Breaux turned the Mercedes off the road and swung the silver luxury sedan onto a narrow dirt track that ran straight across the meadow toward the small adzed-beam cottage a quarter mile ahead. A few minutes later the car had reached its destination.
Breaux parked on the gravel drive and the team emerged from the Mercedes, the five men stretching their legs, hauling luggage from the trunk and unfastening pairs of skis from the rack at the top of the roof. To any observer the men, dressed in après ski gear, would have appeared to be tourists out to catch the last shusses of the fast-waning winter season.
Anyone interested in, and capable of, checking further, would learn that the group had come from Eastlake, Ohio, a municipal subdivision of greater Cleveland, and that they were all local real estaters working for Century 21 on a week-long European ski junket.
The only discrepancy noted would have been a black vinyl body bag that two of the men carried inside. The body bag contained roughly a hundred pounds of aluminum beer cans and crushed ice. But it was an Eagle Patcher tradition to drink your hydraulic sandwiches out of a body bag, and that was that.
The chalet, which was short-stay rental property leased to visitors by a local landowner, had been paid for in advance through a well-known travel agency. The Mercedes was also a rental, also booked in advance through an internationally reputed firm, which had also arranged for international drivers licenses for two members of the ski party.
That would have ended scrutiny of the five men, and so none would have been made suspicious by one of the five who, shortly after the other four had entered the chalet and drawn the blinds, stepped outside to have a smoke and admire the scenery.
Top kick Death did indeed admire the Alps, which reminded him of the Catskills, in a funny way, except that none of the hotels served brisket of beef or prune juice. Sgt. Death also kept his eyes peeled for anybody on their way to the chalet while the team unpacked and checked the gear.
Breaux's checklist of weapons, explosives, timing devices, NVGs and other equipment had been precise and calculated down to the last battery and bullet.
With the blinds drawn, Breaux and the other members of the squad took everything out of the luggage in which an employee of the car rental company — a longtime CIA proprietary — had packed the stuff. It took the better part of an hour for all the gear to be checked out, put together, then broken down again and stowed away, but when it was finished Breaux was pleased to note that everything he'd ordered was there and ready.
For the greater part of the rest of the week, the team would play the role of dumb, drunk, horny, loud but good-natured and fun-loving Americans on vacation. Some of that would be real, since it would be a vacation from military life and the special warfare battlefield. Other parts of it would be the application of hard tactical lessons.
Their objective was the Deutsche Wehrteknik plant situated just outside the nearby ski town of Chur. By the end of the week the team would have secretly entered the factory and destroyed weapons components that DWT was thought to be manufacturing and secretly shipping to Iran along the Bonn-Karachi truck pipeline.
Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni relaxed in a Jacuzzi hot tub with nubile whores catering to his every whim. The wide screen HDTV was above the whirlpool bath, tuned to CNN. Dalkimoni fondled the large breasts and protuberant nipples of the blonde Swedish girl while admiring the swaying ass on the black English girl who licked the blond's snatch while he watched TV.
The girls, the champagne, and the beautiful villa — it was as if he had awakened to a living dream of paradise promised in the Q'uran. It was rumored to have been the same villa in which Carlos had lived before his capture and imprisonment by French agents. Once a promising operator, and a rising star after his brilliant work at the Munich Olympics of 1972, he'd gotten too full of himself to remain effective. Besides, he had not been an Arab. How could an infidel nonbeliever ever truly support the cause? Absurd. And besides all that, ancient history by now, and thus a subject unworthy of the doctor's continued musings.
Earlier, Dalkimoni had met with the presidential heir-apparent, Bashar Mozafferreddin, at the former Saabgheranieh Palace, in what had once been the summer harem of the Shah.
The palace, now renamed the Niavaran Presidential Palace of the People's Islamic Revolution — but still sumptuously decorated to please the bevy of beautiful harem girls whose talents at belly dancing and sucking cock had earned them apartments there — stood within the Niavaran Palace Complex in Tehran's Shemiranat district in the northeast quarter of the city, cooled in summer by vagrant breezes from the Elburz mountains and warmed in winter by the the body heat of its horny female inmates.
Bashar was in his fifth floor office feeding his prize Siamese fighting fish, which he kept in a large tank that had been specially built into one of the office's imported hardwood walls — with the fabled cedars of Lebanon long gone, the wood for the walls had come from the Brazilian rainforest.
Bashar bred the fighting fish himself, and they had won him renown throughout the Middle East and the jet-set capitals of Europe. Bashar beckoned Dalkimoni to join him by the tank as he admired his finny warriors.
"It has been scientifically demonstrated that fish grow balls when successful in warfare and lose them when disgraced or defeated," Bashar declaimed, staring into the tank and ignoring his visitor. "In defeat, the fish also shrink in size."
"This is most interesting, Excellency," replied Dalkimoni, standing at a respectful distance from his benefactor. "Most interesting, indeed."
Bashar continued to ignore the bomb-maker while he carefully sprinkled live, wriggling mealworms, beetle larvae and other small insects onto the surface of the water in the tank. Their struggling movements quickly attracted the predators below.
Bashar had a team of insect farmers in the basement on his payroll. The team did nothing except breed insects as food for Bashar's prize fish. At each morning's feeding, the choicest bugs were gathered by his breeders and delivered to Bashar's office in a medium-sized jar.
It was from this jar that Bashar was plucking tasty morsels with a pair of tweezers when the bomb-maker had come in.
"You see," Bashar went on, speaking toward the tank as if Dalkimoni were not even in his presence, "the defeated fish must either find a way to regain their balls or suffer annihilation. The only way for a fish to achieve this transformation is to fight. Thus, the fish are constantly at war with each other. They live out their lives in a state of perpetual combat."
Bashar had dropped another few wriggling bugs into the tank, smiling as the fish jostled and pushed each other aside, struggling to be the first to snap up the life-giving morsels. The bomb-maker realized that Bashar was deliberately withholding most of the contents of the insect jar, forcing the Siamese fish to crowd one another so that the less aggressive ones would end up starving to death.
Finally, Bashar turned to face the bomb-maker. In his eyes Dalkimoni saw the same strange fire that he had witnessed in a rare interview with the Rais (a word of Urdu derivation variously meaning president or Supreme Leader, and in the Mozafferreddin years, a combination of both). One day soon, Bashar would assume the mantle of his patron and engenderer. Whether he would last very long was an open question.
Unknown assailants had already voted against his stewardship by attempting to shoot his car out from under him, landing him in the hospital for months. Bashar, Dalkimoni reflected, might well prove even more ruthless than even the long-dead master of cunning and treachery, Saddam; but he was far less popular and perhaps less cunning. Still, time would tell the tale.