The Last Man in Tehran

by Mark Henshaw

  “I can help you,” Kyra said. “You kill me or give me up to the Iranians and you’ve got no one to help you get off their list.”

  “They’re not gonna take me off their list. Give me a mulligan or two, maybe.” Amiri put the cigarette to his mouth and sucked on it, the smoke filling his lungs. He looked away from her, thinking, and then exhaled, the white cloud rolling out of him then wafting toward the window. “All right, you ask me your questions. I might answer ’em, I might not, depending. Some things I just can’t tell you because the Iranians would kill me quicker than Mossad and they do know where to find me. So ask and we’ll see if I can work your deal.”

  “Fair enough,” Kyra said.

  • • •

  They had waited the hour before the Ayin pulled the car out of the lot onto the street. Salem pulled out her smartphone and launched the controller app on the home screen. It filled the screen and connected to the radio receiver that was tuned to the GPS tracker attached with magnets to the underside of the mark’s car. It took them only fifteen minutes to find the vehicle parked outside a dockside building at the Kish port facility on the island’s northern end.

  They watched the area for ten minutes and saw no one. “The security here is pathetic,” the Ayin remarked. “I am amazed this man has ever eluded us.”

  “It’s a large world and we are always stretched thin,” Salem told him. “And the security inside the building is probably stronger. Cameras?”

  “There and there,” the Ayin told her, pointing to them. “You should be able to evade them easily. The one at the door will be the most trouble, but it appears to be looking out, not down. Hug the wall and you should be able to stay out of its field of view.”

  Salem launched another app on her phone that connected to the radiation detector now in her bag and put a map on the screen, centered on her position and showing the area around her to a radius of ten meters. She dismounted and made her way through the parking lot to their target’s car. The device immediately found polonium-210 where Salem’s mark had tossed the impregnated cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. She trusted no one would pick it up.

  She touched her earpiece, which any passerby would have mistaken for a Bluetooth headphone. “Moving now,” she said. Salem made her way toward the largest building, aiming for a corner that she judged was unobserved, then stalked along the perimeter until she reached the locked rear door. It was armored, she saw, and set in a reinforced frame. A numeric keypad was mounted into the wall beside it. Her mark had smoked the doctored cigarette to the nub and polonium had stained his fingers every time he handled the lit paper. Salem leaned close to the door, then pulled the radiation detector out, putting it only inches away from the knob.

  The number on the phone jumped. She replaced the Geiger counter in her bag and made her way back to the Ayin. “That’s it,” she reported after she closed the passenger door. “Amiri could be here.”

  The Ayin nodded and pulled out his own phone, then looked up at the sky. “If he is not, there will be others there who will know where he is.”

  “We do not know how many are inside,” Salem observed.

  “I know,” the Ayin admitted. “But what we know of Amiri’s operation suggests that it is small. Fewer men draw less attention. We will keep watch here until the others arrive and try to get a count.”

  “They are already on their way here. I will search the perimeter and see what I can learn of the floor plan.”

  “Very good,” the man replied. “Be very careful. If this is Amiri’s building, then there will be soldiers here, Quds Force most likely. We can take them, but only if we can surprise them. If you are caught, we will lose you. We cannot afford that.”

  “That will not happen,” Salem assured him. She was determined to keep this promise. After her failure in the United States, she had much to prove, to her country and Mossad surely, but more to herself and to Shiloh.

  • • •

  “So what do you want to know?” Amiri asked.

  “Did you meet with a CIA officer named Sam Todd in Basra about three years ago?”

  “Girl, I’ve met a lot of people in Iraq. The mullahs are always sending the Quds Force and a lot of other people across the border. Half of ’em are buying and stealing everything that isn’t bolted down and sending it back across the border. The other half are bringing explosives over and teaching the insurgents how to blow your boys and the Iraqis into little pieces. So what makes you think I could remember meeting some American?”

  “I think you’d remember her.”

