them on a point of analytical determination had provided Aaron Kurtzman with a moment of quiet pride.
“If this has been going on for a while, then why are we just now hearing about it?” McCarter asked.
“Because we didn’t have any operational intelligence,” Price replied.
“You couldn’t find anyone for us to shoot or hit over the head?” Lyons asked.
Hal Brognola removed the unlit stogie from his mouth. “Exactly,” he said. “Bear and his team were putting together a jigsaw puzzle from half a dozen different boxes while in a dark room.”
Barbara Price spoke up. “Stage One is an umbrella term for some sort of operation directed at the United States. It includes several separate but connected operations and projects that are all being run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their black ops unit, the Ansar-al-Mahdi. We were only ever able to tie a couple of low-level couriers and agents to the project. That included this man.” She pointed to the Iranian on the monitor screen. “Colonel Muqtada Ayub of a Basij division near Tehran.”
“Basij?” McCarter frowned. “I thought they were a local militia, like a National Guard for the Revolutionary Guard.”
“Yes and no.” Price nodded. “They are an auxiliary paramilitary force. But they also serve in law enforcement, emergency management and social and religious organizing in their respective areas. They also serve as a secret police militia against the general population doing morals policing and suppressing the activities of dissident groups.”
“Nut jobs?” Lyons asked. He took pride in a direct approach many often referred to as crass. He also liked to claim it was part of his charm, though he had never met anyone who actually agreed with him about that.
“Highly motivated nut jobs,” Brognola specified. “They provided the martyr volunteers for Iran’s human-wave attacks against Saddam Hussein’s army during the Iran-Iraq war.”
“It seems Colonel Ayub is also connected by marriage to a prominent cleric on the Revolutionary Council,” Price added. “He’s the highest ranking operative we’ve been able to connect to Stage One so far.”
“He’s a big, fat intelligence node just waiting to be hacked,” Kurtzman added. “With what he can tell us, I’m sure I’ll be able to piece together this puzzle in no time.”
“Getting him would be a major coup,” Price said.
“Where is he now?” McCarter asked. “I assume somewhere we can get to him.”
“Yes,” Price answered. “Specifically we have him located in a safehouse in Hayaniya, a Shiite-militia-controlled neighborhood in northwestern Basra. Carmen will provide you momentarily with a briefing packet of operational details for you to go over with the rest of Phoenix once we’re done here.”
“That explains what David’s going to be doing,” Lyons spoke up. “How about Able?”
Price acknowledged him, then nodded to Kurtzman. The computer specialist used his thumb to strike a key, and the picture changed to a surveillance shot of a Middle Eastern man in civilian clothes. “That individual is Aras Kasim,” she said. “A known agent of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, VEVAK.”
Lyons leaned forward, reading a sign in Spanish in the picture behind the man. “Where’s he at? Caracas?”
“Yes. You can thank the very thorough Carmen Delahunt for giving you someone to knock over the head, Carl,” Price answered. “Two days ago a CIA interagency memo had Kasim meeting with Ayub in Basra. This morning a brief by DEA agents surveilling Juan Escondito showed him in a meeting with Kasim.”
“An Iranian intelligence operative meeting with a Venezuelan narco-trafficker?” Lyons grunted. “That is big. We can run with this.”
“Good. Carmen will have your operational details ready to go in a couple of minutes, as well.” Barbara Price looked down at her team leaders from the head of the conference table. “Go out and bring me these men so we can shut the Iranians down.”
Both David McCarter and Carl Lyons were grinning as they rose from their seats.
CHAPTER FOUR
Basra, Iraq
Akmed Anjali had been a major in the Iraqi police since the Americans had taken Baghdad. He had been a loyal and partisan son of the Shammar clan all of his life and a follower of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite sect since he had been a small boy. His loyalties were not divided; they were prioritized. Allah, family, national duty. He followed them in that order, and if his duties as a Shia patriarch ever conflicted with his responsibilities as police officer, then he had to remember that his land was far older than most Americans could conceive and after the Americans were gone his land and his faith would continue unabated, like the life-mother Tigris River flowing perpetually to the sea.
It was because of this understanding that he went to see the Iranian after he left his liaison meeting with his British counterparts at their Basra international airport headquarters. Diplomatic imperatives had dictated that the British share what they knew with Major Anjali, just as religious obligation dictated that Anjali share what he knew with the Iranian.
Anjali directed his driver away from the airport and toward the northwest Basra neighborhood of Hayaniya. The sergeant, a nephew of Anjali, guided the white Toyota 4-Runner through a maze of backstreets once they reached the neighborhood. The buildings rose around them to heights of five or six stories, and vendors populated store-front properties along the narrow streets, selling everything from chickens to cheap plastic children’s toys and a thousand different knockoff versions of name-brand items.
They stopped the police patrol vehicle in front of a baked-brick wall with an iron gate that opened up on an inner courtyard. Anjali nodded to the man guarding the entrance. The sentry, who wore an Uzi submachine gun on a shoulder strap, instantly recognized him and let him in. The sounds of the street life behind Anjali faded as the man closed the heavy iron gate behind him.
“Wait here,” the sentry informed the police officer, and Anjali did as he was told.
The man he was here to see kept company with hardened killers. Some were Iraqi insurgents, but more than a few were Quds Force veterans; the Iranian special forces. The network run by the Colonel Ayub was the most efficient Anjali had ever seen in southern Iraq and it ran on impeccable discipline structured around instantaneous and brutal violence.
The sentry reappeared at the inner courtyard door and waved him forward into the building proper. Anjali resisted the urge to unbutton the flap of his sidearm holster. He was walking into a nest of vipers and the only thing that could protect him was the same thing that had always protected him. The good graces of his associates.
He entered a long, low-ceilinged room. Fans ran the length of the chamber, spinning slowly and casting moving slashes of shadows from the harsh white sunlight shooting in from the slats of the window shutters. Anjali paused at the door, blinking his eyes into focus.
There was a blue haze of cigarette smoke heavy in the air. The smell of unwashed male bodies freely sweating in the heat assaulted his nose. The room was filled with armed men in the traditional white robes called thobe. Low couches were positioned against the walls, but no one was sitting in them.
A
