The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  “To what end?”

  “To build relationships with some of these generals in the Revolutionary Guard that the Doha Group was working with. To try to turn them against the mullahs. The request came straight from the president. So I agreed. One, because I’m a patriotic guy. And two, I’ve been doing business with the government long enough to know that you don’t grow your business by turning down a direct request from the president of the United States.

  “Anyway, that was all it was until a little over a month ago, when, like I said, Ellis called up and asked me to buy that plane. Said it had to do with developing ties with more Revolutionary Guard generals they were working on turning, which I took to mean they needed a way to funnel the Iranian generals some money in a way that didn’t look like it was coming from the US government. Again, he says the request comes from the president. So I do it. I buy the damn plane.”

  “So you’re telling me the MEK stole the uranium from the Iranians and instead of handing it over to the International Atomic Energy Agency, they sold it to the US National Security Council. And that you helped broker this deal.”

  “Something like that, assuming you got your facts straight on your end.”

  “What’s the National Security Council planning to do with this uranium?”

  “Hell if I know. All I do know is that I bought the plane like they asked and then you show up raising hell. So what do I do? I call Ellis, tell him what you told me, and ask him to straighten things out with the CIA and get you the hell off my back. None of this is my problem.”

  “If it wasn’t your problem, why’d you have your men follow me when I left your office this morning?”

  “Maybe I didn’t like your attitude. Maybe I don’t like my government barging in here and threatening me when I’ve just shelled out forty million as a personal favor to the president of the United States.”

  “I’m not your government.”

  “You were hired by the CIA. That’s close enough. What I can tell you is that once Ellis’s team took over this afternoon, my team backed off.”

  “Only Ellis’s team turned out to be a hit squad from the Revolutionary Guard. Nice.”

  “Hey dipshit, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Ellis doesn’t always play by the rules. And it’s not my fucking problem if the CIA’s on his bad side. What you got to do is have your people in Langley talk to the goddamn NSC. And while you’re at it, you can leave me the hell out of it. The CIA and NSC can duke it out on their own and you can stuff your threats up your ass from now on, and the same goes for Ellis. You want to go public with what you know? Well, two can play at that game.”

  “Where’d that plane go after the Doha Group bought it?”

  “I have no idea. You’d have to ask Ellis. I just bought the plane, he supplied the pilot. It took off the same day I bought it and I haven’t seen it since. Guess I loaned it out.”

  “At this point I’m thinking Ellis might be less than forthcoming.”

  “What I will tell you is that two people met that plane when it landed in Dubai, and they were on it when it left Dubai. My security guys ID’d them. The first was Colonel Henry Amato, Ellis’s top Iran advisor. Good luck getting anything out of him. The second was Maryam Minabi—the head of that MEK group you were talking about. She might know what happened to the plane, or, for that matter, why Ellis is sending Iranian Guard troops after you.”

  “You know where Minabi is?”

  “Last I heard she was holed up at her place outside of Paris.”

  “Last I heard no one’s been able to contact her in Paris.”

  “Then you know more than I do. Now get the hell out of here. And if you screw with my company any more than you already have, I’ll come after you for spite no matter what you tell the public.”

  PART IV

  Port of Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates

  Above the deck of what looked like an Emirates Coast Guard boat hung a ten-foot-long metal tube.

  “OK, lower it,” said the lead soldier to the crane operator. Then, “Slower! Slower!”

  The tube needed to be inserted into a hole that had been cut into the deck of the boat. But only a few inches of clearance had been left on either side, so the descent had to be perfect.

  The crane operator complied, but he did so too quickly, provoking cries of alarm from the other men in the warehouse as the tube jerked to a stop. A grinding sound echoed off the warehouse’s steel walls.

  There was no air-conditioning and the lead soldier was sweating as he stood on the deck of the boat. The metal tube hung four feet above his head gently swinging back and forth in a way that unnerved him.

  Auvers-sur-Oise, France

  Even with his lousy eyesight, Mark could tell who it was from a hundred yards away.

  John Decker drove down the empty main street in a little compact Hyundai, looking ridiculous with his knees rising up on either side of the steering wheel and his head brushing the ceiling, as though he were in a toy car.

  He had dirty-blond hair now and was wearing glasses that would have made him look studious were his neck not so thick. He slowed to a stop on the corner where Daria and Mark were waiting and gave each of them a rough pat on their shoulders after they’d squeezed into the car.

  The little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise was an unlikely place for an Iranian resistance group to set up shop, thought Mark as they drove over the bridge that spanned the Oise River. The sun hadn’t risen yet but the predawn sky was light enough that he could tell the banks framing the river were green and lush. The town itself, although only fifteen miles from Paris, was a world away from the poorer suburbs where bored and angry youths burned cars every night.

  This was the France of old stone inns and narrow alleys with ivy-covered walls. It was where Pissarro, Cézanne, and Corot had come to paint, and where Vincent Van Gogh had spent his famous final weeks, working madly before killing himself. There were boucheries and patisseries, houses with terra cotta roofs, and little parks with bright flower beds and well-manicured plane trees.

