The Templar Salvation (2010) (47 page)

“Tess, listen to me,” Reilly said calmly. “If you lose it, I’m going to have to shoot you. You do realize that?”

Tess laughed. It was a hearty laugh, borne more out of fear and nervousness than out of her thinking his words were particularly funny. The reality of their situation—being stuck down there, in a condemned underground labyrinth, several levels below the surface—was getting to her. She usually prided herself on not being the kind of person to panic. She’d lived through a few harrowing situations, and she’d done all right and gotten through them. Adrenaline usually kicked in and fueled her drive for survival.

This was different.

This was looking like a slow, agonizing, and frustrating end. Like being marooned in space without the relatively quick release of a limited supply of oxygen.

It was enough to drive one mad.

She’d lost track of how long they’d been down there.

Hours, certainly. How many, though, she couldn’t say.

They’d tried moving the millstone back, but it was impossible. It had been designed to be rolled back from the inside, but they lacked the timber levers to do so. They’d then looked everywhere for another way out, following the cobweb of electrical cabling in all kinds of directions. They’d used the flashlight sparingly, but it had eventally died out. They’d then resorted to the faint light from the screen of Reilly’s BlackBerry, but that had died out too.

Tess knew these subterranean citadels were huge. Estimates for the number of people that could shelter in the larger ones that had been uncovered varied wildly, ranging from a few thousand to as many as twenty thousand. Which was a lot of space to cover. A lot of tunnels. And a lot of dead ends.

She knew they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“What if we’re trapped here forever?”

Reilly held her tight, his arm coiled around her. “We won’t be.”

“Yeah, but what if?” she pressed, tucking into him even closer. “Seriously? What happens to us? Do we starve to death? Do we die of thirst first? Do we lose it and go nuts? Tell me. You must have had some training in this stuff.”

“Not really,” Reilly told her. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing they expect you to go through in the New York field office.”

The darkness was absolute now, so dark it was actually blinding. There wasn’t even the faintest glimmer of light. Tess couldn’t see anything of Reilly, not even the ghost of a reflection coming from his eyes. She could only hear him breathing, feel his chest rise and fall and his fingers tighten around her. Her mind wandered to the not-so-distant past, to an earlier time, curled up with Reilly in the dark, not that far away from where they now were.

“You remember that first night?” she asked him. “In the tent, before we got to the lake?”

She sensed his face broaden into a smile. “Yup.”

“That was nice.”

“It was pretty amazing.”

“More than amazing.” She thought about it, reliving it. It stirred up a comforting warmth inside her. “I’ve always wanted to relive that first kiss,” she told him. “Nothing ever compares to it, does it?”

“Let’s test that theory.” He cupped her face in his hands and drew her near and kissed her long and hard, a desperate, hungry kiss that said more than any word could ever express.

“I could be wrong,” she finally said, dreamily. “Or maybe there’s something about this Turkish air. What do you think?”

“This air? In here? Not exactly doing it for me, but hey, don’t let me spoil your party.”

Darker thoughts pushed their way through. “I don’t want to die here, Sean.”

“You’re not going to die here,” he told her. “We’re going to make it out.”

“Promise?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

She smiled—then it all came back. What she’d been through the last few days, how they’d gotten here. A gaggle of disparate thoughts, swooping in and out of her mind.

“The guy,” she remembered, “the bomber. He told me something. A couple of things he said I ought to look up. He said it was important.”

“What?”

“He asked me if I’d ever heard of Operation Ajax.”

Tess couldn’t see Reilly’s features in the darkness, but she didn’t need to. His pause, and his breathing, told her all she needed to know. He knew what it was.

“What was the other thing?” Reilly asked her, his voice still subdued.

“He said I needed to find out what happened on the morning of July 3, 1988.”

Reilly paused again, inhaling and exhaling deeply this time.

“What?” Tess asked.

After a moment, Reilly said, “I’d say our guy is telling us he’s Iranian. And that he’s got some serious anger management issues.”

“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?’