The Zarrabian Incident Read online

  The

  Zarrabian

  Incident

  C.A. James

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2015 C.A. James

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Golden Gate Bridge cover photo by Jaxon Stevens.

  Edited by Ben Silverman and Dawn Daniels

  Cover Design by C.A. James

  TO MY WIFE LAURI

  With all my love.

  Your belief in me

  made this book possible,

  and your wisdom

  made it even better.

  And your grammar too.

  That helped.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Attack

  Escape

  Betrayal

  Reunion

  Payback

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Awareness slowly returned. Where was he? Around him, dust and darkness swirled, filled with vague shapes and senseless ghosts. Maybe he should sit up? Yes, that seemed like a good idea. He struggled for a moment, but his body didn’t cooperate. Something heavy seemed to be on his chest, pinning him to the floor and crushing his breath away. Was there a wall on his chest?

  Cries and screams started to penetrate the fierce ringing in his ears. Fleeting fragments of memory emerged from the fog in his brain and reassembled themselves . . . a drive to Tehran . . . the Grand Bazaar . . . the whine of a cruise missile . . . an explosion.

  Yasmin and Mina! Where were they?

  Full awareness surged through his brain. He turned his head, ignoring the vertigo, and tried to see through the murk for a sign of his wife or daughter. But the air was filled with smoke, dust, and grit, stinging his eyes and nose and making it impossible to see. He struggled against the immense weight on his chest, but it was hopeless; the effort only made him gasp more.

  A breath of wind swirled through the dust and smoke, clearing the murk momentarily. He looked around frantically, searching for any sign of his family. There! He could see Yasmin on the ground in the rubble, her head resting on one of the shopping bags that she’d carried just moments before. Her face was turned toward him, completely unmarked by the explosion, but her eyes were closed. It took a few seconds for his mind to register. Only half of his wife was there.

  But where was his daughter? The breeze swirled again, revealing Mina lying a few meters from her mother. A pool of bright red blood spread from under her head.

  With a loud crash, a shower of bricks tumbled over Yasmin and Mina’s bodies, and redoubled the weight on Zarrabian’s chest. He felt the last vestiges of air being crushed from his lungs. The ringing in his ears softened, and the sounds of cries and screams faded. The world grew dark.

  Attack

  Zarrabian looked up from the newspaper he was pretending to read. His eyes scanned the restaurant, checking each of the three drivers on his team. They’d arrived at the rendezvous separately and hadn’t spoken or made eye contact yet.

  The truck stop was just off US Highway 101, two dozen miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had a no-nonsense atmosphere, the rough friendliness and camaraderie of truckers in their element. The kitchen served what they wanted: piles of bacon and eggs, mountains of pancakes, and strong coffee. And the newspapers were free.

  Two of his men, sitting at opposite ends of the lunch counter, had finished eating. One nodded as a trucker seated next to him talked and gestured at the baseball game on TV. The other was getting a refill. Zarrabian watched as the young waitress, soft and plump like so many American girls, smiled and leaned forward just a bit too much while she poured. Zarrabian’s brow started to furrow at her immodesty, but he caught himself. Today he was a trucker, not a soldier.

  Zarrabian took another sip of his coffee. It was good, surprisingly rich, an unexpected pleasure in this truck stop. In a country of lite beer and fast-food hamburgers, good coffee was scarce. He held it to his face and let the steaming aroma fill his senses.

  His third man was at a table by himself, finishing his meal. Zarrabian suppressed a surge of impatience. His men needed a good meal. They were on schedule. There was no need to rush.

  His team was dressed to blend in. Zarrabian wore a faded blue denim jacket over a plaid flannel shirt, topped by a baseball cap. He’d stuffed a pack of cigarettes into his shirt pocket to complete the outfit. His men wore similar garb.

  Zarrabian’s complexion was darker than most of these truckers, but he could easily pass for the second-generation son of Iranian immigrants. Here in California, he’d been mistaken several times for one of the Latinos whose ancestors owned this land so long ago, in the time before Americans invaded Mexico’s Alto California and claimed it for their own.

  Underneath the trucker disguise, his body was that of a soldier. Decades of service in an army that guarded uncountable square kilometers of rugged, dry mountains and desert sands had made him hard and lean.

  He looked back at his newspaper. The stories seemed so trivial. Burglaries, a drought, a minor scandal in the American Congress, rising oil prices—tomorrow these would be nothing.

  “More coffee, sir?” He looked up. The waitress smiled and raised her coffee pot questioningly.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Well you have a wonderful day, OK? Come see us again!”

  She set his check down and moved efficiently to the next table. He glanced at it, taking out his wallet. His hand trembled slightly as he removed money from behind a photograph of his wife and daughter.

  He dropped money on the counter, stood, and then briefly made eye contact with each of the other three drivers on his team. The mission was on.

  Outside, Zarrabian climbed into his truck and pretended to write on a clipboard while he watched the restaurant’s entrance in his mirror. One by one, the other drivers emerged and climbed into their trucks. Twin puffs of black soot belched from the exhaust stacks as each truck rumbled to life. Zarrabian started his engine as a plain white delivery van pulled into the parking lot and stopped alongside him.

