The Mingrelian

by Ed Baldwin

  Several other parties to the conference signed on, the last being the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The face of Eskander Khorasani filled one corner of her screen.

  “Eskander, old friend. How have you been?” she asked as he adjusted his headset and looked, confused, into the camera.

  “Madam President, good morning. It looks like our day might finally be at hand, if it pleases Allah,” he responded in Farsi.

  “Allah be praised, it seems so.”

  “Well, we’re here to vet Mr. Khorasani, and to pool our information,” the staffer at the head of the table said, calling the meeting to order.

  “Eskander, who was my roommate at Sharif University when we were students there?” Maryam asked, letting a small smile crease her face.

  “Ah,” Eskander smiled, “Yasmin Farrokhzad.”

  “And, is she well?”

  “She is, Allah be praised. She escaped the country after my last visit to Tehran. She crossed the Armenian border with our girls last week. Thank you for your concern.”

  There followed 10 minutes of more focused questions. Eskander’s wife had been Maryam’s roommate in college, but he had no association with her that Iran's security organization could trace. He was a “clean” mole in the Iranian regime, and the primary conduit for information from the Tehran cell of the PMOI and other sympathizers in the regime. Gradually, the vetting ceased and the pooling of information expanded.

  “How many are dead?”

  “The local commander has told me the blast was at Parchin, two of them, actually,” Eskander said. “The first was a ground burst, the second a penetrator into the nuclear-weapons storage facility. The mountain east of Tehran protected most of the city from the shock wave, but the southern portion has been badly damaged. There is no power, thousands are dead.”

  “That is what I’ve been told by my contacts there. What of Grand Ayatollah Mashadi?”

  “The local commander says he is alive in Evin Prison. PMOI fighters are concentrating there, ready for an assault.”

  “It is essential that we free Ayatollah Mashadi,” she said, addressing the staffers in Washington. “He is an essential element in forming a new government.”

  “They still have a functioning government?” the staffer leading the meeting asked, directed more at the whole group than to Maryam and Eskander.

  “The nation is in a panic, but the military is still functional,” another staffer responded.

  Eskander added, “The regime is leaving Tehran.”

  “Why wouldn’t they leave before they started a war?” the staffer asked.

  “They weren’t ready for it to start yet,” Eskander said. “They set up Hezbollah with a nuclear weapon with the expectation they would wait for Tehran’s order to fire it. They didn’t wait.”

  “It did seem kind of ad hoc.”

  “Now they’re scrambling to get out of town. They expect more detonations.”

  “Where is the president of Iran?”

  “My contacts think he’s been assassinated,” Eskander said.

  “We’ve been frantically trying to find someone to negotiate an end to this thing, and there’s nobody there,” the State Department staffer said.

  Maryam said, “The Revolutionary Guard is in charge. They always have been, and you can’t get them on the phone.”

  “Madam President, why did Iran attack Saudi Arabia, and why did they limit their attack to the royal family? That seems odd.”

  “The royal family of Saudi Arabia is a hereditary monarchy, forbidden by the Holy Quran,” she said sternly. “As they control the Holy City, Mecca, and the City of the Prophet, Medina, and are haram – unclean because of their sin against Islam – they can be punished by any Muslim. It is a duty.”

  “So you have no problem with that?” the staffer asked, somewhat incredulously.

  “It is inevitable, but hardly necessary at this time. Not wise at this time, in my opinion,” she responded thoughtfully, softening her tone from the first statement about the Saudi royal family.

  Boyd Chailland, slumped in a seat next to Eskander Khorasani in Tbilisi and listening to the English translation of the conversation, poked Eskander's leg under the table.

  “Oh, there’s another point,” Eskander added. “My contact in Tbilisi for the past year, Ekaterina Dadiani, has been abducted and is also in Evin Prison. Any plans to break out Grand Ayatollah Mashadi should include her, too.”

