The Command

He owed his men — correction, his people—no less than that.

7

Mashhad, Khorasan Province, Northern Iran

The city was a thousand years old. Its name meant “Place of Martyrdom.” Most of its inhabitants were not yet awake, though here and there chimneys smoked, fires glimmered, where bakers were preparing the morning bread. The cool air was an acrid musk of wood smoke and saffron and centuries-dry dust. In an hour the muezzins would call the city to wakefulness and prayer, but now it lay sleeping under the stars.

The third team had been at it since midnight, in a littered, oil-reeking loading bay with a rolling steel door to conceal their work lights. First to be chain-hoisted into the truck were two rusty but incredibly heavy half-inch-thick steel slabs. They fit flat on the bed of the rented Fiat. On top, wrapped and taped in black plastic bags, went twenty kilos of the Polish explosive the man who called himself Malik had brought with him.

After that, the bricks. With muffled grunts, they stacked them along the left side, up to the scarred metal ceiling. Thick, heavy pavers, dug out of a road sometime past and left at a corner of the plastic company’s sprawling and dilapidated site. Malik had lighted up seeing them, and drawn them into his diagram. They boxed the bricks into place with plywood and braced them with planks.

In the darkness they trudged in and out of the factory, carrying sacks and containers. The second team had bought what they carried here and there around the city, from dealers and resellers the first team had located months before.

The three who labored this morning had never met their predecessors. The first party to arrive identified the target and visited it. They paced off distances, observed guards, took photographs, and drew up the attack plan. The second team arrived after the first left. They assembled the materials; truck, tools, road maps, weapons, and the ingredients of the bomb itself. Malik had provided detailed specifications, and nothing they bought was out of the ordinary for men who carried cards identifying themselves as working for the Mashhad Plastics and Associated Chemicals Company Ltd. Sacks of urea pellets. Concentrated acid in carboys. Plastic surgical tubing. Steel beams and sheeting. Half a ton of used bolts, stripped from derelict cars before they were crushed in a junkyard north of town.

The men now stacking sacks and carboys around the central charge were Baluchis. Sebah Sahaba, Gulbeddin Hekmatyar’s militants from the highlands between Iran and Afghanistan. Malik had met them at the bus station two days before and bunked them on mattresses in the abandoned factory.

Yesterday afternoon they’d slaughtered a lamb, cooked it in a steel drum dug into the ground, and feasted on hot baked meat with hand-fuls of saffron rice and pine nuts and spring onions and sweet cakes and crunchy sweet melons, drinking the sweet Iranian Fanta. Then gone together to a hammam, a local bathhouse. They’d soaked in the steam and let the body-washer peel the grime and tension from them with rough cloths and hot water, then eaten icy sherbet of vinegar and sugar, and drunk many cups of strong thick coffee flavored with anise. A boy had brought them fresh ripe pomegranates, so ripe and juicy that, broken open, they looked like lacerated and bleeding flesh.

The men had laughed and joked then, relaxed and loud, young and brash.

This morning they shivered in the wind, and stared at nothing.

Malik flicked his cigarette away and came into the glare of the work lights.

He was not tall. His black receding hair was trimmed and combed. His eyes were rather sad behind plastic-framed glasses. Flecks of some dark material were embedded in his left cheek, above where his beard began. His left eyelid sagged, making him look sleepy, or cynical. It was actually muscle damage. He wore a rumpled gray polyester suit jacket, blue trousers, and a striped shirt with the collar open. Clicking a flashlight on, he climbed into the truck and inspected what they’d done. Then jumped down again and directed the others as they lifted precut I-beams. These went along the right side, fitting so precisely between floor and ceiling they remained upright, wedged in.

The men listened as he explained again the sequence of events, and how it would be brought about.

Not long after, the sound of drums broke the stillness of the night. Then the wailing of the muezzins began. Metallic-sounding, electronically amplified, their voices soared and fell in an eerie, distant, repetitive polyphony.