The Shield of Darius Read online

  Ben threw his weight to the right, flipping his limp left arm up onto the wheel to add leverage. The headlights raced like darting ghosts among the trees that lined the outside of the curve, adding to the dizzying plunge of the bus. He braced himself against the wheel, gripping until his fingers whitened and numbed against its shuddering rim.

  Feeling desperately with his foot for the clutch, he gripped the wheel with his quivering left hand and mashed the peddle downward, forced the stick forward into neutral, then quickly clutched again and jammed it hard into third. As he released the pedal, the gears seized with screaming protest, throwing him forward against the steering wheel. The acrid smell of grinding steel and burning gear oil filled the bus and it rocked crazily up onto its left wheels, slammed back against the pavement and rocked right, teetered for an instant, then crashed onto its right side and slid top-first toward the tangle of trees.

  TWENTY

  Fisher listened impatiently and scowled into the phone. He was glad he wasn’t speaking to the Director face-to-face. In fact, they had never met and he doubted the Director knew exactly who or where he was. Of the men Fisher had worked with, this one kept the greatest distance. He was a product of the new politics.

  “Sir, it was only a week ago that we became completely aware of the situation. We’re moving as quickly as we can without making things worse. If I could tell you all we’ve learned about this operation and the location, you’d understand why this has to be done carefully. Just do what’s necessary to keep our people from taking any aggressive action toward Iran until we have this wrapped up.”

  He listened again, started to interrupt, then let the Director finish. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its aged roughness and was razor-sharp.

  “The reason we’re here, and that you can’t know more, is to keep you – and everybody else – distanced from this. If you want control of it, just say the word and it’s yours.”

  The Director’s reply was brief and Fisher tried to hide the disgust in his voice. “Then go into that meeting and keep people from screwing this up,” he said.

  . . .

  On the beach at Assateague, Chris Falen had decided that the solution to the DWAT problem lay in the able hands of David Ishmael and in the volatile political and religious passions of the Middle East. David’s personal passion, if it was fair to legitimize his obsessive loathing by labeling it a passion, was Shi’a Islam. The Mossad agent was a Jew by nationalism and heritage, if not by orthodoxy, and though he believed the great God of Israel to be no more than an amorphous expression of that nationalism, he had unwavering conviction that there was a Satan. David’s devil was the embodiment of the collective fanaticism of those who guided the jihad of the Shi’ites – the people who had murdered his family.

  Of the world’s largest religions Islam is the youngest, finding its origins in the life and teachings of its prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. The Hijrah, Muhammad’s flight in 622 AD from his ancestral home in Mecca to what is now the city of Medina, marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar and in the mind of David Ishmael, quite appropriately placed life in the Muslim world six centuries behind the rest of humanity. Islam is a religion of relative simplicity, asking that its adherents express their devotion through five principle observances or “pillars.” The vast majority of Muslims adhere to the pillars with unwavering conviction.

  Like all of the major religions, Islam has had its share of internal discord and division. Chief among these factions are the Sunni and the Shi’ites, sisters of a major schism that divided the Islamic community during its first century of existence. Following the death of the prophet in 632 AD, the followers of the Sunnah or “traditions” declared that Muhammad had named no successor and elected Abu Bakr, father of the prophet’s wife A’isha, first Caliph or successor.

  For some who had been closest to the prophet, the election of Abu Bakr was a compromise, a means of providing leadership until Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali was old enough to assume his rightful place as Caliph. These were the Shi’a or “partisans” who believed that the prophet had declared Ali successor before his death, and that the Caliphate was to remain within the holy family.

  The Sunni have since evolved as the larger and more pragmatic of the sects, accepting the ijma or “consensus” of the community, the hadith or traditions about the Prophet’s life and actions, along with the Koran as the source of enlightenment for decision making. To the majority of Shi’a, Ali become the first of twelve Imams, “the one who stands in front,” whose utterances provide sole access to the hidden and true meaning of the Muslim holy book. This fundamentalist idealism occasionally surfaces as fanatic passion, becoming the wailing and self-flagellation of Ashura, tenth day of the month of Muharram, which commemorates the martyrdom of Husayn, third Imam and grandson of the Prophet.

  In the sixteenth century Shi’a Islam became the sanctioned religion of the Persian kings, and the majority of the world’s forty million Shi’ites still inhabit the high Iranian plateau and Iraq’s southern Fertile Crescent. Their passion has become the most militaristic expression of Jihad, the Muslim “struggle.” Led by the driving religious conservatism of their spiritual guides, the Ayatollahs, the Shi’a of Iran gather support for their terrorist activities from pockets of Shi’ite fundamentalists scattered throughout the Muslim world. One such group is Hizballah operating out of southern Lebanon – the same Hizballah that had once blown up a bus on the coastal road between Tyre and Nahariyya. The bus had carried the wife and youngest son of David Ishmael.

