The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  “All fired from the same gun?” asked Amato.

  “Two guns were used at the Trudeau House. Whether one of them was the same gun used to kill Campbell, we don’t know yet. The bullets that killed Campbell are still in him and we won’t be able to do a ballistics analysis until after the autopsy later today. The one thing I can tell you about the bullets we recovered from the Trudeau House is that they indicate there were significant flaws in the barrels of the guns from which they were fired. Which leads us to believe they were probably knockoffs, likely of an M-14 or Heckler & Koch G3.”

  “Both models the Iranians have been known to copy,” said Amato. “Has your forensic team in Baku gotten in contact with Mark Sava yet?”

  “That’s the guy who discovered the bodies at the Trudeau House?”

  “The same.”

  “We’re still waiting for the Agency to reel him in.”

  “Did they say when that’s going to happen? I mean, you have told them you need to talk to Sava, no? And this Buckingham woman who’s with him?”

  “I share your frustration, sir.”

  Daria and Sava wouldn’t survive for long alone out there, thought Amato. Not with the resources Aryanpur had in Azerbaijan.

  Amato felt the tightness in his chest again. And the need to do something.

  Daria moved to the center of the path. Tural stood to her left, his eyes darting nervously from Daria to Mark.

  On Daria’s right stood a dark-haired man with a large rabbitlike overbite and bright white teeth. He wore brown dress slacks, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and plastic sandals that revealed dirty toes. And he was gripping a scuffed-up AK-47 with a relaxed confidence that Mark found disturbing. The man’s trigger finger rested just outside the trigger well, and the rifle barrel pointed slightly downward. His feet were about shoulder-width apart and staggered. To the untrained eye, he might have looked like a guy just casually holding a gun, but Mark recognized a classic firing stance when he saw one.

  It was Mark’s first inkling that he’d miscalculated yet again. The MEK consisted largely of ragtag soldier wannabes. This guy, despite the civilian getup, seemed more like the real thing.

  Mark said, “I take it you’re Yaver?”

  “You tell him my name?” Yaver asked Daria, with evident derision.

  “I didn’t tell him. Like I said—”

  “Hands so I can see,” said Yaver to Mark. “Walk.”

  “Do what he says,” said Daria.

  So Mark walked until he reached a clearing about ten feet in front of the farmhouse’s privacy wall, in a rutted section of the driveway.

  “Turn around,” said Yaver.

  Daria said, “I told you not to follow me. You were warned.”

  Ignoring her, Mark looked to Yaver. “I’m Mark Sava. I’m the former chief of—”

  “Yes, yes, I know who you are.”

  “The MEK’s people were killed in Astara, probably by a team from Iran. The CIA was hit too, in Baku. Our interests overlap—I came here to propose that we work together.”

  “Why do you say the Iranians do this in Baku and Astara?”

  “Who else would?”

  “You have no evidence?”

  “I’m gathering it.”

  Yaver handed Daria a set of steel handcuffs. “Bind him.”

  Daria said, “You’re going to be staying here for a while, Mark. Locked up.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  “You’ll be given food and water and you’ll be treated well. But you will not be following me any longer. I’ve had it.”

  “You are stupid, Daria joon?” said Yaver, as she approached Mark. “You bring your weapon near this man?”

  Daria handed her pistol to Tural, then started handcuffing Mark’s hands together in front of him.

  “Behind his back,” said Yaver.

  “He needs to be able to eat,” said Daria, and she continued to bind his hands in front.

  “Marg. Sag madareto begaad,” said Yaver. May a dog fuck your mother.

  He spoke the words with more disdain than real anger.

  “Back off. I know what I’m doing.” Daria clicked the cuffs tight.

  And then, for a brief moment, everything was silent. So silent that Mark could hear the wind in the orchard and Daria’s breathing. A small flock of starlings settled in a nearby field.

  “I’m not your enemy,” Mark said to Yaver, although as soon as he said the words, he was hit with a powerful feeling that no, he actually was this guy’s enemy. “I came here because I thought we could work together.”

