necessity. Very few people outside the tight-knit organisations dedicated to fighting the shadowy war against terrorism understood that. Look at the public furor that had erupted several years before when a British SAS team ambushed several IRA guerrillas in Gibraltar and shot them down without warning or mercy.
He looked up. Taleh was still waiting for his response. The hardships of the Revolution and the Iran-lraq war had made his friend far more ruthless than he remembered. But this was the other man’s fight and his home ground. Second guessing his decisions now would serve no useful purpose. He nodded his reluctant understanding.
The Iranian seemed satisfied. “Good.” He glanced at his watch and signaled Captain Kazemi over with a quick gesture. “Farhad will escort you back to your quarters for now, Peter. I will join you there after my prayers.”
Taleh clapped him on the shoulder again. “Then we can eat together and discuss these matters at greater length. We can also talk of the old days the better days of our youth.” He swept his eyes over the smoldering ruins of the Manzarieh camp. “And in considerably more pleasant surroundings.”
Twenty-four hours and seven thousand grueling air miles after leaving Iran, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Thorn finished debriefing the last set of self-proclaimed State Department experts on the results of his mission. He gritted his teeth as the door to the conference room swung shut behind him and turned to the senior officer at his side. “I swear to God, sir, I’ve never seen such a group of pompous, arrogant…”
“Calmly, Pete. Calmly.” Major General Sam Farrell steered him away from the room and down a tiled corridor toward an elevator. He pressed the down button and stood back. “Our current lords and masters of the Foggy Bottom may be pompous. They are arrogant. But they most certainly are not deaf.”
“Sorry, sir.” Thorn took a deep breath and then released it slowly. Farrell was right. He would gain nothing by losing his temper right in the State Department’s inner sanctum.
He’d never thought debriefing this administration’s coterie of foreign policy experts would be a walk in the park. So why should he kick when they turned out to be as obnoxious as he’d expected?
Oh, they had been polite enough on the surface anyway. They’d listened fairly attentively to his outline of General Taleh’s moves to rid Iran of the HizbAllah and to the recap of his conversations with the Iranian leader. But there had been a dead silence when he’d offered to take questions. More telling still, he and Farrell had been completely ignored during the prolonged discussion that followed his briefing.
In fact, it had become very clear that the band of corporate lawyers and former academics who made up the State Department’s current policy elite were utterly uninterested in the views of those they saw as uniformed robots as simple men suited only to obey orders from their civilian superiors. Instead, Austin Brookes, the elderly, courtly Secretary of State, and his inner circle were a lot more interested in claiming total credit for Iran’s sudden change of heart. Thorn had heard enough abstract nonsense about back-channel diplomacy and geopolitical “levers” in the past two hours to last him a lifetime.
At least Taleh was proving a man of his word.
His troops had pounded two more HizbAllah camps while Thorn was still in Iran. And a preliminary analysis of the data he’d brought back from Taleh showed that many of the dead were terrorists who had been on the U.S. government’s Most Wanted lists for years. In the long run, Thorn thought, that mattered a hell of a lot more than which set of American bureaucrats counted coup for making the Iranians see sweet reason.
One thing more was sure. Taleh was thorough. He played to win at all times. He accepted no excuses not from his subordinates and not from himself. That was something Thorn found familiar. It was the way he’d lived his own life from boyhood on.
“Coming, Pete?”
“Yes, sir.” Thorn hurriedly collected his wandering thoughts and followed his commander into the elevator. Without talking they rode down to the car waiting to take them back to Andrews Air Force Base. He and Sam Farrell had been friends for more than ten years and the older man knew when to let him simmer.
But as soon as the staff car pulled out of the curving State Department drive and turned onto a busy, traffic- choked street, Farrell broke the silence. “Everything set for your change-of-command ceremony next month, Pete?”
“Yes, sir. And Bill Henderson’s ready and raring to take charge.” Thorn could hear the reluctance and regret in his own voice. He had commanded Delta’s A Squadron for two years now two of the happiest, most fulfilling years of his life. He’d relished every minute spent leading the officers and men widely regarded as the finest troops in the U.S. Army.
Nothing lasted forever, though especially not in the Army. His command tour was up and it was time to hand the outfit over to his deputy. Time to take on a new assignment. Although that was long-hallowed Army routine, he knew that not even the colonel’s silver eagles he’d be pinning on at his new post would ease his sense of loss.
Giving up command of the squadron was bad. Giving it up for a staff job was worse. And giving it up for a staff job at the Pentagon was awful beyond all measure.
On the strength of his successful covert mission to Iran, Farrell had wangled him a new post as the head of a special intelligence liaison unit, an outfit charged with tracking and evaluating terrorist groups that might become JSOC targets. It was just the kind of ticket he needed to punch to climb higher in the military hierarchy. Somehow that wasn’t much comfort. Like many officers who saw themselves as “warriors” first and career professionals second, Thorn regarded an assignment to the Pentagon with sheer, unadulterated loathing. The massive building was a maze of interservice politics, petty backbiting, paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork.
He frowned, aware that Farrell was watching him with just the faintest hint of mingled sympathy and amusement. Oh, he’d ride the desk he’d been assigned and he’d do his best, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
Thorn shook his head in frustration. Cut loose by Iran, the HizbAllah and the other radical Islamic factions were on the run. They were vulnerable. And now, no matter how he looked at it, he was left with the disquieting feeling that he had been shunted off to the sidelines right when all hell was breaking loose for the terrorist bastards he’d been preparing to fight all his life.
CHAPTER 3
SHARPENING THE STEEL
The camouflaged UH-1H-Huey helicopter clattered west, following the trace of a winding valley deeper into Iran’s Zagros Mountains.
Seated right behind the pilot and copilot, General Amir Taleh found the view beautiful but daunting. Razor- edged mountains soared high above the helicopter, some three or four thousand meters high. The peaks were brown, tan, dun every earth-colored shade imaginable. Naked to the harsh sun beating down out of a cloudless sky, every sheer rock wall and jumbled boulder field radiated heat.
He glanced down. The narrow valley they were flying over was also a stark unrelieved grey and brown, the color of rock and bare earth. Nothing green seemed to grow along the banks of a bone-dry stream bed that filled only during the region’s short winter.
The Huey bucked up and down suddenly, rocked by strong gusts that clawed at the fragile craft. The deeper into the mountains they flew, the more turbulent the air became.
“Masegarh Base, this is Tango One-Four. Request permission to land. Over.”
Taleh could hear the strain in his pilot’s voice. Safe flying this far up in the Zagros required total concentration and pinpoint precision. Only the most skilled professionals in the Iranian Air Force were allowed to fly this mountainous route. Mistakes were too costly in lives and, more important, in valuable machines.
He leaned forward slightly, craning his neck to see through the cockpit canopy. Several kilometers ahead, the valley widened, opening onto a broad natural amphitheater surrounded on all sides by jagged mountains. A dirt road snaked out of the valley and across the plain, visible from the air only where it cut through isolated clumps of
