The Disciple

I straightened up as I looked at him. Another u

In a moment Davar joined me. She was trying to wipe the tears and dirt from her face. “Why did he follow me?” I asked her.

“He didn’t want to live anymore,” she said. “Couldn’t you see that?”

We left him there and piled into the technical. I didn’t even look into the massive hole, which was still giving off visible smoke with an acrid odor. G. W. got behind the wheel and fed gas.

He didn’t waste any time getting us going. Nobody wanted to be here when the Iranian army eventually showed up to see what happened.

I leaned forward and shouted, “Give us a look at the secondary tu

A helicopter went right over us as we roared up the access road toward the boulevard, a Hind. It circled the crater, then landed beside it. A figure stepped out and walked over to the edge.

Grafton!

I reached though the gap where the rear window in the pickup used to be and grabbed G. W.’s shoulder.

“Go back. Go back,” I shouted. “It’s Jake Grafton!”

G. W. slammed on the brakes, made the turn and roared back.

Grafton watched us come. He must have recognized us, because he waved at the Hind pilot, who lifted his machine off and flew away. Grafton threw his duffle bag into the back of the technical and climbed in. G. W. peeled out.

Grafton gri

I lay down in the bed of the pickup and tried to sleep. Amazingly, I dropped right off. It had been a long night.

General Martin Lincoln called the president to report that all the Iranian missiles had been shot down and all the launch sites seemed to be out of business. “We have drones over the sites monitoring them, and the people inside the tu

“So it’s over,” the president said, his voice pregnant with relief.

“The shooting, anyway,” Lincoln admitted. “The Israeli missiles were destroyed over Jordan, so there may be a serious fallout problem there.”

“Bomb the Iranian reactors,” the president told him.

“Radioactivity will be released. The environmentalists will howl.”

“That’s unavoidable, but we’re not doing this again. Bomb the reactors.”

“Yes, sir,” said General Lincoln. After he hung up, he gave the appropriate orders.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Jake Grafton had an agenda, which should have been no surprise to me, but to tell you the truth, I hadn’t been thinking much beyond the vaporization of Tehran or sealing the executive bunker. Call me shallow.

When I awoke from my nap in the back of that old pickup, I saw Grafton in the passenger seat talking to Davar, who sat between him and the driver, G. W. Hosein. Haddad Nouri was standing tall behind the machine gun, and Ahmad Qajar was sitting in the bed of the truck, cradling his broken arm. Haddad passed me a canteen; I guzzled some water. Actually drained most of it.

Finally I took a look around. Not a soldier did I see on the streets, nor were there very many people or vehicles.

“The empty city,” Ahmad said, gri

Hosein took us to the embassy a

Grafton shook hands with the three of them, then climbed behind the wheel. We finally came to a driveway that went into what appeared to be an old estate. The building was a huge, ramshackle place, with bricks and ivy and lots of windows. The truck pulled up right in front; Jake Grafton got out, then helped Davar out. She was almost as much of a mess as I was, filthy from head to toe.

Jake Grafton paused and grabbed my hand. He looked me in the eyes, gri

Then he released my hand and took Davar’s elbow. They went in, and I trailed along. About a hundred things bubbled up that I wanted to ask Grafton, but I sensed that now wasn’t the time. He did murmur to me that this place was a mental institution.

They conferred with the man on the desk, who led them away. I located a men’s room and tried to wash some of the dirt off.

When I came out, the lobby, if that’s what it was, was empty. I found a chair and sat in it.

About a half hour later Grafton and Davar came back with a medium-sized fellow wearing a bedsheet. He seemed somewhat dazed. Grafton introduced me. He was General Habib Sultani. “General Sultani has been a patient here,” Grafton said, “and he wants to see the bunker.”

We piled into the truck. Grafton got behind the wheel, and Sultani sat in the passenger seat. Davar sat between them to act as translator.

Away we went. I was feeling better by this time. My head was clearer, and every muscle I had hurt like hell, but I was alive and I felt pretty good about it.

Grafton drove us along the ridge where Joe had parked the tank, then downslope toward the bunker’s back entrance. We found the holes where the bunker busters went into the ground, two hundred yards upslope from the entrance, twenty feet apart. They were in the center of a gentle depression. The earth had subsided, filling the tu

We went back to the Mosalla Prayer Grounds. Several dozen young adults in civilian clothes, men and women, were staring into the hole. Grafton parked as near to the remains of the collapsed mosque as he could get and led Sultani and Davar across the loose earth and rock to the edge. I trailed along. The four of us stood on the berm of earth that marked the rim and looked in. The crater wasn’t very deep; the bottom was full of packed dirt and rock, yet fumes were still wafting up. Maybe the bombs had ruptured the ceiling of hell.

“Iran has a choice,” Grafton told Sultani, through Davar, as the other spectators looked at us curiously. “You can dig Ahmadinejad and his po litical and religious allies out of there, if they are still alive, and he will use his thugs to retake control of the country, make some more bombs and rant on about ‘Death to America’; or you can see that he stays in that hole and let the politicians who remain aboveground rechart the nation’s course.”

I looked around, in all directions. There wasn’t a single soldier in sight. The other kibitzers were whispering among themselves as they surveyed the scene. Maybe they sensed that something terrible had happened here. Or something hopeful, depending on your point of view.

“It is possible to be a Muslim nation,” Grafton continued, “tolerate dissent, argue about the political choices the nation faces, and sell oil to the world and use the proceeds to build a new Iran. Instead of spending money on nuclear reactors and weapons and a comfortable life for the mullahs, build schools, roads, sewers, factories and hospitals, loan money to entrepreneurs who will build companies to manufacture goods for domestic use and export, build a brighter future for every Iranian. The choice, quite simply, is up to you.”

I didn’t know where Sultani had been emotionally these last few months or weeks, but as Grafton talked I could see him mulling the possibilities.

“Regardless of our personal wishes,” Grafton continued, almost talking to himself, “it isn’t possible to withdraw from the world. Nor is it possible to remake the world into what we want it to be; that’s a fool’s errand. We must accept the world as it is and live within it as best we can, as our conscience dictates.”

Sultani said little and promised nothing. He kicked a rock or two into the hole, watched the fumes leak out, and finally asked to be taken to the Ministry of Defense.