?”

  I didn’t answer. I ground my teeth and stared. Finally, I said, “I can’t think with this wire around my neck.”

  “Maybe it’s not tight enough.” The man with the black eyes snapped his fingers. The soldier on his left moved up so fast that he was grabbing the garrote and ratcheting the tension on the wire before I had time to fill my lungs. The wire cut into my neck. I gagged and coughed and felt the pressure building in my head. I was on the verge of passing out when the echo of the man snapping his fingers hung in the air. The man behind me gave the wire a centimeter or two of slack. I coughed so violently that my insides turned to knots.

  They waited until the coughing stopped. “The code or the wire. It makes no difference to me,” I heard the man with black eyes say eventually. “What will it be, Mr. Moreau? Choose.”

  “Okay,” I croaked through the spittle bubbling on my lips. Giving them the code would probably seal my fate, but at least I could see the look on their faces.

  “I didn’t expect you to break so easily,” Ora Drago said with a sneer. “How disappointing!”

  “Shut up,” the man with the black eyes said. He put a fist under my chin and lifted my head. “The code.”

  “One. Nine. Backslash. Two. Eight. Backslash. One. Eight.”

  “You Americans,” Drago said. He entered the number, his fingers jabbing the screen, a man eager to prove to his superiors that he had thwarted the Great Satan and captured one of its demons.

  The phone emitted a low beep followed by the wail of a high-pitched alarm, and I knew the self-destruct app had been activated. Drago’s eyebrows settled low over his eyes as the phone’s screen began to erode. “What’s happening?”

  “What do you think’s happening, Mr. Phelps?” I couldn’t help the Mission Impossible reference even though my throat burned with every word.

  The man with the black eyes snatched the iPhone from Drago’s hand. He stared at the corrosion eating the screen. His fingers opened. The phone clattered to the floor. The screen cracked. Smoke curled from the broken glass.

  He kicked the phone and sent it spinning across the floor. He glared, his eyes sharp with malice. “Don’t be so proud of yourself, Mr. Moreau.”

  He turned and whispered a command to his fellow Guards. They moved with the precision and speed of a well-oiled machine. One released the wire pinning me to the pole. The other two yanked me to my feet, hoisted me onto the table, and pulled me across the rough surface until my head dangled over one edge, my legs over the other. They tightened the wires around my chest, wrist, and neck and held me down. I knew what was coming.

  The man with black eyes walked around the table, a bucket in hand, water sloshing over its rim. He set the bucket on the floor between us. “Waterboarding. Such a twisted creation. And I applaud the twisted minds inside your CIA for its invention. Almost the perfect torture. Leaves no marks and breaks all resistance.”

  He had it pretty much right. I guessed I could start talking and save myself the trouble, but I was probably dead in any case.

  He barked another order. The Guard who responded had a blank face and a surprisingly pale complexion. He fished a towel from the bucket. He wrung the towel and water rained back down. I heard Drago laugh.

  Time slowed. I reached deep inside myself and called on whatever reserve of determination and grit I had left. Every detail came into sharp focus. The drip, drip, drip of water splattering on the floor. The dank odor of decay. T
he pockmarks on Drago’s bladelike nose. The dull luster of his crooked teeth. Dust motes circling the bare light bulb like crows above a carcass.

  “You can beg for mercy,” the man with black eyes said. “Or you can endure the terror. In any case, you will answer my questions.”

  The man with the towel draped it over my face. It smelled of mildew. I filled my lungs with air an instant before water drenched the towel and forced it heavy and flat against my features.

  Someone came down hard on my midsection with his fist. My stomach seized. I gasped, sucking in air … and water.

  The water gushed up my nose, down my throat, and into my lungs. A lever tripped in a distant part of my brain that went straight to survival mode.

  More water drenched the towel, and I convulsed.

  Pain control has very little to do with this. With some pain, you can retreat deep into your soul and fend off the most brutal blow. But there is no such pain in drowning. It’s a gigantic monster of terror that rampages through your consciousness. Your mind flails. Panic seizes your soul.

