She sensed his face broaden into a smile. “Yup.”
“That was nice.”
“It was pretty amazing.”
“More than amazing.” She thought about it, reliving it. It stirred up a comforting warmth inside her. “I’ve always wanted to relive that first kiss,” she told him. “Nothing ever compares to it, does it?”
“Let’s test that theory.” He cupped her face in his hands and drew her near and kissed her long and hard, a desperate, hungry kiss that said more than any word could ever express.
“I could be wrong,” she finally said, dreamily. “Or maybe there’s something about this Turkish air. What do you think?”
“This air? In here? Not exactly doing it for me, but hey, don’t let me spoil your party.”
Darker thoughts pushed their way through. “I don’t want to die here, Sean.”
“You’re not going to die here,” he told her. “We’re going to make it out.”
“Promise?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
She smiled—then it all came back. What she’d been through the last few days, how they’d gotten here. A gaggle of disparate thoughts, swooping in and out of her mind.
“The guy,” she remembered, “the bomber. He told me something. A couple of things he said I ought to look up. He said it was important.”
“What?”
“He asked me if I’d ever heard of Operation Ajax.”
Tess couldn’t see Reilly’s features in the darkness, but she didn’t need to. His pause, and his breathing, told her all she needed to know. He knew what it was.
“What was the other thing?” Reilly asked her, his voice still subdued.
“He said I needed to find out what happened on the morning of July 3, 1988.”
Reilly paused again, inhaling and exhaling deeply this time.
“What?” Tess asked.
After a moment, Reilly said, “I’d say our guy is telling us he’s Iranian. And that he’s got some serious anger management issues.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Reilly let out a slight chortle. “Operation Ajax is the code name of an old screwup of ours. A major one. In Iran, back in the fifties.”
Tess winced. “Ouch.”
Reilly nodded. “Yeah. Not our finest hour.”
“What happened?”
“Around the time of World War One, the British controlled Iran’s oil production,” he told her. “Back when they were an empire. And they were basically raping the country. They were taking all the oil revenues and throwing back crumbs to the locals. The Iranian people—rightly—got really pissed off about that, but the British government didn’t give a rat’s ass and kept refusing to renegotiate terms. This went on for thirty, forty years until the Iranians elected a guy called Mohamed Mosaddegh to become their prime minister. We’re talking about Iran’s first democratically elected government here. Mosaddegh won by a landslide and immediately started the process of taking back Iran’s oil production and nationalizing it, which was why he was elected.”
“I bet the Brits must have loved that,” Tess remarked.
“Absolutely. Mosaddegh had to go. And guess who stepped in to help them overthrow him?”
Tess grimaced. “CIA?”
“Of course. They went all out for him, and they pulled it off. They bribed and blackmailed scores of people in the Iranian government, in the press, in the army, and in the clergy. They smeared the guy and everyone close to him, then they got mobs of paid thugs to march down the streets and demand his arrest. The poor bastard, who was basically a selfless patriot, spent the rest of his life in prison. His foreign minister got the firing squad.”
Tess sighed. “And we put the Shah in his place.”
“Yep. Our friendly puppet dictator who we could count on to sell us cheap oil and buy our weapons by the shipload. Our guy rules his country with an iron fist for the next twenty-five years, with the help of a secret police that we trained and that made the KGB look like pussies. And that went on until 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini channeled the Iranian people’s anger and got them to rise up and kick the Shah’s ass out of the country.”
“And we got ourselves an Islamic revolution that hates us.”
“With a passion,” Reilly added.
Tess’s face tightened with frustration, then a realization flourished in her mind. “Mosaddegh wasn’t a religious leader, was he?”
“No. Not at all. He was a career diplomat, a sophisticated, modern man. The guy had a Ph.D. in law from some Swiss university. The mullahs running the country today never mention him when the coup comes up, like on its anniversary. He was way too secular for their liking.” He paused, then said, “There was no Islamic Republic back then.
“A democracy that didn’t suit us.”
“It’s not the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last. It’s all about cheap oil … Still … just imagine how different the world would be right now if we hadn’t done that back then,” he lamented.
She let the information sink in for a beat, then said, “I’m not sure I want to ask about the third of July.”
“Another stellar moment for Uncle Sam,” Reilly grumbled.
“Tell me.”
Even in the pitch-black cavern, Tess felt Reilly’s face darken.
“Iran Air, flight six-five-five,” he told her. “Takes off from Iran on a half-hour hop across the gulf to Dubai. Two hundred and ninety passengers and crew on board, including sixty-six kids.”
Tess felt a stab of horror. “The one we shot down.”
“Yep.”
“Why? How did it happen?”
“It’s complicated. The plane’s transponder was working and it was sending out the right code. The pilot was in his assigned flight airway and he was in touch with air traffic control and speaking in English. All routine, all by the book. But for a bunch of reasons, our guys thought it was an F-14 attacking them and they lobbed a couple of missiles at it.”
“They knew it was a civilian plane?”
“No. Not until it was too late. The ship had a list of all local civilian flights, but they screwed up their time zones. The ship was running on Bahrain time while the flight list showed Iranian local time, which is half an hour off.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. And it’s not the first time something like that’s happened either. Remember Cuba and the Bay of Pigs? One of the main reasons that failed was a time zone screwup. The bombers that flew out of Nicaragua were meant to get air cover from fighter jets coming off one of our carriers. The bombers were under CIA control and working on Central Time. The fighters were controlled by the Pentagon, which was on Eastern Time. They never hooked up, and the bombers were all shot down.”
“Jesus.”
Reilly shrugged. “Simple mistakes, but ones that shouldn’t happen. With the Iranian plane, it was a combination of a lot of them. Our ships have systems that assign codes to potential targets. For some reason, the code the airliner was given was changed after they’d logged it in, and then it was given to another plane, which was another mistake. So the radar operator looks down at his screen, sees it in one place, looks away, looks down again, sees it’s somewhere else, it looks like it’s moved incredibly fast, and he panics, thinking it’s got to be a fighter jet. Plus the arrows that show whether a plane is climbing or coming down are really hard to read. The ship’s radar operator panicked and thought the plane was diving and attacking them. So he sounded the alarm and the captain fired his missiles. The guy was apparently a hothead who liked to pick fights. Shoot first and ask questions later. The CO of a frigate that was there alongside them that day singled the guy out as being way too aggressive. But it was a major fuckup, a tragic one. Both our ship and the airliner were in Iranian water and airspace. A lot of people died. A lot of kids. It deserved an apology. A huge one.”