  Chapter 38: Persian Gulf

  P

  rince Colonel Turki bin Muqrin Al Saud of the Royal Saudi Air Force pushed his F-15C into afterburner and accelerated through 30,000 feet over the Persian Gulf. He was followed by a flight of 11 other aircraft spread out in tactical formation. Drones and cruise missiles had preceded them into Iranian airspace, plastering the main fighter base remaining on the Persian Gulf side of Iran. Intermediate-range conventional missiles from Israel had hit the air-defense network around Tehran, destroying its central control and many of the surface-to-air missiles there. It was a fighter pilot’s turkey shoot: plenty of bad guys, no SAMs and a reliable radar vector from your own AWACS.

  “Bandits climbing through 12,000 feet,” crackled in his headset. It was a message from a Saudi AWACS plane loitering within Saudi airspace but watching the coast of Iran with side-looking radar.

  He’d been training for this moment since he was a cadet. All the arms and training Saudi Arabia had absorbed during his lifetime had been for the purpose of opposing Iran in a confrontation that might, or might not, include the United States or any other world power. If Saudi Arabia was to stand as a nation, it must someday confront Iran. Today was that day. The Israeli nuclear weapon that had hit Bandar Abbas at the Strait of Hormuz had blown a big hole in Iran’s anti-aircraft radar defense, and his flight was streaming through it. Ironic, he thought. As a young man, he assumed he’d be going to war against the Israeli air force, but now in the background noise he could hear an American AWACS plane vectoring them into Iran in another sector. Lest there be any confusion, he’d been lectured by his grandfather on who were Saudi Arabia’s friends and who were adversaries, and now his grandfather was unaccounted for in the rubble of the King’s Palace.

  Turki was focused. Just today, he’d heard there was an insurrection within Iran, people in the streets, fighting, the regime tottering. He hoped so, and he was here to guarantee that whatever the next government was, it wouldn’t have an air force.

  ****

  The last of the U.S. Navy ships berthed at Manama, Bahrain, were making flank speed out into the Persian Gulf and the relative safety of open water. The remnants of the mushroom cloud over Bandar Abbas were still visible, 150 miles away and three days after the nuclear exchange.

  “Detonation! Off the port bow!” the officer of the deck called out.

  A mile to their port, a geyser of white water sprayed into the air, and the surface of the ocean boiled with turbulence. A deep rumble was felt by the crew. Moments later, the crushed carcass of a Ghadir-class Iranian submarine popped to the surface.

  “That’s for the Normandy,” muttered the captain of the USS Helena (SSN-725), a Los Angeles-class attack submarine that had been lurking along in a hundred feet of water behind it. Orders had finally come to destroy all Iranian submarines encountered.

  Chapter 39: Reinforcements

  “Y

  es, it’s a chicken-shit way to fight a war,” Maj. Gen. Ferguson said on the scrambled secure teleconference from his command center in rural Virginia. Boyd had excused Eskander Khorasani, and the embassy car had taken Eskander back to his apartment. Now Boyd was alone in the conference room, linked up with Ferguson.

  “But, those are the orders,” Ferguson said. “No 82nd Airborne, no special-ops Combat Talon C-130s, no air cover. Everyone over at the White House is on the phone with somebody trying to get this thing called off, and we have explicit orders not to violate Iranian air space.”

  “I saw on the
news that there was a pitched battle between Iran and the Saudi and Israeli air forces all along the coast today,” Boyd said.

  “And the Kuwaitis, and the Qataris, and the Omanis ...”

  ”So, Iran slips up, and they all jump on.”

  “Iran still has an air force larger than all that put together. This fight’s not over by a long shot. But, that’s a good thing. Keep the Iranians busy so we can do what we have to do,” Ferguson said walking toward a map on the wall

  “We?” Boyd did not feel like a part of any “we.” He felt alone and let down and mad at himself. He’d roughed up Ratface, and now he was feeling the payback. And here was Ferguson talking about some new adventure they were cooking up for him. So, he gets killed and Ekaterina gets whatever the rat-faced man has in store for her, and her son Niko gets to grow up an orphan. Where was the “we” in that?

  “The request from your Iranian friends is for a C-130 to fly into a remote airfield in the mountains of Iran and pick up the Grand Ayatollah Mashadi, who they are going to break out of jail tomorrow. They assure us they will get your friend Ekaterina as well.”

  “How do you know all that?” Boyd asked. “We just got off a teleconference with the State Department an hour ago.”