  I thrashed against the table. My lungs screamed for air. A veil of darkness descended inside my head an instant before the towel was pulled away. The pain of coughing was almost unbearable. I tasted something salty in my mouth. I turned my head and spit water and blood.

  “We’re going to do this all night,” a voice whispered. It was Drago. “First we’ll break you. And then we’ll break you into a million pieces.”

  He was a complete blur, but I couldn’t let that go unanswered. “Rat.” It came out a raspy croak, but at least it came out.

  The man with the towel yanked my head straight. He draped the towel over my face again. The material was as cold as a drowned corpse.

  I readied myself for the onslaught. And then I heard the Voice. It was hardly more than a whisper. It was telling me to save myself. It was saying, Tell them what they want. You’ve done enough. You’ve given enough.

  We’re told about this—that if things got bad enough, the Voice was inevitable. I had never believed it. The Voice was for others, not me. Not bad-to-the-bone Jake Conlan. But they also said that the Voice wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was a defense mechanism. You could suppress it, but it would return, louder and more insistent. It was how you dealt with it that counted.

  I gulped air, buying a few precious seconds.

  Water sloshed from the bucket and soaked through the towel like a flood. It pressed against my eyes like thumbs of steel and clasped my face like dead fingers. I puffed hard to keep my airways clear.

  I knew the bastards would hit me again, and I readied my stomach for the blow. It came hard and metallic: the butt of a rifle. I fought, but it wasn’t enough. My lungs exploded. A howl traveling through my throat and mouth was swallowed by the onslaught of water. Water flooded my nose and burned my sinuses. I bucked against the table, my body screaming for air and release, panic driving me toward the edge.

  The Voice returned, louder and more insistent. Save yourself. Tell them. About the attack. About Fouraz. About Charlie and Leila. Denounce the lot of them: Rutledge, Elliot, the Great Satan. All of them.

  The water stopped. The towel fell away. I gagged and coughed and felt pain in places I hadn’t even known existed. Complete and utter exhaustion. Not defeat. But close.

  I needed something to hang onto, something to focus on, something to fight back with. Anything. So I crashed through a door in my memory and came away with a picture of home, of Cathy and the kids. But the picture hurt too much, so I pushed it aside and crashed through another door. I found myself standing in Arlington Cemetery. The gravestone staring back at me belonged to my dad. This picture didn’t work any better than the one before it, but it served a purpose. I was suddenly back where I had begun and every ounce of my focus was centered on the memorial bracelets cutting into my wrists. My hands were soaked with sweat and water, but I knew the Semtex coating the bracelets was insoluble. So was the primer. The problem wasn’t the weapon; the weapon was a thing of beauty. No, the problem was gaining enough leverage to ignite it. Then again, even if I did succeed in igniting it, the explosive would probably blow my hands off, and then where would I be.

  What the hell! Go for it, Jake. If nothing else, die trying. Hard to argue with that, so I tugged furiously at the wire binding my wrists and felt the brush of metal on metal.

  “I know why you’re here,” the man with the black eyes was saying. He set a fresh bucket of water by my head on the table. “We know you entered the facilities at Qom and Natanz without invitation or authorization. We know that you left a trail of dead bodies in your wake. We know that you have been colluding with traitorous elements throughout our country. What I want are names.”

  A sound like the whoosh of a hydraulic motor echoed throughout the warehouse. The man with the black eyes looked in the direction of the sound and smiled. “For you, things are about to get much worse.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I put a name to the sound: hydraulic doors opening. Then a second sound filled the air: distant footsteps echoing down a long hallway.

  “My comrades have arrived,” the man with black eyes said.

  “Now you’ll talk,” Ora Drago said, his voice painted with intense satisfaction.

  I twisted my wrists and snapped one bracelet against the other. Come on, goddamn it! It did it again, heard a pop and a hiss, like a match bursting into flames. The primer ignited, the Semtex detonated, and my skin began to melt. That was the bad news. The good news was that the explosion had also turned the wire binding my wrists into molten metal. My hands were suddenly free.