  Yaver gave him a who-gives-a-shit look, then suddenly stepped to the left and popped Tural hard on the side of his head with the butt of his AK-47. The hit was sharp and professional, and Tural collapsed.

  “What the hell?” said Daria, turning.

  “I change the plan.” Yaver stooped down to retrieve Daria’s pistol, which had fallen near Tural’s feet. With one hand he removed the magazine from the gun and threw it fifty feet away, into the field of lemon trees. “On knees, both of you. Hands to heads.”

  “I gotta give it to you, Daria. You sure can pick ’em,” said Mark as he knelt. “This guy’s a real winner.”

  Tural started to moan so Yaver kicked him and told him to kneel next to Mark, which he did.

  Daria just stood there. “Yaver, I told you we didn’t bring him here intentionally.”

  “Hands to your head, Daria joon. Now.”

  Mark studied Yaver. His gun hand was steady and his eyes were boring into Daria. This clearly wasn’t the first time he’d ordered people around like this.

  Daria put her hands on her head and dropped to her knees. “He was following us, Yaver. I tried to lose him in Baku and I thought for sure I’d lost him in Astara…I did my best, I didn’t mean to bring him here.”

  Yaver searched each one of them from behind, keeping his AK-47 aimed at the back of the head of the person he was searching. When he came to Mark, he removed a bundle of hundred-dollar bills from each of his front pockets—$20,000 total.

  “Thank you for the tip. Very generous.”

  Then Yaver produced a cell phone and dialed a number, keeping one eye on his phone and the other on his prisoners. In Farsi, he read off the date, time, and GPS coordinates, said that he had Mark Sava and Daria Buckingham in his custody and was requesting instructions. Mark thought he sounded like a highly trained soldier communicating with a superior officer.

  “You bastard,” said Daria to Yaver. “You’re not MEK, you’re a plant.”

  Yaver stared blankly at his three captives as he held the phone to his ear, waiting.

  By now it was oppressively hot. Mark could feel trickles of sweat running down his neck.

  “Was that your work in Astara?” asked Daria. “And in Baku?”

  “I understand,” said Yaver, speaking into his phone, which he then snapped shut. His face hardened as he slipped the device into his back pocket.

  Mark had seen executions before. He knew the look professionals got before they pulled the trigger, the way their eyes deadened, as though they were looking at a paper target.

  He saw that look now and wondered where the hell Decker was.

  “How much are the Iranians paying you?” Mark asked, stalling. Before Yaver could answer, he added, “You should know that I have evidence that Iran was directly involved in Campbell’s assassination. And if you kill me, that evidence will be transferred to the CIA within a day.”

  “You lie, tokhme sag—” Seed of a dog.

  “I’m willing to make a deal. That money you took, it’s only the beginning. I’ll give you thirty thousand more, in cash, to let us walk.”

  Mark still had nearly that much hidden in the Lada back on the road.

  Yaver paused. “This money, where is it?”

  “First we need to come to an understanding.”

  “There is no understanding. There is no deal. There is only—”

  Tural suddenly jumped up, ful
ly panicking, and began to run, prompting Yaver to fire two expertly placed shots into his head.

  The instant Yaver turned, Mark ran at him, lunging for his neck with his bound hands. They both fell, rolling in the dirt as Daria sprinted away.

  Mark tried to ram his head into Yaver’s face, but he wasn’t strong enough to keep his grip on Yaver’s neck and he wound up falling back in the dirt. He gripped the barrel of the AK-47 and pushed it away from his body just as Yaver fired off a few rounds. The barrel was hot and it seared Mark’s hands.

  “Drop your weapon!” yelled Decker from about fifty feet away.

  Mark struggled to keep the barrel of the AK-47 away from his body as Yaver yanked on it. He dropped to his knees and jammed the barrel into the dirt.

  The crack of a pistol rang out. Decker hit Yaver’s leg.

  Then Daria came back. In her hands was the pistol that Yaver had thrown away. She jammed the magazine she’d recovered into the grip frame, aimed quickly, and fired two shots. One hit Yaver in the gut, the other in his chest.

