Warning Light

by David Ricciardi

  FIFTEEN

  NIGHT DESCENDED UPON the region as the last light faded from the high mountain peaks. The clear desert air and a thin crescent moon made for excellent visibility as Zac put more distance between himself and the shot-up Land Cruiser. He headed east and made good progress for nearly an hour until his knees buckled and he collapsed onto the ground.

  He began to shake. He’d never shot anyone before and now he’d just killed half a dozen men. He could rationalize the four soldiers in the warehouse. If he hadn’t shot them, he would either be dead himself or back in confinement. But the last two . . . he’d ambushed them as they’d tried to escape.

  Yet, he’d felt no pangs of conscience, no hesitation, no emotion whatsoever as he’d pulled the trigger. He hadn’t second-guessed himself; hadn’t paused to reconsider. He’d seen nothing except the enemy. He didn’t even remember hearing the sound of his own gunfire. But as the panic began to subside, he was grateful that he’d suffered no indecision. Hesitation might have gotten him killed, and when it came down to it, his ultimate goal was survival. He could live with the decisions he’d made.

  Zac stood and immediately discovered that pain had returned to his body. He pulled off the parka and looked at his left shoulder. The wound was still damp and stuck to his shirt. With a grimace he separated the shirt from the wound, drawing a trickle of fresh blood. It was a deep scratch, but at least there wasn’t a bullet lodged in there. He took a few sips of water from the canteen and set off to the south. For the first time since he’d escaped, he was heading for the Gulf.

  The air cooled quickly after sunset and soon became cold. The extreme swing in temperature was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Miles passed underfoot, but even in the cold of night, the lack of water was a problem. The canteen he’d taken from the truck was already empty, and he’d barely been sipping enough to keep his mouth moist; so his spirits rose when he crossed a small stream running down the north side of a hill. The water had a metallic taste to it, probably from contaminants in the land around it, but he didn’t have hours to search for another source. He drank his fill and topped off the canteen.

  He walked for half an hour until his gut erupted in pain. He looked down, thinking maybe he’d been shot. He doubled over, then fell to his knees. Within seconds he broke into a heavy sweat and was throwing up what little was in his stomach. It took hours for his body to purge itself of the impure water. Shivering, he lay down upon the dusty earth, rolled onto his side, and pulled his knees to his chest.

  It was another hour before he struggled to his feet and began to shuffle over the ground. He was lucky to find a small cave after a few miles. It wasn’t much more than a crevice in some stratified rock, but when he curled up he could get his entire body inside. He poured the contaminated water out of his canteen and clasped the rifle across his chest. The cold air and his chattering teeth kept him from the sleep he so desperately needed.

  Alone in the dark, Zac’s mind began to wander. He tried to steer his thoughts in a positive direction. He thought of his colleagues at CIA, bright, dedicated people who were undoubtedly searching for him after he’d failed to check in. He remembered his friends from London, a close-knit group who would wonder about his long absence and miss him. He contemplated a pleasant future with Genevieve. But despite his best efforts to stay positive, his thoughts kept drifting back to the traumatic event that had changed his life.

  * * *

  • • •

  ZAC HAD BEEN just fourteen years old when his parents had driven into Philadelphia one evening for dinner, leaving him alone in the house. The ringing of the home telephone awakened him just after midnight. His voice was hoarse from sleep and a state police officer, unaware that he was speaking with a teenage boy, informed him that Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Miller had been killed that night when a drunk driver had struck their car, sending it skidding off the road and into a concrete bridge support. Zac hung up the phone and cried for hours until he finally fell asleep, curled up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor.

  His father’s older brother and his wife had no children of their own and quickly adopted Zac. His uncle Alfred came to Pennsylvania to close up the house and drive him to his new home in Connecticut. His uncle indulged Zac as he walked numbly through the house one last time, sitting for hours in his parents’ bedroom, where he used to get dressed with his father, and at the kitchen table, where he’d done his homework while his mother made dinner.

  Something changed inside Zac the next morning and he announced that he was ready to leave. He kept only his father’s briefcase and motorcycle helmet, and the engagement photo of his mother that had been in the newspaper. His uncle had everything else put into storage and Zac left his childhood home forever.

  Before his parents’ death, he had always looked forward to their visits to Connecticut. Zac’s father and uncle were avid sailors, and the three of them spent hours on the water each day, especially if the weather was windy and rough. He proudly remembered watching the two grown-ups smile as young Zac steered the big boat through the heavy seas.

  Sailing regularly with his uncle was one of the few things that he was looking forward to after his parents’ death, but Zac was barely settled into his new home when his aunt and uncle informed him that he would be attending boarding school in the fall.

  Zac was devastated. First his parents were snatched away and now his aunt and uncle were abandoning him in his time of greatest need. He hadn’t known that his aunt Liz was seriously ill, having recently been diagnosed with cancer. Bitter and alone, Zac had decided then that he could rely on no one but himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SUN ROSE over the Iranian countryside and a warm breeze blew up the hill, returning Zac’s thoughts to the present. He knew that relief from the cold would be short-lived and he would soon be wishing for cooler temperatures again. But his victories here were small, and he was learning to cherish every one of them lest the more numerous hardships break his will. Before he fell asleep, the faintest of smiles emerged on his face as he thought, if it came down to it, he wouldn’t let the bastards take him alive.

