LITMIR.BIZ

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what?” Brognola exhorted.

      “That’s what Ayatollah means, sign of God. Only this cleric has anointed himself Grand Ayatollah, and it appears he’s looking to muscle out all the competition, from drug and arms traffickers to rival mullahs, all the way to the president of Iran, who, as far as moderates go in that part of the world, is about as rational as they come.”

      “Meaning, can we say, ‘he wants to be chummy with Uncle Sam,’” Brognola interjected.

      “Up to a point, but only as long as he can keep the country from being overrun by Pizza Huts, rap music, satellite television that pipes in western entertainment while kissing up to the hardliners behind the scenes. The president of Iran, as we all know, isn’t the real power that keeps either the oil pumping or the radicals frothing at the mouth and chanting ‘Death to America.’ He’s a puppet, in truth, toeing the line between bringing his country into the twenty-first century and appeasing the radical clerics.

      “According to our CIA intelligence skims, there’s been another in a long line of internal power struggles between rival clerics for the choice seat at the head of the extremist table. Right now, it looks like Namak has fairly fitted himself to wear that crown. He has his own and not-so-small army of radicals, including some of the most dangerous and vicious intelligence officers, ex-SAVAK thugs, a mass following of politically indoctrinated Revolutionary Guards who do his bidding, which is pretty much offing the competition or who are so cruel and barbaric they could have given Saddam’s sons a few lessons in torture. He’s done pretty good for himself, if you factor in his last known five or so years of opium and heroin proceeds coming across the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, cutting himself in a for a nice chunk of change for safe passage and warehousing. Then there’s his version of madrassas, about twenty schools, our intel cites, only far more radical than anything in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Egypt, and which he runs across Iran in every corner, with hand-picked mullahs who give new meaning to the word extreme. Pretty much the usual brainwashing of angry impoverished youth being groomed for future martyrdom, only these students, some as young as seven or eight, are being shipped out to blow themselves up wherever Namak aims his ‘kill all Americans’ automatons.

      “Considering he was born with a silver spoon shoved down his vitriolic anti-West yap—the son of a father whose father brokered himself a sweet deal during the early Anglo-Iranian Oil Company days—Rafiq was educated in Europe where he apparently forgot all about the strict tenets of Shi’a Islam, his reputation being one of a free-spending, drug-using playboy, who, so the rumor goes, had some peculiar tastes in sexual games. Word from spook city is he spent a few years in the late eighties and early nineties ingratiating himself to the CIA, the NSA, DIA and whoever else might help him climb the ladder of success while he lies, backstabs, generally plays both ends against the middle in a high-wire act that apparently left a whole lot of wreckage—spell dead American intelligence operatives.”

      “Meaning,” Brognola said, “his former friends are now his enemies.”

      “Or may still be his pals, if what is rumored churning out of the spook mill pans out and he’s handing out the ready cash to the buzzards of the day. What he wants, publicly stated, is one united Middle East under Shiite control, and he’s starting with Iraq, lighting the powder keg of resistance. Beyond that, engineering mass killing sprees, who knows what his end game really is? He’s made plenty of enemies, no question, there have been several assassination attempts, but he seems blessed by that weird dark light that always sees his ilk live to savage another day. He uses body doubles to keep trigger-happy rivals guessing, never known to be in the same place for very long. Sometimes you see him in robe and turban when he makes an appearance before the adoring mobs. Other times a three-piece suit, or he sports tiger-striped camous when he ventures into the desert to check out one of his three known training camps for the youngbloods. There are claims by his followers that he can see the future.”

      “Do tell.”

      Kurtzman grunted. “Apparently he’s not bashful when it comes to touting himself an oracle of Mohammed.”

      “I’ll venture a wild guess here, but his psychic powers predict terrorist attacks.”

      “He’s been right on the money, at least the where and how of it,” Kurtzman said, cocking a grin in Brognola’s direction. “The body counts are a little off, but with each attack, whether in Israel or his favorite killing ground, Iraq, the crowds go wild in Tehran. Lately he’s been hitting the airwaves over there with predictions of total annihilation for the Great Satan, a ‘conflagration from God that will wipe America off the face of the earth in a storm of fire the world will never forget.’”

      “Blowing smoke?”

      Kurtzman shrugged. “Hard to tell. How far along Iran’s reprocessing plants are to make weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, we don’t know, but we know of at least two factories of WMD that are well on their way, and believed to be loosely controlled by an influx of Namak cash. We do know that he calls his organization of fighters the Army of Armageddon, and with radical ties all the way to Lebanon where, it’s believed, he wants to establish a power base. And, yes, in order to jumpstart his war of annihilation, presumably starting with Israel while he torches what he can in Iraq.”

      Brognola gnawed on his cigar, perused the intel packet Barbara Price had handed him earlier. During the brief pause, Brognola noticed that the Stony Man Mission Controller seemed unusually quiet, but the lady was a pro, no problem listening with one ear to the brief while she scanned the monitor of her battery-powered laptop, combing through the grim facts as he’d received them late last night from his nameless source in Shadowland. Likewise, Kurtzman had his own notebook computer, having already downloaded the CDROM to his hard drive, hooking the modem that would allow him to frame pertinent data direct from both computers to the wall monitor.

      “This,” Kurtzman said, clicking the screen to frame what looked like a typical artillery shell, “is SPLAT. Special Purpose Laser Anti-Tank.”

      Brognola waited as Kurtzman broke the screen into four quads. He saw a tracked vehicle, a UAV that looked suspiciously like a CIA Predator, and some sort of delivery system, complete with radar screen, the background appearing to be a stone hovel.

      “During a U.S. special ops raid on a stronghold believed used by Namak along the Iranian-Iraqi border, these were seized, along with blueprints and instructions strongly suspected of having their origins somewhere far outside the Mideast realm.”

      “Any ideas on who’s looking to help pile up the body count with SPLAT?”

      Kurtzman sipped from his mug, frowning. “There was some talk, the French were mentioned, but we think it’s a smoke screen to deflect blame. Since France was dumped in the crapper on oil contracts in Iraq, however, they have been schmoozing the Iranians. I’m not one to jump on the PC bandwagon, so I don’t mind saying they’re a sneaky, backstabbing lot, with a whole lot to hide in some shady dealings with Saddam, but I don’t think they have the balls to start dumping off ordnance that could be used against Coalition Forces in Iraq, though they most likely have this technology. That aside, there are no markings, serial numbers and such that we know of on the ordnance, which leaves suspicion enough to go around it could be Germans, North Koreans or Russians…”

      “Or someone on our team.”

      “It’s happened before, as we all sadly know. Now, as for SPLAT, it’s the next step in laser-guided artillery and its sister version for short and intermediate range missiles. Laser guidance has been tried in the past where field artillery is concerned, but there’s a few refinements on SPLAT. Thermal, or heat-seeking guidance systems have been upgraded, for one, the use of sophisticated super microchips installed in computer systems, developed, in part, from the U.S. Navy’s SidewinderAIM-9D. You can see the tracked vehicle with eight launch rails, I’m told twelve to twenty more shells, or short-range missiles, can be stored in ready-access pallets. As for the shells, they range anywhere from 85 mm to 155 mm. On the short-range or intermediate missile range…”

      “I bet you’re going to tell me they can be fitted with chemical or biological warheads. Or tactical nukes.”

      “Not

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