The Mingrelian (23 page)

“That’s the prison at three o’clock,” Emmet says, looking at his instruments and not the window.

The radar altimeter shows 410 feet above ground level. The prison is at the northern edge of Tehran, and hills rise steeply
beyond. Raybon circles counterclockwise to the south. They all stand to look out the side window behind Raybon.

“Set up the 50-cal at the jump door,” Raybon says.

Rick Shands jumps to the ladder, nearly toppling one of his Marines who had been standing on the top step. Davann is right behind him. The jump door is just forward of the cargo ramp on the left side of the aircraft, the pilot’s side. In a counterclockwise turn, the jump door is inside the circle.

“There’s mountain over here,” Boyd says. From his perspective in the right seat, the ground slopes steeply upward. “Let’s make it a straight pass.”

“Roger,” Raybon says. “You guys ready on the fifty cal?”

Raybon turns to Boyd. “Think we can take out the towers with just the 50-cal?”

“Oh, yeah. Let’s don’t use that cannon yet. Neutralize the towers so we don’t take any ground fire, then fly right over the prison and get the front door on the way out.” Then he keys his microphone. “SLUGGO, get your people away from the towers.”

Raybon turns clockwise toward Tehran and circles to the west. When he comes back at level flight he is a few hundred yards south of the prison and 400 feet above ground level. There are flashes of small-arms fire from the nearest tower.

“Coming up on the left, concentrate on the closest tower.”

The first controlled burst of six rounds blows the roof off the guard tower, eliminating the brick wall the shooters had crouched behind. The next burst eliminates the shooters in a spray of red. The next blows the other side of the protective wall out, and the final burst collapses the floor into the stairwell as the old aircraft lumbers off into the snowy mist. When it turns to the south Boyd can see people running out the back door toward the highway nearby.

“The far tower. I’ll give you more elevation this time.”

They are higher but closer. Raybon drops the left wing slightly.

There is nobody in the second guard tower now. The first burst of 50-caliber fire eliminates the roof, and a long second burst collapses the top half of the tower.

“Open the back.”
      

Controlled from the back, the loading ramp of the C-130 lowers below horizontal to allow vehicles to drive into the cargo bay. It closes by rising above horizontal and meeting with the door, which retracts inward, thus closing the back of the aircraft in a clamshell fashion. The loading ramp has the same dual rail pallet system as the rest of the cargo bay, so one standard pallet can be carried there. The Vulcan, bolted to a standard aluminum pallet, has been rolled onto the ramp and secured to the two rails beneath. As the back of the aircraft opens like a whale’s mouth, the Vulcan hangs slightly down into the slipstream.

Davann Goodman is standing behind the Vulcan wearing body armor and is anchored by a paratroop line to the side of the cargo bay. Rick Shands lowers the ramp 10 degrees below horizontal. The rest of the back-end crew stay well forward, lest a sudden lurch throw someone out.

“Coming over the top now,” Raybon says. “The door is reinforced steel with thick stone supports.”

He brings the 130 right over the prison. There is no small-arms fire.

“Remember, there are people inside there,” Boyd says.

Evin Prison flashes beneath them.

Blurrpp. A 25-round burst takes less than a second.

Raybon banks hard to the left, and Boyd cranes in his seat to see out the window behind the pilot. The prison door has been blown in with a burst of dust and smoke.

“Close the back,” Raybon says, looking back at the wreckage.

“We could land on that highway,” Emmet says. “Get somebody to clear those cars and mark an approach point.”

Evin Prison is just off a major, controlled access, four lane highway with an elevated straight span nearly a mile long.

“Good shooting JUBA.”

“SLUGGO, clear that highway down there, mark the east end just at that overpass with paint, then measure a thousand meters and mark it again. We’ll land there.”

Boyd sees men streaming through the gate into the prison. As the aircraft circles out south toward Tehran, three pickups race down the road from the prison toward the highway. Over the next 10 minutes, cars are pushed off the overpass, and a bucket of red paint is thrown across the highway to mark the beginning of the makeshift landing zone. As the C-130 circles, Boyd searches the city more carefully.

