The Big Blue Sky: Fifty-one

The bodies lay in the alley, not twenty yards from bristling coils of razor wire strung across the street and around the long apartment block in both directions. The man was face down, appearing as though he had been frozen in mid run. He was dressed in a loose fitting beige kafiya. His body dipped unnaturally in the middle where dark blood pooled, as if it was held in a bowl. One arm lay close to one side, the palm turned upward. The other had suffered the full weight of the man’s falling body and was bent cruelly just above the elbow.

Beside him lay a middle aged woman. She was sprawled on her back, one arm outstretched and pleading. Her handsome Persian face was pale, and painted with a mixture of agony and confusion. She was dressed in a pink terry-cloth bathrobe, now open to expose a white blood spattered slip beneath. A loosely tied hijab covered the woman’s long dark hair, which was streaked with rivulets of silver. The young Azeri conscript who had fired the fatal wounds became so inconsolable that he had to be hospitalized.

The entire block had been cordoned off, trapping a number of people within. Razor wire and flood lights went off, the perimeter secured by soldiers, police and guard dogs. It had been simultaneous, four of the six American captives died almost immediately. A fifth was clinging to life in a military hospital, unconscious and without any notable brain activity. The last, a young Army Staff Sergeant, who had been held alone in a bank vault near the airport was apparently unaffected. All of the officers who had taken part in the battle and had accompanied the Americans to Tehran, seventy soldiers as well as an entire village near the crash site and simply dropped dead, as if someone had flipped a switch. Given the circumstances, a shoot to kill order for anyone attempting to escape the quarantined area was arguably unavoidable.

The bodies were the human face to the unfolding tragedy. The quarantines all around the country had proved nightmarish to pull off. People fled in panic, trudging through sewers, disappearing into the night or slipping through cordons as they struggled to close off whole blocks amid urban sprawl. Police and soldiers and doctors were allowed to pass after viewing the bodies, and few if any precautions were taken once the order was given to move the dead. If the deaths had been caused by a pathogen that was easily transmitted from person to person, the initial response might well have spread it throughout the population already.

The mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths drove the Iranian leadership into a near panic. Within an hour Iranian airspace was closed and the military thrown into chaos. The immediate reaction was that this was indeed a biological attack by the Americans, some long feared sneak attack of some sort. But it couldn’t be confirmed, and after several hastily conducted autopsies no one was any closer to an answer. In truth, in all but one of the seven independent post mortems, only one had correctly identified severe brain hemorrhage as the cause of death, and only because that was conducted in a hospital with CT Scanning equipment, as opposed to the others done at military bases, outlying clinics, and in one case, a woefully outdated local mortuary. What was sure was that it was well beyond any reasonable chance that all the deaths, occurring at precisely the same moment were a coincidence.

From the Islamic revolution during the late Seventies, Iran saw the United States as its greatest enemy. It began a long covert war between Iran and the West, with assassinations, sabotage and open hostilities. Almost immediately the new Iranian Islamic Republic adopted Hamas in Lebanon, as well as their patrons, the Palestinian Liberation organization under Yasser Arafat, joining a common front against Israel and the West. In response, the Americans aided Iraq against Saddam’s war against Tehran.

Cyber warfare against the West had been in the works for years, targeting US companies, satellites, power grids and the like. Sleeper cells had been in place since the first months of the Islamic revolutions, prepared to unleash waves of terror attacks against soft targets around the globe and across the United States. Some would attack shopping malls and public gatherings to terrorize the population, while others would target infrastructure: bring down a bridge, blow up a railway line and bring down a hand full of highway overpasses in any American city and it would become paralyzed for weeks or months.

The operatives had lived and worked in the US and the West for years, often decades, awaiting orders or the signal to undertake a given operation. Those orders would come through foreign news sources, local classifieds, coffee house message boards or Facebook. Some were ex-patriots and émigrés; others were sympathizers, criminals, and even some willing to make a fast buck.

Simultaneous to terror attacks Iran would scuttle several large freighters in the narrow Straits of Hormuz, cutting off sea-going traffic in and out of the Gulf, and effectively trapping two American fleets. Combined air and sea suicide assaults by the Iranians would turn the Gulf in a cauldron. Bridges and roads all along the Iraqi border would be mined and blown up. Already there was an alarming number of Iranian troop movements into the mountains, while others began dissolving among the population all around the country for the inevitable insurgency against an expected Allied invasion

Once the order was given, the government would scatter, or flee to sanctuaries. Iran and its people would suffer America’s punishment and the years of hardship to follow. That was their history, far more of the people than the government. The nation had lasted five thousand years, from the advent of farming through the Iron and Bronze Ages. They survived Alexander’s armies, the Mongol hordes, the Shah’s abuses, Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs. This they could surely endure.

But the order wasn’t given, at least not yet, despite the desperate pleas of the army and the apocalyptic fatalism of the ruling party. In the end, it was the Mullahs, the nation’s religious leaders that called for prudence. If it came to war, they said, the Mullahs would offer their unanimous support, but given the terrible destruction that would rain down upon the Iranian people, a moment’s pause, at the very least, was justified. There was still time to prevent a war, but the moments remaining grew scarcer and more precious each second that passed. No one could have known that best hope for stopping war were fighting for their lives on a lonely rain-swept stretch of road among the wilds of Northern Michigan seven thousand miles away.