  His team was ready.

  What was it the ancient had said? “We make war that we may have peace.” So true.

  Christine Garrett took her eyes off her sails for an instant—just long enough to glance at her competitor’s position.

  “Damn!”

  Kerry’s boat was four lengths ahead of her and two boat lengths to leeward—a dead heat. They were just one minute from the windward buoy of the race course, where they’d turn and head for the finish line.

  They were out past the Golden Gate in vintage San Francisco summer weather: a stiff, cold wind and brilliant blue sky. A dark wall of fog lurked a mile farther out. Behind them, twenty other racers were bashing through the waves, but unless something dramatic happened, it was between her and Kerry.

  Sailing was more than a hobby for Christine Garrett. It was her passion, her escape from the daily grind, some even said her raison d’être. In twenty-six years on the job, she’d moved from a rookie reporter to senior investigator for the Bay Area’s biggest TV station, with frequent national coverage of her big stories. At age fifty-one, she was one of the best. She had standing job offers from a dozen other stations around the country and had received an inquiry from the BBC.

  But her real passion was sailing. The daughter of an a
stronomer at the Lick Observatory, Christine had spent her childhood on Mt. Hamilton. The mountain’s isolation meant safety for the eleven children in her tiny elementary school. They were mostly left free to fend for themselves after school, and used their freedom to roam the grassy, oak-dotted mountaintop. It was the best life she could imagine, and she felt sorry for the city kids she knew.

  Then one day Pop announced he’d finally been promoted, and the next thing she knew the moving truck hauled her whole life to a little house near the University of California in Santa Cruz. She was horrified. A high school with a thousand students? A backyard the size of a postage stamp? Creeps, hippies, drunks, and weirdos on the streets? She crawled into her room and buried herself in books and TV.

  Then Pop bought a sailboat, a fast racer called a Santa Cruz 27. He practically had to drag her from her room for their first outing, and once they arrived at the boat, she’d sat sullenly in the rear of the cockpit while Pop and her brother had made ready to sail.

  A light breeze had pushed the boat out of the dock and silently up the harbor, past the restaurants and past the stony arms of the two jetties. As they emerged into the open ocean, a fresh breeze pressed against the white sails; the boat heeled and picked up speed, and the shore quickly receded. There was nothing but the boat, the wind, the waves, and the salty spray stinging her cheeks. It was magical. She felt free again.

  By the time Christine was fifteen, she was a better sailor than Pop or her brother, and Pop started letting her take the boat out singlehanded. The twenty-seven foot boat was a lot for one pair of hands to manage, but she she’d made her father sit idle during three successive Wednesday-night races and won two of them. He was convinced.

  Where once she’d had the mountain top, she now had the ocean. A hundred yards from shore and you might as well be a hundred miles; the ocean was yours. No creeps or weirdos, no press of a thousand high school students rushing from class to class, nobody who cared whether she was wearing the latest fashion or a cool hairdo. Seagulls, pelicans, and the occasional dolphin kept her company. Her hair styles were courtesy of the wind, fog, and ocean spray; she had little choice in the matter. For makeup, she wore SPF 100 sunblock and white zinc-oxide cream smeared across her lips.

  Three and a half decades of sailing had made her one of the best. Her sailing today had been perfect: the racing buoy was dead ahead. But Kerry was paying for an earlier mistake: he’d made his last tack a couple seconds too early, and now his course would take him almost a boat length downwind of the buoy. He was going to have to tack twice to recover from his mistake, and the turns would cost him precious seconds. Christine had the urge to raise her fists into the air in victory, but couldn’t take them off the tiller.

  Could he do it? It was too close to call. The moment Kerry made his first tack to port, he’d lose right of way to her starboard tack. If he was too slow and she had to turn to avoid bumping boats, he’d be disqualified from the race.

  She loved these tactical duals.

  She checked Kerry’s position again; it was close. Very close. She cranked the groaning jib winch in another notch and brought the boat a half point harder into the wind.

  Kerry started to move. He was going to tack! This was it. She held her course, aiming directly for the rapidly approaching buoy.

  In a flurry of action, Kerry tacked his boat across the wind and trimmed his jib. Christine tensed—would he pass in front of her? No! He was too late!

  “Starboard!” she yelled. “Got you, Kerry!”

  At her yell, Kerry was forced to turn. She felt a rush of glee as he passed behind her.

  She drew abeam of the buoy and pulled the tiller to weather, then quickly eased the sails. Watergate surged forward as the wind got behind it, racing toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Behind her, Kerry executed his second tack and rounded the buoy perfectly. She’d taken the mark, but Kerry was still breathing down her neck.

  He quickly altered his course to get directly upwind and steal the wind from her sails. She altered her course too, but knew that Kerry would be matching her, move for move. He was catching up.

  Christine looked at the spinnaker sail lashed in its bag on the foredeck. It was the namesake of the Sphinx, a San Francisco yacht that, over a century earlier, had put up a billowing sail so huge that it became the “Sphinx’s acre.” A century later, it had evolved into the brightly colored balloon-like “spinnaker” sail that was waiting on her foredeck.

