The Command (10 page)

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.

 

 

GOD is most great!…
God is most great.

I testify that…
I testify that

There is no god but God!…
There is no god but God!

And that Mohammad …
And that Mohammad

Is the Prophet of God….
Is the Prophet of God.

Come to the Prayer!…
Come to the Prayer!

Come to the Salvation!…
Come to the Salvation!

Prayer is better than sleep….
Prayer is better than sleep.

God is most great….
God is most great.

There is no god but God! There is no god but God!

 

 

AS they rose from their salaams they glanced at the man in the shadows. “You do not join us?” said one.

He shook his head. “I am not worthy.”

“Truly, you are.”

“Truly I am not, my brothers.” Malik spoke quietly. “Today you are His true and beloved soldiers, who will purify the earth of those who defile the true Islam with this false cult of saints. Remember what the Prophet,
sallallahu alayhe wa sallam,
said before his death: that a curse be upon those who took the graves of their prophets as mosques. We are all His instruments. But you are His firstborn sons. I bow down to honor you, and wish you the tranquillity that comes before battle.”

“Truly, it is so. That we are but His instruments,” said the man who would drive the truck. He licked his lips, frightened, but making his voice bold. “But you're still one of us, brother. May His peace be upon you.”

They recognized this as more compliment than truth. This man had come from far away. And Malik probably wasn't his real name; Malik was the angel in charge of hell. Yet he knew his dangerous trade. His clear, liquid Arabic marked him as educated, but he also spoke good Farsi and reasonable Pashto and no doubt other languages, too. But there was a gulf between them.

“I am merely the willing servant of God. God is great!”

“God is great!” Their shouts echoed in the loading bay, under the glare of the electric light.

THE city was the holiest in Iran, a country drunk with holiness since an aged ayatollah had toppled a dictatorial emperor. Here lay Ali Riza, great-grandson of the Prophet, and the eighth holy and infallible imam, who had been murdered in 817
A.D.
Beside him slept the storied Caliph Harun al-Rashid, scholar, poet, warrior, the most magnificent of all the caliphs, correspondent with Charlemagne, hero of
A Thousand and One Nights.
Omar Khayyam was another poet buried not far away, at Nishapur; but in Mashhad, poets, though respected, did not rank with imams.

Imams were holy leaders in line of succession after Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom the Shi'a held had been blessed by the Prophet as his rightful inheritor. Great merit could be earned by pilgrimages to their tombs. Especially to that of the
shah-i-ghariban,
Emperor of the Exiled, patron of the lost, the hopeless, and the damned. So that as centuries ebbed, marbled courtyards, golden-domed mosques, museums, and minarets had risen. Its library gathered the largest collection of handwritten Qur'ans in the world. British and Russian had played the Great Game in its alleyways, and in 1912 a bomb had ripped through the sanctuary, permanently estranging the Shi'ite world from the Muscovite bear.

Today was a holy day of mourning for Hussein, grandson of Muhammad. All over the city, at hundreds of inns and hotels, thousands of pilgrims rose and washed and prayed. They streamed into the streets, where first a trickle, then a flood floated through the predawn darkness, converging in an echoing shuffle and the sigh of prayer.

THE team scrambled up into the truck. Malik kept looking to the eastern sky. The silhouettes of mountains loomed against the gray light of coming day.

The chain-link gate swung open, and the Fiat pulled out onto Quarani Tohid, Quarani Street, a wide, spotlessly swept boulevard. It roared slowly south, teetering heavily on overloaded springs. Malik followed in a white Datsun sedan with a battered-in fender. He stayed well behind the truck, blinking involuntarily each time it bottomed out.

His hands tightened on the wheel. A green pickup had pulled out
from a side alley. It accelerated up to the Fiat, paralleling it on the four-lane street. In it he could see two of the feared and omnipresent Iranian religious police—the
komiteh.
They could stop any vehicle, question or jail anyone, simply on suspicion.

It moved up alongside the roaring, smoking truck, and he took his foot off the gas, dropping back even farther as one of the
komiteh
leaned out, looking it over. Then relaxed as the police vehicle pulled off and vanished down another street.

The driver wasn't from Mashhad, but he'd driven the route several times, practicing, in the sedan. Still in the near darkness, threading among the groups of pilgrims as they gradually converged on the huge tomb and mosque complex, he drove slowly, at no more than thirty miles an hour. Then, a quarter mile short of the golden dome, the truck pulled to the left and descended a ramp.

The Datsun kept straight on, passing the central square. Malik peered through the windshield. Thousands of pilgrims gazed up at the glowing bulbs outlining minarets and domes, the colonnade, and the arched portal that led to the interior and ultimately to the holy burial chamber in a sparkling wonderland of light and beauty.

