The Mingrelian (12 page)

“Pretty ambitious,” Boyd said, curious at the complexity of all this.

“My father,” she said, stopping for a moment and looking back along the trail toward the villa, “is a dreamer.”

She sat, pensive for a moment. The moment passed and they rode on.

They toured the farms and the vineyards and returned just as the music started. A large, festive crowd filled the yard. Cooks were grilling pieces of meat over an open fire, wine was being opened, beer was flowing, a receiving line snaked onto a wide patio beside the house where people paid their respects to Lado Chikovani.

“I must hurry,” she said, riding back to the stables.

In the few minutes it took to water and feed the horses and take a quick shower, the crowd had doubled. Tables groaned with platters of food, including one on crushed ice mounded over with fresh caviar flown in from Moscow that afternoon.

The music paused, and Ekaterina walked to the stage in front of the musicians and spoke to the crowd in Mingrelian. They applauded, and the youngest of the boys Boyd had seen at the ballet appeared from the side, dressed in the gray chokha. Straight and proud, he walked toward the stage. He was met by a girl, a year or two older, dressed in the white dress and veil he’d seen on the female dancers at the ballet. The music started and they circled, beginning the traditional dance.

Ekaterina found Boyd at the edge of the crowd.

“My son, Niko Dadiani.”

*****

Dabney St. Clair, dressed in an evening gown, swept into the German Embassy on the arm of Maj. Rick Shands, who was dressed in his Marine Corps mess dress uniform. She felt it was quite an entrance. They were formally announced as they came to the head of the receiving line and were introduced to the German ambassador and his wife.

“Some wine?” the major asked, nodding toward the bar.

“Something light,” she said, eyes scanning the crowd. She’d had a couple glasses at the embassy while getting dressed. Farhad Shirazi smiled from across the room.

“Delightful to see you here,” Shirazi said as they met in the middle.

“Yes. This is such a lovely evening.”

Shands approached with her wine. She took it and introduced him to her Iranian counterpart. Shands took the hint and excused himself. His only remaining responsibility for the evening was to be sure she got home.

“So much excitement at your embassy last week,” Shirazi said as they moved to a corner of the large room. “I hear you’ve enlarged your security team.”

“Enlarged? Oh, Chailland, yes. He’s the new deputy chief of security.”

That wasn’t classified, was it? She would need to be careful here.

“Was that before the, ah, excitement?”

“No. He just got here.” She wrinkled her brow. When did Chailland show up? She suddenly recalled an image of a bloody Boyd Chailland passing quickly through the embassy after the ambulance that Rick Shands had called whisked the wounded man away, yet it was days later that he showed up with all his gear on the regular embassy run. It just now dawned on her that her feeling that she’d seen him before was true. It was the day of the shooting.

“The ambassador was out of town, I’ve heard,” Shirazi said, studying her face carefully while he changed the subject.

“Yes, left me in charge and waltzed off to a vacation with his family.”

“I saw you on television.”

“Yes, well, that was my responsibility, to control an unexpected crisis.”

Dabney looked out across the room, exuding confidence now. She’d proved herself in a sudden, trying situation and felt entitled to gloat a bit. She was willing to give Shirazi some bits of inside information; after all, she expected this meeting to result in a significant diplomatic contact.

“So, you gave the order to your Marine guards to shoot those people in the street?”

“Shoot what people?”

“The bodies, they were on television. There were three men in a Mercedes.”

“Uh, well, there was some shooting.”

“Yes.” Shirazi held his cup of tea and looked at her, as if he expected some additional response.

“They fired at our embassy,” she told the lie quickly, struggling to recall exactly what had happened after Shands had rushed into her office with news of a “high-value asylum seeker.”

“You were certainly prepared,” he responded quickly, “with a machine gun on your balcony.”

“Yes. Major Shands felt it best to be prepared, uh, for the unknown.”

This was going badly.

“He was expecting trouble?”

“I think there was a call, uh, just before.”

“Yes,” Shirazi said. “The first reporters on the scene said there was a wounded man in the car with the Russian president.”

“Oh?” She wasn’t going to give him anything more.

“It seems to have turned out well, for you. Congratulations.” Shirazi backed off the questioning.

Dabney felt relieved. She took a sip of her wine.

“This is very good. Do you take wine?”

“It doesn’t agree with me,” he said pleasantly.

They walked around the room to another corner and looked at a large painting.

*****

“How tall is he?” Shirazi asked. A picture of Boyd Chailland was on a computer screen in the Iranian Embassy later that night. A nearby computer was playing a repeating loop of a cellphone video of the blue Lada at the Gorgasali Street intersection and two men running toward the smoking Mercedes and the Russian president. Ratface tapped quickly on the keyboard. Soon, they had it: 6 feet 2 inches.

“So, the tall one was Boyd Chailland.”

Chapter 22:
PAF Base Mushaf, Sargodha, Pakistan

apt. Ghafoor Khan waited in the predawn darkness, smoking a cigarette and contemplating eternity. In less than an hour, the eastern sky would show a glow, and the miracle of another day would begin, a gift from God. An educated man, he did not believe that dying this day in the service of Allah would guarantee him heaven and the services of dozens of nubile virgins. He had no interest in virgins. He thought of the passage in the Holy Quran that said, “… and the life of this world is nothing but an illusory enjoyment.” That about summed it up for Ghafoor Khan, 35 years old and widowed with no children.