  “You aren’t the only one with contacts inside Iran. The CIA has been fielding calls since the first bright light three days ago. We need to move fast, though, because VEVAK is getting calls, too.”

  Boyd’s spirits began to rise. Now, he felt like part of a “we.”

  “You said no Combat Talon C-130s.”

  “It’s a contractor.”

  “A contractor? Surely, you’re not going to send a contractor on a combat mission.”

  “We’ve done it before,” Ferguson said. “In fact, this contractor has flown combat missions in the past month.”

  Boyd could sense that Ferguson was playing with him. He grew wary again. What Ferguson might think was cute could get Boyd killed.

  “Old friends of yours,” Ferguson said.

  “From 130 school?”

  “South Sudan. Raybon Clive and Davann Goodman bought a C-130, with the help of the CIA. They’ve been flying resupply into South Sudan for a couple months.”

  “No shit!” Boyd exclaimed, a big smile breaking out on his face. “Last I heard, they had a Grumman Albatross running rum into Mombasa.”

  “The CIA made them an offer. They’re ‘RD Associates,’ doing business as Juba Aviation now.”

  “I’ve negotiated with Raybon Clive,” Boyd said. “I’ll bet the CIA wrote some checks.”

  “They’ve got money. The important thing is the CIA will let us use the plane, and it maintains plausible deniability as the president tries to negotiate an end to this war.”

  “Boy, this is a chicken-shit way to wage a war, but I’m in,” Boyd said, returning from the depth of depression he’d been feeling. “What’s the plan?”

  “We gave them the warning order when we got a negative response from Strike Command. They’ll be in Tbilisi tonight. You leave in the morning.”

  *****

  He saw the smoke before he saw the aircraft. It was just a dirty smudge on the horizon at the approach end of the runway. First, there was a speck in the smudge, then a tiny yellow light as its landing lights came on, and finally an ancient C-130B lumbered into view. It was painted gunmetal grey with some lighter patches where an insignia had been sanded off – a thoroughly disreputable, world weary transport. Perfect.

  Boyd and Rick Shands sat in Boyd’s car as the old aircraft landed and the marshaling vehicle escorted it to the parking ramp next to the terminal. Boyd and Rick went through the terminal and flashed their embassy credentials. Even though there was no reason for them to be on the flight line, they walked right through security. One of the holdovers from their days in the Soviet Union is a respect by the Georgians for “official” documents.

  “Hey! Any one-legged pilots on board?”

  “Boyd Chailland! Come on up,” a black man in a plain flight suit with no insignia or rank called down as the crew door opened and the steps were lowered.

  “Yo, Davann Goodman,” Boyd said as he and Rick climbed the steps and stepped into a cloud of cigarette smoke. Smoking had been banned from Air Force aircraft since Boyd was a cadet, but this wasn’t an Air Force aircraft. A tall, gaunt, gray-haired man in a flight suit with a cigarette clamped between his lips descended the ladder from the cockpit above the cargo bay.

  “Emmet Boyle,” he said, turning to Boyd and offering a hand.

  “Navigator,” Davann said. “This dude got us into some places in South Sudan. We’ve been doing some work down there.”

  “I heard you were doing resupply.”

  “Resupply? Shit, we been kickin’ ass.”

  Davann crossed the cargo bay, leaning on his cane and swinging his rigid hip as he grabbed the tarp on a pallet and pulled it off.

  “Uh oh!” Shands said as the tarp came off.

  “Crap, Davann,” Raybon Clive said. “Don’t let the locals see that thing!”

  The aircraft commander came down the ladder. His flight suit was cut off at the knee, revealing an ornately carved wooden leg attached to a state of the art articulating foot.

  “And Raybon Clive,” Boyd said, watching the pilot descend. He pointed to Shands.

  “Ray, this is my boss here in Tbilisi, Maj. Rick Shands, United States Marine Corps.”

  “Raybon Clive, captain, United States Air Force, retired,” Raybon said, shaking Rick's hand.

  “Emmet Boyle, major, United States Air Force, retired.”

  “Davann Goodman, gunnery sergeant, United States Marine Corps, retired. Semper fi, sir!”

  “We’ve got to talk,” Boyd said, looking over his shoulder at one of the local ground crew lurking about the crew door.

