PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  The area below him was a hive of bustling activity, and Cole noted that hundreds of people were streaming in and out of one of the large buildings opposite.

  Cole recognized it as Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, a covered market famous round the word for its six miles of enclosed avenues, selling everything from traditional carpets to modern cell phones.

  It was the perfect place to get lost.

  The only trouble was, how was he going to get down there?

  He looked over the edge, saw that outside the bazaar were more market stalls, dozens of people milling around and looking at the wares on offer.

  He turned to the soldiers chasing after him, saw them clearing the last building toward this rooftop, and knew he had no time to make any better plans.

  Turning back to the street that led to the bazaar, Cole crouched down on the edge of the roof and jumped, aiming for the top of one of the market stalls, hoping that the big canvas awning would be sufficient to break his fall.

  It was only a thirty foot drop, but his mind played tricks on him as he sailed down through the cool evening air, telling him he was going to miss the awning, or someone would notice him and quickly pull it out of his way, and he’d up with broken legs, writhing on the ground in agony.

  But then he was hitting the canvas, and although it bowed with his weight, it held him just fine, and he got his breath back a moment later and rolled off the awning to the ground below just as the soldiers opened fire from above.

  Cole raced for the bazaar as the people in the street screamed and sought cover from the gunfire that came from the rooftop, and Cole used the confusion as he pushed through the gathered masses, pushing hard ahead until he reached the large ceremonial archway that led inside.

  And then finally he was there, just part of a crowd of hundreds pushing to get inside, away from the gunshots, completely covered from view.

  Safe, he hoped, for the next few minutes at least.

  The side door of the Black Hawk was open now, and Barrington leaned out to check their progress across the rooftops, still struggling with her motion-induced sickness but overriding it with sheer force of will.

  The cell phone tracker indicated that Cole was within a building on Arg Square, coming up on them just five minutes away, and Barrington noted that it was the city’s Grand Bazaar.

  Cole wasn’t answering, but the cell had been moving after the gunshots, and she assumed he was still alive.

  The question was, would he be able to get into a position for the Black Hawk to get him?

  Inside the bazaar was a veritable maze of corridors, all jammed full of merchants and customers, vibrant colors all around him as he pushed through the crowds, deeper into the huge, covered market.

  He saw stalls selling copper and other precious metals, others which specialized in fruits and spices, watches and jewelry, fabrics and carpets.

  The people were a wide mix also – men, women and children, some dressed in traditional garb while others wore more western clothing. But almost everyone was Iranian, with very few Caucasians, and Cole stood out like a sore thumb, especially as he continued to push and shove his way through the crowds.

  But he forced himself to slow down, to draw less attention; instead of pushing and shoving, to let the flow of the crowds carry him into the heart of the bazaar.

  For a time it worked, and he was transported from one corridor to the next, the sights and sounds like something out of a fairytale; but then the magic was broken as half a dozen armed soldiers emerged from side halls, shouting angrily and waving their weapons at the crowds.

  The people, recognizing the stranger among them, immediately started to distance themselves from him, and as the space opened up around him, the soldiers began to fire.

  The rounds missed, but the chaos that erupted as a result of the shots – hordes of screaming, running, crying citizens – threw off the men’s aim, covered their arcs of fire, and Cole took the opportunity and ran down a narrow covered alleyway off to the side, racing past the small market stalls of men dealing in copper plates and ceramic vases.

  He could hear the soldiers coming after him, and focused on the corridor ahead, which went up to a narrow junction at the end.

  But then something caught his eye, and he stopped momentarily, grabbing an ornately designed scabbarded scimitar from the wall of what looked to be an antique weapons stall, ignoring the protests of the owner as he continued off down the alleyway, ripping the sword out of its scabbard and dropping the cover to the floor behind him.

  He stepped right at the end of the alley, turned back to face the way he had come, and waited there, drenched with sweat.

  And then he saw the shadows bouncing across the ancient stonework and whipped the scimitar back into the alleyway he had recently left, in a vicious horizontal swing that cut clean across the body of the first oncoming soldier.

  Leaving the sword embedded in the man’s stomach as he fell to his knees, Cole grabbed his rifle and started firing, before the other men even knew what was happening, blasting away at them at close range, the 7.62mm rounds taking out all five of them in the blink of an eye.

  Cole quickly stripped the combat webbing from the nearest man and put it on, ejecting the magazine from the G3 and slipping in a new one as he began to once again race down the now-empty corridors.

  He saw the stonework erupt around him, heard the sound of gunshots from behind, and turned into a crouched position, keeping himself low as he shouldered the G3 and returned fire.

  There were four men at the other end of the corridor, and Cole fired aimed shots toward them, taking them all out in as many seconds before returning to his feet and carrying on in the opposite direction, knowing that more would be there soon.

  The trouble was that the Iranians knew this market, and he did not. They would be able to anticipate his movements, get people into the right places to cut him off, ambush him.

