“Yakov, we’ve found her!” a voice followed in an excited whisper.
“Alive?”
The light found her, blinded her, and she shrank back to shield her eyes.
“Yes. Quite.”
A third flashlight joined the first two. Evira struggled to gaze past the beams at the men who held them.
“Can you hear me?” came the voice of the one called Yakov.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to blow the lock on your cell. Back up as far as you can in the corner.”
She did as she was told and dragged Kourosh along with her. The boy started to stir, barely awake.
“It’s okay,” she soothed. “We’re being rescued.”
She held him close to her as a fizzle came, followed by a flash, and a poof! One of the men kicked at the cell door and it reeled inward to allow the group to enter.
“How long since you’ve had anything to eat or drink?” Yakov asked her.
“Two days, I think. Maybe three.”
“Then that’s our first priority,” he said, helping her to her feet, while another of the men supported the urchin. “I assume the boy is with you.”
“He is. Who are you? What brought you here?”
“A long story. For now I’ve got a message from Blaine McCracken. He says you should have stayed an old hag in Jaffa.”
“What?” Isser blared at McCracken’s assertion of the final piece in the mad plan of Yosef Rasin. “That’s insane!”
“Of course it is,” Blaine told him. “It’s Rasin.”
“But if what you say is true …”
“Then everything makes sense. Everything becomes clear.”
“How could he have pulled it off, though? Think of the logistics.”
“Forget logic. It doesn’t matter anymore; it never did. We’ve got to think like him if we’re still going to have a chance to win.”
They were seated in Isser’s office in the squat, innocuous complex of buildings outside Tel Aviv near the Hebrew Country Club that formed the permanent headquarters of Mossad.
“You know, Isser,” Isaac started, “I think he’s got a point.”
“It’s crazy,” the head of Mossad persisted. “And you want me to risk everything based on this … hunch.”
“Not a hunch and not everything. Just me and Operation Firestorm. I go into Tehran and get Rasin. All you do is let Firestorm proceed as planned.”
“Including the Apaches, of course.”
“More than ever, since one of them’s gonna serve as my taxi in.” He turned back toward Isaac. “So when’s show time?”
The old man turned an empty gaze out the window where the first signs of light were still an hour or so away.
“Dawn,” was all he said.
The Shah’s secret tunnel ran nearly half a mile and ended beneath a street beyond the square that fronted the royal palace.
“You’re Israeli,” Evira said as they made their way forward with flashlights slicing through the darkness.
“Born and raised.” Yakov laughed, taking his turn at carrying Kourosh.
Evira recalled her suspicions brought on by the comic books purchased in Israel. “But what are you doing here?”
“We’re here to start a revolution. Several hundred of us were planted over a year ago amidst the young, the poor, and the students to organize their discontent into rebellion — and to supply them with the means to fight.”
“Weapons …”
“No revolution is complete without them.”
“An Israeli-inspired revolution?”
“Supported would be a better choice of words. It is the people’s will. We are merely helping them exercise it.”
“ ‘We.’ Mossad?”
“Let’s say we’re an independent group working with their sanction. Easier to disavow involvement that way. Less likely to have leaks with an operation required to take place over such a long period of time.”
“Jews working with Iranians. Incredible …”
“Not really. People working against oppressive, murderous regimes is never incredible. You must agree. You came here to kill Hassani yourself.”
Evira stopped suddenly, and Yakov’s men bringing up the rear nearly collided with her. “How did you know—”
“Because an order was sent by the mission controllers to insure you failed. With Hassani dead, the people would have lost their symbol to rise against. There would be no Firestorm.”
“No what?”
“Code name of this operation.”
“Then it was your people who betrayed that cell in Naziabad.”
“Regretfully,” Yakov acknowledged softly. “This boy, he saved your life?”
Evira nodded. “And to return the favor I’m going to get him out of this country. With your help, of course.” Thanks to Blaine McCracken, she almost added but didn’t. The fact that he had somehow arranged this rescue could only mean that he had fulfilled his end of the mission. Whatever happiness she might have felt over that, though, was tempered by the failure she had experienced at her end. But maybe it wasn’t too late….
“You’ll have to be patient. The hour of Firestorm is upon us.”
“When?”
The other end of the tunnel appeared as a grating in the ground that allowed the first light of the morning to cast a checkerboard pattern downward.
“Dawn.”
“You up for another run, Indian?”
Wareagle’s gaze was noncommittal. “How strange it seems that we spend so much of our lives trying to reconcile ourselves to the hellfire that forged our spirits. And yet each time it beckons we return to it without pause.”
“You once told me the hellfire wasn’t a place, it was a feeling.”
“It is even more than that, Blainey. Our manitous are cleansed by the hellfire. It recharges us, gives us our worth. We lapse from it too long and we become the things we feared it would make us.”
“Kind of like a fix, an addiction.”
“More like an impulse to breathe. We cannot stop ourselves even if we try.”
“This is no time to stop trying,” Blaine said, gritting his teeth. “Someone’s going to answer for killing Hiroshi, and I’ve got to get my son back.”
“Dropping ourselves into a revolution might pose a difficult setting to accomplish either. The palace is our target, but even the spirits cannot lead us into it through the chaos and the crowds. We’re going to need something more this time, Blainey.”
“Precisely why a little present’s going to be waiting for us on the aircraft carrier Kennedy when we land to pick up the Apaches.”
The small group climbed out of the tunnel into the street with the first of the light and the first of the chaos. Already people were taking to the streets, haphazardly, with no real sense of purpose yet, as if some word had reached them and they were waiting for further instruction. Evira had been a party to such scenarios before. But the fervor she sensed in the morning air here was almost palpable in its commitment. The Israelis had done their job well.
“It is happening,” said an Iranian student leader named Rashid who had been waiting for them at the escape hatch. “It is truly happening.”
“And this is only Niavarin,” Yakov reminded them. Then he added to Evira, “The uprising will be focused in Tehran proper, spreading outward from there.”
“A good strategy, if Hassani’s Revolutionary Guard doesn’t stop you in your tracks.”
“We’re not totally alone here,” he told her. “Fifteen Apache helicopter gunships will strafe the strongest of enemy positions, starting at the estimated height of the battle three hours from now.”