  Yaver fell to his knees and Mark wrenched the AK-47 out of his hands.

  As Yaver lay there moaning, curled up into a fetal position on the ground, Daria watched Mark pull back the action on the AK-47, confirm there was still a bullet in the chamber, then switch the rifle to semiautomatic with a flick of his finger.

  He pointed the AK-47 at Yaver’s head. Daria noted his hands were steady, his mouth set in a sneer. A couple of veins on his forehead had popped out.

  “Patch him up!” he yelled to Decker.

  Decker knelt down and started ripping Yaver’s shirt into strips to use as a field dressing.

  Daria stood a few feet away holding her pistol.

  “Put it down,” Mark ordered.

  Daria looked at her gun hand. She’d never shot anyone before. It was an awful feeling.

  “Now!”

  She eyed the AK-47 in Mark’s hands and, for the first time, was afraid of him.

  “Take it.”

  She handed over the pistol and he flipped the safety on without even glancing at it.

  Yaver’s eyes were open, but they were glassy and unfocused. His mouth was moving, but in such a way that he looked like a starving baby bird asking for food.

  “Fuckitall, he ain’t gonna live,” said Decker.

  Mark wedged Daria’s gun into his waist belt, then yanked his $20,000 and Yaver’s cell phone out of the dying man’s back pockets. When he pushed the button for recently dialed calls, no numbers appeared.

  Decker finished packing the chest wound, raised Yaver to a sitting position, wrapped it, then started working on the gut wound.

  “Who is he, Daria?” asked Mark.

  She heard the question but was too dazed to respond. Mark gripped her arm.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Who is he? And spare me the bullshit version.”

  “I knew him as Yaver Mustafa. Until now I thought he was loyal to the MEK. I came here to ask him whether he knew anything about what happened in Baku and Astara. I wasn’t lying to you.”

  “How long had he been a member of the Astara cell?”

  “Maybe a year.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was told was he used to work in Tehran exporting carpets, and that his brother was executed by the regime for organizing protest marches. He had money and he helped bankroll a lot of resistance operations. Which was probably why we weren’t more suspicious of him than we should have been.”

  Decker finished with his second improvised dressing and gave it a hard yank so that it was tight around Yaver’s waist. There was more moaning.

  Mark bent down. “Yaver! Can you hear me!” He slapped Yaver’s cheek. “Wake up here, buddy. I need to ask you a few questions. After that we’re going to drive into town, get you some medical help. You help us out here, we’ll help you out.”

  Yaver didn’t respond.

  “Who did you report to, Yaver? You Qods Force, buddy?” said Mark, referring to the elite special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

  Yaver didn’t answer. Bubbles of spit formed at the corner of his mouth as he struggled to breathe. Mark lightly slapped his cheek again. “Stay with me.”

  For a moment Yaver’s eyes focused on Mark, but then he went slack.

  Mark let his head drop into the dirt. “Dickhead. Stick him in the back of the Land Cruiser,” he told Decker. “Find some way to secure him, in case he gets a second wind.” He pulled out Yaver’s cell phone. “And see if you can get anything off of this. When you’re done, shut it down so the signal can’t be triangulated. Be quick about it.”

  Watching Mark operate, Daria realized she hadn’t been the only one hiding things about her past. Because it was rapidly becoming clear that he hadn’t just risen through the ranks of the CIA as some analyst. No, he was way too comfortable, way too sure of himself around violence for that.

  Mark ran to the farmhouse. He figured he only had another minute or two before whoever Yaver had called started wondering why it was taking so long to get an execution confirmation.

  Daria followed him to the bright blue front door. Mark briefly considered having Decker drag her back to the Land Cruiser and tie her down to one of the seats.

