The Natanz Directive (15 page)

“He's got company,” I said, seeing the silhouette of a second man in the truck. “Passenger side.”

McCormick whispered, “Okay. Excellent. Now what?”

My mind flipped through a dozen possible action plans, none of which had a chance in hell of working. We could run the guy over and come back for his companion, but that made less sense than seeing what the hell he was doing out here, not a half mile from Field 27 and my transportation into Iran. In any case, it was a good bet the landing zone had been compromised and my mission was dead in its tracks anyway.

“Keep cool. Let's see what he wants.”

The cop put up his hand, and McCormick eased to a stop.

The cop came around to my side of the Mercedes. I thought that was kind of odd, but maybe that was the way they did things in Turkey. He kept his head down and skirted the periphery of the light created by our headlights.

I wrapped my hand around the Walther's grip and kept it nestled along the door panel. Safety off. Finger on the trigger.

If there was something urgent or out of place happening here, the cop gave no indication. His step was even. His posture was relaxed. Of course, he had a machine gun capable of displacing twenty rounds in a split second, so maybe he had a right to be nonchalant. Then I got a glimpse of his face, and my memory traveled back in time nearly fifteen years.

He made a circle with his hand, telling me to roll my window down. I pressed the window control on the side of the door, and it opened. The cop leaned in. I recognized him.

“Atif! Jesus! What the hell?” I said. Atif Hakan. An operative from the Turkish State Security Bureau. He and I had worked together for nearly six months, busting narco rings and cracking heads from Izmir to Budapest. He was as ruthless as I was and just as dedicated. “You're still alive.”

“You sound surprised.” He extended a hand. “Jake Conlan. I shouldn't be surprised to find you in the middle of nowhere.”

“What's an old fossil like you doing out here?” I replied. I was still gripping the Walther. This was weird. McCormick had used the word
coincidence,
but coincidence didn't explain this. “Who'd you piss off?”

“Duty calls. You know the drill.” His grip was firm, pleasant. His tone easy and relaxed.

“The last time we met,” I said, “you were wearing the uniform of an air force colonel. That's quite a fall to flatfoot cop.”

Hakan laughed. “Well, with all the cutbacks, I'm lucky to have a job. This time it's something really important. Like making sure a certain airstrip is clear of stray goats.”

“You're kidding?” I was genuinely surprised.

“Would I do that?” He straightened. “Follow me up the road.”

Hakan climbed into the cab of the truck. Its headlights came to life. A spray of white illuminated the road, and the truck rumbled out ahead of us.

“Who is he?” Trevor McCormick wanted to know, and rightfully so.

“An old colleague.”

“Is that why you were gripping your gun like a man holding on to his last dollar?” He glanced over at me.

“He's Turkish. Turks take it as an insult if you trust them,” I said.

The American embassy attaché shook his head. “Our guy back in D.C. didn't tell me you were completely full of shit.”

A half mile ahead, we turned off the road and followed a dirt path bordered by slender poplars, through newly turned fields, and up and over a rocky slope. The air outside was chilly and smelled of rain, but I kept the window down. The road dead-ended in a small wooded valley. The truck stopped and turned off its lights. Hakan got out. The airfield was just beyond the crest of the hill.

“Cut the lights and motor,” I said to McCormick.

I combed the surroundings. The trees were a tangle of black against the purple of the night sky. The night had fallen under a spell of dead silence. All I heard were Hakan's footfalls approaching. He had left the MP5 in the truck and instead carried a radio.

He touched the side of his wristwatch. A dim yellow glow chiseled his features with soft light. “The bird is ten minutes out. Better get going.”

I looked over at McCormick and shook his hand. “Thanks. I'll put in a good word for you when I get back home.”

He grinned when he heard this. “I'd say, ‘Stay out of trouble,' but I know that's not going to happen.”

“Probably not.” I climbed out and slid the Walther into my shoulder harness.

Hakan and I hiked up the draw to the top of the hill. In the darkness, I felt a rush of old memories storming back—distant missions and fallen comrades—and told myself this was no place for a walk down memory lane. Actually, if I never walked down memory lane again it would be too soon.

We crested the hill and found ourselves at the southern end of a long, wide strip of flat concrete, like a section of highway someone forgot to connect with the rest of the world.

