“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. We caused it. Before we screwed that pooch, Iran was a democracy.”
“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.”
“Which they never got.”
“Not a word. We never admitted any wrongdoing. We cut the relatives of the victims a few checks, but we never accepted responsibility, never apologized. Even worse, the guys on that ship got medals. Medals. For exceptional conduct. How’s that for a slap in the face? Bush senior, who was vice president at the time under Reagan, actually said, ‘I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.’ “
“The noble, measured words of a true statesman,” Tess said wryly.
“And we wonder why whackjobs like their current president get so much traction when they tear into us and call us the ‘Great Satan,’ ” Reilly added. “They got their revenge, though.”
“When?”
“The Pan Am jumbo that got blown out of the sky over Lockerbie,” Reilly told her.
“I thought the Libyans were behind that. Didn’t they try two of their agents for it, and one of them’s now dying of cancer or something?”
“He’s not dying. And you can forget what you’ve read. The Iranians were behind it.”
Tess went quiet for a long second. “So, do they give you history lessons at Quantico, or what?” she finally asked.
Reilly breathed out a dry laugh. “Some. But not about that. It’s not a great idea to lay out your dirty laundry for impressionable agents during basic training, is it? Hardly the best motivator.”
“What then?”
“Come on. Give me some credit here. Iran’s a hot button right now. Priority one. And I need to know the whole backstory of who we’re dealing with, especially when they’re trying to get their hands on nukes.”
Tess nodded, processing what he’d told her. After a moment, she asked, “So how does it feel? Knowing the bad guys you’re after might be the result of something we did?”
Reilly shrugged. “History’s one long series of one country messing with another. We’re as guilty of it as anyone else, and it goes on. So a lot of what I do has to do with dealing with blowback from the fuckups of others—usually the
geniuses running our foreign policy. But it doesn’t change the fact that assholes like our Iranian friend need to be taken out. It has to be done, and I have no problem doing it. I mean, sure, maybe the guy has grievances that stack up, maybe we’re the ones who triggered whatever turned him into this bad motherfucker … it doesn’t change what he is now, or justify what he’s done.”
Tess frowned, deep in thought. “You think he might have lost some family on that plane?”
“Sounds like it. It happened in 1988. That’s twenty-two years ago. Say he’s in his mid-thirties now. That puts him in his early teens at the time. Not a great age to lose your parents, if that’s what happened. It’s easy to see a lot of hate coming out of that.”
“God, yes.” She pictured the Iranian, as a boy, being told that his parents or his siblings had been killed. Her mind drifted to Kim, and for a brief instant, she imagined her in the same situation. Then an idea dropped into her head and rescued her from that grim picture. “You guys must have a passenger manifest of that flight? A list of the victims?”
“There is a list. The one they used to pay the survivors’ relatives. But figuring out which one of them left behind a son, in a country we have zero diplomatic relations with, ain’t gonna be easy.”
“So even knowing that won’t help figure out who he is?’
“Probably not.”
“You don’t sound too hopeful.”
Reilly shrugged again, remembering his thoughts in the car, when Ertugrul had picked them up at the airport. “Ever since Ajax, every time we’ve gone head to head with the Iranians … we’ve lost. The embassy in Tehran. The choppers in the desert. The hostages in Beirut. Iran-Contra. The insurgents in Iraq. Even the goddamn World Cup, back in 1998. We’ve lost every time.”
“Not this time though,” she said, trying to believe it.
“Damn right,” he said, hugging her close to him.
She snuggled up against his chest, listening to his breathing, and something inside her stirred. An anger, a resolve, a hunger. She righted herself and turned to face him, then moved in and planted her mouth on his, lifting her leg to sit astride him.
“Hey,” he mumbled.
“Shut up,” she mouthed back.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
Her fingers were working on loosening his belt.
“We’re supposed to conserve energy,” he managed in between hungry mouthfuls of her.
“Stop talking then.” She was now tugging down her own pants.
“Tess,” he started to say, but she interrupted him, squeezing his face in her hands.
“If we’re going to die here,” she whispered into his ear, lowering herself onto him as she tasted the saltiness of a lone tear that slid down her cheek and trickled onto her lip, “I want to die knowing there’s a big smile on your face. Even if I can’t see it.”
Chapter 47
Reilly was the first to stir. The silence around him was surreal, and it took him a moment to process where he was. He sensed Tess, asleep beside him on the hard ground, her breathing shallow and calm. He didn’t know how much time had passed since they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms and didn’t have a clue as to what time of day or night it was.
He sat up, slowly, twisting his head around to stretch the stiffness out of his neck, conscious that every movement he made—the brushing of cloth against cloth, the tiniest scrape of his shoe against the hard ground—was getting amplified out of all proportion. It made the natural isolation chamber he was in feel even more unnerving. He rubbed his eyes, then looked around, more out of instinct than out of necessity, given the stygian darkness around him—and something registered. Something he hadn’t first noticed.