  “Her? Oh.” Amiri looked away from the woman, frowning at some private memory, and he snorted. “You would ask about that one,” he said, a rueful look on his lined face. “No, I didn’t meet with her. I was supposed to . . . Grayling asked me to do it, a favor for some CIA friend of his that I’d never met. I’d just started working off my sentence, as Grayling likes to call it, and I thought a few favors might shorten it, if you understand me. So I told my employers that I’d been contacted by some unsavory types who were offering some military kit that a few of the locals had looted from one of Saddam’s warehouses. The story got me to Basra.” Amiri stopped, thought again for several seconds, then slapped his hand on the table in anger. “But that stupid girl, Todd, she didn’t realize that the insurgents were watching all of the Americans in town. Some of the boys grabbed her when she left her hotel for dinner and beat on her awhile. She finally gave up my name and they dragged her back across the border and then here to Kish. I was able to talk my way out of it . . . told ’em that the deal must’ve been a CIA setup to grab me and toss me into Abu Ghraib and squeeze me for everything I knew. That got me off, but the mullahs didn’t let me travel for a good while after.”

  The man stopped talking and stared down at the floor, disappearing into his thoughts again. Kyra let the silence hang for a minute, to see whether he would start talking again of his own accord. Her patience finally ran out. “Where is she now? Is she still alive?”

  “She ended up where the mullahs send all the people they really don’t like. They sent her up to Evin Prison in Tehran, but what happened after they marched her inside . . . Alive? That was years ago, so I’ve got no idea, and I’m not stupid enough to ask.”

  “Do you know what Todd wanted to talk about?”

  Amiri sat up straight and stared at the young woman in amazement. “You don’t know?”

  “Long story.”

  “Humph.” Amiri shrugged. “I don’t know. I assumed she wanted to know about the deal I was brokering for Tehran at the time.”

  “What deal?”

  “With the Russians,” Amiri told her, as though speaking to a child. “After their empire fell apart, the Russian army started selling kit on the side to feed themselves . . . guns, vehicles, whatever they could pawn off. That time, they had something the mullahs wanted. The old commies had set up a series of lighthouses on the north coast years before, stuck ’em in places so remote that you couldn’t run a power line to them. So they hooked them up to RTGs . . . radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Know what those are? No? Batteries full of radioactive junk. The radiation heats up the casing and the device turns the heat into electricity. Well, a few of those RTGs went missing. One of them had been at Lishniy Island in the eastern Kara Sea, and Moscow told those soldiers to go find it. The soldiers came back and said that it must’ve washed out with the tide, but they’d taken it and were offering it and a couple more they’d pilfered to the mullahs. My employers sent me to make the deal. I figured that’s what your girl Todd wanted to ask about.”

  “Where are the RTGs now?”

  “Here on Kish.”

  Kyra stared hard at the man’s face, trying to read his expressions. “If they were the source of the radioactive dust in the dirty bomb that blew up in Haifa, giving the RTGs up might get Mossad off your back permanently,” she suggested.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “Don’t think I’m dumb enough to reach out to Mossad. They�
�re just as likely to listen to me and then kill me.”

  “They just want to make sure Tehran doesn’t hit Israel again—”

  “Girl, you think Tehran did that to Israel? Don’t be daft. The mullahs like to make a show of being religious crazies, but when they’re indoors they aren’t nuts and they surely ain’t suicidal,” Amiri said.

  “Then who did it?” Kyra asked.

  Amiri laughed. “Oh, don’t think I’m gonna rat out that bunch,” he said. “Bad enough I’ve got Mossad wanting to smoke me.”

  “Then give up the RTGs to the Brits,” Kyra implored him. “It would be your ticket out.”