Many would taste death this day. Some would be prepared. Most would meet it with surprise on their faces. He was neutral. He’d been entrusted with devising the actual plan, and had done so first as a planner and later as a participant. A graduate of the Combat Commander’s School, at this base he was certainly qualified. As an ethnic Pashtun of the Bangash tribe from the Kohat Valley and an observant Shiite Muslim, he was tired of the infidel presence in his land and longed for the stable, quiet, religious existence promised when the land was returned to Shariah, God’s law. If he perished executing his plan, all the better. He was lonely and bitter, hollow. If he succeeded, the warriors of Islam would have a powerful weapon to use against the infidel, a weapon equal to the weapons the Americans used to threaten the world, unfettered by the treaties and alliances
negotiated by the Punjabi rulers of Pakistan. It was time to suit up and bring it all to the test.

The first explosions across the runway startled him. They shouldn’t have; they were right on time. The guards in the heavily guarded compound containing the nuclear weapons were killing their supervisors. It wasn’t a matter of breaking into the compound to steal the weapons, because all the guards inside today were devout Muslims intent on making those weapons available for immediate use against the infidel, this very day if possible. The explosions and automatic weapons would draw the roving security guards, and the fight would be at the compound gate. Heavy, crew-served weapons were being brought out of storage at this moment. When the armored personnel carriers arrived carrying the SWAT team reinforcements, they would be met with heavy machine guns, thoughtfully provided by the Americans to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

He walked to his aircraft. The Dassault Falcon 20 was supposed to have a crew of two, but he could fly it himself. No need to add the uncertainty of another pilot. If he got off the ground and up to altitude, they’d never catch him. And if he didn’t get off the ground and up to altitude, another pilot would make no difference. He unlocked the aircraft, and the door descended quietly, steps extending. He finished a quick walk around and climbed into the pilot’s seat to begin the preflight checklist. It would take 10 minutes.

An alarm sounded atop the headquarters building across the runway. That would draw the garrison to battle stations. He’d exercised the drill dozens of times. It would take them half an hour to get together and mount any kind of assault on the fortified weapons-storage area, and he’d be gone by then. The plans for the security force were all directed outward, to thwart
an assault from outside the base. Foolish, he’d always thought. Allah’s most faithful warriors were the enlisted Pashtu’s right here on the base.

He overrode the navigation lights coming on when he turned on the electrical system. They’d see that from the tower and know someone was starting the aircraft. They could put barriers up to stop him from getting to the runway, if they thought of it. He skipped checking radio frequencies and activating the transponder, which would alert the tower. The first engine started on battery power.

The Americans had first wanted to provide to Pakistan a Permissive Action Link security system for the nuclear weapons but changed their mind because it would expose their own systems engineering to potential adversaries. A PAL would have had the weapons assembled with redundant, encrypted security built in, another downside in the American’s thinking. With the PAL, a couple of officers with the right codes and keys could activate the weapons. Instead, the Americans had insisted on storing the weapons and detonators separately. That way it would take a team to assemble them and, hopefully, the rush to use them might cool off with the passage of a little time. Perfect, because Ghafoor Khan’s team didn’t want the weapons, only the detonators.

The second engine started. He eased the throttle forward, and the still dark aircraft began to roll toward the taxiway. The weather report had stated the wind was from the east, so he’d need to taxi the length of the runway, past the tower, to the west side of the runway to take off into the wind. In actuality, there was no wind and he was near the eastern end of the runway. He paused at the end of the runway as a light truck burst through a back gate from the weapons storage area and raced in his direction. Explosions and heavy weapons fire were light
ing up the night on the other side of the compound. He set the parking brake and opened the side door of the 10-seat executive jet. Two men wrestled a wheeled cart stacked with wooden boxes to the side of the aircraft. He helped them lift the boxes into the aircraft.

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

The two men had been selected to pick up the detonators because they were low level engineers and knew what they looked like. No sense in killing a hundred people to steal the wrong item. They looked back at the intensity of the fighting and made their decisions.

“I will go,” one man said and climbed the steps.

The other man gave a salute and walked back to the truck, apparently preferring to meet Allah today rather than later.

Ghafoor returned to the cockpit and strapped in, released the parking brake and turned onto the runway. He pushed the throttle all the way forward and turned on the landing lights. In 60 seconds he was at 10,000 feet headed west at 590 miles per hour.

Chapter 23: The Secretary of Defense

’ve got a meeting at the White House in two hours,” the defense secretary said, fiddling with a pencil on the large and mostly empty expanse of his desk. “The National Security Council is going over the whole story of the Iran situation. Now that someone has stolen nuclear triggers from Pakistan and they’re apparently in Iran, the whole nuclear scenario is front-burner,” he said, looking up at Maj. Gen. Bob Ferguson.

“Yes, sir,” Ferguson said, feeling like a bug under a dissecting lens.

“State and the CIA have both reported message traffic from the People’s Mujahedin of Iran,” the secretary said of the group known as MEK in Farsi, “and their political organization, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, that the communications we’ve gotten from inside Iran on the Iranian nuclear program are genuine, and that they’re coming from within the government itself, very high in the government itself.

“Also, that strange communication from the Second Ayatollah, as he’s being called, is genuine, and they want to publicize that worldwide to expat Iranians, as it strengthens their position as a government in exile. It seems there is a power struggle going on in Iran, and things are very unstable. That’s good, and it’s dangerous, doubly so now that we know from the last flash drive that the source within the program discovered new stockpiles of plutonium and asserts that Iran has three times the
plutonium we previously thought. That source confirms that those new designs you ran by our technical people at Sandia Labs are indeed being manufactured right now. So, it’s later than we thought.”

“Yes, sir,” Ferguson said. “The Sandia people were shocked that the Iranians have abandoned work on the simple gun assembly uranium weapon and are building an implosion plutonium bomb from the beginning. We thought that was years away.”

“Someone’s helping them.”

“Yes, sir. Sandia thinks it’s the Russians. The design of the bomb shows the fingerprints of Russian engineering process.”

“Then why would the Iranians let the Chechens try to assassinate the Russian president?”