“Relax,” said Nuri. “Just play cool.”
The man with the rifle stepped in front of the car, waving at him to stop. Flash had his pistol ready, under his jacket.
“We’re just lost,” Nuri whispered to Flash. “Keep quiet. Keep the gun out of sight. Ignore theirs. We’ll just smooth-talk this. They’ll want to get rid of us quick.”
Flash’s inclination was to step on the gas, but he wasn’t in the driver’s seat.
The man who’d gotten out of the SUV shone a flashlight at them as they stopped. Nuri rolled down the window.
“Who are you?” demanded the man with the rifle.
“Please, we are looking for number three-one-two,” said Nuri in Arabic. “Do you know it?”
“Who are you looking for?” said the man, still using Farsi.
“Three-one-two.”
The man with the flashlight came around to Nuri’s side. The two Iranians debated whether they should help him or not.
“Do you know where three-one-two is?” repeated Nuri. “I have an appointment. We were late coming from Mehrabad Airport but I hoped—”
“Three twelve is back the other way,” said the man with the flashlight. His Arabic had an Egyptian accent, similar to Nuri’s. “Turn your car around, take a right, then a left at the far end and circle back down. You will find it.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said Nuri.
Tarid’s cab drove toward him as he finished the three-point turn.
Nuri cursed.
The men had stepped back into the shadows but were still nearby; there was no way to warn him.
“You think they’re going to shoot him?” asked Flash as they passed.
“Fifty-fifty,” said Nuri, watching from the rearview mirror.
Tarid felt his throat constrict as the man with the rifle stepped out from the side of the street. He’d focused all of his attention on the passing car and was caught completely off-guard.
The taxi driver jammed the brakes. As the man raised the rifle, the drive turned and started to throw the car into reverse. But a man with a flashlight ran out from behind an SUV on the other side and shone it in the back. The driver froze, unsure what to do.
“We’re not going to harm you!” yelled the man with the rifle. “Stop the car. Tarid?”
“Tarid!” yelled the man with the flashlight. “You’re here for a package.”
Tarid leaned toward the door and rolled down the window.
“I am Arash Tarid. Aberhadji sent me.”
“Come with us,” said the man with the flashlight. He shone the light toward the driver. “You stay here. He’ll be right back. Don’t worry. He’ll pay you.”
Tarid’s fingers slipped on the handle. Still, he thought it was a good sign that the man with the flashlight had said he’d be back.
But what else would he have said?
Tarid’s legs became less steady as he walked. He tried remembering a prayer — any prayer — but couldn’t. He couldn’t think at all.
The man with the flashlight stopped near the bushes. He reached down and pulled up a large duffel bag.
“You’re to give this to the man with the red jacket at Imam Khomeini Airport,” he told Tarid. “Go to Hangar Five. The man will ask you what time it is. You reply that it is a nice day. Do you understand? You don’t give him the time. You say it is a nice day.”
“OK.”
“Go,” said the man with the gun, pushing him toward the taxi.
Tarid felt a surge of shame. He’d been in life and death situations before. Never had he acted like this — never had he felt such fear. Even just the other day, when the camp was under assault in the Sudan, when he was hurt, he had acted calmly.
Here in Iran he’d been reduced to a coward. Why?
Because of Aberhadji. He was deathly afraid of him. He’d always been afraid of him.
You couldn’t give one man that much power over your life. To be afraid of a single man like that — however righteous or powerful — if you lived like that, you were nothing but a dog, a cur begging in the street.
Tarid grabbed the handle of the taxi and angrily pulled it open.
“We need to go to the international airport,” he told the driver. “Take me to Hangar Five. And no more complaints about your in-laws. I have more important things to worry about.”
“Identify and locate hangar five,” Nuri told the Voice as he pulled onto the highway.
The Voice identified the hangar as a civilian facility at the center of the airport’s service area. It was used by foreign airlines, primarily Turkish Airlines.
“What’s he doing?” Flash asked.
“Delivering a package to somebody at the airport,” said Nuri. “It’s not too big.”
“Bomb?”
“Probably papers,” said Nuri. He guessed it had to do with the network, documents or plans of some type. “It’s way too small for a nuke.”
“Could it be bomb material, though?”
“It could be.” Nuri thought about a bomb. The actual amount of pure uranium or plutonium needed was relatively small, though very heavy. The package might contain enough for a third or even half a bomb, depending on how sophisticated the design was.
Actually, he realized, it could contain the entire bomb — but only if the design was very advanced.
“You know, we don’t really have to rescue Tarid,” said Flash. “We can just make it look like we did.”
“There’s only two of us, Flash. We can’t set up a whole operation like that. Especially at an airport.”
“Why not?”
“How do we get away?”
“We’ll be at an airport, right?”
“We have to take Tarid with us.”
“We knock him out.”
It wasn’t a horrible idea, just totally impractical. Nuri let Flash talk about it as he drove. He thought about what else the box might contain.
Traffic was light, but not so light that they could count on not being seen if they ran the taxi off the road. Still, that might work: push him off the road, rob him, grab the bag.
The Iranians would realize they knew. But they were already shutting down the operation, so what did it matter?
“How would we grab the bag?” Nuri asked Flash finally. “How can we take it?”
“The bag? Not him?”
“What if we just got the bag?”
“We just point our guns at him and grab it. Shoot him if he won’t hand it over. Straight robbery, dude.”
Somehow, Nuri didn’t think it would be that easy.
70
The voice directed Danny and Hera to an abandoned farm about a mile from the air base. Danny parked just off the road, then led Hera as the Voice guided them down an old creek to a farm lane where they climbed up a hill about a half mile from the rear of the complex. Until they crested the hill, they saw nothing. Hera kept wanting to complain that they were going in the wrong direction, and struggled to keep her mouth shut.
And then, suddenly, they saw floodlights in the distance. They didn’t even need their night glasses to see what was going on.
“It’s a missile,” said Hera. “Oh my God.”
Aberhadji watched as the warhead was bolted into place. The process was delicate — not because of the warhead, which would remain inert until after it was launched, but because of the rocket fuel and oxidizer being pumped into the tanks.
Fueling the missile was not quite as easy as loading a truck with gasoline. The liquids had to be carefully monitored; their temperature and pressures were critical, and a spark in the wrong place would ignite a fireball. While Aberhadji’s team had perfected quick fueling methods, his short notice added another level of difficulty. Still, he knew it should take only a little more than an hour before they were ready to launch — a prep time that would be the envy of the best-trained crew in the West.