  All he could do was react.

  But, he decided, if that was all he could do, then it would just have to be enough.

  The Little Bird was closing in on the bazaar now, high in the sky to avoid detection, providing cover for the Black Hawk.

  Barrington could see that Cole was still inside.

  But where?

  Would they have to land the chopper and fight their way inside to him, help him extract?

  Or would he just pop up somewhere at the last moment?

  She sighed, understanding that it was all part of the game.

  She would just have to react to the situation as it unfolded.

  Cole pushed through a tiny alleyway, closed off for repairs, and emerged at the other side into a larger area, a double height hall with a mezzanine level that was still crowded with people.

  It appeared to be a carpet warehouse, the huge hallway covered from one end to another, and from floor to ceiling, with carpets of every hue and color, every style and size imaginable.

  Under any other circumstances, it would have been quite a sight; but with half the Iranian army chasing him, Cole had other things on his mind.

  His internal clock told him that the choppers should be on target right about now, and his mind raced as he tried to figure out how to meet them.

  He saw soldiers appear at the other side of the giant hall, eyes scouring the crowds for him. Momentarily unseen, Cole aimed from the alleyway and shot the first two soldiers he saw, an action which sent the crowds into a blind panic, making them run for the exits.

  Cole used the confusion to sprint forward, eyes on a long carpet, rolled and leaning against one of the lower stalls.

  Shouldering his rifle, Cole launched himself onto the carpet and scampered up it, hands and feet close together and moving fast like a monkey climbing a tree.

  He reached the top a few seconds later, where the tip met the wall just a foot or so under the ornately carved stone balcony of the mezzanine level above; and as the soldiers realized where he was and opened fire, his hands reached upward and gripped the ra
ilings, pulling him up and over to the upper level, the Guards’ 7.62mm rounds bouncing off the ornate carvings just inches from his head, the stone protecting him.

  He swung the G3 from his shoulder and popped up back above the balcony, letting off bursts of full-auto to the soldiers below, keeping them pinned down as he withdrew the cell phone, calling Barrington as people fled, terrified, from the upper levels, adding to the confusion and panic below as they emerged from the stairwells into the main hall.

  ‘Where are you?’ Barrington shouted into her radio.

  ‘Have you got my position?’ Cole asked, barely audible above the gunfire coming from inside.

  ‘Yes,’ she said as the Black Hawk started to circle the bazaar, all too aware of the seemingly huge amount of military vehicles that were parked up outside, dispersing armed soldiers this way and that.

  ‘Good,’ Cole’s voice came back. ‘This is what I need you to do.’

  The ceiling above the carpet hall was as intricately carved as the mezzanine balustrades, three arched domes with colored glass at the top which – during daylight hours – must have made the hall awash with light and color.

  Cole kept his eye on the central dome, even as he reloaded from the magazines in his webbing and continued to lay down fire on the soldiers below, using his elevation to his advantage.

  He was managing to keep the soldiers away from the stairs that led up to him, but he knew that there must be other routes, upper corridors that would lead there, and that other soldiers would even now be finding them, using them.

  He didn’t have long before the entire mezzanine would be swarming with blood-crazed Revolutionary Guards, and then his chances of survival would be narrowed down to nearly zero.

  But then – just as his worst nightmares were realized, and he sensed movement at either end of the mezzanine balcony, saw soldiers coming out of the narrow doorways – the skylight of the central ceiling dome crashed open, colored glass falling to the hall below.

  And then Cole saw the rope drop through the opening and he stood quickly, letting off bursts from the G3 in all directions before jumping up onto the balustrade and then hurling himself off, into the air above the great hall.

  Dropping the rifle, his hands reached out for the rope.

  As he fell, he thought for several terrible moments that he was going to miss it, that he was going to end up splattered across the stone slabs of the carpet hall below; but then his hands caught hold of the nylon cable and he gripped tight, body swinging wildly in the air.

  ‘Go, go, go!’ he shouted into the dark skylight above him, and – as the Iranian soldiers recovered from their surprise and started firing again – the rope pulled him upward, and then he was passing through the dome, up into the night sky beyond.

  With Mark Cole being winched aboard the Black Hawk, Barrington and her men aimed covering fire toward the groups of soldiers below who – though they surely couldn’t see anything – were shooting skyward toward the vague sound of silenced engines and rotors.

  The Little Bird also went into action then, launching its Hydra rocket projectiles toward the military vehicles parked outside the bazaar.

  A truck exploded in a ball of flame, then a car, then an armored personnel carrier, and the streets of Tehran were alight with raging fire as the two choppers pulled up high and made their way out of Tehran, heading for the border, and the safety of Ashgabat.

  12

  Michiko sat at her desk within the Force One control center, which was laid out in a similar style to the White House Situation Room, and monitored the feedback from Tehran.

  She was surrounded on all sides by technicians, analysts and operators from Force One, Vinson right by her side; but due to her own technical capabilities, as well as her relationship to Cole, she was the primary contact with the helicopter group.

