The Temple Mount Code

by Charles Brokaw

  ‘Proceed, Sediq, and if the colonel sees fit to bless you with a bonus, remember who your friends are.’

  ‘Always, Hamid.’

  Metal shrieked, and Lourds imagined the big metal gates parting in front of the car. Then they drove through.

  In the darkness beyond the security lights surrounding Evin Prison, Mufarrij lay on his stomach and watched the car entering the security gates. He trained his night-vision binoculars on the car’s occupants, missing Lourds in the backseat the first time because of the blindfold and the fact that the man wasn’t wearing his ugly hat.

  But there was no doubt that it was the American professor.

  Mufarrij tapped the radio’s transmit button on his bulletproof vest. ‘Be advised, the American is inside the prison. We will give them twenty minutes to put him away. Then we’re going in.’

  His teams quickly checked in and confirmed the order.

  Moving as gracefully as a leopard, Mufarrij rose to his feet. Staying hunkered over, he trotted to the back of the prison and joined the team at the rear corner. They’d taken out the perimeter guards to climb the outer wall, but that wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. Thankfully, it didn’t have to. God willing, Davari would detain Lourds in the same area as the woman.

  He ran his hands over the AK-47 he carried, trailed them over the pistols he had belted at his waist and chest, and checked his watch once more.

  The countdown was ticking down. He felt loose and ready, and he was going to kill as many of his enemies as he could.

  Tonight, there would be no mercy.

  ‘Okay, time to go.’ The man to Lourds’s right caught his elbow and tugged.

  Awkwardly, Lourds got out of the car and stood awaiting other orders. His mind raced, and he wondered what he was going to do. Living to see the morning seemed suddenly optimistic.

  Then the man holding him removed the handcuffs. ‘I need you to keep playing the game, Professor. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do not talk. Just listen.’

  ‘You people are really guards here, aren’t you?’

  The man slapped the back of Lourds’s head. ‘Shut up, or you will get us all killed. As for who we are, we are men who believe democracy is the only way for our country. We must get rid of the Ayatollah. Tonight, we are risking our lives because Reza tells us you can help make that happen.’

  ‘I will. Are you going to take off the blindfold, too?’

  ‘Shut up. The blindfold stays in place. You are supposed to be a prisoner. We are not supposed to be nice to you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The man sighed.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I am putting a pistol in your waistband. Do you know how to use a pistol?’

  ‘I’m not really a gun guy.’

  ‘Would you prefer a knife?’

  ‘Not a knife guy either.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Pick a language. I’ll conjugate any verb you want so fast it will make your head spin.’

  ‘You must be fun at parties.’

  ‘Ones where munitions aren’t involved? You bet.’

  Something cold and hard and heavy slid into the back of Lourds’s pants. It was a decidedly uncomfortable feeling.

  ‘All right. We are taking you inside. We should be able to get you back to where your friend is.’

  Lourds nodded.

  ‘Start walking.’

  As he moved in step with the man, guided by the hand on his elbow, Lourds tried not to think of what these men had probably done while they’d been guards at the prison. They were Reza’s friends. They were helping him save Miriam.

  Please let her still be alive and whole.

  Lourds walked, sensing as the lights changed around him. He remained silent as his ‘captors’ filled out the necessary forms and passed through the checkpoints. He still didn’t know how the men hoped to get him and Miriam back out of the prison even though they were guards there. Doubtless Miriam was under lock and key, and Lourds would be as well.

  He only hoped Lev’s book was still in the air duct at the hotel. Surely, the Revolutionary Guards would have sent someone to search the room after he’d left.

  And he still had to get Namati’s al-Buraq figurine.

  One thing at a time. Just stay alive, and you’ll figure out a way.

  Only a short distance farther on, after passing though after a half dozen turns and two more electronic gates, the man next to Lourds removed the blindfold.

  ‘Be ready. And when you must, shoot to kill.’

  ‘When? Not if?’

  The man didn’t reply. He took out his sidearm and drew back the action. Then he freed a knife with a curved blade.