  “Let’s go up to the parlor,” Raybon said as he hit the door control and the steps began to retract. He led the way up the ladder to the cockpit. “We’ve been living in this heap for the past month. It’s beginning to feel like home.”

  “Where have you been?” Boyd asked as he stepped onto the ladder. The crew door closed, blocking out the curious crew outside.

  “Kalafal, South Sudan. It’s not in the papers, but there’s a hell of a war going on along the Nile River. We’ve been flying supplies from Entebbe, Uganda into the base at Kalafal, grabbing some sleep and going back for more.”

  “So, they just called you with this mission and you dropped everything and flew up here?” Boyd asked as he entered the cockpit.

  Raybon had taken the left pilot seat and swiveled it to face to the rear. Boyd took the right seat and did the same. Emmet Boyle took the navigator’s seat at the side, Davann and Rick Shands sat on the bottom bunk at the back. Boyd dropped a small briefcase onto the flight engineer’s seat in the middle just behind the two pilot seats.

  “There were some negotiations,” Raybon smiled.

  “We dropped our plans for a tiki bar,” Davann interjected. “With my bro’s new deal with your general in Washington, we’re thinking about starting the first airline in South Sudan.”

  “When things settle down,” Raybon added.

  “Well, we’ve got something else to do first. It kicks off tomorrow. What did they tell you about it?”

  “We’re going to need some maps,” Emmet said. “They’re talking about a 3,000-foot landing strip on the side of a mountain.”

  “I’ve been downloading maps all afternoon,” Boyd said, opening his briefcase and pulling out several.

  “These are the latest satellite images from the National Reconnaissance Office. They’ve marked this airfield that the People’s Mujaheden of Iran fighters want us to land on,” he said as he spread out one of the maps and pointed to a highlighted area. “There are no navigation aids operational in Iran since the nukes three days ago, and we’ve turned off the GPS for this whole region.”

  He looked up at his companions. />
  “There’s going to be an AWACS plane loitering over the Caspian Sea to vector us in, but they can just put us over the airfield. We’ll have to do the approach on our own.”

  “Give me a compass, a map and a stopwatch,” Emmet said, taking a long draw from his freshly lighted Pall Mall. “I’ll put you over the end of the runway. You put it down.”

  “This is no easy mission,” Boyd said. “The PMOI is going to hit Evin Prison at dawn. They’ve assured Eskander Khorasani, their contact in Tbilisi that it’s lightly defended and cut off from the rest of Tehran. But once they spring this Grand Ayatollah Mashadi, its 30 miles up the mountain to that airfield.”

  “Hmm,” Raybon said. “Look out the window.

  Big fluffy snowflakes were drifting down from a darkening sky.

  Chapter 40: Sheraton Metechi Palace Hotel, Tbilisi

  “I

  t was January 2009, and the Brits were having a tough time up at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. We were flying in ammunition and food, and it was a blizzard, snow so thick you couldn’t see 10 feet. But the C-130 is an all-weather aircraft, so we went in on instruments. The problem was, the ragheads had gotten through perimeter security and were right at the end of the runway. They couldn’t see us, but they could hear us coming in.”

  Raybon Clive was telling his story in the hotel bar. A nearly empty pitcher of beer sat on the table. They’d changed out of their flight suits, had a shower and had ordered dinner. It was still early evening.

  Boyd had heard this story, as had everyone at the table except Rick Shands.

  “As we went over they fired up with rocket propelled grenades, and one hit the front of the aircraft. Blew out the instrument panel, killed my co-pilot, and blew my leg off.”

  Raybon stuck his wooden leg out from under the table to demonstrate.

  “I pushed the yoke down, and we hit the runway, hard. We skidded off the runway into the mud and caught fire. The flight engineer pulled me out of the seat and carried me down the ladder and threw me out into the snow, then he grabbed a rifle and, with the loadmaster, fired from the crew door to keep the bad guys back. I was lying out in the snow, bleeding to death. I should have had a tourniquet, but I didn’t. Just as I was about to give it up, 50-caliber bullets started snapping overhead. Here comes a Marine Humvee plowing through the snow with Davann Goodman on the 50-cal.”