“Badr near Teheran? A few years ago, Badr missile site suffered an explosion that destroyed two buildings.”
“How did that happen? Saboteurs?”
“The revolutionary guards, who run the facility as they do here, said it was sabotaged. It could have been an accident.… Who knows? The Guard Corps are rebuilding the site now, hardening the fifty missile silos there,” Ferdows said.
She nodded and followed Ferdows into the communication room.
If I get out of Iran alive, one bomb will misfire, she thought to herself, calculating that when the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the military GPS satellite network, she would have the Pentagon redirect the torpedo from harm’s way and alert Merk about the Russian navy dolphins.
But for that to happen, she had to get out of Iran.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The helicopter ride over the mountain ranges of Kurdistan in northwest Iran was about to deliver Jenny a great deal closer to Iraq, the Kurds, and pockets of ISIS, all less than one day’s drive to the border. Her immediate goal of exiting the hardline country with the Ayatollah’s vow to destroy Israel and attack America became her only task, her singular goal, her only mission.
Sitting in the cargo bay with armed revolutionary guards, she avoided eye contact. She shut her eyes to feign taking a nap. Jenny, dressed as Kim Dong-Sun, began to run a slew of what-if scenarios with their potential outcomes, good and bad, in her mind when the helicopter touched down before sunset at the Lake Urmia missile site.
The worst-case scenario: Jenny would be exposed by her North Korean colleagues for being an imposter, in which case she would have to fight her way out of the base and then find a way to leave the country to Iraq, which was close enough by vehicle, but not on foot. The latter would take days. She also understood the longer she met with the real Dong-Sun’s North Korean fellow engineers and scientists at the new missile site, the greater the risk of her being exposed as a CIA spy.
Upon landing, Agent King needed to move quickly. She had to find the quickest, most discrete way to vanish, to make her way over the Kurdistan Mountains to the border of Iraq. She had to escape. She had to make it. She had to give all the intelligence she collected to the directorates in Langley so they could act, with terrorist city and targets still unknown.
The helicopter slowed down as it approached the base under construction. Behind it, the big bowl of depleted salt water Lake Urmia spoke about the severity of the region’s drought, which like ISIS extended from Syria through northern Iraq to the northwest corner of Iran. Lake Urmia looked like Las Vegas’s dying Lake Mead — with Iran’s overbuilding of dams accelerating its death. Urmia once was a favorite resort for thousands of Iranians. She saw several abandoned houses with ghost docks on the far side of the lake, a stark reminder of the summer days when Iranians used to flock to the resort to bathe and water ski.
Out the window in the foreground, Kim Dong-Sun saw three helipads, a long warehouse structure, and a parking lot half filled with Iranian, Russian, and Chinese-made cars. One of those cars, she posited, was going to come into play as her exit strategy.
When the helicopter landed, the Revolutionary Guards Corps walked Dong-Sun across the helipads to the rear entrance of the building. The door opened and an Iranian military officer greeted her. He led her to a debriefing room, where she was introduced to an Iranian scientist, a European engineer—a defector? she wondered — and what she feared was one of her North Korean colleagues. She didn’t recognize the Korean engineer; and he didn’t give her a hint that he knew Kim Dong-Sun either. So far, she was lucky.
The North Koreans greeted one another with a slight nod. In their native tongue, he congratulated her on the books and white papers she wrote over the years, shaping the missile program from duds falling short of their mark to a new, more robust, more accurate generation of North Korean missiles and guidance systems, stolen from American defense contractors.
She saw a set of plans spread out across the table. Aware of her homeland custom, she could neither point to her colleague nor wave him to pass the plans across the table — since in Korea it was considered rude and bad Western manners. Instead, she lowered her hand, turned it with her palm open facing up, and moved her hand forward. The North Korean engineer bowed to her request and slid the plans across the table to her.
“What do you want to see, Lady Kim?” the Iranian scientist asked.
Also lucky for Jenny, she had studied the satellite, drone, and spy plane images a month before on the Lake Urmia base being built. She noted a third helipad had been built since she saw the recon photos, but recalled there were no silos excavated as of that date, while the parking lot had doubled in size from what she recalled in the helicopter arriving to the base.
Jenny had also spent days studying the shrinking salt lake, some 85 percent in less than two decades. A bad mix of changing climate and man-made pressures caused Lake Urmia’s death spiral. With drought the real threat to the region, the lake would soon dry up. Iran had hired a Belgium environmental science and engineering firm to restore the lake. The European company, which was hacked by the NSA, had previously resurrected the Dead Sea from a similar fate. But she doubted they would have success in Iran. Too many dams, built too fast. But then she realized Lake Urmia’s restoration project was going to be Jenny’s ticket out of Iran.
Dong-Sun spread the plans open. She studied the topography, where the missile pads would be installed in Phase II, and where the half dozen silos would be excavated, cored, and sleeved in Phase III of the project. She pointed to the south bend of the lake, asking “Is this where the shoreline resides today?”
“Good question,” her North Korean colleague said.
“I believe that’s the shoreline today,” the Iranian scientist said, not quite sure.
She put the drawings together, rolled them up, and said, “I need to go outside and conduct a survey of the missile silo locations.”
“I will come with you,” her colleague said.
“No. I need to work alone. I think clearer when there’s silence, the absence of chatter. Then I need to sleep on what I observe,” she said. “By morning I will have an answer.”
“I will send a guard to accompany you,” the Iranian scientist said, insisting, “He will be quiet. He doesn’t speak Korean or English.”
Knowing she couldn’t say no to the Iranian watchdog, Kim Dong-Sun nodded. She believed there would be no way to walk the shoreline alone. If she had to take out someone to make her escape, it might as well be a revolutionary guard sentry. She looked at her colleague, saying, “Wait for me for dinner. I will be back in two hours.”
He nodded to her. They saluted each other.
Dong-Sun headed out of the office with the guard in tow. She stepped out into the setting sun as she exited the building. She would need to wait for dusk before she would attempt her escape, first by neutralizing the watchman, then searching for a car to steal in the parking lot. Outside, she noted that there was only one surveillance camera on the far end of the lot. She wondered if the lone closed-circuit TV cam was operational or even had its lens installed and software tested and operational.
Jenny walked the shoreline, past salt shapes, salt figures, and salt mounds, shadowed by the Iranian guard. She thought about the Book of Genesis and Lot’s wife, when the woman of lore stopped to look back at the destruction of Sodom — the fallout from a comet, Jenny now knew — and was turned into a pillar of salt.