The Enemy Within

He held up a hand to forestall any protest Thorn might make. “I know what your codes of military justice say about such things, but you must understand our position here. As you pointed out, we are now at war with the HizbAllah. Since they will show me no mercy if I fail, I will show them none now. In any case, every fanatic we take alive is only another prisoner the others will try to free a constant irritant, perhaps even a danger to us again someday. Dead, they may become martyrs, but martyrs cannot hold a rifle or turn a detonator key.”

He was right, Thorn knew. The UCMJ contained specific procedures for dealing with prisoners procedures laid out with lawyerly precision. But very few of the rules written for an antiseptic courtroom were easily applied under combat conditions. And by its very nature counterterrorism was a murky field one full of moral ambiguity and cruel necessity. Very few people outside the tight-knit organisations dedicated to fighting the shadowy war against terrorism understood that. Look at the public furor that had erupted several years before when a British SAS team ambushed several IRA guerrillas in Gibraltar and shot them down without warning or mercy.

He looked up. Taleh was still waiting for his response. The hardships of the Revolution and the Iran-lraq war had made his friend far more ruthless than he remembered. But this was the other man’s fight and his home ground. Second guessing his decisions now would serve no useful purpose. He nodded his reluctant understanding.

The Iranian seemed satisfied. “Good.” He glanced at his watch and signaled Captain Kazemi over with a quick gesture. “Farhad will escort you back to your quarters for now, Peter. I will join you there after my prayers.”

Taleh clapped him on the shoulder again. “Then we can eat together and discuss these matters at greater length. We can also talk of the old days the better days of our youth.” He swept his eyes over the smoldering ruins of the Manzarieh camp. “And in considerably more pleasant surroundings.”

MAY 10

The U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.

Twenty-four hours and seven thousand grueling air miles after leaving Iran, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Thorn finished debriefing the last set of self-proclaimed State Department experts on the results of his mission. He gritted his teeth as the door to the conference room swung shut behind him and turned to the senior officer at his side. “I swear to God, sir, I’ve never seen such a group of pompous, arrogant…”

“Calmly, Pete. Calmly.” Major General Sam Farrell steered him away from the room and down a tiled corridor toward an elevator. He pressed the down button and stood back. “Our current lords and masters of the Foggy Bottom may be pompous. They are arrogant. But they most certainly are not deaf.”

“Sorry, sir.” Thorn took a deep breath and then released it slowly. Farrell was right. He would gain nothing by losing his temper right in the State Department’s inner sanctum.

He’d never thought debriefing this administration’s coterie of foreign policy experts would be a walk in the park. So why should he kick when they turned out to be as obnoxious as he’d expected?

Oh, they had been polite enough on the surface anyway. They’d listened fairly attentively to his outline of General Taleh’s moves to rid Iran of the HizbAllah and to the recap of his conversations with the Iranian leader. But there had been a dead silence when he’d offered to take questions. More telling still, he and Farrell had been completely ignored during the prolonged discussion that followed his briefing.

In fact, it had become very clear that the band of corporate lawyers and former academics who made up the State Department’s current policy elite were utterly uninterested in the views of those they saw as uniformed robots as simple men suited only to obey orders from their civilian superiors. Instead, Austin Brookes, the elderly, courtly Secretary of State, and his inner circle were a lot more interested in claiming total credit for Iran’s sudden change of heart. Thorn had heard enough abstract nonsense about back-channel diplomacy and geopolitical “levers” in the past two hours to last him a lifetime.

At least Taleh was proving a man of his word.

His troops had pounded two more HizbAllah camps while Thorn was still in Iran. And a preliminary analysis of the data he’d brought back from Taleh showed that many of the dead were terrorists who had been on the U.S. government’s Most Wanted lists for years. In the long run, Thorn thought, that mattered a hell of a lot more than which set of American bureaucrats counted coup for making the Iranians see sweet reason.

One thing more was sure. Taleh was thorough. He played to win at all times. He accepted no excuses not from his subordinates and not from himself. That was something Thorn found familiar. It was the way he’d lived his own life from boyhood on.

“Coming, Pete?”