Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

Sadeghi was a tall man, almost skeletally thin, in his fifties, in a dark shirt, no tie. He had first made his reputation, Zahra recalled, as one of the militant Islamist students who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Sadeghi gestured for her to sit facing a marble table he used as a desk. One of his men, young, with a sparse, young man’s mustache, stood against the wall behind her, a ZOAF pistol in his belt.

“ Salam . Are you all right, Sarkar khanom Ravanipour?” Sadeghi said sympathetically, not taking his dark eyes off her. “We were concerned about you.”

Zahra bit her lip. “Mersi, mersi. Khayli mamnun, jenab Sardar Sadeghi agha,” she whispered. Thank you. Thank you so much, General Sadeghi, sir, a tear glistening in the corner of her eye. “I was so frightened.”

“They forced you to go with them?” Sadeghi asked, lighting a cigarette. “Would you like chai ?” gesturing for the young man to bring them tea, not waiting for her response.

“Mersi,” she said. “It was terrible. One minute we were prisoners being taken in the police van, and suddenly the Swiss, Westermann, somehow managed to get free and kill the two guards. I don’t know how. He is a demon, that one.”

“More than you know. You pretended to go along?” Sadeghi said, gesturing for her to go on.

“What choice did I have? Besides, I never thought we’d get away. He almost killed us!”

“How did you get away?”

“He stole a car and we came into the city and got on the Metro. I was alone with them. What was I to do? I thought you would follow us. I expected to be arrested again any second,” she said. She held her hands out. They were trembling. “Look at me. I thought I was going to die.”

“We followed your cell phone with GPS on the Metro. Some beshoor idiots had taken it and we had to waste time arresting them.” He grimaced. “They’ll never take anything again.”

The young man came back into the room with a tray of tea with a dish of nabat , candied sugar on a stick, with fried zoolbia pastries, which he placed on the table. Sadeghi took a glass of tea and poured one for her from a small silver samovar. Zahra bit into a sweet zoolbia and glanced at the window between the parted curtains, seeing only the light from the room reflected back at her.

“You know where they are now?” Sadeghi asked, stirring his tea with a nabat sugar stick.

“Of course,” she said, and gave him the address of the safe house apartment on Second Street. Sadeghi gestured to the young man, who immediately left. The safe house would be stormed within minutes, she assumed.

“Are you taking over the al Quds Force?” she asked, sipping her tea, not looking at him. “I can’t believe Muhammad jan is a traitor,” referring to Ghanbari. “Is he?”

“How is it they let you go out on your own, Zahra jan ?” Sadeghi said, putting a black rubber truncheon on the table.

“What are you saying?” she asked, panicked. “I did everything you told me. I called you and set it up so you could capture him. I’m working for you, Farzan Sadeghi jan . Not VEVAK, not Ghanbari, not General Vahidi jenab . You! You know it!”

“Do you imagine I’m a child that you can deceive me, you jendeh ?” Sadeghi snapped, coming around the table, grabbing her by her hair. “You were working with the Swiss, Westermann. He is CIA. Do you think we don’t know this? And then he just lets you walk out on your own so you can call us? What do you take me for?”

“Why wouldn’t they trust me?” she cried. “I was arrested with them. Handcuffed. Taken to Evin Prison with them. They sent me out to shop for food, that’s all. They’re probably wondering where I am this second.”

“Because this Westermann madar sag is not stupid like you, you gav ,” he said. Cow. He picked up a rubber truncheon and pulled her by her hair so she was bent over. “Do you think he hasn’t asked himself how we caught him and Ghanbari in the cabin in Dizin? Do you?” he shouted, smashing the truncheon on the peroneal nerve on the back of her thigh, above the knee. “Do you?” hitting her again.

She screamed. Her leg collapsed under her and she fell to the floor. She clutched the back of her thigh, unable to move.

“Please!” she sobbed. “I did what you told me. I’ll do anything. Don’t hurt me anymore, ghorban .”

“ Khob ,” he said, okay, pulling her up and putting her, curled in agony, back in the chair. “This time you’ll tell me everything, won’t you?”

“Yes, ghorban ,” she muttered, looking desperately past him toward the slice of window between the parted curtains. “Anything.”

From his perch on the roof of a ten-story apartment building two blocks away, Scorpion listened intently through ear buds. This was what he had wanted to find out, beyond flushing Sadeghi out, why he wanted her to see Sadeghi. To find out what Sadeghi knew and how he knew it. And to confirm that he was the Gardener.

He checked the range finder again. It showed he was 450 meters from the office where Zahra and Sadeghi were on Baghestan 5. The length of about five football fields. Through the sniper scope he could make out the lighted interior of the room in the space between the parted curtains. He had only a glimpse of Zahra and only part of the back of a tall man in a dark shirt. He could take the shot now, he thought, settling the Nakhir rifle on top of his backpack, making sure it was secure for stability. He looked around. From this distance at night and wearing a dark jacket, he was virtually invisible, though that wasn’t why he had selected this building for the hit.

The key to any lethal operation, he knew, wasn’t the setup, but the exit. Finding a spot, say in an empty apartment across the street from the target, would make the shot trivially easy. Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with an old 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a 4x scope at a maximum distance of eighty-eight yards-as a Marine sharpshooter, Oswald had routinely received high scores on head-sized targets at two hundred yards-with Kennedy’s car a slow-moving target heading away from the shooter at a steady rate of approximately eleven miles per hour. Great shooting wasn’t the issue. Getting away was.

On a single residential street in a neighborhood with plenty of local security, given the opposition’s ability to seal the street and nearby streets almost immediately, it would make escape next to impossible. Odds were, within 120 seconds of firing the shot he’d be dead or on his way to the torture cells in Evin Prison.

Firing from the roof of a tall building two blocks away meant there would be no direct visual by anyone or any security camera of the shot or its trajectory or the muzzle flash. Anyone on the scene would have a much more difficult time calculating the trajectory and source of the shot. There would be a half dozen or more full city blocks facing the target house that would have to be shut down and searched. Scorpion had timed the elevator and stairs in the building he was in and determined he could be down from the roof, out of the building, and on Pesyan Avenue in less than seventy seconds. And from there by foot to Vali Asr, one of the busiest streets in the city, in another two minutes or less.

At 450 meters, the shot wasn’t especially difficult. The real issue was calculating the elevation and windage correctly for the mil-dot scope. Elevation, because a bullet starts slowing and dropping the instant it leaves the barrel; windage, because a single mil in diameter off at a distance of 450 meters would result in a gap of about eighteen inches at the target. The sniper scope had a dial with 0.1 mil increments. After checking and calculating twice, he set it for fourteen clicks elevation. As for windage, he could feel just the barest touch of wind on his face at about a forty-five degree angle coming toward him. There were no flags or clothes on lines to check, but holding a strip of cloth in front of him, it barely stirred. He estimated a three mph wind, which at forty-five degrees gave a value of seventy percent on a 4.5 MOA, or Minute of Angle. It wasn’t worth a horizontal adjustment in the scope. At 450 meters the shot would be off by two inches at most to the right. He would simply aim a hair to the left to compensate.