  Walking a bit farther, they paused at an office. One of the other men unfolded a sheaf of papers and handed them to a guard sitting at a desk, watching security monitors. ‘Your lucky night, I see. The colonel will be happy to see your prisoner, Foad.’ The man flipped one of the pages as Foad stepped behind him. A knife flashed briefly in Foad’s hand as he slit the security man’s throat.

  Lourds stood there frozen, not believing the cold-blooded killing he’d just witnessed.

  Foad grabbed the dying man’s hair and shoved his face into the desk, preventing him from standing and fighting in the small room. Crimson sprayed over the desk and the monitors.

  ‘Go, Adan!’

  ‘God be with you, Foad.’ The man holding Lourds’s arm tugged him into motion. They rounded another corner. A uniformed guard stood in front of a door. He looked over at them and yawned, then smiled and waved.

  Without a word, Adan left Lourds and took a step toward the man and drove his knife up under the guard’s jaw. The blade slid through the soft palate and into the man’s brain. He died as he was falling.

  Horrified, Lourds watched as Adan grabbed the dead man’s radio earbud and an electronic key from the dead man’s pocket. Adan shoved the key into the door’s reader and waited for the light to turn green before slipping the dead bolts free. He pushed the door open and motioned Lourds inside.

  Heart beating rapidly, Lourds entered the room and spotted Miriam huddled in the corner. At first he thought she was dead. Then she stood and tried to approach him. Chains mounted on the wall kept her from taking more than a few steps.

  ‘Thomas …’ Her voice was hoarse and ragged. Bruises marred her face, and all she wore was a pair of red panties.

  Lourds went to her, not knowing what to say or do. Instantly, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cold body up against his. Warm tears trickled down her swollen face. Anger and sadness swelled in a knot at the back of Lourds’s throat. He turned to the two men with him. ‘Can someone get these chains off her?’

  Adan dragged his kill into the dark prison cell. The other man produced a picklock set, crossed to Miriam, and got to work on her cuffs.

  In a few seconds, Miriam was free. ‘You came for me.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I knew if anyone did, it would be you.’

  Before he could reply, the dull roars of several explosions filled the prison cell.

  46

  Evin Prison

  Evin District

  Tehran, the Islamic Republic of Iran

  August 13, 2011

  The shaped charges at the back of the prison building worked perfectly, creating a smoke-filled crater Mufarrij could have driven a tank through. The shattered wall burst apart in broken chunks.

  Mufarrij pulled a scarf over his lower face to block the dust, then stepped into the prison, his AK-47 leading the way.

  A man coughed to the left, and Mufarrij turned with his finger on the trigger. The emaciated body and dulled eyes belonged to a prisoner, though. The man lay unmoving on a thin mattress on the floor and watched with little interest. He lifted one sticklike arm.

  ‘Water. Please. Water.’

  Mufarrij ignored the man and pressed on. The blast was supposed to allow them entrance to a hallway. Instead, he s
tood in a prison cell. Their intel had been off. That would cause complications, which he hoped wouldn’t snowball.

  On the other side of the bars, two dazed guards started to pick themselves up. Seeing him, their hands fumbled for their dropped weapons.

  Mufarrij shot them, hitting both men with short, controlled bursts that drove them back and burst their hearts and lungs. Some of the rounds danced between the steel bars, striking sparks. One of the ricochets flattened further against Mufarrij’s body armor.

  At the door, he pulled out a shaped charge, slapped it onto the locked door, and activated the three-second timer. When he stepped back, the six men following him stepped back as well. They worked as a unit, as he had trained them.

  The charge exploded, blowing the locking mechanism to bits. The door swung open, clanging against the far wall.

  Mufarrij went through, holding the assault rifle close to his body. At the corner ahead of them, a guard peered around and pointed a pistol at the advancing Saudi strike team.

  Never breaking stride, Mufarrij stitched a short burst at the man. One of the rounds struck the wall, and the next two smashed the Guardsman’s face into pieces and pitched the corpse into the hallway. Mufarrij stepped over the dead man and took a quick look into the hall beyond.

