Oath of Office

Everything was coming together. Both launch tubes would be on the trucks before Ayatollah Ghorbani arrived. The tubes themselves had been relatively simple to acquire. Other missiles in Iran required launch tubes, and the manufacturing process was already in place. Orders and designs from the correct government department made it happen. The massive sixteen-wheel MZKT-79221 were also a straightforward purchase. Ubiquitous in the Red Square military parades of the Soviet Union, these huge missile transport trucks were now manufactured in Belarus under the Volat brand. As with much of anything worthwhile, the importation of these vehicles violated UN sanctions — but stripped of their sixteen wheels and broken down to the smallest components possible, they were much easier to ship illicitly than the Gorgons themselves. It took only a team of mechanics to reassemble the trucks, not a rocket scientist.

Kazem tamped back his excitement. Slowly but surely, this was all working out. He wished Ghorbani would have waited another day. But one did not argue with the likes of Ayatollah Ghorbani. Second only to the Grand Ayatollah himself, Ghorbani acted as his eyes and ears — and his contact with Reza Kazem. After all, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran could not be seen with the man the entire world thought wanted to bring it down.

* * *

The harsh chime of Sassani’s mobile phone wormed its way into his dreamless sleep. The mattress in his Herat hotel room was too soft, but it was more comfortable than the couch in his office.

“It is up and running, Major,” the voice said when he answered. “I apologize for waking you, but I thought you would want to know at once.”

Sassani sniffed and then looked around the room, blinking away the memories of the day before. “What is up and running?”

“The satellite phone you ordered me to monitor.”

Sassani sat up a little straighter at that. “At this very moment?”

“Yes,” the technician said. “And we have audio. The caller is an Azeri woman, speaking to, we believe, her mother. The caller’s name is Nima.”

“Origination?” Sassani snapped. He was on his feet now, pacing at the foot of his hotel bed.

“She is calling from Mashhad, Major.”

“Mashhad?” Sassani stopped in his tracks. “She is calling from inside Iran?”

“Yes, Major. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact address, but we are reasonably certain the phone is being used not far from the Shrine of the Imam at this very moment.”

“Bracket in,” Sassani said. “I want as close a location as you are able to give me.”

“Yes, Major,” the technician said.

“You say the speaker’s name is Nima?”

“Correct,” the technician said.

Sassani ended the call. He pitched the phone on the bed and rubbed his hands together, thinking. He wondered if Nima would make this easy, or difficult. Fatima had made it difficult. He sighed. Difficult was certainly much more interesting.

55

Something brushed Jack’s elbow. His back was painfully knotted and stiff. The shoulder nearest the floor, wedged against something hard, throbbed with a sickening ache, like the time he’d wrenched it out of its socket. The touch came again, accompanied by a distant voice, Ysabel’s voice. A dream, maybe? Surely he’d been asleep only a few minutes. Jack tried to open his eyes, but they were glued shut, refusing to cooperate. The pain in his injured ear came next, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. He wondered if that was a good sign or bad.

Ysabel spoke again, closer now, an urgent whisper, pushing aside the fog.

“Jack. Wake up.”

Ryan sat bolt upright, searching the room to get his bearings. It took him a moment to remember where he was. Dovzhenko had heard the voice, too, and was up on one elbow, eyes flicking, listening.

“I’m sorry,” Ysabel said. She’d showered and covered her torn clothing with a borrowed smock.

Jack saw Nima standing in the kitchen — which was really just a corner of the same room. She was dressed now, in a dark skirt and a knee-length khaki top that reminded Ryan of a cotton pillowcase. Steam came from a kettle set over the blue flame of a two-burner gas stove. People didn’t make tea in the middle of an emergency. He rubbed his face, wincing at the jab of pain the movement caused his injured ear.

“Sorry for what?”

“Please don’t be mad at her, Jack,” Ysabel said. “She didn’t know.”

Jack stood on wooden legs, feeling a half-dozen more sprains than he’d felt the night before. Whatever this news was, he didn’t want to get it lying down.

His neck felt as if someone had tried to twist it off his shoulders, and he was pretty sure he’d chipped a tooth. And that didn’t even take into account the fact that his ear was hanging on by nine stitches of catgut put in by an opium smuggler. Old age was going to be a hell of a lot of fun — if he made it that far.

He looked at Ysabel and smiled in spite of the situation when he saw her. “What are you talking about?”

She nodded toward the satellite phone on the table.

A sudden chill washed over Jack. “What’s this?”

Dovzhenko saw it, too, and jumped to his feet.