  The reports they were intercepting from Tehran – even after translation by the unit’s experts – were a confused babble, nobody in the city really having any idea what was going on. There were conflicting stories circulating over the police and military systems, some about an escaped spy from MOIS headquarters, others of an armed terrorist on the loose, and it was clear that there was no real idea what had happened. Mention of the American choppers was sporadic, and nearly non-existent.

  There was anger higher up the chain of command though, with answers being demanded by everyone from the Ayatollah on down.

  But right now, Michiko had questions of her own.

  ‘Is he with you?’ she asked Barrington over her radio system. ‘Did you get him?’

  Everyone in the room listened intently for the answer, eager to find out what had happened over in Iran.

  ‘We got him,’ Barrington confirmed, ‘we’re out of Tehran and heading back to Ashgabat. You still got those air defenses down?’

  ‘Yes,’ Michiko replied, filled with an enormous sense of relief. ‘Yes, they’re still down, you should be okay all the way out of Iranian airspace.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Barrington said. ‘You want to speak to him?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Michiko answered, and before she could greet him, express her joy at his safety, her father’s voice came on the line, professional and urgent.

  ‘Michiko,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try and transfer the rest of those files over to you now. Have you found anything from the first batch?’

  ‘No,’ Michiko said, ‘not yet, anyway. We’ve got all our translators working on it, as well as the supercomputers, if there’s anything there, we’ll find it. Send across the rest, we’ll get started on it right away.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Cole. ‘I’m sending it across now.’

  Cole opened up the files and started to send them across, even as the Black Hawk lurched this way and that through total darkness, the Little Bird leading the way up ahead, visible only to the pilots with their night vision goggles.

  He hoped that Michiko and the team would find something; he knew that Younesi had something planned, just not what it was, not exactly. And with the time past midnight back in London, it was already the day of the memorial events over there.

  He scanned the list of files as they downloaded to the Force One systems back in DC, and his eyes stopped as he recognized a name. He read it again, checking his translation of the Arabic script, pretty sure he had it right.

  Shahid Dastgheyb.

  The name sent a chill through his spine, as some of the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.

  It was the name of the mountain base which produced chemical weapons for the Iranian regime, the facility which had been the subject of a terrorist theft just a few months before.

  The theft of a single crate of unknown chemical weapons, intercepted while en route to the transport hub at Ahmad Ibn Mousa.

  A single crate, like the one that had been passed to Milanović by the Iranians, the one he had asked the Corsicans to smuggle across to England along with the weapons for Javid Khan’s boys.

  He got back on the line to Michiko immediately.

  ‘Start on the file labeled ‘Shahid Dastgheyb’,’ Cole told her, ‘it’s a chemical weapons plant in Iran, Bruce knows all about it. A crate went missing there a few months ago, blamed on an IS offshoot. Might be the same crate that the Agostini family smuggled into London for Khan.’

  Cole heard his daughter gasp on the other end of the line. ‘You think . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cole confirmed, ‘I think there are chemical weapons in London, and Wembley Stadium is the target.’

  Secret Service agent Victor Parish checked over the physical security arrangements at Wembley Stadium one last time.

  As the leader of the service’s advance team, he had been in London for a couple of days already and – despite himself – had to admit that he was pretty happy with how the Brits had set this thing up.

  It was nighttime now, in the early hours of Sunday morning, the day of the big event itself. The skies above were dark, yet the stadium was bathed in light as w
orkmen continued about their business, getting things ready, always under the watchful eyes of the British police and security services. Members of the British Army had also been drafted in to provide extra armed security for the event, and Parish was happy that this thing would be as secure as it could be.

  The president was due to arrive in London in just a few hours, and it was absolutely vital that every security precaution was in place before she set foot in the stadium.

  Parish felt his cell phone vibrate and he answered it, surprised to see the caller ID displaying the number of the director’s office.

  ‘Parish?’ he heard the gruff tones of Secret Service director Dennis O’Hare ask.

  ‘Yes sir?’ he replied, immediately nervous despite his decades of experience.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ the director announced without preamble.’

  Parish stood up a little straighter. ‘What sort of a problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Recently developed intelligence suggests that a secondary attack in London is highly likely,’ the director told him, ‘and Wembley Stadium is the most probable target. We have reason to believe that the attack might be chemical in nature. I’ve spoken to my opposite numbers in the UK and they’ve agreed to look into it but – pigheaded bastards that they are – they’re refusing to cancel the event unless there’s more evidence. And what’s more, the president agrees with them, she’s still going to go through with it. So what I need you to do is check the place over again, with a fine toothed comb, check everything and everywhere that such a weapon could be hidden, from packages underneath the seats, to the cleaner’s pushcart, to the ice cream vans pulling up outside. Understood? Everything and everywhere.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Parish answered, already calculating the time he had left before the doors opened to the public, hoping he had enough.