place, filled with evil, brutal men!—but I do not know if White has been taken there.”
“Perhaps you could inquire, Mr. President?” Behrouzi suggested.
“I was never a favorite of the Pasdaran,” Nateq-Nouri said, “but I believe there are one or two officers at headquarters that may speak to me.” With that, Nateq-Nouri picked up a phone.
Briggs raised his Uzi. “Be careful what you ask for, Mr. President.”
“You, sir,” said the President of Iran with a cold smile, “are the least of my worries right now.” He dialed the phone, spoke briefly in Farsi to two different persons, then hung up. “Colonel White is indeed in the Pasdaran medical facility, headquarters building, first subfloor A, room A-193. He is alive and perhaps even conscious. My friends have arranged for the guards at the medical facility to be ‘preoccupied’ for the next half hour. I trust you can effect some sort of rescue in that time.”
Hal Briggs was almost too stunned for words. He shrugged, gave Riza a confused expression, then nodded. “Sure, Mr. President.
That will be great.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “Will you be safe after General Buzhazi finds out about this, sir?”
“I do not know, young man.”
“Hal. Call me Hal, Mr. President,” Briggs interjected. Riza looked at him in absolute surprise—Intelligence Support Agency operatives were not supposed to use their real names—but, somehow, it fit in this very bizarre setting. Thirty seconds ago, Briggs was ready to shoot this man between the eyes—now he was introducing himself to him, using his real name!
“Just Hal is fine.”
“Yes. Hal it is then.” Nateq-Nouri regarded Riza for a moment, searched his memory; then, wagging a knowing finger at her and smiling, said, “Ah. Now I recall. OPEC Ministers’ Conference, last year, Quito, Ecuador, the reception at Energy Minister Nazur’s residence. It was hotter than Mogadishu in the summer and the humidity … forgive me, I do not remember your name, but I will never forget the black dress and that delicious diamond ankle bracelet you wore—very alluring, I must say. You accompanied Minister Yusuf of the United Arab Emirates to the reception, but I could not help but notice you two spent very little time together—he already had a young translator that he kept fondling, as I recall—so you must have been on some sort of secret assignment, perhaps for the Directorate of Intelligence for the United Arab Emirates, no?”
“Your memory is quite remarkable, Mr. President,” Behrouzi said, touched by the man’s charm in the face of almost certain disaster, “but it would be best if your memory of me was restricted to an ankle bracelet in Ecuador.”
“Of course,” Nateq-Nouri said. “Now, you must do something for me in return.”
“What’s that?”
Nateq-Nouri fixed both of them with a deadly serious stare.
“Destroy the aircraft carrier Khomeini, Hal,” the President of Iran said.
“Say what?”
“I cannot hold out against General Buzhazi for long, Hal,” Nateq-Nouri said resignedly. “He will either discover or bypass the code, or he will torture the code out of me, in a very short time—perhaps even tonight.”
“Code? What code?”
“The code to arm the nuclear warhead on the carrier Khomeini,” Nateq-Nouri said. “One of the anti-ship missiles on board that carrier has a very large nuclear warhead capable, I daresay, of sinking your Abraham Lincoln very efficiently.”
“Holy shit!”
“Please, mind your sacrilegious language, young man,” Nateq-Nouri scolded Briggs. His tone softened immediately, however, and he went on: “To continue: General Buzhazi has one set of codes, I have the other. I do not know how long I could hold out, but I know the general has very effective ways to get the information he desires. Then he will have both sets of codes he requires to arm the nuclear missiles. When he does, he will move the carrier and launch the P-700 missile—perhaps at Saudi Arabia, perhaps at Iraq, perhaps at your Lincoln carrier group. I do not know. I feel he will use that carrier, along with his other forces, to decimate the Gulf Cooperative Council military bases along the Gulf. You must stop him.”
Briggs looked at Behrouzi, then slapped a fist into his other hand in frustration. “I had that sucker in my sights once, Mr. President—I’d love to get another shot at it and send it to Davy Jones’s locker for real. You got a deal.”
“Very good,” Nateq-Nouri said. “Now, I suggest you should leave.
Good luck to you.” And Nateq-Nouri headed “Thank you, Hal … or is it colonel, major, captain …
for the door to his suite, closed the door behind him and left the two commandos by themselves.
“I must be dreaming, Riza,” Briggs said as they prepared to depart. “The President of fuckin’ Iran is helping us spring Colonel White, and in exchange wants us to destroy his fuckin’—I mean, his friggin’ carrier…?”
“I am not so surprised—Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri is truly a man of peace, a rare commodity in Iran these days,” Behrouzi said with a smile, “What is even more surprising is you telling him your real name!”
“I felt it was a pretty safe move,” Briggs said coldly. “I owed him a little sign of gratitude, of respect—and I don’t think he’s going to be alive very much longer to tell anybody about us, poor devil. Now let’s get moving!”
The back portico of the President’s residence was hidden from most of the compound because of the intricate design of the old palace; hidden sensors and surveillance cameras had effectively compensated for the shortfall, but those were easily bypassed by Madcap Magician commandos.
Chris Wohl was on the ground just below the President’s apartment window, covering the primary exit, when he saw the curtain above flutter, a sliding door bang open, even heard muted voices!
“Shit, Briggs, what in hell are you doing?” Wohl muttered. This exfiltration was going down the shitter real fast, he thought. He hurriedly clicked his transceiver to alert the ten other commandos in the compound to get ready to move and that they possibly had been discovered—when suddenly he heard footsteps behind him. He whirled, gun at the ready.
“Hang on, Mondo, it’s me—George and Gracie. Shit, Wohl thought, it was Briggs and Behrouzi, climbing down the side of the building. “Let’s get going. We know where Colonel White is, and we’ve got less than thirty minutes to get him.”
“Briggs, what in hell are you talking about?”
“We found out where White is,” Briggs said. “He’s at Pasdaran headquarters, first subfloor, room A-193. He’s waiting for us.”
“Waiting for us? Who the hell told you this?”
“Thank him,” Briggs said. Wohl followed his pointed finger up the dark, looming walls of Shamsol Emareh Palace and, to his continuing astonishment, saw the President of Iran, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, looking down on them from his open fourth-floor window! “We gotta get moving, Chris—the President has a job for us.”
“The President—you mean, the President of fucking Iran?”
“Hey, watch your sacrilegious language, young man,” Briggs scolded Wohl. “This is serious, man—some bad shit could be happening any hour now out in the Gulf. Nateq-Nouri told us about it, he asked for our help, and he sprung the colonel for us to show he’s for real—he probably just sacrificed his own life to help us. In return, he wants us to trash Iran’s aircraft carrier …”
“What?”
“Never mind now, Chris—when we get back, we’ll get hold of Future Flight and get them loaded up for bear again. Right now, we gotta get the colonel before the Pasdaran troopers shut the door on us for good. Let’s hit it, Marine.” Briggs and Behrouzi trotted off down their preplanned exfiltration route, leaving a totally perplexed Chris Wohl and his fellow ISA commandos shaking their heads.
THE WHITE House OVAL OFFICE, WASHINGTON, D.C. 27 APRIL 1997, 2136 HOURS LOCAL TIME
“General Buzhazi, this is President Kevin Martindale, calling from Washington, D.C. How are you this morning?”
The translator’s voice responded, “Very well, thank you.” A Farsi-speaking interpreter listening in on the line made notes on a computer terminal in front of the President, verifying the accuracy of the Iranian translator.
“I wish to speak to you about the aircraft carrier Khomeini, General,” the President said. “My government has received disturbing news. We have learned that the carrier is carrying a cruise missile with a nuclear warhead.”
