weathered rock and withered brush. The road ended at a cluster of low buildings shimmering in the heat.
“Tango One-Four, this is Masegarh. You are cleared to land through Air Defense Corridor One. Winds are from the east at twenty-five kilometers an hour, with occasional gusts up to sixty kilometers.”
“Roger.”
Slowing now, the helicopter flew out of the valley and out across the barren plain, heading for a small cleared square of ground outside the Masegarh camp. A fuel truck and several jeeps were parked off to one side of the helipad. A Cobra gunship in Iranian Air Force markings sat nearby under camouflage netting. Needle-nosed shapes poking out from under more camouflage netting further away betrayed the presence of a SAM battery.
Engine whining, the Huey slid over the pad, flared out, and settled heavily onto the ground. Sand and small pebbles kicked up by the rotor downwash rattled off the helicopter’s fuselage and skids.
Taleh could see a uniformed reception committee waiting beyond the arc of the Huey’s slowing rotor. Ducking beneath the blades, one officer ran forward and slid the side door back.
Bracing himself against the heat, Taleh jumped down. Kazemi followed right behind him. They walked slowly over to the waiting officers.
One immediately stepped forward, came to attention, and saluted.
“Welcome to the Masegarh Special Forces camp, sir.”
“Colonel Basardan.” Taleh returned the salute, eyeing the other man with approval. He’d handpicked Basardan for this assignment. During the war with Iraq, the colonel had proved himself a good soldier and a superb organiser, but he’d been letting himself go at a Defense Ministry desk job in Tehran. Now the incipient paunch and double chin were gone. Evidently, the mountains and the harsh training routine agreed with him.
“I believe you already know my senior officers?” Basardan asked.
Taleh nodded. He’d personally selected each and every man above the rank of lieutenant stationed at Masegarh.
The weapons, tactics, demolitions, and language instructors assigned to this training camp were among the best in the Iranian armed forces. They represented a sizable percentage of his country’s relatively small pool of professional soldiers. In fact, the whole facility represented an enormous investment in precious time, scarce resources, and even scarcer military skills. Had they known anything about it, Taleh’s surviving opponents inside the government would have been sure to decry the whole effort as an inexcusable waste. Others might argue that the officers based here would be better employed teaching their specialised skills to the broader mass of Iran’s Regular Army.
He would have ignored them all. The elite commando teams being trained and hardened at Masegarh were vital to his future plans.
Taleh was suddenly impatient. Written reports meant nothing. He wanted to measure the progress being made here with his own eyes. He caught Basardan’s eye and nodded toward the waiting Russian-made GAZ jeeps.
“Let’s proceed, Colonel. You can brief me on the way.”
“Yes, sir.” The commandant turned away, signaling his officers into their vehicles. “We have an exercise or two under way that I think you will find most interesting.”
With Taleh, Basardan, and Kazemi in the lead jeep, the small convoy swung off the helipad, heading down the lone dirt road toward the base.
The sentries manning a checkpoint outside the main gate saluted and waved them through. Taleh noted with interest that none of them were Iranian.
Basardan saw his look and nodded, pitching his voice to carry over the sound of the jeep’s motor. “They are trainees, General. We expect them to perform a wide range of routine duties everything from manning our guard posts to working in the maintenance pool.”
“Very good.” Taleh was pleased. These men would have to function efficiently deep in enemy territory for several weeks and even months. Anything that enhanced their selfdiscipline and self-sufficiency was a welcome addition to the course.
The camp’s “Main Street” was two rows of plain concrete barracks, an administration building, classrooms, an armory, and an elaborate obstacle course all the trappings of a regulation Army training facility. There was only one unmilitary touch. The minaret of a small mosque built just beyond the compound stood as a constant reminder of God’s dominion.
Masegarh had once been used as a Pasdaran camp for training foreign “freedom fighters.” Taleh was having dozens of such places dismantled, but he had ordered this installation kept in operation and even upgraded slightly. But only slightly.
One had to be careful. The location of this place was certainly known to Western reconnaissance satellites. Still, he believed it would attract less attention to use an established base than to build a new one. Taleh’s mind conjured up the English phrase that most closely captured his intention: to hide in plain sight.
He scanned the camp as they roared through it at high speed. Everywhere, he saw groups of hard-working men jogging in formation, with an Iranian noncommissioned officer always close on their heels. Others scrambled under and over the obstacle course’s maze of barbed wire, pits, walls, and ropes all under a steady barrage of shouted criticism from unsmiling, eagle-eyed instructors.
More trainees were busy on firing ranges outside the base perimeter, honing their combat skills with a wide array of different weapons. The periodic crack of high-powered sniper rifles being zeroed in blended with the steady rattle of automatic-weapons fire. Other men clustered around Iranian Special Forces officers demonstrating rocket- propelled grenade launchers, mortars, plastic explosives, and shoulder fired SAMs.
The convoy kept moving, accelerating down the road and out into the countryside. They drove for fifteen minutes before pulling up to a stone cairn by the roadside the only landmark visible in the whole bleak landscape. Another GAZ jeep and two senior noncoms with clipboards waited near the cairn, occasionally consulting their watches.
Taleh turned to Basardan for an explanation.
“I sent a-platoon of twenty men out on a twenty-kilometer hike this morning. They have three hours to complete the march.” The camp commandant nodded toward the cairn. “That is the finish line.” Taleh waited. The glint in Basardan’s eye told him there was more to this exercise than a simple road march.
“Each man carries a rucksack filled with thirty kilograms of rocks.”
Taleh could hear Kazemi suppress a soft, astonished whis tie. He understood his aide’s amazement. The grueling march the colonel had outlined surpassed anything in the standard Iranian Army regimen.
Kazemi leaned forward from the back of the jeep. “And if they do not finish within the three-hour deadline, Colonel?”
“They fail the course,” Basardan said flatly. “Permanently.”
The young captain sat back, silent, while Taleh exchanged glances with the colonel. The trainees did not know it, but there were no return-trip tickets from Masegarh. His orders dictated the most extreme measures to maintain absolute secrecy.
Taleh saw the leading group of marchers first. He pointed down the road. “There they are, Colonel.”
The four men were still several hundred meters away, tiny in the distance and barely visible through the shimmering heat waves. All wore the same olive-drab fatigues and reeled under the weight of the bulging rucksacks slung from their shoulders. As they came steadily closer, Taleh could hear their hoarse voices egging each other on.
He nodded. That was good. Very good. Even in pain and near the edge of utter exhaustion, these men were still a group not a pack of lone wolves.
At last, half carrying one man who’d stumbled and nearly gone down, they trotted the final hundred meters to the cairn and collapsed panting on the ground. Taleh studied the four men with interest. One looked like an Arab, probably a Palestinian. Another might be a Turk or a native of one of the former Soviet republics. Two were Bosnian Muslims one dark-haired, the other fair. All in all, a mix typical of the camp’s population.
One of the noncoms who had been waiting checked their names off on his clipboard. The other stalked forward to the middle of the huddle of gasping trainees. “Congratulations, little children. You made it.” He paused. “Trucks are waiting to take you back to the camp.”
Still too breathless to speak, they looked up with smiles that were faint on worn faces. One by one they levered themselves off the ground and staggered painfully to their feet. Slowly the smiles faded. There were no