  Three Guardsmen held the corridor. Their rifle rounds smacked into the walls, ceiling, and floor, one bullet nicking Mufarrij’s right ear. He pulled back, warm blood spilling down his neck, and motioned to the squad member who carried an AK-47 outfitted with a GP-30 Obuvka.

  The man nodded, readied the underbarrel grenade launcher, and pointed it out into the hallway. He fired immediately and ducked back to cover.

  When the grenade exploded, filling the hallway with a deafening BOOM!, Mufarrij wheeled around the corner with the assault rifle snugged tight against his shoulder. One of the three men staggered out from the wall and lifted his weapon. Mufarrij put a short burst into him, dropping the guard where he stood, and kept going.

  Waking up from his rest in one of the unoccupied cells – which were growing fewer every day – Colonel Davari ran to the main prison security network headquarters. He carried a rifle he’d taken from one of the Guardsmen along the way.

  ‘What is going on?’

  The three Guardsmen manning the security cameras talked rapidly into their microphones, trying to organize the security details. They sat tensely at their workstations, juggling between the different cameras with their keyboards and joysticks.

  Davari crossed to the officer in charge, a hard-faced man who had served the prison for a dozen years. ‘Wafaei, what is happening?’

  ‘The prison has been attacked.’

  ‘I can see that!’ Davari’s gaze raked the monitors.

  A full-scale offensive lit up the front of the prison. Heavy weapons fired on the tall security wall, knocking down sections, shorting out electricity. On one of the screens, a Guardsman returning fire was standing beneath one of the wall sections as it came down. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, buried under hundreds of pounds of rock and concrete rubble. ‘Who’s attacking us?’

  ‘We do not know.’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  Wafaei crossed to one of the workstations and took over the keyboard. He tapped keys, and the image blanked. ‘This is all we have seen.’

  A new window opened on the computer monitor. Three men caught by the security cameras as they crept close to the wall. They wore thobes, but those served only to disguise the weapons they carried. When they were challenged by a Guardsman walking his post, the men reacted immediately. One shot the Guardsmen while the other two pulled out rocket launchers, took aim at the guard posts at either end of the wall, and fired. They were already pulling back before the rockets struck their targets.

  ‘They took out the sniper teams in the front.’ Wafaei wiped sweat from his face.

  ‘I have eyes. I can see for myself.’

  The image closed and returned to real time as another wave of rockets smashed into the front of the main building.

  ‘These men are too well trained, too well equipped to simply be rebels.’ Davari thought furiously. ‘They have specific goals in mind.’ He gestured toward the computer. ‘Bring up the security camera in Miriam Abata’s cell.’

  Wafaei checked a printout from his uniform blouse and spoke to the computer tech. ‘Cell Ten.’

  A window opened on the computer, but it remained blank and gray.

  The tech entered the command sequence again, but got the same result. ‘The camera is offline.’

  Another tech whirled around in his chair. ‘The rear of the prison has just been breached, Colonel. There are reports of casualties and an invading force.’

  Cursing, Davari took one of the walkie-talkies from a nearby table, hooked it to a bulletproof vest, and pulled the vest on. He shoved the earpiece into his ear. ‘Keep me in the loop, Wafaei.’

  ‘I will.’

  Davari returned to the hallway and called to a half dozen Guardsmen who looked like they’d just gotten out of bed. ‘You men, come with me.’

  They turned toward him.

  ‘There are armed men at the rear of the prison. We are going to find them and kill them.’ Davari turned and ran through the hallway, heading for the confrontation.

  Adan turned to Lourds, his face pensive. He’d been listening to the prison frequency on a headset. ‘Someone else has broken into the prison – it is also under attack from an outside force.’

  ‘Gonna be a busy night.’ Lourds looked around the cell for Miriam’s clothing, but couldn’t find it. He took off his Oxford and handed it to her. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do.’

