Mark bent down. “Yaver! Can you hear me!” He slapped Yaver’s cheek. “Wake up here, buddy. I need to ask you a few questions. After that we’re going to drive into town, get you some medical help. You help us out here, we’ll help you out.”
Yaver didn’t respond.
“Who did you report to, Yaver? You Qods Force, buddy?” said Mark, referring to the elite special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Yaver didn’t answer. Bubbles of spit formed at the corner of his mouth as he struggled to breathe. Mark lightly slapped his cheek again. “Stay with me.”
For a moment Yaver’s eyes focused on Mark, but then he went slack.
Mark let his head drop into the dirt. “Dickhead. Stick him in the back of the Land Cruiser,” he told Decker. “Find some way to secure him, in case he gets a second wind.” He pulled out Yaver’s cell phone. “And see if you can get anything off of this. When you’re done, shut it down so the signal can’t be triangulated. Be quick about it.”
Watching Mark operate, Daria realized she hadn’t been the only one hiding things about her past. Because it was rapidly becoming clear that he hadn’t just risen through the ranks of the CIA as some analyst. No, he was way too comfortable, way too sure of himself around violence for that.
41
Mark ran to the farmhouse. He figured he only had another minute or two before whoever Yaver had called started wondering why it was taking so long to get an execution confirmation.
Daria followed him to the bright blue front door. Mark briefly considered having Decker drag her back to the Land Cruiser and tie her down to one of the seats.
“Anyone inside?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The front door opened onto a kitchen, where a battered samovar sat on a bare-wood kitchen table and unwashed pots filled the sink. Mark rifled through the cabinet drawers and ripped food off the open shelves but found nothing of interest. He moved on to the small living room, where a worn couch sat behind a coffee table cluttered with oil lamps, aging newspapers from Baku, and a worn volume of poetry by Hafez — a fourteenth-century poet still wildly popular in Iran. The walls were covered with dark hand-knotted carpets.
Behind another wall-hung carpet in the back bedroom, Mark found a metal door with a sophisticated-looking lock on it. He tried the handle and it wouldn’t turn so he fired a shot into the lock and threw his shoulder into the door. It stayed shut. He fired two more shots and kicked it open.
A rickety wooden staircase led down to a small cellar with clay walls. Mark turned on a single fluorescent overhead light, revealing a series of bright stainless-steel tables lining the perimeter of the room.
On one of the tables lay a set of night-vision goggles, an infrared strobe light, and a digital camera with an enormous telephoto lens. On another, a collection of listening devices and a miniature GPS tracker. On still another, a pistol belt, boxes of ammunition, two 9mm Glocks, a mini-arsenal of old AK-47s, a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol, a few limpet mines, and what looked like a halfway decent knockoff of a CAR-15 automatic rifle. From the ceiling hung a black wetsuit, fins, a scuba-related contraption, and waterproof chemlites.
“Holy shit,” said Mark to Daria, who had followed him down the steps.
“This isn’t MEK stuff,” she said slowly. “I mean, we had a few weapons, but nothing — nothing like this.”
“Did the Astara MEK know this basement even existed?”
“I know I didn’t. I thought this was just an auxiliary site. It was used as a safe house for Iranian defectors. Yaver arranged it all.”
Mark pulled out a couple of canvas duffel bags from under the stainless-steel tables. He stuffed everything in them except a few beat-up AK-47s and hauled it all back to the Land Cruiser.
Yaver was in the rear seat, lying on his back between the two doors. His feet and hands had been bound together with duct tape and tied to the armrests. But his eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. Decker was taking his pulse.
“Is he dead?” said Mark.
Decker shook his head. “Not yet. But give it a few minutes and he will be.”
“He’s not faking?”
Decker pointed to the sizable pool of blood collecting on the seat of the Land Cruiser and dripping onto the floor. “I can’t completely stop it, I can’t get enough pressure on his gut.”
“Shit,” said Mark. He suddenly felt lightheaded. God, what a mess, he thought. What a world.
“We lost our chance to interrogate him,” said Decker, sounding slightly accusing. He gave Daria a look.
“I did what I had to,” she said.
“There was a reason I just tagged him in the leg.”
“Then you were playing with fire.”
“Leave it be,” said Mark.
He placed his hand an inch away from Yaver’s mouth. He could hardly feel the man’s breath.
“Listen, buddy! Last chance here. Tell us who you report to and we get medical help. Hold back on us, and you’re screwed.”
Daria translated what Mark had said into Farsi, but Yaver was beyond hearing.
Decker, who was looking through the duffel bags, said, “I gotta say, some of this is crap but a lot of it reminds me of what I used to carry.” He pulled out something that looked like a piece of scuba equipment. “This is a Draeger rebreather. You can dive without releasing bubbles. Standard SEAL gear.”
“Would Qods Force use it?” asked Mark.
“They might.” Decker picked up the Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this gear was lifted from our guys who’ve gone down in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Pack it back up, we gotta get out of here.”
Mark climbed into the driver’s seat, Daria slid into the passenger seat, and Decker got in back. After picking up the rest of Mark’s cash from the trunk of the Lada, they started hauling ass toward the coast, bouncing all over the rough road and skidding through a few curves.
But they’d only gone a couple of miles when they heard the distant thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Mark.
“It can’t actually be coming for us, do you think?” said Decker.
Mark swerved off onto a narrow trail that paralleled a tea field and dead-ended at a dense grove of oak trees.
He backed the Land Cruiser into the trees, raised his binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the sky. He saw nothing. Suddenly there was silence.
“They touched down,” said Decker, who’d opened the back door of the Land Cruiser and had been listening intently.
“At the farmhouse?”
“Could be. Yeah.”
“They’re looking for us,” said Mark.
He continued to search the sky as a breeze rustled the leaves behind him. Daria stood on the other side of the car, silently scanning the tea field and the surrounding sky.
He considered the logistics of getting a helicopter to a rural part of Azerbaijan within what — ten minutes? Whoever they were dealing with had access to some serious resources.
In the backseat, Yaver was dead. Mark dragged him out of the car and let him flop to the ground. Then he picked up some downed branches from the forest floor and piled them on the roof of the car.
“We’ll lay low here for a while,” he said. “In the meantime maybe Daria will finally deign to tell us more about what the hell is really going on.”
42
“No more lies,” said Daria. “No more secrets.”
“No more secrets,” Mark agreed.
“No, look at me. I mean it this time. I tell you what I know and in return you don’t bullshit me, like saying you sent Decker away. Or telling me you were a CIA analyst.”