  Amiri’s smile faded. “You might be right. You might not. If you’re a spook, you know how they think about people like me. They always want to keep you in place a little longer, keep you feeding ’em the good stuff no matter how dangerous you tell them it’s getting.” He studied Kyra’s face, narrowed his eyes as he thought. “They’re here on Kish, but that’s all I’m going to tell you, ’cause the SIS won’t be the only ones interested. You go back and make Grayling an offer. You tell that bloke that he’s got three days to come collect them and me, package deal. He doesn’t show up for them, I make the offer to someone else. Might be enough to get Mossad off my back or maybe the CIA would like to score that trophy—”

  The crack of guns sounded outside the room, in the distance. Kyra looked past Amiri to the door as the man’s head jerked around. He pulled a small radio from his belt and jabbered into it in Farsi, pure gibberish to Kyra. A frantic reply answered him. Amiri cursed, drew a side arm, and ran for the door.

  “Hey!” Kyra yelled. She jerked her arms against the shackles. Amiri didn’t look back at her as he ran out, turned a corner, and disappeared.

  • • •

  There were sixteen on the team now that Salem had joined them, one more than they had had when they sent Qolam Rouhani off into the next life, and this would be an operation unlike most they had run since joining Mossad. There was no division of labor now, no small group of two or three pulling the trigger on the target while the rest navigated the way in or out. All were former Sayeret Matkal and all were carrying weapons. The enemy was Quds Force, trained special forces soldiers like themselves, so it was possible that none of the Mossad team would come out of the warehouse again. But if the dirty bomb that had exploded in Haifa had been born in this building, at least some of the men inside would answer for that crime.

  Four of the Israeli men lay prone in sniper blinds, hastily arranged wherever they could find cover, one on each side of the building to seal it off and kill anyone trying to enter or leave. The first shot came from an M24, an American sniper rifle. The first of the men taking a smoke break outside dropped as a bullet split his head open from a distance of four hundred yards. His partner went down a second later as a round from a second rifle punched through his brain stem before his friend’s death had registered in his mind.

  The other twelve Israelis rushed the building, teams of four, coming in from opposite sides. Each carried a Tavor MTAR-21 assault rifle raised to eye level as they ran in the dark through the parking lot. One sentry taking his own cigarette break by a window on the top floor saw movement below in the moonlight. The Israelis had taken out what few artificial lights there had been, but nature herself was not giving them her full cooperation. The sentry frowned, reached for his radio, and was raising it to his mouth when a sniper’s bullet plowed through the “triangle of death” shaped by his eyes and nose and took off the back of his head as the slug came out the other side.

  The Israelis reached the doors. Forewarned by Salem that the entryways were armored, the lead men pulled shaped charges from their packs and attached them to the hinges and locks. The teams backed away as their leaders unspooled the detonation cord attached to the explosives. They didn’t use their radios to coordinate the blasts. They had agreed that the doors would be blown at the same moment, three minutes after the raid began. The team leaders pressed the switches on the detonators.

  The doors blew inward at the same moment, ripped free of their frames, and became flying weapons that killed three men, one each on the north, west, and south. The east sentry survived by chance alone as he was standing just to the side of the door as it was blasted into the building. His luck gained him five seconds of life, but he was stunned and deafened, and unable to use his radio before the Mossad team entered and cut him down, three shots to the head.

  There had been two dozen men inside the building and on the roof when the operation had begun. Now there were seventeen and the Israelis faced almost even odds, though they didn’t know it yet, and they had finally lost the element of surprise. The sound of the doors being blown off their hinges had done that, but the enemy was not yet organized. The boredom and lack of drills here over the years had left the Quds Force complacent and unprepared. Their response was slow and half of the Iranians were not at their posts.

  The north Mossad team encountered their first resistance, two men running for their stations when they turned a corner to see the four unknown intruders who shot them down before either could raise his pistol.

