The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,118
team, each piece of the Increment. Adrian asked Harry if he had anything he wanted to say.
“Don’t get caught,” said Harry. “This is one operation where we cannot afford a flap. The things you would say if you are captured and interrogated, and the use the Iranians would make of them in a show trial, honestly, it’s the kind of thing that starts wars. So don’t get caught.”
“Meaning what?” asked Adrian. He had willed himself not to think about this part and Harry had just burst the balloon of denial.
“I mean that if people try to stop you, serious people with guns, then shoot it out. Don’t leave anyone behind. You either get out safely, or you don’t get out. Nobody gets captured, no matter what. Understood?”
There was silence in the room. Adrian was looking away. Hakim and Marwan didn’t move a muscle, either of them. There was a keen look in their eyes, like hawks that had sighted their prey and could not see anything else.
It fell to Jackie to respond. Harry had been right, in the end. She was the strong one. With her darkened hair and complexion, she seemed almost to have changed form. Adrian was still looking away.
“I don’t think there will be a problem, sir,” said Jackie. “We know how to do this. We’ll get back. This is what we do.”
MASHAD, IRAN
The helicopter trip from Ashgabat took just over an hour. The craft followed the main highway east and then banked south over ragged farmland ruined by decades of Soviet monocrop agriculture. Adrian and Harry had come along, each for a different reason wanting to be waiting at the other side of the border when the team came out. Both men sat in harness in the chopper, wraparound sunglasses shielding their eyes from the sun and wind. Nobody said much on the trip. Their focus was inward. Karim was dressed in dirty coveralls that cloaked the black suit he would wear to the laboratory. Jackie, Hakim, and Marwan were dressed in the modest pilgrim garb they would wear into Mashad. Weapons and other gear were packed into two bags.
The Mitsubishi minivan was waiting in a garage on the Turkmenistan side of Saraghs. The driver stood beside the van wearing a round Turkmen hat that stood atop his head like a brightly colored porkpie. He had a wispy beard and high cheekbones—a Mongol face of the steppes. He had been paid some money already by Atwan’s man, enough so that he was attentive as a house dog. Hakim and Marwan approached him, miming the splayed feet and bad backs of men who had lived in the sun. Jackie followed submissively behind them, shrouded in black. All three had a protean ability to change shape and deportment. They could become whatever they had to be.
The driver spoke a little Arabic. Hakim spoke a little Turkish and Marwan a little Farsi, so they managed to say enough that they understood each other. Karim Molavi, the special cargo, was the last to arrive. He had been talking outside with Harry, having a few last words before the journey. He was dressed in a floppy cotton hat and his rough coveralls. The driver hadn’t been given any explanation for who this mystery passenger was, and he didn’t ask. Dressed as he was, Karim might have been a foreign worker smuggling himself to the West to look for work.
The driver raised the backseat, revealing the compartment where Karim would ride during the three-hour trip. He handed him a large bottle of mineral water and gave him a rough pat on the back, and then sent him into the well. Karim hunched into a fetal position. He was big enough that it was a tight fit in the narrow van, but he eventually arranged his limbs in the least uncomfortable position, and the driver lowered the seat on top of him.
The driver checked the documents of his other three travelers. He scanned the photos and stamps, and checked the visa page twice. He nodded and gave a half wink, as if to say, Good work, and smiled a nearly toothless grin. The most reassuring thing about him was that he was so obviously corrupt, and the certainty that Atwan paid better than anyone else.
The Mitsubishi rumbled through the Turkmen sector of Saraghs toward the border that bisected this ancient Silk Road town. They were nearly an hour at the frontier. The Turkmen side was easy enough; those skids had been thoroughly greased.