He'd visited that chamber. Had entered, men separating from the women as they did so. Had checked his shoes and strolled in stocking feet through the marble paved courts, the silver balconies of supplication, examining the inlaid tiles and mirrors, the intricate inscriptions. Had prostrated himself before the magnificent golden
zarih
that protected the ancient tomb. Had watched the other pilgrims with sad eyes, noting as they entered from this direction and that.

And had smiled, heart racing with excitement, as he realized how it could be done.

THE truck was underground now. The three sat crowded together in the cab. One reached under the seat from time to time, stroking the steel buttplate of an assault rifle. He kept hoping for the tranquillity that was supposed to come to the martyr. But only touching the gun seemed to give him any comfort. The driver concentrated on driving; the one sitting in the middle held a hand-drawn map on his lap, directing him. It had been drawn by a man on the second team, who'd taken a job inside the shrine, repairing the plumbing in the pilgrims' washrooms.

The tunnel road circled the immense complex, leaving the spacious courts and open areas at ground level free for the pilgrims to enter and
congregate and wander from porch to porch and shrine to shrine. It was a service access, the walls neither enameled tile nor fine marble but rough concrete spaced with fluorescent tubes covered with yellowing plastic. Signs pointed to various exits from the ring.

“Dar al-Sa'adah,” said the man with the map suddenly, pointing. The driver pulled off, and the truck twisted into a maze of smaller passages. At last he downshifted to first gear. The motor slowed, laboring as it pulled its weight up a short, steep incline.

ON the porch between the Golden Balcony and the dome of Hatam Khani some three hundred women and small children were gathered, waiting.

The porch—actually an enclosed hall of access—gleamed with semiprecious stone and shining gold. The floor was smooth, brightly colored marble, scrubbed and waxed to spotlessness. A shallow trough showed where millions of feet over the centuries had passed through a golden door. The walls were covered to head height with thousands of intricately carved tiles incised with verses from the Holy Qur'an. Above that, across the upper wall, the sixty-six couplets of the elegy Malk-ush-Shu'ara Saboori Mashhadi had pronounced over the murdered imam were inscribed in the lovely intricacy of Nastaliq script. The whole interior was brilliantly lighted by hundreds of bulbs nestled in immense nineteenth-century chandeliers of the finest Bohemian crystal.

The golden door, closed now but about to be opened, led into the Zari-i-Mutahhar, the Holy Burial Chamber itself. The women peered toward it, praying and speaking in hushed voices. An infant cried out, but was hastily rocked and kissed back into a restless, fidgeting silence.

THE bearded man in the gray suit coat stepped on the accelerator again. The minarets, the lights fell back in his rear view. He drove south, careful to avoid the throngs that spilled now onto the streets. They were singing. The words came indistinctly through the closed glass. Glancing again at his watch, he turned on the radio. Leaned to tune it to a local station, and increased the volume till it drowned out the hymns. He examined the mirrors again, looking for police or any sign of interest in him. There was none.

Lighting a cigarette, listening to a discussion on the radio about milk production, he drove slowly and carefully out of town.

…

THE man who'd kept touching the Kalashnikov pulled it from beneath the seat and chambered a cartridge. He slammed the door open, jumped down, and walked back to guard the rear of the truck.

Inside the cab, the driver, sweat running down his face, reached behind the seat to pull a thick cable into the light. It was made up of four fuses. Each was covered by transparent plastic surgical tubing. Their ends stuck out, cut and frayed apart to expose the core. The driver flicked a lighter several times. But no flame emerged. Finally the other pressed in the cigarette lighter, on the dash. Seconds later it popped out, glowing cherry red.

When all the threads were burning, fizzling up a thin blue sulfurous smoke, they bailed out of the cab to either side, drawing Russian-made automatics.

At that moment the green pickup pulled up the ramp behind them. The man with the Kalashnikov saw the
komiteh-men
at the instant they saw him. They were armed only with heavy sticks, but they charged out of the pickup and up the ramp at him without hesitation, shouting and brandishing the clubs. He pulled the rifle close to his body and hosed out a burst. The bullets blasted them backward.

THE bomb went off in two stages, separated by milliseconds. The first detonation, the five kilos of explosive on the right side of the truck, fired the heavy steel I-beams sideways and upward through the ancient brickwork and plaster between the underground access and the reception hall above. They crashed through bricks and lath and the thin sheathing of marble and tile on the plinth, mowing down the women who stood closest to the wall.

Then the main charge went off. This second explosion was so powerful the plates only resisted for a time too short to measure before they gasified in the expanding fireball that stamped the truck frame down into flattened steel, and blasted apart the heavy masonry foundations, dating back to 1602. But before they disintegrated, they and the mass of heavy brick focused the blast, sending a half ton of rusty rivets and bolts through the freshly torn hole.

Moving faster than bullets, heavier and even crueler in their jagged irregular shapes, the thousand-pound fragment-charge cut down the waiting crowd in a welter of blood and torn flesh, jewelry, cloth. They sheared off arms and hands. Smashed through faces and
skulls, punctured bodies, tore through lungs and eyes and stomachs.