  I did three things so fast that the blackbeards hardly knew what hit them. I grabbed the garrote controlling the wire around my neck, spun it clockwise, and pulled my head free. I drove my knee into the stomach of the man with the black eyes and sent him sprawling backwards. I rolled off the table, grabbed the AK-47 that one of the Guards had stupidly left leaning against the pillar, and barrel-rolled across the concrete floor. I came up firing. Three shots in less than a second erased three of my captors and made me feel ever so much better.

  Behind me, Drago started to run, confused and panicked.

  I spun around and saw the man with the black eyes tracking me with a 9 mm pistol. A burst of orange fire erupted from the barrel, but I was already moving. I dove behind the pillar and rolled to my right, using the waterboarding table as a shield. I came up in a low crouch, put a shoulder against the edge of the table, and sent it flying in the direction of the man with the black eyes. He backpedaled and stumbled. The table caught him in the mid-section and drove him to the ground.

  I stepped toward him. More than anything I wanted to savor the kill, but I didn’t have time. The footsteps pounding along the corridor were seconds away. I heard shouting. I raised the AK-47 and fired once at the man with the black eyes. He slumped forward.

  I took up a position behind the pillar. I put the butt of the rifle against my shoulder and sighted the barrel in the direction of the approaching footsteps. I didn’t mind dying like this. Me against them. A fair fight, more or less.

  I saw a shadow materialize at the entrance, then a person. I was a blink of an eye away from pulling the trigger when I realized it was Jeri. She was jogging deeper into the room, two hands gripping a machine pistol and a look so intense that it made me glad she was on my side.

  “Jake!?” Her voice echoed throughout the warehouse and I thought to myself that never in my life had I heard a more welcome sound. I saw Bagheri and six of his men a step behind Jeri, Uzis raised and ready.

  “Here,” I called. “I’m here.”

  I waited until the barrels of their guns were at a less-threatening angle before tossing aside the AK-47 and stepping out from behind the pillar.

  Jeri raced up to me. “Oh, my God. You poor man. Look at you.”

  “I feel better than I look,” I said, a lie of the highest order. The words felt like glass raking across 50-grit sandpaper, and I knew they�
�d done serious damage to my throat and lungs.

  “Don’t talk,” she said and instinctively laid fingers gently across my lips. She put her arms around me, and I let her. My gaze settled on a man walking into the room, a pistol at his side, as calm as if he were being escorted to a table in his favorite restaurant. It was Charlie. A sight for sore eyes, if ever there was one.

  “Jake! My good friend,” he called out. “You’re alive. Thank God! Where’s Drago!”

  I motioned toward the far end of the warehouse. Bagheri and his men had Drago cornered. The MEK traitor had made it as far as a locked door, and now he was shrinking like a shriveling fig in the face of his own capture.

  Bagheri’s men dragged him back. “You want him?” Bagheri asked me.

  I wanted him, all right. Mostly I wanted him for the men who had died keeping my mission on track: Akbari in Amsterdam and Charlie’s man Lukas. And when Drago’s lips curled with contempt, his last attempt at justifying his miserable existence, I wanted him even more. But I didn’t have the strength.

  “He’s your traitor,” I said to Bagheri.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Bagheri marched forward, raised his pistol, and aimed it at Drago’s forehead. He fired once. A red dot appeared in Drago’s forehead. He rocked on his feet and toppled backward, dead before he hit the floor.

  Bagheri shook his head in disgust and turned away. “Way too good for him.”

  Charlie shared a crooked smile with me. “You look like shit.”

  He wrapped an arm around my shoulder, and he and Jeri helped me into my shoes and jacket. He added, “I’d shower you with endless amounts of sympathy and pity if we had the time, but we don’t.”

  “I screwed it up, Charlie. They got the memory stick,” I said. My voice wasn’t much more than a whispered croak.

  He shook his head. “Actually, they didn’t.” We started down the hall toward the door, with Bagheri supporting my other shoulder.