  SIXTEEN

  CELIA SMILED AS her car turned into the driveway of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. A bastion of a bygone era, its colonial architecture and impeccable white facade made her feel instantly at home. And a home away from home it was. Her late husband’s merchant banking career had relocated them to Singapore for nearly a decade, and their band of mostly British expatriates used to gather at the hotel each day for afternoon tea.

  Many years had passed in the interim. Spouses had died or been divorced, families had returned home or moved on, and individuals had simply drifted away. But the remaining members of this affluent and worldly group had made a concerted and successful effort to reunite at the Raffles once every year to relive bygone days and catch up on the present. Along with Celia’s visits with her two daughters and their families, the annual gathering was one of the highlights of her life.

  A uniformed Sikh doorman opened the door of her car as she returned to the hotel, having spent the day at the National Orchid Garden. It was nearly nine in the evening by the time she walked into the Grill. She was the last to arrive.

  There were eight of them this year, down two from the prior year due to an illness and a death. As the maître d’ walked Celia to the table, one of her companions spotted her and the whole table stood to welcome her.

  One of the gentlemen, Sir James Houghton, was a former British diplomat. Dressed immaculately in a gray double-breasted suit, he bowed slightly as she approached.

  “Good heavens, Celia. You’ve elevated the concept of fashionably late to haute couture.”

  “So sorry to keep you waiting, James. Has the restaurant run out of single malt whiskey yet?”

  “Speaking of which, where is our waitress? I’d wager you could use a drink yourself.”

&nbs
p; “She’s probably in hiding since you’ve been leering at her all night,” chimed in one of the other guests.

  “I’ll leave you to admire the Old Masters, Geoffrey. I prefer my works of art to be three-dimensional.”

  “Ah, well, when you put it like that, I’m sure she’ll be positively flattered.”

  The good-natured ribbing continued as everyone finished their greetings and took their seats. Sir James ordered four bottles of vintage Petrus Pomerol and had them decanted at the table.

  “Celia, how are you? We just arrived this afternoon and James told us about your ordeal,” said Katrina Reinhold, who, with her husband, Hans, was one of the two married couples in attendance.

  “Well, I won’t lie to you. It was a difficult trip, but I’ve spent the last two days resting and taking in the sights. I’m feeling much better now, thank you.”

  “How was Iran? It must have been nerve-racking for a Westerner,” added Hans.

  “It was very much like this,” Celia said with a straight face as she gestured to the opulent surroundings, “except I sat on a wooden bench for twelve hours and had to queue up for twenty minutes to use the lavatory.”

  “Where exactly were you?” asked Sir James.

  “A small city called Sirjan. It’s quite remote.”

  “Goodness, that was a spate of bad luck,” James said. “There was an earthquake there just a few days ago.”

  “Indeed. The airport was a mess; doors broken, windows shattered. They had almost no services at all. It must have been devastating to the local population. It looked like a very poor area.”

  “It was a frightfully powerful earthquake,” James said. “Landslides in those mountainous regions cause a terrible amount of destruction. Magsie and I passed through Sirjan a few times when I was assigned to Tehran. It was just a village back then.”

  “I thought of you and Magsie many times while I was there. We were segregated by gender in the airport since none of the women were wearing the Islamic version of proper clothing. I felt as if I’d set my watch back fourteen hundred years when I got off the plane. It must have been horrible for her.”

  “Actually, Tehran in the early 1970s was a wonderful place. The shah was receptive to Western ideas. Women were liberated and had access to education, and the Mohammedan fundamentalists had all been expelled. It wasn’t Vienna, but Tehran certainly wasn’t a hardship posting. We both loved it.”

  “Well, what happened?” Celia asked. “Their attitudes toward women are positively medieval now.”

  A scowl crossed James’s face. “The revolution’s fuse was lit twenty years before we arrived, but it burned slowly. Back in 1951 one of their parliamentarians, a fellow by the name of Mohammad Mosaddeq, became prime minister and nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It was a terrifically popular move with the people, but Britain considered it theft. Mosaddeq subsequently dissolved parliament and was on his way to becoming dictator until two years later, when MI6 and CIA spent a million U.S. dollars to engineer a coup and restore the shah to power.”

  “One million dollars? You can’t buy a flat in London for that today,” interjected a rather intoxicated Geoffrey.

  “Quite so,” said James. “For the next twenty years the shah opened up the country to the West again, the Mohammedans were kept in check, and life was basically good. But as more and more Iranians became educated, they grew dissatisfied with their lot in life. There was a sense of entitlement or, perhaps more correctly, an expectation that their lives would improve. However, the economy was stagnant and there were few job opportunities. Meanwhile the shah was lining his pockets and living quite lavishly for all to see. By the mid-1970s, the people had turned restive again. Magsie and I left in 1976, just as things started getting interesting.”