  But even though he couldn’t see it, Mark knew there was also a compound, consisting of several houses bristling with satellite dishes, that had housed the political leadership of the MEK since the mid-1980s.

  “It’s good to see you,” said Decker.

  “Good to see you too,” said Daria.

  “After what went down outside of Astara, I wasn’t sure—”

  “Just take us to the compound,” interrupted Mark.

  He’d already explained over the phone the basics of what they’d learned in Dubai, and that they’d come to France to try to question Maryam Minabi. Decker had said he’d found the MEK compound, but hadn’t been able to locate Daria’s uncle yet. He hadn’t seen anyone that matched the description of Minabi yet either.

  “Well, that’s the thing. Something’s come up.” Decker exhaled and focused on the road.

  “I’m not going to like it, am I?” Mark was dead tired. He hadn’t slept at all on the red-eye from Dubai to Paris.

  “No, you won’t. It’s a freakin’ complete clusterfuck.”

  “What happened?” asked Daria.

  “So like I said, first day I was here I found the compound and started up surveillance from a barn loft a couple lots down. I didn’t see a lot of activity, just a few guys who looked like guards patrolling the perimeter. Five guys total on the inside. None of them was your uncle. On the outside it’s just a bunch of old French geezers riding by once in a while on bikes.

  “Then just six hours ago, around an hour before midnight it was, I’m watching from the barn and a laundry-service van pulls up to the front gate. A few guys wheel out a couple canvas sacks and dump them in the truck. I’m talking big sacks, these guys can barely lift them. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that whatever’s inside them, it sure as hell ain’t somebody’s dirty underpants. So I follow them.

  “They drive to a field, ten clicks or so to the northwest, in farm country. I
watch the two guys who’d been driving the van meet a couple more guys who are waiting for them there in the field. When they’re all together, damn if they don’t pull out two bodies from those laundry sacks and then set about burying them in the field.

  “They dig one grave and put both bodies in it. There’s a lot of other areas that had been dug up recently too. And I mean a lot—whole field’s scattered with them. More graves probably, though I didn’t try to dig them up because after these bodies get buried, I follow the two men that hadn’t come from the main compound. They drive straight to this farmhouse a couple clicks away from the field and disappear inside. So I set up a surveillance post in an abandoned church not far away but didn’t see shit and then I had to blow to pick you two up. How many people used to live inside the main MEK compound?”

  “Probably a hundred or so, maybe more, maybe less,” said Daria. Her voice was hard, but trembled.

  “Fucking hell,” said Decker. “I hate to say it, but I think they’re toast. That compound is practically empty.”

  “Then ditch the compound. Take us to this farmhouse,” said Mark coldly. If Minabi was dead, he’d learn what he could from her killers.

  “Going there now, boss.”

  Decker pulled to a stop in front of a big stone church encircled by a six-foot-high chain-link fence on which notices had been posted, warning people away and proclaiming that the church had been slated for destruction. Down the street, a few old stone houses abutted the road.

  “If you hop the fence, you can get inside through a door in the back that I popped open,” said Decker. “Behind the altar to your left are steps to a lookout. The first twenty feet or so have been ripped down, but I pimped a ladder from a house down the street. Once you get to the top, look due south. You’ll see the farmhouse in the middle of a field.”

  Decker got out and opened the trunk of the Hyundai, revealing two sets of high-powered binoculars, food supplies, a large brown canvas tarp, and a digital camera with a telephoto lens.

  “Won’t need the camera,” said Mark brusquely. “Bought one in Dubai.”

  He eyed the church. It was made of stone similar in color to the surrounding houses, but unlike the old houses, the church walls had more of a smooth, polished look. Built just a hundred or so years ago, he guessed. Which meant no tourists would bother to visit it—not when there were gorgeous medieval cathedrals to look at all over France—and since hardly anyone in the country under the age of eighty bothered to go to church for religious reasons anymore, tearing it down had likely been deemed a more practical option than renovating it.

  Evidence of neglect abounded. The roof had a few big holes in it where patches of slate tiles had fallen off, exposing the wood timbers beneath; the pavement surrounding the building was half-covered with weeds; and most of the varnish on the massive front entrance door had peeled off. Anything of value appeared to have been removed—a gaping circular hole hovered behind the altar where a rosary window had once stood, and what Decker had called a lookout Mark pegged as a former bell tower whose bell and roof had been salvaged, leaving just an open platform on top.

  “Are workers going to be showing up this morning to take the rest of this thing down?” asked Mark.

  “Maybe, but I’ll be watching from the ground so I can call you if we get any surprises.”

  In the east the sky looked as though the sun would crack the horizon at any moment. Except for the sound of a distant owl, it was absolutely quiet. Mark concentrated on the silence, listening for a break in it, maybe the sound of an approaching car.

  He heard nothing. “All right, let’s do this.”