  Falen met with Ishmael in the boisterous restaurant of Die Port Van Cleve on Amsterdam’s Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. He had checked with the hotel in advance this time. No touring cattlemen were booked and he found the restaurant bustling with its usual lunch crowd of businessmen and well directed tourists. David sat in a corner sipping gin and tonic and seemed pleased to see him.

  “Haven’t heard from you lately,” he said, smiling and extending a strong calloused hand. “Thought you might have given up the business.”

  “Temporary diversion,” Falen laughed. “But I’m back and I think you’ll like what I have. By the way, how do those hands get so rough in your line of work?”

  “Ah….” David held his hands palms up against the wooden tabletop. “For Israelis, what I do is not work. Physical work is our life blood. You either find a way to work with your hands, or die. Me? I keep a small farm just outside of Ma’barot south of Hadera. That’s where I do my real work. When I’m home I go there and dig post holes and build sheds for my animals. It does wonders for the stress that goes with the job.”

  “Whatever works,” Falen said lightly. “Frankly, I find the job relaxing. It’s when I’m away from it that I get stressed.”

  Ishmael shrugged. “That’s because you have no soul.” The two men exchanged cynical smiles.

  Falen nodded toward the door. “There’s a park behind the Rijksmuseum. Let’s walk.”

  They left the hotel and walked south to Leidse Street, talking of growing oranges and building sheds. At the Square they turned left on Stadouders Quay to the imposing stone front of the Rijksmuseum. An arched tunnel passed beneath the famous gallery, leading to a long narrow greenway on its southwest side. The park was bordered on both sides by rows of stately Dutch homes and office buildings, the KLM Offices and the Van Gogh Museum. Men in business suits and women pushing round faced babies in dark-colored carriages strolled along the shady walks, enjoying the noon break. As the two settled into a comfortable pace a cautious distance from others in the park, Falen spoke without looking over at the Mossad agent.

  “You’ve been looking for an al-Qaeda training center in Tehran for some time, I think. I believe we have found something that might interest you more.

  Ishmael walked for a moment in silence.

  “We think we found the training center,” he said finally. “North of downtown in the Abbasabad District. Up near the police academy and army headquarters.�
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  “This isn’t a training center,” Falen said. “It’s a hostage storage facility where the Iranians are warehousing American hostages.”

  David Ishmael stopped in mid-stride and turned to face his American colleague.

  “I haven’t heard about any hostage situation, “he said.

  “It’s been done very cleverly. Tourists suddenly missing, and presumed runaways. They disappear without a trace and after a few months, our State Department gives up on them.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty!?” Ishmael’s expression was a combination of surprise and amusement. “Hard to imagine that this would go unnoticed.”

  “It’s been going on for over two years and apparently has been noticed by State,” Falen explained. “They don’t know what to do about it and don’t know where they are. But you’re right. It is a bit surprising that no one else has put two and two together.”

  “How did you become aware of it…if you can tell me?”

  “By accident. We got suspicious of a carpet importer in Philadelphia who was passing himself off as Egyptian. Turned out to be Irani. He was getting travel information from a contact in our central passport office and having travelers abducted while they were abroad. We tailed one of his deliveries to Tehran and to an old hotel on Rasht Street. You know the city at all?”

  “I haven’t been there, as you can imagine. But I’ve been over the street maps enough times. Rasht is down by the Danish Embassy off Laleh-Zar.”

  Falen nodded. “The building’s the old Rubaiyat Hotel and sits next to another called the Caravan. From what we can tell, they may be using both. The windows are painted over and security’s pretty intense.”

  “How are they getting people in? We watch the city like hawks.”

  “By ship to Bandar Abbas, then flying ‘em into Meherabad. They take them into the city in plain black vans a few at a time.”

  Again David walked beside him for a moment without speaking. “We’re tracking shipments through the Gulf and try to watch all traffic at the major airports. But all of our information so far hasn’t uncovered this. It does help explain something though.”

  Falen looked over at his Israeli colleague, “And what is that?”

  “The Shield of Darius.”

  “Shield of Darius?”

  “Yes. We’ve been picking up a lot of chatter recently from Iranian intelligence that talks about the Shield of Darius. It didn’t fit into anything we knew about until now.”

  “Interesting. I heard that expression just last week. It looks like we’re talking about a human shield – for high vulnerability sites around the country.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Why Darius, do you think?”

  “Darius the Great was king at the height of the Persian Empire. We think the leadership in Tehran has grandiose ideas about trying to return Iran to some semblance of its past glories.”

  “Hope the Greeks are aware of this,” Falen chuckled, and they walked for another moment in silence.

  “Who knows about this?” Ishmael asked thoughtfully.

  “Only two people,” Falen said. “Me and the person I report to. But we’ve got a high level of confidence in our location. You might want to confirm it.”

  Ishmael nodded. “We’ll try to take a look at it. But we don’t have the resources in the city you people have.”

  “We’re running short on time. Our intel tells us they may be moving the people to sensitive sites around the country in about a week.”

  “And you’re telling me this because...?”

  “Some of our other intel also tells us you may be planning to hit reactor sites in-country in the near future. I thought you might not want to find out you had killed a dozen prominent Americans after the fact.”

