Damascus Countdown (12 page)

CAPE MAY, NEW JERSEY

Najjar Malik couldn’t sleep—again.

He missed Sheyda, his beloved wife. He missed his daughter. He even missed his mother-in-law. He wondered where they were. Was the CIA taking good care of them? Were they safe?

Najjar rolled out of bed and went down to the kitchen of the enormous and gorgeous beachfront home in which he’d been staying nearly since he’d escaped from CIA custody the week before. It was owned by a friend of one of the producers at the Persian television network that had broadcast Najjar’s now-world-famous interview explaining to his fellow Iranians why he had converted to Christianity and defected to the United States. He’d been given use of the home free of charge, for as long as he needed, on two conditions: that he not use the telephone in the house (only the untraceable cell phone the producer had given him), and that he not do anything that would alert the authorities to his presence in that particular house. Najjar had promised not to implicate the producer or his friend, and he was a man of his word. But there were moments like this when he wondered whether it was time to go to the Cape May police station and turn himself in. He wasn’t a criminal, and he didn’t want to be a fugitive. He had told the CIA everything he knew. He had turned over all his computer files and answered all their questions, a hundred times over. Now he just wanted to be with his family and to study the Bible with them, pray with them, and continue to communicate with the people of Iran—and Muslims around the world—telling them the good news of the one true Savior.

He went to pour himself a glass of milk but realized he had used up the last of it at dinner. He would have to go out when the sun came
up and get some more. Indeed, a shopping run would do him good, as there were a number of staples he was running low on. Najjar grabbed an icy-cold Coke out of the fridge instead and went into the study, where he sat at the computer and caught up on the news.

He clicked on the BBC Persian website and was stunned by the headline: “Israeli Nuclear Reactor at Dimona Hit by Missiles.” He quickly scanned the coverage, but it was sketchy at best. No specifics yet on the death toll and no official reaction from the Israeli government, but a widespread evacuation of the area around Dimona was under way, and Najjar feared Prime Minister Naphtali might now be seriously contemplating going nuclear against Tehran. He grabbed his mobile phone and tweeted a quick note about the attack along with a link to the BBC article, but he decided against adding any of his own commentary.

Sifting through other websites, he was in search of more details about Dimona and the rest of the war between Israel and Iran when to his surprise he found himself diverted by news out of Damascus. One headline in particular caught his eye: “Massacre in Syria: Hundreds Killed.” He clicked on the link. The article, written by a
Time
magazine reporter in a dispatch filed in English, described the latest “horrific massacre” in a string of attacks carried out by Syrian security forces. More than three hundred people had been killed, and over a thousand more were injured.

Najjar shuddered as he continued reading about how the Syrian president appeared to be specifically targeting Christians, Jews, and other minority groups in the Islamic nation. Meanwhile, the United Nations seemed obsessed with passing resolutions condemning the Israelis for responding to the attacks of madmen instead of doing anything to condemn—much less stop—Gamal Mustafa from systematically slaughtering thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

There was nothing he could do about it, Najjar knew, besides informing the world and staying in prayer. But for some reason the story made him miss Sheyda and their child all the more, and he got down on his knees and pleaded with God to reunite them soon.

QOM, IRAN

“Let’s go, let’s go. We’re almost there,” David insisted as they entered the city limits and raced through the ghost town that Qom now was.

As instructed, Torres pushed the pedal to the metal. And why not? There were no cops. There was no traffic. There were no pedestrians and seemingly no activity of any kind. The streets were empty. The sidewalks were empty. Not a single child could be found on the playgrounds. Not a single shopper browsed in the stores. It was surreal.

David had been to Qom just a few days earlier—on Thursday, in fact—to meet Javad Nouri. He had met the aide to the Mahdi at the Jamkaran Mosque, in a suburb of Qom. On that day, as on every day, the city had been wall-to-wall people, and the streets had been clogged with every kind of car and truck and cab and motorcycle imaginable. Now everyone—all of it—was gone. The entire population had gone into hiding or had fled the city completely, probably fearing the possibility that one of the Israeli missiles would be nuclear and kill everything within a fifty-mile radius. David had never seen anything like it, and the entire bizarre situation gave him the creeps.

However, when they reached the entrance to Haqqani Street, where Abdol Esfahani’s parents lived, everything changed again. Normally there would be nothing particularly noteworthy about Haqqani Street. Like many neighborhoods in this part of Qom, it was lined on both sides with cherry trees not yet in bloom bracketing small, two-story, single-family homes, typically owned in this neighborhood by Shia clerics and seminary professors and some of Iran’s more prestigious intelligentsia.
The homes had well-manicured lawns with gorgeous rosebushes out front and varying arrays of tulips and forsythias and chrysanthemums. But this was not a normal day.

