‘You fucking barbarian,’ said Kroll. ‘Amara, you should give his food to the civilised among us.’
‘Can you peasants please remember there’s a lady present?’
He caught sight of Amara in the rear view mirror. She was smiling.
When he had alerted her to the dangers of the plan, her reaction had surprised her.
‘It’s only fair to warn you there may be some shooting.’
‘What, with real guns? My husband shot a guest at our own wedding reception. You think I’m going to burst into tears and run away? Why do you think women are so weak all the time? I thought Russian women were meant to be tough.’
‘I don’t know. I promised personally to deliver you back to your father, so I guess I don’t want to let him down.’
She had shrugged. ‘Let’s do this one step at a time.’
They passed Sepehr Airport. The set-up, which was basic at the best of times, now lay in pieces. The Americans had done their worst. An Airbus sat on the runway, broken in two like a rotten log. Three smaller jets were completely burned out. The control tower had taken a direct hit. They took the Tello Road past the Imam Khomeini Sports Complex, where Dima had once put on a boxing contest for his trainee Revolutionary Guards. How many of those men were now PLR?
He looked again at Amara, her husband dead, her whole life in Tehran cut from under her. What future did she have? What future did anyone in Iran have right now? Those bombs, just their presence in the country could be devastating, never mind if they were used. What had Bashir intended with them? Was he about to find out?
After Nasirabad, the road, which had been getting steadily rougher, turned into a track. They were climbing up a long, tree-lined valley: either side of them the mountain slopes reared up — barren, lifeless, forbidding, an awesome beauty all of their own. In winter they were completely different, a snowy wonderland, teeming with skiiers. He had skied near here many times. His free pass and social working hours made him an attractive proposition. There were many women willing to enjoy his company, influential, well-connected women who in turn provided him with invaluable insights into the ruling groups and the vicissitudes of local politics. All of his relationships, except one, had had a mercenary angle. So much so that it had become a reflex. If I spend time with this or that woman what will she bring me? What’s the benefit? No wonder he had ended up alone.
As they bumped along the track up into the mountains these thoughts took him right away from the job in hand. Amara’s tap on his shoulder brought him back. From the seat behind she pointed at the gates up a steep ramp to the left. Dima slowed down about ten metres away and then pulled to a halt. They checked out the gun nests on either side of the gates. Two men in each: one with binoculars, the other with a machine-gun. They were NSVs — a universal anti-infantry, anti-aircraft, anti-everything weapon, discontinued after the collapse of the USSR, made under licence in Iran. Except those were probably the original Russian models, courtesy of Kaffarov.
‘They should recognise the car,’ said Amara. ‘I mustn’t look like a prisoner.’
‘Then you do the talking.’
Her outfit looked pretty convincing. She had taken a silk suit and wrenched off one of the sleeves and all of the buttons of her blouse, consistent with someone having grabbed her. Now the tied tails of the front held it closed. The trainers on her feet looked incongruous — but what would you wear for a post-quake, possibly pre-nuclear getaway?
They politely let her out, Dima nudging Vladimir to stand up straight.
‘Wait near the car. Let them come to you. The further in we can get before trouble starts, the better.’ She did exactly as she was told, trembling and looking for all the world like a woman whose house had just survived a brutal looting, whose virtue had even been compromised. The tears rolled down her cheeks as if she’d told them to. What a natural, thought Dima: she could have a bright future in the GRU.
A guard came forward, his Kalashnikov on his hip.
Amara practically threw herself on him.
‘Tell Kristen it’s Amara.’
He nodded at the Chevy.
‘My own security detail.’ She pressed a hand against her chest. ‘I said no, but Gazul insisted. They saved my life.’
‘Where is your husband now, ma’am?’
She touched him on the arm and shook her head, letting her hair fall over her eyes: she was good.
He walked back to his post, picked up a phone. A few seconds later the gates whirred open. Dima shifted into Drive and they rolled through. They were in.
43
North Tehran Airspace
Black and Montes watched through a starboard window as a pair of F-16s screamed past the Osprey.
‘They better leave something for us!’ shouted Chaffin over the roar of the rotors.
Black continued to watch until they turned into silver specks at the end of their ascending vapour trails.
‘They’re taking out the perimeter AAs and any other hardware they can lock on to. Plus any stray air cover they might have up there.’
‘We any closer to knowing who or what’s gonna be waiting for us?’ said Campo, as if he now knew how to zero in on Black’s weak spot.
Black didn’t know. His crew always looked to him for the answers. If he had one, he’d give it to them. If he hadn’t he’d give them some possibles. Always something. They thought of him as the smartest: the guy who was going to get home, get to college and go up in the world, be a teacher like his Mom, maybe. But Blackburn didn’t know where he was going. His judgement had been shaken. Nothing in the world looked how it used to. Campo, his former friend, sat staring out at the sky. He’d almost killed him earlier. He had to hold it together. Who or what was waiting for them? Perhaps only God. Perhaps nothing. He thought of his father, in the Vietcong’s cage in the water, from brave soldier to terrified teenager: what had he expected to face in the end?
The images from the CCTV screen in the bank vault flashed back to him. Bashir had been easy to ID. The more he thought about the second man, the more a voice in his head clamoured for attention. A guy cuts a Marine’s head off with a sword on the Iraqi border; thirty-six hours later he’s moving nukes around with Al Bashir in downtown Tehran. Andrews and Dershowitz hadn’t looked convinced. Now Blackburn was having his own doubts. Felt himself headed into a whole tunnel of self-doubt: not a good way to be going into a mission.
The mountains reared up like a great barren wall, the only patches of green being the vegetation down below in the valleys. Blackburn tried to imagine the hard, sunbaked rock covered with snow, shut his eyes for a moment and took himself back to a day out with his family, swooping down Blacktail Mountain in Montana, breaking the rules and going straight down. The trick was knowing when to break them.
‘LZ three miles. Prepare rope!’
44
Alborz Mountains, North of Tehran
The distance from the gate to the chalet was two hundred metres. Dima drove at walking pace to maximise the time they had to take in the buildings and scan the surroundings.
Kroll piped up from the back.
‘Hey, guess what — both nuke signals just stopped.’
‘Is the scanner fucked again?’
‘Nope. Still getting a signal from the third device.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘Could be underground. In some kind of vault.’
As they got closer to the house they saw a Mercedes G-Wagen: black with black glass. Kaffarov’s? There were two other vehicles, a brand new Range Rover Evoque and a battered 1990s Peugeot.