“He made a pass at you?”
“His eyes had me undressed faster than I’ve had in months,” Barbeau said with a pleasured smile. “He’s no shrinking violet, that’s for sure. McLanahan might be the goody-two-shoes, but Hunter Noble is more like the captain of the swim team — and I like jocks, a lot.”
“This is more than a major blunder, Buzhazi — this is an embarrassment to the entire Iranian military and leadership,” the commander in chief of the Iranian Armed Forces, General Hoseyn Yassini, thundered. Younger by eight years and shorter by several centimeters than the man standing at attention before him — and, the man noticed, much softer around the neck and middle since leaving the field for headquarters in Tehran — Yassini was obviously not accustomed to dressing anyone down, and it appeared that he had to put some effort into doing so now. He glared at the man standing at attention before him. “And I thought I ordered you to change your uniform before you came here.”
The man standing at a brace in the center of the office was General Hesarak al-Kan Buzhazi, still wearing his field utility uniform stained with blood and dirt and smelling strongly of smoke, gunpowder, and a large dose of fear. “I thought since you did not see fit to go to Orumiyeh yourself,” Buzhazi said, “that I should come directly to you and give you a little taste of what’s happened out there.”
“I don’t need a lecture or a demonstration from anyone, Hesarak, even you,” Yassini said. “If you look like a jihadi reject here in headquarters, you’ll be treated like one.” He picked up the casualty report, glanced at it, and shook it in Buzhazi’s face. “Two hundred thirty-seven dead, five hundred and eight wounded, most critically, including the brigade commanding officer and three Majlis members.” The Majlis was Iran’s Parliament. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I say give me a single Shock Battalion and I will round up and present you with all of the terrorists — or their heads — within two weeks,” Buzhazi said.
“The Shock Battalions no longer exist, Hesarak, and you know it,” Yassini said. “They have been disbanded for years.”
“I know that all regular army and marine special forces troops have been merged with the Pasdaran,” Buzhazi said. “You have them spread out all over the damned planet, in every lousy backwater mud pit, assisting psychopathic nut-cases who don’t know which end of a rifle is which.”
“Watch your mouth, Buzhazi,” Yassini said. “You may have been the former commander-in-chief, but I am commander of the armed forces now.” He paused, then added, “The Pasdaran was created to protect, defend, and support the Islamic revolution throughout the world…”
“Don’t give me that madrasa indoctrination crap, Hoseyn,” Buzhazi said. “The Pasdaran was initially created as the faqih’s private army to hunt down and assassinate any of the monarchy’s and republic’s sympathizers still left in the country after the revolution. When it was discovered that most of those sympathizers were in the military, the Pasdaran was transformed into a branch of the armed services so they could more effectively spy on fellow soldiers. When it was determined that the Shock Battalions were the greatest threat to the cleric’s regime, they were absorbed into the Pasdaran. I was there, Hoseyn — I saw it with my own eyes.”
Yassini could not argue with Buzhazi’s assessment, although he was careful not to say or do anything that could even be construed as agreement — the walls had ears, and probably eyes as well. “The reason you were sent away to command the Basij, General, is because you have this habit of speaking before thinking,” he said. “I strongly advise you to stop.”
“You know as well as I why I was allowed to command the Basij instead of being executed, Hoseyn — the Supreme Defense Council was hoping some enterprising young radical Islamist would assassinate me so the mullahs could disavow any responsibility for disposing of me,” Buzhazi said. “There were ten thousand such crazies willing to do it.”
“You made sure any dissenters were eliminated.”
“You’re wrong, Hoseyn — I didn’t have anything to do with the so-called ‘purges’ in the Basij,” Buzhazi said. “What I did was simple: I showed the youth of Iran what real leadership was. I gave the really dedicated kids direction, and I isolated the rest. I turned that organization from nothing more than prowling gangs of murderers and extortionists into a real fighting force.” He shrugged and added, “When the true soldiers realized how badly the radicals and Islamists were hurting their organization, they took action. No one had to order them to clean house. It’s nothing more than natural selection and survival of the fittest.”
“It was a purge, Hesarak — that’s what everyone believes,” Yassini said. “You may or may not have ordered it, but you certainly were the inspiration for the purges, and you did not punish the offenders as harshly as the Supreme Defense Council wished.” It was Yassini’s turn to shrug. “But, because of your record of service and your considerable political connections, you survived anyway…”
“I survived, Hoseyn, because even the deaf, dumb, and blind idiots on the Council saw that my forces did exceptionally good work,” Buzhazi said. “While the Pasdaran and Air Force were busy scratching their crotches and fingering worry-beads, my national guard forces were capturing infiltrators and shooting down American spy drones.”
“They were in the right place at the right time, nothing more,” Yassini said — but he knew that, again, Buzhazi was right: the Basij, what Buzhazi wanted to call the Internal Defense Force, had done some remarkable work in the past few years. Their biggest achievement was setting up an ambush for an American Predator-A spy drone near a nuclear research facility. Buzhazi set the trap, computed when and how the little unmanned aircraft would approach the target area, and set his forces in place at precisely the right moment. It was only a Predator-A, the lowest-tech version of the unmanned remotely piloted spy plane, but the catch yielded lots of valuable data on the plane’s capabilities and systems. Buzhazi’s forces had shot down another Predator-A and uncovered dozens of remote data collection and relay devices in the deserts as well, shutting down a good portion of America’s covert spy network in Iran.
Yassini’s aide came in, bowed politely to Buzhazi, and handed Yassini a memo. Here it comes, Buzhazi said to himself — this whole conversation had been nothing more than a way for Yassini to stall until a decision had been made…“General, the Supreme Defense Council has ordered you to be placed under arrest until the conclusion of its investigation into the attack on Orumiyeh,” Yassini said tonelessly.
“If you have me put in prison, Hoseyn, the investigation will get bogged down and nothing will ever happen except the obligatory rounding-up of the ‘usual suspects,’” Buzhazi said. “Let me, or the members of my staff, lead a special forces team into Iraq and Turkey. It was Kurdish commandos, I know it. It won’t take long to…”
“The investigation is already underway, General.”
“Who is in charge?”
“I am.”
“No, Hoseyn — I mean, really in charge.” The commander-in-chief’s face turned stony with anger. “Listen, General, you have some discretion here. Put me under house arrest — that way I can continue to receive reports and coordinate activities with…”
“That’s not possible right now, Hesarak,” Yassini said. He hit a button on his desk telephone, and his aide entered the office, followed by two security guards with AK-74 rifles at port-arms. “Someone has to pay for what’s happened. There was a major breach of security protocols, and the Supreme Defense Council believes it was a lack of leadership and attention to detail.”