To David’s surprise, the street was clogged with people looking and pointing and covering their mouths in shock. Torres slowed the car, and David peered down the street. Once again he could smell jet fuel and smoke, sharper and more pungent than any other place he had been. Smoke was billowing from a house halfway down the street. Flames were shooting twenty or thirty feet in the air. And suddenly he realized what had happened. The Israeli fighter jet they had seen falling from the sky had crashed here. And now, amid the wailing and shrieking of neighbors and onlookers and their children, David heard sirens approaching in the distance.

“Stop the car,” he ordered and jumped out once Torres had pulled over. “I’m going to find Esfahani. The rest of you find a place to park on the next street. Then fan out into the crowd in a way that allows you to see his parents’ house from all sides. Be discreet, and don’t talk to anyone. None of your Farsi is near good enough.”

Before Torres could object to the plan, David was sprinting, checking house numbers on both sides of the street until through the thick, black, billowing smoke he could make out the number 119 just two doors down from the house that had been demolished by the burning fuselage of the F-16. He was making his way around the crowd when a secondary explosion from the plane erupted to his left, sending him flying through the air and smashing onto the gravel street. Flames were now shooting a good forty or fifty feet into the air. Molten metal from the plane and burning embers from the house were landing everywhere and starting new fires.

David pulled himself back up and wiped the soot from his face. He wondered whether the Israeli jet had more ordnance on board, bombs or Sidewinder missiles that were now cooking in the flames and preparing to blow and take out the entire neighborhood. And it was then that he saw the roof of the Esfahani home ablaze.

Bolting for the front door, he started shouting for the Esfahanis and pounding as loudly as he could on the door, but it was clear no one
could hear him. He could barely hear himself. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. He tried kicking it in but to no avail. He looked around. There was no one near him. The crowds that had come to gawk were now screaming and running away. But the sirens were getting closer, and David did not want to be around when the police or the army arrived. He had done nothing illegal, necessarily—nothing obvious or immediate, anyway—but he still didn’t want to be interviewed or interrogated or slowed down in any way. But he absolutely had to find Abdol Esfahani, if he was really there. Or had he come and gone already? Had he already gotten his parents out and left for a safer place? After all this, was David too late?

Determined to get into the house and find out for sure one way or another, he worked his way around to the side of the house, peering through windows but seeing no one. When he got to the back door, he was fully prepared to pull out his Glock 9mm and blow through the lock. There was no one watching, and few would care even if they were. Any observers would likely assume he was a member of the secret police. But to David’s surprise, the door was not only unlocked; it was open.

With the top of the house now completely ablaze, David calculated he had only a few minutes before the entire roof collapsed into the second floor, trapping and burning alive anyone who might be up there. So without hesitation he rushed into the ground floor, scanning for any movement, any signs of life.

“Abdol! Abdol Esfahani!”
David yelled.
“Are you here? Is anyone here?”

The house was rapidly filling with smoke, making it extremely difficult not only to breathe but to see.

“Hello! Is anyone here?”
he yelled again.

With no sign of anyone in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, or the first-floor bathroom, David raced up the first few stairs, continuing to shout at the top of his lungs, when suddenly, to his shock, he found himself staring up into the bleary, bloodshot, and terror-filled eyes of Abdol Esfahani. Over his shoulder he carried an older woman, clothed in a brown chador, who looked at least eighty years old, if not older.

“Reza?” Esfahani asked, stunned.

“Yes, it’s me, Abdol. I came to help you save your parents,” David replied.

Esfahani just stood there, paralyzed, trying to make sense of this. “How did you—?”

“No, not now,” David shouted as another explosion erupted nearby. “Is that your mother?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Then let’s go, get her outside. This place is going to blow any second.”

“But my father is upstairs too.”

“Just go,” David shouted. “Get your mother out. I’ll go for your father.”

Esfahani started choking violently.

“Go, go—don’t wait,” David shouted, and Esfahani finally began moving. “Take her out the back, and get her as far away from the house as you can. Is she breathing?”

“I’m not sure,” Esfahani admitted as he came rushing down the stairs.

“I’ll be there in a moment,” David said. “Now run, and don’t stop.”

When he saw that Esfahani was listening and doing what he told him, David scrambled up to the second floor, dropped to his knees, and pulled part of his shirt over his nose and mouth, trying to find some decent air. But breathing was not his main problem. In his haste to get Esfahani and the man’s mother out of the house, David had neglected to find out which room the father was in. He could hear the fire roaring above him. Ashes and pieces of burning lumber were already falling from the ceiling, which was clearly about to give way at any time. David crawled down the hall and peered into the first bedroom. He couldn’t see a thing, so he sucked in a big gulp of air, jumped to his feet, and began feeling his way across the bed and along the floor only to find no one there. He moved to the hall, dropped to his stomach, and again took several short breaths.

