Time to improvise.
The copter came straight at me. 500 meters and closing. A Bell Jet Ranger. I dropped to one knee. I hit the Activate button on my iPhone. I had 30 seconds. Might as well do some damage before the fat lady sang.
I sighted down the barrel of the AK-47. One shot each for the pilot and the co-pilot. I could picture the chopper crashing into the school and exploding in flames. One hell of a distraction. But not from this range, Jake. Be patient.
I counted off the seconds and calculated the distance: 400 yards. 350. The landing light under the chopper’s nose began to flicker. The hell?
The Jet Ranger banked to the right, then orbited the building, the co-pilot in the left seat facing me. The cargo door was open. If the Ranger was armed — and every Ranger was — there would be a crewman hanging out the door with a machine gun. But the back seat was empty.
I glanced down at the iPhone’s screen: 15, 14, 13 …
Decision time. 250 yards. Wait! I eased off the trigger. I’d seen the helicopter before, and now I knew where. On the landing pad outside Charlie’s warehouse in Seyfabad. I lowered the rifle.
The co-pilot braced himself against the chopper’s doorframe and leaned out. He raised his sunglasses and pushed a boom mike down from in front of his face. There was no mistaking the mustache and broad cheeks. Charlie Amadi. He signaled me to stay down and stay put. Yeah, as if I were going somewhere without him.
I dropped the rifle and reached for my phone.
Now it was down to 5, 4, 3 … I hit the Disarm trigger. The countdown froze.
The helicopter banked hard and swooped toward me. Now I recognized the pilot. It was Jeri. I was liking the girl better and better all the time. I pressed against the shed door and prayed that the guards in the stairway would hold off for three or four more seconds.
At the last second, the Jet Ranger flared upward to bleed off airspeed. A cloud of dust lifted from the roof. Jeri leveled the copter and raked her landing skids close to me, turbine engine screeching, rotor blades churning the air.
“What are you waiting for?” she shouted.
I dived onto the backseat. The helicopter accelerated upward. The roar was deafening. I rolled into a sitting position and snapped the seat harness over my shoulders and waist. I gripped my iPhone, stared down at the screen, and activated the self-destruct mechanism on the suitcase bomb. Thank God.
Wind whipped through the open cabin. I leaned to the left and glanced out the door. Security guards burst out of the hatchway on the school roof and began firing. Bullets sprayed us from the adjacent roof, wild shots that couldn’t keep up with the forward motion of the Jet Ranger at full throttle.
I watched until we were well out of range. When I turned around, Charlie was holding out a headset for me. I slipped it over my ears.
“So?” I heard him say.
First, I held out the iPhone. He read the screen, and his eyes doubled in size. Then I pulled the phone away.
“Pay dirt,” I answered, as we disappeared over the hills west of Qom and the first hint of dawn peeked above the horizon.
An hour later. Charlie handed me hot tea, Iranian style, in a short glass with one sugar cube. My hair was still wet from a hot shower and my face tingled from a welcome shave. He, Jeri, and I had just finished a late lunch of fried spinach and eggplant with yogurt, onions, and garlic. I was dying for a cheeseburger.
We hadn’t gone back to Seyfabad, and we hadn’t returned to Tehran. We’d gone south from Qom seventy or eighty miles to Kashan. Jeri had ditched the chopper at a private airport a mile from the city. The safe house was in an old neighborhood populated by painters and sculptors and papermakers, as Charlie described it.
He was expounding on Kashan’s history. “Like everything in Iran, it’s been overrun and pillaged by the best of them. Arabs, Mongols, Persians, and who knows all. That’s what happens when you’ve been around for five thousand years.”
Jeri wore the same tank top she’d been wearing during my rescue. It showed miles of skin the color of burnished walnut; I could have stared at her all day. She said, “If you had the time, you could walk into town and find a silk scarf for your wife unlike anything you could find anywhere else in the world. But you better get it quick before the mullahs make the arts a footnote in Iranian history.”
“What’s really special about Kashan is that Natanz is only forty miles away,” Charlie said. He knew that was my next destination. “I assume that’s the plan.”
“Strike while the iron’s hot, my friend. The Revolutionary Guards will know their security has been breached. I figure I have twenty-four hours max before everything within five hundred miles of Qom is battened down tighter than a drum,” I said. I looked across at Charlie. He had chosen a hardback chair and a stiff posture. His cup and saucer were balanced in his hands like an artist with his brush and palette. “But you’ve done enough, Charlie. You and Jeri risked your necks for me back there. I won’t forget. We’re square.”
Charlie looked over at Jeri. He was grinning. She looked like she was ready to take my head off. “He’s no Persian, is he?” he said.
“No, but I like his style anyway,” she said unexpectedly.
“In our country, as fucked up as it may be, it’s the debtor who decides when a debt is paid. You’ve still got work to do, and we’ve still got a traitor to find,” he said. “I’m in for the long haul.”
“And I’m just beginning to enjoy myself,” Jeri said. “But it’s up to you, Abu.”
Abu? What the hell? Abu meant “father” in Arabic. My eyes swept the room. Charlie must have seen it on my face. But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he pulled a laptop from a case on the floor and set it up on the table.
While he was powering it up, he said, “I heard from Bagheri. You lit a fire under his ass. He’s got people searching high and low for his mole.”
I shook my head. “Bad move. All he’s going to do is make it harder for us to find the bastard.”
“Don’t I know it. But there might be an upside. He raises enough hell, it might keep Security out of our hair for a while. My guys are narrowing things down. They’re tracking twenty-six known MEK operatives who seem to have hidden agendas.”
“Moradi?” For some reason, I didn’t want it to be Moradi. He’d been chumming for the MEK in Amsterdam for thirty years. We’d partnered enough times to know we were on the same side. Or so I thought.
“Not Moradi. But Karimi and Drago keep coming to the surface,” Charlie said.
“Okay. We have to flush our guy out,” I said. “We have to set a lure for the twenty-six possibilities on our list. We have to use the communication links your guys have established to hint at various rendezvous sights around Tehran. See who bites.”
“I’m on that,” Jeri said, rising from her chair with the grace of gymnast on a balance beam. “I’ll set up a video conference with Amur.” She glanced at me. “Amur. The guy with the bow tie. We’ll have something out on the wire in an hour.”
“Keep it subtle, Jeri,” I said. “This guy’s smart. We don’t want to spook him.”
She nodded briskly — the soldier replacing the gymnast in the blink of an eye — and hustled out.
“Consider it done,” Charlie said, as if I might have misgivings about a twenty-six-year-old screwing up our counterintelligence op. Nope, not this twenty-six-year-old. I’d share a foxhole with her any day of the week. Charlie turned the computer screen my way. “Professor Fouraz came through again. He sent another batch of photographs from Natanz and a couple of audio links.”
Charlie put the photographs up on the screen. The first batch showed unmarked semi-trailers escorted by unmarked SUVs. All the men wore sunglasses and most weren’t particularly discreet about hiding their weapons: MP5 submachine guns, Beretta auto-shotguns, and the ubiquitous AK-47s.