“They still have an air force, you know,” he says. ‘We could see a Mirage or Mig-29 any second.”

“Right,” Raybon says. “We’d better get this done and get out of here. If they figure out what we’re up to, they’ll launch something.”

Raybon tightens his circle heading back to the prison. They can see red paint on the highway and black paint at the other end, and the road is clear. Several vehicles are gathered at the exit closest to the prison. They make a low-level pass, only 100 feet off the ground, to check for debris and holes in the road. It is clear.

“Let’s land to the east, that puts us closest to SLUGGO, and we can load up, turn around and be gone,” Raybon says, banking sharply and throttling back, lining up on the west end of their makeshift runway.

“Roger,” Boyd says, “Pre-landing check list. Flaps down, gear down …”

The old C-130 glides over stalled traffic and a few astonished pedestrians and touches down at 100 knots right on the black splash of paint on a highway overpass a half mile from Evin Prison. Safely landed in just over half of the 1,000 yards allowed, they taxi to the waiting knot of PMOI fighters.

Shands and two Marines in body armor and armed with sidearms and M-16s jump from the crew door and run to meet the insurgents. Boyd can see them briefly as he and Raybon turn the aircraft on the highway and point it back to the west for takeoff. There is a heated discussion with waving of arms and pointing back to the prison. Something is wrong.

Chapter 42: Ratface

atface is in Evin Prison. Everything changed in the moment of the first nuclear blast at Parchin, and he hasn’t returned since Ekaterina’s first night here. The party he’d so looked forward to when he’d first seen her nude in the hospital gown was postponed by events. The Supreme Leader had been at Niavran Palace collecting his belongings before moving to a secure bunker in the mountains in anticipation of a possible conflict in a week or two. Angered at the incompetence of his subordinates when the war kicked off early, he had summoned and executed by firing squad the president, the chief of the Revolutionary Guards, the head of the Iranian Armed Forces and the commander of the Quds Force, the special forces unit of the Revolutionary Guards trusted with exporting Iran’s Islamic revolution – the man in charge of managing Hezbollah.

The next round of executions took out the VEVAK director for failing to expose and destroy the traitors in the senior leadership, leaving Ratface as the head of the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security and personally responsible for the safety of the Supreme Leader.

The other influential Western nations had declined to send diplomats to the Tehran leadership conference, leaving Dabney St. Clair as the only hostage of consequence. When the Supreme Leader was trapped in Tehran after the nuclear exchange, hostages were brought from their hotel suites and consolidated in a bunker near his palace in anticipation of a ma
jor media broadcast to the world announcing that diplomats were still trying to work something out.

With only one prominent diplomat, and she known to be a spy, that didn’t seem worth the effort. So, the pretense that the dozen or so hapless diplomats were welcome guests at an international negotiation was dropped and they were concentrated in one room in a bunker under armed guard. They were to appear on a television broadcast as hostages, and the more the merrier. Ratface had been dispatched to Evin Prison before dawn to pick up Ekaterina Dadiani to add to the list.

When he opened her cell door, he could see she was hypothermic and disoriented and hadn’t had food or water for almost four days. The Supreme Leader would want her to appear reasonably healthy, and the television broadcast was to be immediately upon his return. Desperate to revive her, he wrapped her in a blanket and turned up the gas heater in his office while he boiled water for tea.

The first shots were fired by the PMOI fighters at dawn. He barricaded the door and gave her tea, bottled water and candy bars while bullets ricocheted off the side of the building and fighting raged. Then it was quiet. An aircraft flew over, very low, and then there was firing of a heavy machine gun and an explosion at the front gate. He was afraid it was one of those commando raids the Americans are so notorious for.

At the back of the prison, across the hall from the interrogation room, Ratface has an office with a secure exit used to remove bodies after interrogation. Many opposition figures rumored to have been arrested but never seen in Evin Prison have passed through this door. This is where he is now barricaded, Ekaterina blindfolded and gagged. He has used cable ties to bind her hands and feet, and then those tied together so
she’s pulled into an obscene ball with her bare butt exposed beneath the blanket.