“Mr. Esfahani!”
David shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Can you hear me? Where are you? Hello?”

The house began to rumble and shake. Burning sheetrock was now falling from the walls, and behind him a ceiling light fixture fizzled and
popped and then crashed to the floor. He took another few breaths, then jumped to his feet and headed to a second bedroom, where again he felt his way through the smoke-filled darkness for what he now presumed was the unconscious if not lifeless body of an eightysomething-year-old man. But he was nowhere to be found in this room either.

David made it back to the hallway and dropped to his stomach. He put his head as low to the floor as he possibly could, but there was almost no good air left. He began choking. His eyes were watering. The heat was unbearable. His clothing was soaked with sweat. But he started crawling forward, groping with his hands in the darkness as he held his breath and prayed for mercy and God’s favor.

Suddenly he hit a door, a closed wooden door. He cautiously reached up and felt for the knob with the back of his hand. He found it and winced, as it was blazing hot. He pulled the end of his long-sleeved shirt over his hand and, using that as a sort of oven mitt, turned the knob and fell into what felt like a porcelain-tiled bathroom. He worked his way across the floor and found the bathtub, and there, within it, he found Esfahani’s father. The man was unconscious and covered in wet towels, Abdol’s apparent effort to keep him as safe as possible until he got back. But Abdol was not coming back. No one was coming up those stairs. And if David didn’t get out of this house soon, he was never getting out.

His air supply was nearly depleted. His lungs were burning. His temples pounded. Sweat poured down his body. But he kept telling himself that as desperately as he needed to inhale, if he did so, he would pass out and die a grisly, fiery death moments later. David willed himself to his feet, pulled the towels off the man, heaved him out of the tub, and slumped him over his shoulder. And then the blazing ceiling collapsed on top of them.

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

Dr. Mohammad Shirazi came down the creaky stairs and padded into the living room in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. He looked around the first floor and, seeing no one, shrugged. Not wanting to
trudge all the way back up to his room yet, he lowered himself slowly into his recliner beside the embers of a dying fire. Then he drew from his bathrobe pocket his favorite pipe and some rum-and-maple tobacco, lit up, and soon was leaning back and puffing away, hoping to decompress in the first few minutes he had truly had to himself since his wife’s death.

It had been such a long day, and it felt good, even at this late hour, to get off his feet and just savor the quiet. He was grateful for all the people who had come to the service. It had been a beautiful one at that, one that truly honored Nasreen for the remarkable wife and mother and friend she had been. She would have liked it, he thought, though she wouldn’t have admitted it. Rather, she would have complained he was making too much of a fuss.

He was surprised that David had not called, but he didn’t begrudge that. He was proud of his son, off fighting the mullahs of Iran and trying to take down the Mahdi, that wretched beast. Indeed, the only thing that had made this week bearable was the knowledge that his youngest son was fighting the good fight. He was sticking it to the regime in Tehran, and his father couldn’t have been more proud. He just wished he could actually say that to David—even say it face-to-face.

Dr. Shirazi studied the pipe in his hands and enjoyed the sweet aroma of the smoke. Then he put it back in his mouth and looked at the rows of photographs on the side table near the window and around at all the special decorating touches his wife had added to the room over the years. He smiled at the memories and the faces in the frames, thankful for a very happy marriage. What a history they’d had together. What adventures. But neither he nor Nasreen had ever dreamed that their youngest son would be on an adventure such as this.
What would she have said?
he wondered. But he knew. He knew all too well, and in a way, there was a part of him that was glad she did not know. She would have been horrified to learn that David was back in the nation they had turned their backs on long, long ago. She had never wanted to go back, and neither had he—not that they could have, of course. They were both wanted criminals in Tehran.

Dr. Shirazi shuddered to think of the darkness surrounding David.
He hoped with every fiber in his being that his boy was safe. In his heart, he knew David was making a difference, and he felt a sense of honor he had never before felt about any of his sons—that his family might be a part of bringing justice to an unjust place, of bringing redemption for millions of people trapped under an evil leadership. For a moment, he considered turning on the television to see the latest news out of the Middle East, wondering if his heart and his imagination could handle what he’d see.
Not yet,
he thought. He’d check a few headlines later. Perhaps it was best to take the news in small doses.

Just then he heard the toilet in the first-floor bathroom flush. Then he heard the door open and the creak of floorboards behind him. He set down his pipe and turned his head to see Marseille Harper standing there, a yellow notebook in hand.

“Oh, Marseille, I was afraid you had left,” he said. “Indeed, I was sure of it. But I’m so glad you’re still here. I came down specifically to see you.”