There was an odd shimmer in the air, a kind of phosphorescence, floating across the walls of the cavern. It was barely visible, faint and ghostly. At first, he wasn’t sure it was actually there, or if it was just some kind of a reaction in his retinas, maybe due to being deprived of any kind of light. He tried blinking the tiredness away and focused on the wall again.
It was there.
A spectral glow of light, filtering through.
From outside.
Hope swelled inside him. He got up and, his arms outstretched to keep him from hitting anything, he advanced slowly across the cavern. The glimmer wasn’t enough to light his way, but he felt marginally more comfortable moving around with it there than without it. It seemed to be coming from a tunnel that led away from the cavern, one he and Tess had, he thought, checked out. He crouched and crept through the passageway, his splayed fingers feeling the walls around him.
They found an opening in the tunnel wall. It was waist-high, a round hole around three feet in diameter. The light seemed to be gliding in from there. Reilly ran his hands along its ledge, letting his touch do the exploring. The ledge was only about a foot and a half deep. Beyond it was a void. A void that dropped down—and rose up.
A shaft.
Reilly leaned right into it for a closer look. Light—daylight—was definitely seeping in from above. But there was something else. Noise, from below. The gentle murmur of water. Not a gush. More of a slow meander.
He backed out of the hole and got down on his haunches, his fingers searching the ground. He found a plum-sized piece of loose rock and picked it up. He leaned back into the opening, extended his arm over the hole, and dropped the stone. After about two seconds, and without bouncing against any bends in the shaft, it struck water with a clean splash that echoed up to him.
He knew he’d found a well that culminated in some kind of ventilation shaft. He guessed that the sun was possibly at an angle where its rays were coming through the shaft with enough strength to find their way down to the tunnel he was in, but if that was the case, it meant that the light wouldn’t necessarily be there for long. He started drawing a mental picture of how the well could be laid out. During their fruitless exploration the night before, Tess had told him about the underground cities’ elaborate water-collection and ventilation systems, designed to allow the escaping villagers to bunker down for extended periods of time while hiding out from invading forces. The ventilation shafts extended all the way to the bottom of the complex and were barely narrow enough for a human adult to crawl through. They had gates and spikes built into them to block any uninvited guests. The design also catered to a safe supply of drinking water, one that couldn’t be cut off or tampered with from the outside. The villagers had dug wells that allowed access to subterranean streams, and carved out other shafts that collected rainwater from the surface. Both systems had to be well hidden to block enemies aboveground from either crawling in or pouring poison into them.
Reilly thought it over. He doubted he could make it up to the surface through a ventilation shaft. On the other hand, Tess had told him that the handful of wells in the underground settlements were usually connected to one another through a system of channels. Given that it was the height of summer, he thought there was a chance that the water level down there was manageable. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, he could use the well to reach another part of the complex—one that wasn’t blocked to the outside world.
He roused Tess from her sleep and showed her what he’d found. The glimmer was fading, no doubt from the sun’s shifting position. They had to move fast.
“I’ll go first,” he told her. “Keep an ear out in case any help shows up from the tunnels.”
Her hand reached out and grabbed his arm, stilling him. “Don’t. There’s water down there. What if you can’t get back up?”
“We don’t have a choice,” he said. He dredged up a smile, though it was barely visible. “It’s summer. The levels can’t be that high.”
“I’d buy that—if it weren’t for the melting snow, doofus.”
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her with a slight chuckle.
She frowned. “The codices,” she said. “If there’s water … they might get damaged. Beyond repair.”
br /> “So leave them behind.”
“We might never find them again.”
Reilly reached up and cupped her cheek in his hand. “What’s more important? Your life, or these books?”
She didn’t answer, but he felt her nod slightly. Then her tone went dead serious again. “What if you don’t find your way back?”
Reilly could just about see the reflection in her eyes. That comment was harder to deflect. She was right. Then he remembered something, and glimpsed a possible solution on the wall behind her.
“The electrical cabling. Help me rip it off the walls.”
They went around the passageways and caverns in the darkness, feeling their way around and yanking as much electrical cabling as they could. They managed to gather a couple of hundred yards of it and tied the various sections together to make it one continuous length.
Reilly took one end of it and tied it onto the fixings of one of the wall lights. He tugged at it, hard. It didn’t budge. The fixing itself seemed solid enough to hold his weight, and the cable was strong. The weak link was the soft rock the fixture was anchored into. He had no way of knowing if it would hold, or if would just crumble off. Regardless, he dumped the big roll of cable down the well, then Tess handed him the pick-shovel combo tool from the Iranian’s rucksack.
“You’ve got the gun. Use it if you have to,” he said.
Tess nodded, still clearly uncomfortable with the idea of his leaving. She gave him a deep kiss, then he climbed into the hole.
“I’ll be back,” he told her.
“You’d better be,” Tess replied, her hand holding on to his tightly for a few seconds more before finally letting go.
THE CLIMB DOWN WAS, as Reilly’s drill instructor back at Quantico liked to say, character-building. Character-building, and slow. He made his way down one small, precarious move at a time, his back pressed against the wall of the tunnel, his arms and legs sprung out against the opposite face of the narrow passage, his taut muscles clamping him into place.