During the day, Iranian gunships, drones, and spy planes watched from the sky, while ground patrols branched out, scouting along the border and following the corridor for ISIS warriors, suppliers, smugglers of cigarettes and kerosene, exiled Baath Party commanders once loyal to Saddam Hussein, deserted Syrian soldiers, Syrian rebel factions, and al Qaeda groups and offshoots that wanted to attack the West and the United States.
The US countered that activity at night with high-tech hardware, from infrared cameras able to detect the heat signatures of rodents on the ground, to Long-Range Acquisition System (LRAS) night-vision scopes capable of picking up humans several klicks away on dark moonless nights. Beyond degrading the Islamic State, Iraq deployed more of their policemen and army guards at Fort 24 than at any other border crossing along Syria. It was an attempt to stop the influx of suicide bombers, al Qaeda bomb-makers, ISIS fighters, and former Hussein loyalists from destabilizing the fractured government in Iraq any further, whether north fighting ISIS over Mosul, or in the villages on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Across the border from Fort 24 in Syria’s northeast desert, a flat, arid plateau with a ridge of berms rising low to the east along Iraq, a group of Syrian Army generals met with a pair of North Korean engineers and a middle-aged Iranian nuclear scientist named Ferdows.
Among the leaders in the group stood Syrian four-star General Adad, a rotund, bombastic man with graying hair and sun-leather face. Adad ran through a list of items on a marked-up blueprint. Loving to hear himself talk, the general surveyed a swale to the south and pointed to planned locations for a missile launch, a supply house, a couple of false buildings, and a control center. He pointed to a road in the distance, fingering where a connector road would be constructed that ran across the sand in a figure eight driveway, as shown on the plan, that would encompass the site. With the wave of his hand, he boasted about how the site layout was his idea, even though the plan was cloned from an existing base in North Korea, first, then Iran.
As Adad spoke, flanked by a trio of Syrian guards armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, a translator listened to and verbalized his words into Korean so the visitors would understand the general’s remarks. Since Ferdows was fluent in English, French, his native Persian of Farsi, and Arabic, Syria’s official language, no translation was needed for the Iranian scientist.
The balding, bespectacled Ferdows listened intently, taking in elements of the design piece by piece, jotting them down in a tablet design app. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and squinted southwest, where he visualized Israel standing on the other side of Jordan. The idea to build a North Korean long-range missile launcher in eastern Syria, like similar facilities erected in Iran, armed with Iranian nuclear-tipped rockets, brought a grin of satisfaction to his face. Syria couldn’t let the rebels or ISIS insurgents overthrow the general’s government. They had to be kept out of the eastern desert border. To ensure that level of containment, General Adad blew up a dam, destroyed access roads and infrastructure to water, in effect cutting off supplies to the Caliph and his army of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant (ISIL). ISIS’s primary goal was to liquidate Shia Muslims in Iraq and Syria, the Putin-backed Syrian regime, the Kurds to the north, and Iran emboldened by the US nuclear treaty. That threat was still real and not going away. General Adad understood that better than most; he also knew cutting off fuel and water were key to keeping the Islamic State’s power contained in the north, along the border with Turkey.
The North Koreans listened to the general. The old Korean man was a frail ballistics engineer, while his female colleague, Kim Dong-Sun, was a missile specialist. The Korean pair checked the contours of the land and the locations where each component would support and supply the missile battery.
Dong-Sun was a petite colonel devoid of emotion. She wrapped her long hair in a bun and tucked it under a cap, which accentuated her angular, stone face, plain without makeup, and that afternoon coated with sand dust. Her narrow, Siamese cat-like eyes, black, shifting, took in the desolate landscape. Whenever she glanced at the fat, portly body of General Adad, which was alien to her countrymen’s smallish, thinner figures, she cringed.
Dong-Sun looked over the shoulder of General Adad, seeing the plans with hand-written notes in Sanskrit for the first time since they were emailed to the Syrian military from North Korea’s Physics Department of Kanggye Defense College a month ago. The Syrian engineers had done a decent job of plotting what she designed. The only item she saw missing were the Chinese solar panels she engineered that would provide backup power in case the underground cables, which ran from the mountain valleys of the west at the earthen Tabqa hydroelectric dam to the nearby border with Iraq, were severed by the civil conflict or damaged by sabotage.
Dong-Sun was about to broach the subject when out of the corner of her eye she spotted apparitions drifting in the heat haze along the Syrian side of the berms by the Iraqi border. She had been silent for the better part of the hour-long briefing. She knew her place in the misogynist Syrian world was to stand resolutely still, hover in the background, be silent, be gracious, stay out of sight, speak when spoken to — she was used to the same boorish treatment back home in the male-dominated Asian societies of China and the Korean peninsula.
The engineer watched the visitors float across the melting sand. Silently, steadily they strode over the watery mirage. For a moment she was transfixed by the optical illusion, by the way their legs wriggled in the heat waves, by the way their lower bodies melted in the undulating mirror of sand. With a tap on the wrist, she interrupted the translator, pointing to the visitors. Redirected by the unwelcome party, he stopped translating.
General Adad didn’t hear the chatter of the translator. So he glanced at him and followed his sightline over to the intruders. As the Syrians turned east, adjusting their eyes to the heat rising from the desert, the foursome came into view: Armed Syrian soldiers escorted a white male and female couple, in their twenties, dressed in khakis and tee shirts, looking American.
Dressed in an olive green North Korean officer’s uniform, pants, and a tunic with blue liner, big buttons, and starch-stiff lapels, Dong-Sun opened a flap on her utility belt, pulled out a pair of binoculars, and zoomed in on the couple. The man was sturdy with a robust frame, had curly brown hair and a beard. The woman was tall and thin, her straight blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Both were covered in dust. The armed guards carried many cameras slung over their shoulders.
“Western maggots. They smell like American journalists,” Dong-Sun said in Korean. The translator stared at her. She shot a stare back, prodding him to translate her observation. He did so reluctantly. She looked at the tablet that Ferdows stowed under his jacket.
The guards stepped in front of General Adad in a defensive posture that both bewildered and amazed her. They spread their legs apart, stiffened their wide frames in an open stance, and lifted the AK-47s chest-high without lowering their heads to eye the rifles’ scopes. Taken back by their unorthodox stance, by the fat targets they made of their bodies, Dong-Sun handed the binoculars to her colleague and moved Ferdows aside. She studied the poor aim and terrible posture the Syrian marksmen made in taking a stance against the threat.
The engineer shook her head, took out a lemon from the utility belt and, with a paring knife, cut the fruit in half. With a swipe she peeled the rind back and cut the halves into quarters. She bit into the lemon, sucking on the sour juices, watching the guards’ tense shoulders, at their once-relaxed demeanor stiffened into frowns. Dong-Sun spat out a seed and the chewed quarter before spitting out the rind, then inserted the next lemon slice into her mouth.