  The west team was the next to encounter hostile forces and the first to finally meet a squad larger than themselves. Six Quds Force officers met them at a T-intersection in the hallway. Both the Israelis and the Iranians shot at each other from behind corners at their ends of the corridor, but only one Quds soldier was carrying a weapon larger than his pistol. He emptied his magazine down the hallways while his teammates swapped out theirs. They never got to use them, as a grenade came skittering down over the tile and exploded, killing four men outright and leaving the other four helpless on the ground, stunned and bleeding from their ears and cuts made by the shrapnel. The west team ended their suffering a few seconds later as it closed the distance and put bullets in the head of every man who still had one.

  The Iranians were outnumbered now. The enemy, whoever it was, was carrying assault weapons and light explosives, and half of their own were not answering their radios. None of their response plans allowed for losing so many of their men so quickly, and confusion had set in. Their chain of command was broken and they could not figure out who was the senior man left alive.

  The south Mossad team was the first to take casualties. A small unit of the Quds Force sentries had finally laid hands on their own assault rifles and were running to the sound of the guns when they saw four people carrying bullpup rifles pass to their front at the end of the corridor. They raised their own and opened fire, hitting three, two men and a woman. The team leader was struck on the shoulder, which spun him around before knocking him to the floor. The man behind was struck in the throat and went down, blood gushing out of the hole below his jaw. The woman was struck in the head and killed outright, most of her skull shattered and its contents sprayed out on the wall. The last man in the line cursed and threw himself back behind the hallway corner. He pushed himself up to kneeling, raised his weapon, and filled the hallways with enough lead to discourage anyone thinking about a forward charge. He looked to his companions. His leader was still alive, he saw, the man trying to push himself across the floor to find some cover. The other two were not moving.

  He held his trigger down until the rifle stopped firing, sooner than expected, and a Hebrew curse followed as he checked his weapon. The Tavor had jammed. He wrestled with it, but the rifle was stubborn. He pulled a grenade and sent it down the hall, where it went off, killing one of the hostiles who had shot down his friends. He jumped forward two steps, grabbed his female companion’s fallen rifle and returned to cover. He made it just as the Iranians threw their own grenade. It skittered down the hall but hit the body of one of his dead comrades and stopped short before exploding, tearing the corpse into parts. He felt the blast but the shrapnel could not reach him behind the corner, instead tearing holes in the building. He raised his new weapon but held his fire, listening for footsteps in the hallway. The Quds Force soldiers were moving cautiously, gu
ns raised, looking for any movement that would prove their adversaries were not all dead. The Israeli waited, his anger screaming for him to fire.

  A few more seconds, and he unleashed it. He turned the corner, kneeling, aiming up as he fired. The first two Iranians went down almost together. The third managed to shoot but every round went into the ceiling as the Tavor’s slugs punched through his torso, jerking his body backward. The last Iranian used his extra second to focus on his target before shooting. He pulled the trigger to his own AK-47 an instant before the Mossad officer’s shots blew through his head, but it was time enough. Most of the AK rounds missed except for the last, which shattered the Israeli’s knee and plunged the young man into a kind of agony he had never imagined possible. He tried not to scream and failed, then gritted his teeth to shut off the cries that he only distantly recognized as his own.

  The south Mossad team was down.

  • • •

  Kyra could hear the gunfire more clearly now, the shots coming faster and closer. Her heart was punching her ribs and she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She strained against the cuffs again, then tried to slip one of her hands out. Amiri or his men had locked the restraints on her wrists so tightly that they hurt even when she wasn’t pulling against them. She ignored the pain and pulled hard until the metal cut into her skin and drew blood. She saw it but couldn’t feel it, the adrenaline in her system blocking the hurt.

  Finally, she stopped. She couldn’t rip her hands free.

  She heard an explosion in some nearby hallway, surely a grenade or some other small explosive. Men yelled and screamed in pain. One man shouted a panicked stream of Farsi pleas that was cut off in an instant by the repeated cracks of a carbine.

  Kyra’s chest was heaving now as her breathing accelerated. She fought to control herself as her instincts screamed for fight or flight, but she could do neither.