He hears shooting and shouting in the halls, then footsteps as several men enter the holding area and unlock all the cells. He hears grateful cries as the starved, frozen, dehydrated prisoners are released. Then silence. He can hear the aircraft engines in the distance; they must have landed. Half an hour passes, his spirits rise. Then he hears footsteps again, and two or three men walk across the broken glass, look in each cell and break down the door to the interrogation room. They are speaking English.

Ratface’s heart is racing. He clutches his pistol, aiming at Ekaterina’s head. Then the men leave and there is silence. He waits 10 minutes, 15. Silence. His car is parked just outside the door. The road to the highway is open.

Ratface stands and listens at the door. He hears nothing. He removes the barricade, opens the door and peeks out. The holding area is deserted. He goes to the interrogation room and retrieves a hospital gurney. Pulling it through the door to his office, he smiles. Her eyes are wide with fear. Color has returned to her cheeks, and she looks healthy again. He lifts her torso onto the gurney, freely feeling the now warm flesh beneath the dirty hospital gown.

No time now for the party he had planned, but no harm in a thorough pat down; no telling what these prisoners get smuggled to them. She could have a gun or a knife, and the Supreme Leader would be in jeopardy. Can’t let that happen. He pulls the gown up and, in the dim light does a thorough examination, leaving nothing unexplored. He fights back his excitement, as the Holy Quran forbids a man being aroused by a woman not his wife; this is work. This is necessary. So necessary is the security of the Supreme Leader that he ponders
taking Ekaterina back into the interrogation room for a quick session before returning with her for the hostage broadcast. Really, time does not permit that.

Well, it would take only 10 minutes, 15 at the most. If something unfortunate should happen, he could tell the Supreme Leader that she’d been killed in the assault. Then he remembered that there had just been a prison break. Thousands of family members and friends would find out about it and descend on the prison looking for loved ones, loved ones long since dead and secretly buried. Don’t want to be here when they get here.

Suddenly a paragon of efficiency and job focus, Ratface pulls the gurney to the steel door and opens it, peering out. On the other side of the building, he can hear the C-130 still idling, but the road down the hill and under the highway is open.

Chapter 42: Evin Prison

oyd Chailland’s hand flashes from behind the door and slams into Ratface, the grip finding his neck. The momentum of the thrust lifts Ratface off his feet. Boyd steps forward and slams Ratface into the wall and, for a moment, the two men’s eyes are locked. In that moment, Ratface pulls his pistol and fires two shots into Boyd’s abdomen. The muzzle flash in the dim light momentarily illuminates the two men’s faces.

“Arrgghh!” Boyd cries, not in agony, but in rage. He is wearing body armor, and the two 25 caliber bullets fail to penetrate it, although the impact is like a body punch. He pulls Ratface back from the wall and takes a step forward before doing a 360 degree turn holding Ratface over his head and smashing his head into the stone of Evin Prison. The head smashes like a rotten pumpkin, and blood and brains boil out of the back. Boyd can’t stop, he pirouettes again and Ratface's head makes another sickening crunch against the wall. Boyd drops him and turns to Ekaterina.

The Marine that accompanied Boyd from the C-130 steps into the office to cover their back.

When Boyd first went to Ekaterina’s empty cell, his nose told him that she’d been confined there without relief of any kind for the entire duration of the nuclear war and that she was probably still alive. When they broke into the interrogation room, his nose told him it had not been recently used. The shackles, blunt objects, probes, drills and curling irons were clean and
neatly displayed in their racks and shelves; no scent of blood or burnt flesh. He saw the gurney and surmised its use. Prisoners could walk in here, but when Ratface got started, he wouldn’t be able to stop and they wouldn’t walk out. The door across the hall was wider than a regular office door, to accommodate that gurney. There must be an exit there. If Ratface had left already, and Boyd was pretty sure he had, a quick circle around the back to make sure wouldn’t hold things up too much. If he were still there, he’d be in that office with a gun to Ekaterina’s head, and a hostage situation would play out. Break down that door, and Boyd and/or Ekaterina would die.