Hakan adjusted the volume of his radio. The speaker crackled.

A groan echoed from the distance. To the west, a black form cut through the clouds. Cigar-shaped fuselage. Four turbo props. Long, narrow wings that raised the C-17's operational ceiling from thirty-three thousand feet to a height well over forty thousand. Fuel tanks hanging between the engines that allowed the plane to stay aloft pretty much all day.

Hakan raised the radio to his mouth. “Tango-tango-sierra-five. Have you in sight. Status. Victor.”

A voice replied, “Roger.”

In the early days, for a mission like this, we'd have to guide the airplane in with radar vectors and radio beacons and mark the landing strip with portable lights. Now, with GPS, the crew could plop the machine within one foot of any location, no sweat. Supersensitive radar allowed the pilot to thread a needle if that's what he had in mind. Night-vision systems gave the crew a clear-as-day view of the terrain. Electronic countermeasures made the airplane practically invisible to radar and infrared detectors. About the only thing the Globemaster couldn't do was clear the landing zone of stray farm animals.

The plane began a steady descent, wings level, landing gear extending. No navigation lights, no landing lights, just a black shape getting bigger and bigger. Very cool.

Seconds later, the C-17's huge tires touched the pavement, and puffs of smoke feathered skyward. There was some protesting from the engines and the brakes, but the pilot got the plane stopped, and did so with runway to spare.

The big airplane crawled toward us. The thunderous noise, the sense of urgency, and the sudden realization that I would be jumping out of the tail end of this behemoth made my blood pulse with anticipation.

The C-17 rolled to a stop. The ramp dropped to the ground.

Hakan slapped my back and shouted, “Good luck, Jake. Next time we meet, you better be retired and knee deep in grandkids.”

“I'm working on it.”

I ran toward the C-17 Globemaster.

Next stop. Iran.

 

CHAPTER 12

IRAN—DAY SIX

I stood at the rear of the C-17's cargo deck, feeling like a stuffed pig.

An air force staff sergeant named Dooley checked my HALO rig for the umpteenth time, and I had no intention of complaining. He fussed with the harness. He ran his hands over the main parachute and did the same with the reserve chute. He scanned the GPS monitor on my instrument console, the O
2
equipment on my right hip, and the jump bag banded around my waist. He checked the breathing regulator attached to my oxygen tank and the seals where my helmet, gloves, and boots fit into a pressure suit, a necessity at this altitude: forty-two thousand feet. One leak and my blood would literally boil. Dooley gave me a thumbs-up.

“You're a thing of beauty,” he said. Normally, you have to write everything down on a dry eraser board or a pad in a situation like this, but we were on comms and using a bone mike.

“I owe you a beer,” I said.

“Oh, hey. I nearly forgot.” He reached into his back pocket and came away with a folded piece of paper that looked like it had been torn off yellow legal pad and not very gently. “This was tucked inside your suit when I unpacked it.”

He handed it over. I opened it with gloved hands.

It was handwritten and clearly in haste. It read:
Enjoy the ride, old man. Try coming back in one piece. Roger.
I grinned out of the side of my mouth and offered Roger a mental thanks. Dooley took the note back and found a pocket for it.

“Let's check the numbers,” he said, nodding toward my helmet and visor.

The digital readout from the instrument console hovered inside my visor: Pressure Altitude. Absolute Height Above Ground. GPS location. Distance and compass heading to the LZ (landing zone). Time Elapsed. Oxygen Count. Not a lot of light reading.

This time I gave Dooley a thumbs-up.

“Better you than me,” he said. I felt like a man in a fishbowl, and the hollow sound of his voice didn't help.

Dooley wore a helmet and pressure suit similar to mine only with a monkey strap that secured his harness to the airplane. The fuselage interior lamps reflected across his visor. He squinted at his wristwatch.

“Showtime, Mr. Conlan. All set?” Now his voice was all business. So was his expression.