  “Anyone inside?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The front door opened onto a kitchen, where a battered samovar sat on a bare-wood kitchen table and unwashed pots filled the sink. Mark rifled through the cabinet drawers and ripped food off the open shelves but found nothing of interest. He moved on to the small living room, where a worn couch sat behind a coffee table cluttered with oil lamps, aging newspapers from Baku, and a worn volume of poetry by Hafez—a fourteenth-century poet still wildly popular in Iran. The walls were covered with dark hand-knotted carpets.

  Behind another wall-hung carpet in the back bedroom, Mark found a metal door with a sophisticated-looking lock on it. He tried the handle and it wouldn’t turn so he fired a shot into the lock and threw his shoulder into the door. It stayed shut. He fired two more shots and kicked it open.

  A rickety wooden staircase led down to a small cellar with clay walls. Mark turned on a single fluorescent overhead light, revealing a series of bright stainless-steel tables lining the perimeter of the room.

  On one of the tables lay a set of night-vision goggles, an infrared strobe light, and a digital camera with an enormous telephoto lens. On another, a collection of listening devices and a miniature GPS tracker. On still another, a pistol belt, boxes of ammunition, two 9mm Glocks, a mini-arsenal of old AK-47s, a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol, a few limpet mines, and what looked like a halfway decent knockoff of a CAR-15 automatic rifle. From the ceiling hung a black wetsuit, fins, a scuba-related contraption, and waterproof chemlites.

  “Holy shit,” said Mark to Daria, who had followed him down the steps.

  “This isn’t MEK stuff,” she said slowly. “I mean, we had a few weapons, but nothing—nothing like this.”

  “Did the Astara MEK know this basement even existed?”

  “I know I didn’t. I thought this was just an auxiliary site. It was used as a safe house for Iranian defectors. Yaver arranged it all.”

  Mark pulled out a couple of canvas duffel bags from under the stainless-steel tables. He stuffed everything in them except a few beat-up AK-47s and hauled it all back to the Land Cruiser.

  Yaver was in the rear seat, lying on his back between the two doors. His feet and hands had been bound together with duct tape and tied to the armrests. But his eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. Decker was taking his pulse.

  “Is he dead?” said Mark.

  Decker shook his head. “Not yet. But give it a few minutes and he will be.”

  “He’s not faking?”

  Decker pointed to the sizable pool of blood collecting on the seat of the Land Cruiser and dripping onto the floor. “I can’t completely stop it, I can’t get enough pressure on his gut.”

  �
�Shit,” said Mark. He suddenly felt lightheaded. God, what a mess, he thought. What a world.

  “We lost our chance to interrogate him,” said Decker, sounding slightly accusing. He gave Daria a look.

  “I did what I had to,” she said.

  “There was a reason I just tagged him in the leg.”

  “Then you were playing with fire.”

  “Leave it be,” said Mark.

  He placed his hand an inch away from Yaver’s mouth. He could hardly feel the man’s breath.

  “Listen, buddy! Last chance here. Tell us who you report to and we get medical help. Hold back on us, and you’re screwed.”

  Daria translated what Mark had said into Farsi, but Yaver was beyond hearing.

  Decker, who was looking through the duffel bags, said, “I gotta say, some of this is crap but a lot of it reminds me of what I used to carry.” He pulled out something that looked like a piece of scuba equipment. “This is a Draeger rebreather. You can dive without releasing bubbles. Standard SEAL gear.”

  “Would Qods Force use it?” asked Mark.

  “They might.” Decker picked up the Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this gear was lifted from our guys who’ve gone down in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “Pack it back up, we gotta get out of here.”

  Mark climbed into the driver’s seat, Daria slid into the passenger seat, and Decker got in back. After picking up the rest of Mark’s cash from the trunk of the Lada, they started hauling ass toward the coast, bouncing all over the rough road and skidding through a few curves.

  But they’d only gone a couple of miles when they heard the distant thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Mark.

  “It can’t actually be coming for us, do you think?” said Decker.

  Mark swerved off onto a narrow trail that paralleled a tea field and dead-ended at a dense grove of oak trees.

  He backed the Land Cruiser into the trees, raised his binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the sky. He saw nothing. Suddenly there was silence.