  She could almost hear it calling to be unleashed. It was a risky choice. Spinnakers were for light to medium conditions and could be very difficult to handle, even dangerous, in a single-handed race.

  But she wanted to win—badly.

  She looked back. There wasn’t enough distance. Kerry was gaining. She felt her sails slack just a bit as Kerry’s boat moved on top of her wind again.

  It was now or never.

  Christine pulled on the lines. The spinnaker pole jumped off the deck to its ready position, its windward guy taut. She uncleated the halyard and hauled. The sail leapt free from its bag and climbed to the top of her mast, billowing and snapping untamed in the wind. Finally ready, she winched in the leeward sheet.

  The wind filled the huge sail’s belly with a snap. She grabbed the tiller and pulled hard, wrestling for control. The Watergate surged ahead, sailing so fast that she started overtaking the waves. Christine struggled for control as the boat ground up the back of each wave under the relentless power of the huge sail, crested the top, then accelerated wildly down the wave’s face like a surfer on a huge breaker.

  Ten exhilarating and exhausting minutes later, the Golden Gate Bridge loomed in front of her. A few of her fellow racers, left far behind by her rash choice of sails, had finally raised their spinnakers, but Christine was too far ahead. The race was hers!

  A sudden gust hit the huge spinnaker, making Watergate reel to one side, threatening to spin out of control. Christine strained at the tiller, pulling fiercely to regain control.

  With a loud crack!, her spinnaker sheet parted. The huge sail, which moments ago looked like a beautiful half-balloon soaring across the seas, transformed into a snapping, flapping, horrible mess, shaking her mast and rigging.

  “Crap! You piece of . . . goddamn it!”

  She rounded up to spill the wind from her sails, preparing to heave to and haul down the shredded sail before it could entangle the rest of her rigging. Dead in the water, Christine watched helplessly as Kerry overtook her, followed closely by the rest of the racing fleet.

  “Hey Christine, need any help?”

  “Up yours, Kerry!”

  Kerry laughed and waved. “See you at the dock!”

  Zarrabian’s truck convoy wound its way south down the long hill past Sausalito, then around the last few curves of Highway 101. They’d caught several tantalizing, distant views of the Golden Gate Bridge as the freeway twisted and descended, but the bridge quickly disappeared behind the hills each time.

  As they passed Alexander Avenue, the massive Golden Gate Bridge finally came into full view. Zarrabian couldn’t help but admire it. The bridge’s mighty cables spanned more than a kilometer of blue, wind-whipped waters, joining San Francisco and Marin. It was a magnificent work of engineering, architecture, and art.

  A short few minutes later, the convoy rolled onto the bridge, carefully obeying the forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Zarrabian checked his mirrors; the trucks were in perfect formation. Ahead, traffic was light. There was plenty of room.

  He reached the center of the span where the huge cables nearly meet the deck. To the west he could see sailboats racing, leaving trails of white foam in their wakes. One even had its colorful spinnaker sail flying. They had no idea what was going on right over their heads. But they soon would.

  Zarrabian jerked his steering wheel violently left. Behind him, the second truck mirrored his movement. He knew the third and fourth trucks would do the same, creating a carefully choreographed ballet of violence as the fo
ur trucks overturned in unison.

  He felt the truck lean heavily to one side as it careened across the lanes of the bridge into oncoming traffic. The cargo in his trailer, deliberately packed to be top heavy, started to topple the big rig. Zarrabian clutched the steering wheel tightly as the huge truck crashed onto its side, screeching down the pavement in a cloud of dust and sparks. He felt a couple thumps.

  Amidst the violence of the crash, Zarrabian’s mind was oddly calm. He supposed the thumps were collisions with cars in the oncoming northbound lane. He felt mildly sorry for the drivers, but another part of his mind told him that at this relatively low speed, their airbags would protect them. With any luck, the northbound lane would be completely blocked by his truck.

  The screeching stopped. Zarrabian was hanging by his seatbelt in the now-sideways cab. Thousands of hours of training kicked in as he swung his foot off the brake and onto the passenger seat, unsnapped his seatbelt, and stood up, using the seats and steering wheel as footholds.

  He reached behind the driver’s seat to extract a broomstick, cut exactly to length for this moment, pulled the door latch, and pushed upward to open the door over his head. Using the broomstick to prop the door open, he climbed out.

  Zarrabian quickly surveyed the scene from atop the overturned truck. Horns were blaring. A few people were shouting and crying. He ignored it; there was work to do.

  The four trucks had crashed perfectly in two pairs, each pair forming a complete wall across all lanes of the bridge with a twenty-meter gap of clear space between them. The white cargo van was parked perfectly in the center of their instant fortress.

  Ibrihim, the van’s driver, was already in motion, flinging the doors open. Zarrabian saw the other three trucks’ doors opening as their drivers repeated his escape maneuver and climbed atop their overturned truck cabs.

  Perfect.

  He reached down into the truck, grasped the end of a rope that was tied loosely to a handgrip near the door, and hauled. It was heavy, but it felt good as his shoulders, arms, and back bent to the task, strong again after his long recuperation. A military duffel bag appeared at the end of the rope.