This was a critical step of the HALO protocol, switching from the airplane's oxygen system to my personal tank. For the last hour and a half, I'd been “prebreathing” to purge nitrogen from my bloodstream. Falling through the rarefied atmosphere could induce an embolism, though not as extreme as what could happen to a deep-sea diver. I wouldn't suffer the bends, but I could sure as hell get disoriented and lose track of what I was doing. Not a healthy mindset when you're dropping through the night sky at one hundred twenty miles per hour, counting every second, and maneuvering like a bird of prey in free fall.

If the oxygen switch wasn't done correctly, even one breath of regular air would be enough to contaminate my system, and I'd have to start all over. Trouble was, there would be no starting over. We didn't have the time. It was a one-shot deal.

The sergeant puffed oxygen from my tank to purge the regulator and made the switch. The readout on my visor blinked from Standby to 100%. All good. I had twenty minutes of oxygen, and the countdown had already started.

Even though I was being dropped from 42,000 feet Pressure Altitude, my LZ was 6,292 feet above sea level. That meant I would have to open my main chute at 8,792 feet Pressure Altitude, which was actually 2,500 feet Absolute Height Above Ground with an Elapsed Time after jumping of four minutes and fifty-six seconds. This was not a give-or-take situation. Give-or-take meant you were squashed against a mountaintop like a bug against a windshield. I wasn't afraid of dying, but that was no way to go.

“Okay, Mr. Conlan,” Dooley said. “Six minutes, and we're going to open her up.”

The sergeant gave me the once-over, and I gave him a thumbs-up. The jump light on the bulkhead panel glowed red.

Six minutes. My mind looped through the commands drilled into me by the Black Hats at jump school in Fort Benning. The one that stood out was: “Don't get all amped up. You're only going one hundred twenty miles per hour. A walk in the park.” The Black Hats were renowned for their sarcasm.

Six minutes: get ready!

Six short minutes; 360 seconds that tightened my nerves like a ratchet. My mouth went dry, but my heart rate hadn't jumped two beats. Nice, easy breaths. Nothing too deep.

I did a slow, methodical equipment check. Not that I wasn't confident in Dooley's handiwork. But it was a good way to pass 360 seconds.

I stepped through my mission. The Iranians had made an art out of hiding the key components of their nuclear weapons program. You could apply only so much science to ferreting out hidden factories and industrial plants. The way to crash any well-orchestrated shell game was to dig under the shells. You did that with boots on the ground and people. The plan was to link up with the MEK inside Tehran, but the operation had been plagued with double crosses from the start. So I turned to a back-up plan, one that I would stitch together on the fly, using a guy whose life I'd once saved from an ambush perpetrated by one of the most ruthless drug dealers ever to invade American soil.

Charles Amadi. Nephew of Abbu Amadi, known publicly as the prime minister of the Republic of Iran; known privately as an ardent foe of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Charlie was just as ardent, and I planned to tap his zeal.

Charles hadn't followed his uncle's footsteps into politics. Charlie had spent a few years in America running errands for the Iranian drug cartel in the 1970s and had returned to his native land after the revolution, intent on maximizing the black market that was the inevitable result of a nation run by a tyrant. Over the years, he'd built an underground network that smuggled and sold everything from electronics and booze to hard cash and information. Charlie wasn't picky about what he sold as long as the bottom line was drenched in black.

He and I hadn't seen each other in years. No matter. He would listen to my pitch because that's how men of honor acted when it was time to repay a debt.

Dooley disconnected the umbilical cord that connected me to the airplane's electrical power. He switched off our handheld comms and relieved me of mine. Now the static inside my earpiece went silent and the drone of the C-17's turboprops replaced it. The console battery had thirty minutes' worth of juice to power my GPS system and to heat my suit and gloves.

A battery of servos groaned. The hull at the back of the fuselage cracked apart. A pair of thin, bright lines connected together by a quirk of physics appeared. The lines widened into a parallelogram framed by the aft cargo doors and ramp. The sky shone white and brilliant, like a glimpse into a different dimension.

I blinked and felt my adrenaline surging. The plan was to land in predawn darkness. This was more like the glare of an early-morning sunrise, the kind that made driving east a royal pain in the ass. The split second of alarm passed as quickly as it had come when logic set in, and I realized we were forty-two thousand feet above my landing sight. Up here, dawn was already a reality. By the time I'd enjoyed the ride of my life and deployed my parachute, I'd be nicely masked by twilight.