  “And if this problem were to go away?”

  “No one knows that there is a problem,” Falen said.

  “We’ll look into it,” said Ishmael.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ben was back in his cell. He could tell without opening his eyes. His head throbbed just as it had when he’d first awakened in the prison, and he was surrounded by the same smells. Every part of his body hurt. It hurt to breath, especially on his left side where the bullet still bulged between his skin and protruding ribs. He wondered if he was in the same cell – back with Jim.

  He listened for traffic, for sounds of the city. Complete quiet. They had taken him somewhere else. Or he was deep down in the bowels of the building. Slowly he opened his eyes.

  A man stood over him looking down with cautious curiosity. He was Iranian, but not a soldier; clean shaven and wearing a loose brown suit and no tie. Merchant class. The man bent closer, and spoke softly.

  “Farsi mefameed?” Do you understand Farsi?

  Ben shook his head painfully. “Farsi koobe ne-meefamam.” I don’t understand Farsi well.

  “Eenjaw khoob neest,” the man said. “Meefameed?”

  Ben nodded. The man was telling him as simply as he could that this was not a good place to be. Ben struggled into a sitting position on the low cot, seeing a woman peering at him from behind her shielding husband. Both withdrew a step as he rose, but the man stepped forward again to steady him until he regained his balance. The burning in his side doubled him over and he straightened slowly, feeling shrunken and impotent.

  He was in the bedroom of what appeared to be a small house of plain concrete block. The furnishings were simple, with a single red carpet covering most of what was otherwise a bare cement floor. Somehow they had managed to dress him in a new shirt, but he still wore the plain pajama pants. He pulled the shirt open. His bandage was freshly changed and he could feel the sting of some kind of antiseptic against his skin.

  “What place is this,” he asked in broken Farsi.

  The man pointed toward the wall on his right. “Anzeli,” he said.

  Ben looked out the single bedroom window. A small rocky beach began a hundred yards behind the house, stretching into endless gray sea. An early morning sun was just breaking the horizon over the water.

  Anzali? He must mean Bandar Anzali, north along the Caspian coast from Rasht. When he had come to this coast before, the family had driven in one day the distance from Tehran that it had now taken him over a week to travel. They had stopped to shop for fruit and souvenirs in the open markets at Bandar Anzali.

  Ben straightened painfully and stood, tottering to the open bedroom doorway, then through the small living room to the front door. The couple followed, the man reaching with every step as if he thought Ben would fall. The house stood on the seaward side of the road, facing coastal mountains that rose abruptly a half mile inland. Between the road and the mountains spread a patchwork of carefully terraced rice fields, the grassy grain now almost knee high. An equal distance along the road to his left, the rooftops of Anzali rose above the trees. A piece of luck. He was north of the city and wouldn’t have to pass through it. The couple must have come across the wreckage of the bus, decided from his wound and foreignness that he was a fugitive, and brought him here.

  Gingerly Ben felt at an egg sized knot in his hairline above his right eye. He remembered little of the crash. Just the bus leaving the road. As he turned back into the house, a cramp seized his wounded side, again doubling him forward.

  “Nun dareed?” he asked in a strained whisper. Do you have bread?

  The man led him back to a hard sofa and turned to his wife who nodded and disappeared, returning with a tray carrying strong black tea, small bananas, and a fresh piece of sangyak. Ben drank most of the tea before trying the banana, eating slowly and mashing the fruit to watery paste before each painful swallow.

  “Chador? Chador dareed?”he asked.

  Again the couple looked at each other, this time with unveiled surprise. The woman finally shrugged, bringing a plain black chador from a second small bedroom and handing it to him.

  “Merci,” he said simply, using the French ‘thank yo
u’ that was a common substitute in Persian. The couple stood watching him nervously.

  “Bayreed,” the man said, his voice tight with fear. Go!

  Ben smiled weakly and nodded. For some reason they had chosen to help, but knew that they were now in mortal danger. He stood slowly and made his way to the door, scanning the road in both directions before venturing into the bare yard. Instead of moving toward the road, he walked to the corner of the house and started toward the sea. As the couple watched, he splashed knee deep into the water with the chador bunched around his shoulders like a shawl and with the sand and gentle undertow tugging at his feet, turned north up the coast.

  Three hundred yards up the beach, beyond a dozen similar square block houses, a small stream washed into the sea. Ben wrapped the bread in the chador and tied it around his waist, then turned inland along the shallow bed, dropping to his hands and knees to stay below the top of the stone embankments that protected the land on either side from washing into the sea. A low concrete bridge took him beneath the road and into the rice fields that stretch to the mountains, and he stood into a low crouch along the sandy bed, bending below the green shield of rice stalks. Surely the bus had been discovered and an alarm raised. Within hours, police would learn that it had been stolen in Karaj. They would probably view it as a common theft, a joyride – if anyone in Iran took joyrides. But no sense taking chances. He would stay in the water and below the level of the rice paddies until well into the forest.