  Gratefully, Miriam took his shirt and pulled it on. It was far too big, but the tails dropped to just above her knees and preserved some of her modesty.

  Meanwhile, Adan had been stripping one of the dead guards of his boots. When he had them off, he tossed the pair to Miriam. ‘Put those on.’

  Miriam laced the boots on, looking like a very frightened orphan.

  Adan waved to Lourds. ‘Follow me. We will go very quickly now. If we do not hurry, we will be caught between the two forces.’

  ‘We need to find Professor Namati.’

  Miriam shivered. ‘He’s down the hall. They’ve been torturing him.’

  Adan glanced at the other man. ‘Shahram, go see.’

  The other man went, and Lourds was at Shahram’s heels. If the Guardsmen had been torturing Namati, the professor probably wouldn’t be able to walk unassisted.

  When he saw Namati limply hanging from the chains attached to the ring in the ceiling, the light glazing his dead eyes white, Lourds knew they were too late to save the man.

  Namati was slack-jawed in death. Burns showed black across his naked body. Someone had cut off all his toes, which lay scattered around the floor. Cables from a car battery were clipped to the mutilated stumps as he hung inches above the floor.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  Hearing Miriam’s voice right behind him, Lourds wheeled around and grabbed her by the shoulders, hustling her back out of the cell and the horror that hung there.

  Unable to control herself, Miriam shook. Lourds tried to help her, but she just pushed him away. ‘I can do this.’ She wiped tears from her bruised face. ‘Let’s go.’

  Lourds nodded to Adan, and they headed out. Miriam knelt beside the dead man whose boots she wore. She stripped his pistol from his holster, checked it with amazing proficiency for a graduate student, then plucked two spare magazines from the dead man’s pockets. When she stood again, the tears were gone, and a cold fury had settled over her features.

  Adan stared at her for a moment, then nodded and spoke in Farsi. ‘You have the heart of a lioness.’

  ‘This lioness is pissed now.’ Miriam stepped in front of Lourds, took a position to Adan’s right and a two-handed grip on the pistol, and trotted after the guard in her too-big boots.

  Remembering the pistol tucked int
o his waistband, Lourds drew the weapon and felt immediately foolish. He had never shot anyone and wasn’t planning on starting today. When they paused at an intersection, he leaned close to Miriam. ‘Can you use another pistol?’

  She looked at the gun in his hand, then at his face. ‘Won’t you need that?’

  ‘I don’t shoot people.’

  She took the pistol and flicked off the safety. ‘After everything I’ve been through last night and today, after seeing Professor Namati, I know there are people that need to be shot in here.’

  Lourds didn’t know what to say. That certainly wasn’t the attitude he got from most graduate students he’d known. But he didn’t doubt her words for a moment.

  They crept forward again. The hardest thing for Lourds was leaving behind all the poor souls trapped in the steel cages. Most of them looked to be at death’s door, miserable and suffering from malnutrition, many carrying horrible scars. The worst of the lot were those that simply lay in bed or sat on the floor and acted like nothing was going on, devoid of all hope.

  Adan listened intently on the headset, waiting for a moment at the next intersection, then glanced down the hallway to the left. ‘Foad is joining us. We have to find another way out of the building.’

  In the next instant, Foad rounded the far corner at a dead run. ‘They’re coming!’

  Adan lifted his rifle to fire, but hesitated an instant too long when four men rounded the corner in pursuit of Foad. One of them fired, and he fell.

  Lourds reached for Miriam, intending to pull her back to safety. She eluded him and thrust both pistols forward, standing over Adan. ‘Get down!’

  Foad dove to the floor. As soon as he was clear, Miriam opened fire. The pistols bucked and thundered in her fists, sounding as rapid as a machine gun. Both weapons locked back empty at the same time. Calmly, she tucked one under her arm and reloaded the pistol in her hand, chambering a round. Then she loaded and readied the other one as Adan and Foad climbed to their feet.

  At the other end of the hall, the four Guardsmen lay dead. At least three of the four were down with multiple headshots.