  “What year was the revolution?” asked Geoffrey.

  “The shah’s secret police suppressed most of the dissent until 1978, when students started taking to the streets. The protests soon became violent and the two sides eventually fought to a standstill. At that point, everyone was waiting to see what the army would do. You see, the chief of the army had been elevated to prime minister upon the shah’s return, but he’d passed away by the time the trouble started. When his successor announced that the army would remain neutral in the whole affair, the country was suddenly up for grabs.”

  “But if the protestors and the secret police were evenly matched, and the army was out of the fight, what tipped the balance?” Katrina asked.

  “It’s really who tipped the balance,” James said. “It was a religious leader by the name of Ruhollah Khomeini. He’d been allowed to return to Iran in 1979 on the condition that he only set up a small religious enclave in the south, but I’m afraid his plans were a bit grander. His supporters co-opted the students’ revolution and made it their own. They preached that fundamentalist Islam was the answer to the corruption of the shah and to all the country’s other problems as well. The revolution suddenly became the Islamic Revolution, the American embassy was stormed, and those poor hostages began their ordeal.”

  “And Ruhollah Khomeini became ‘Grand Ayatollah’ Khomeini,” Celia added with a touch of scorn.

  “Exactly. The Iran that you visited was quite different from the Iran we inhabited in the seventies. It was the same place, separated only by time.”

  “Thank you, Herr Einstein,” Geoffrey mumbled.

  “It sounds horrible,” Katrina said.

  “Unfortunately it became much worse after 1979,” Sir James continued. “To safeguard the revolution and to prevent the army from becoming the arbiter of future governments, a second army was created, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. It spread its tentacles throughout the military, the economy, and the political culture of the country. They even established a division called the Qods Force. It literally means the ‘Jerusalem Force,’ and through it Iran has expended considerable time and money supporting disruptive and destabilizing organizations throughout the world. Its mandate runs the gamut from providing weapons and intelligence to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, to running training camps for terrorists. Qods taught anti-coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan how to form roadside bombs and conduct suicide missions. They’re very bad actors, I’m afraid.”

  “Celia, were you scared?” Katrina asked.

  “Nonsense. Celia’s never been scared of anything in her life,” Geoffrey added. “She’d probably stare down the devil himself.”

  “Thank you for that, Geoffrey. I wasn’t actually afraid, but I was uncomfortable, and not just physically. There were soldiers everywhere and you could see the contempt in their eyes when they looked at you. They seemed to be suspicious of everyone, constantly walking through the airport and watching our every move. We had to take buses to another airport before we flew out, and we had a military escort the entire way. It was very disconcerting . . .” A frown crossed her face.

  “What is it, Celia? You look troubled,” asked Sir James.

  “Well, there is one thing that still distresses me. I sat next to a lovely young American man on the first leg of the flight, but I didn’t see him on the flight here. I was up in first class, so I didn’t think much of it until we landed. We were going through immigration and I thought I saw him from behind . . .”

  “Oh, Celia, you tart!” interrupted Geoffrey, who’d finished at least a bottle of the Petrus by himself.

  “As I was saying,” she continued. “He was dressed exactly like the American and he even had the same type of carry-on bag, one of those awful laptop-backpacks. But when I approached him to say hello, it wasn’t him at all. The whole situation was very upsetting.”

  “It’s probably just a coincidence, Celia. I’m sure BA wouldn’t have left without your friend,” said Hans.

  “Do you remember the name of this American chap, dear?” asked Sir James.

  “Yes, of course. He introduced hi
mself as Zachary Miller, and he’d been taking pictures of the countryside when we landed.”

  SEVENTEEN

  ZAC WAS STIFF, sore, and perilously thirsty. He spent the day in the cave, out of the sun and out of sight. With the approach of sunset, he was ready to get moving. He oriented himself to the south and set off toward a distant mountain peak and several stands of trees. If vegetation could grow in such an inhospitable environment, then there might be water there too.

  Mile after mile his thirst, his aching muscles, and the extremes of temperature attacked his resolve. He could push through the pain, but it was his mind that was his true enemy. It was telling him that the odds of successfully escaping were overwhelmingly against him, that it was nearly impossible to survive and evade recapture. He tried to estimate how far he had walked the prior day and night. Maybe fifteen miles, maybe twenty. As the steps blended together in the darkness, he couldn’t believe that he was trying to walk to freedom. Lost in the middle of a hostile foreign country, he was guiding himself by the rising and setting of the sun. In an age when a GPS system was in every car, boat, and phone, he was estimating the cardinal points of the compass. The margin for error was enormous.

  And when he found the Persian Gulf, then what? Call for help? Maybe stow away or steal a boat? And if he did manage to steal a boat, how would he cross the Gulf and where would he go, Saudi Arabia? He knew how to sail, and he’d spent his summers racing with friends on Long Island Sound, but crossing a sea full of hostile warships was an altogether different proposition.

  Negative thoughts cascaded through his mind until he was walking in a daze, unaware of his path or direction. The only sound was the rough cadence of his boots scratching along the dusty ground.

  Splash.