  Washington, DC

  Colonel Henry Amato fumbled in the dark for his cell phone, finally locating it on the end table next to his bed. After pushing a few wrong buttons, he found the one that allowed him to answer.

  “Amato, here,” he half shouted, still disoriented from the several glasses of grappa he’d downed just a few hours ago. He was bare-chested, wearing only boxer shorts.

  An antique brass lamp embossed with a Persian design stood on the end table. He turned it on as he sat up in bed.

  “This is Martinez, sir.”

  Amato asked for a verification code. Upon receiving it, he said, “Confirmed.”

  “There’s been activity in France. Two individuals are monitoring Minabi.”

  “Have they been identified?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s their present status?”

  “Well, they’re watching the house from a church tower.”

  Amato ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “A church tower?” he said skeptically.

  “Yes, sir, it’s about a half kilometer away from the compound where Minabi’s being held. One of our NightEagle drones picked up a suspicious thermal image on top of it five hours ago.”

  “Human?”

  “We thought. But the image was taken from a few miles up, so it wasn’t conclusive. We continued to monitor the site from a better angle but didn’t see anything else—until dawn that is, when we picked up two bodies. That’d be zero one thirty your time, just a half hour ago.”

  “You have the images?”

  “I sent them to your account.”

  Amato slipped out of bed, being careful not to stand up too quickly because of his bad back, and made his way out to the spare bedroom where he kept his laptop computer.

  He logged on to an anonymous, nongovernment e-mail account and typed in an additional security code to view the files. The first was a five-second infrared video clip shot five hours ago. The central image was a grainy blur of green, red, and yellow—indicating heat—against a background of deep indigo blue. The video had been shot from directly above the church, and the size approximation was in meters, so it was impossible to know whether he was looking at a large bird or a human being.

  He played the second video clip, which had been recorded just a half hour ago. Here there were two blotches, each a mix of red, green, and yellow. This time the video had been taken at a forty-five-degree angle to the church, allowing for a size approximation down to the nearest centimeter.

  In this clip each figure looked like a ghostly human being.

  One was of average height, just under six feet tall. His thermal image was distinct and bright, with a hot red core. The other was shorter in stature and gave off a thermal image dominated by yellows and greens.

  Amato felt a stab of pain in his gut and his chest tightened.

  “Sir?” said Martinez.

  “I have the images.”

  “I anticipate I’ll be able to get you some decent conventional photos within the hour, assuming they stay up there and the clouds hold off.”

  Would they have had time to travel from Dubai to France? Barely. But how could they have known to go right to where Minabi was being held? It was insane. How could they possibly have figured that out?

  Amato was both proud and appalled. “You’ve already alerted the Iranians, I take it?”

  He needed time to think, but he didn’t have time.

  “It was the first thing I did, to confirm that they weren’t just maintaining precautionary surveillance on their own compound.”

  “What was their response?”

  “They’re arranging for a takedown.”

  How could he have let it come to this?

  Amato looked around his spare bedroom, as if searching for an answer. His eyes lit on a crucifix that he’d hung on the wall, a simple ceramic one that his wife had picked up on a trip they’d taken to Rome fifteen years ago, and then on a photo of his parents that he’d inherited when his father had died last year.

  He stared at his father, gray-haired and stooped from years of laying brick, and for a fleeting moment remembered how his father used to sing to him at night before bed, then kiss him on the forehead. That small display of love had meant the world to him when he was a little boy.

  He hadn’t deserved a father like that.

  “Do we e
ven know that the subjects are still in position?”

  “The Iranians sent a team over as soon as we alerted them and they haven’t reported any movement. And the subjects were still showing up on our thermal images until a few minutes ago, when dawn hit.”

  “They need to be taken alive.”

  “Those were my instructions to the Iranians, sir. They agreed to wait until the subjects descend and then take them on the ground rather than storm the tower. It’ll be safer that way, especially if the subjects are armed.”

  “The Iranians will still foul it up,” said Amato sharply. There was a long silence. “It’ll piss them off, but I want you and Davis there as an auxiliary force to ensure the capture goes as planned. The subjects have to be apprehended alive and interrogated. Is that understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Not shot through the head and half alive. I mean definitively alive.”

  “Wilco.”

  “In the meantime, tell the Iranians not to alter the daily routine for Minabi or do anything else that could send signals that they know they’re being watched. Also…”

  Amato’s voice faltered. If he spoke the words that were in his throat, he would be crossing the Rubicon.

  Of course he should never have let it get to this point. He should have acted sooner, years ago, when he’d first learned Daria had applied to the Agency. He should have used his connections to have her rejected, to steer her into a profession that didn’t involve such terrible risk. At the very least he should have found a way to protect her after Minabi had told him that a CIA officer named Daria Buckingham had helped the MEK steal the uranium.

  But he hadn’t. At every stage of her life, he’d been absent. Because he’d been a coward. As a young man he hadn’t wanted to admit it, but he was too old now to lie to himself.