Chasing the Lion, page 7
He had been true to the words he had spoken to me in the 2001 meeting in Basra. Iran was attacking American soldiers.
Everywhere Parizad deployed, Iran succeeded. It didn’t matter if it was overt combat or supporting a counterinsurgency, Parizad was viewed by the Iranian cabinet as a rising star not only in military circles but potentially even in the harsh political warrens of Tehran. Those that favored Parizad liked the idea of a military man with impeccable credentials who had been endorsed by the ayatollah himself.
Those that opposed Parizad’s ascendancy were quick to come around or die. Young Dariush was not only proving himself a worthy combat commander, he also was becoming adept at organizational maneuvering. He had teamed with a fellow boxer and soldier, a man named Mahmood, who was slightly taller and broader than Parizad at six and a half feet tall and over two hundred pounds. Mahmood had the misfortune of being one of Parizad’s sparring partners after the 1988 Olympics, and in part because he had survived, the two remained close throughout their respective military careers.
After the Iraq War officially ended in 2011, Parizad pressed the Iranian advantage to deploy his clandestine special operations forces throughout western Iraq, turning many Iraqis to support the network he had created. Persian-Arab relations had always been tenuous, but in this part of the world, that old saw of the enemy of my enemy being a friend was ruling the day. The Sunnis and the Shias wanted the Americans out, and Parizad exploited that sentiment to Iran’s advantage.
Ben David and Parizad likely had overlapped during this transitional phase, but it had been a long time since I had spoken with David. Until two days ago.
Only in hindsight was I able to reverse engineer Parizad’s movements and put together how his plan unfolded. He was methodical and kept meticulous records, first in notebooks and later by spreadsheets, and even later via saving his picture, video, and audio records in the cloud, much of it recorded by smartphones and computers.
Forty-two years after the infamous Eagle Claw mission at Tabas, Iran, thirty-three years after he was denied a shot at Ray Mercer because of a bogus doping ruling, and at the same time as I was leaving Fillmore’s office in Tampa, Florida, Dariush Parizad stood in the observation room offset from an interrogation cell in a cinder-block building on a remote compound near Heidelberg, Germany.
Inside the cell was a man holding a smartphone in the air as if he were taking a selfie. He took a few steps in one direction and then stopped.
“The hack is effective on both the iPhone and Android. It invades apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to then take over the camera. When the subject has Demon Rain in his system, he sees images that aren’t really there. Those images can be manipulated remotely. We can even do deepfake videos,” Dr. Abdul Noora said.
“How does it work?” Parizad asked.
“The people in the cave, for example,” Noora said. “We gassed them with Demon Rain near the village of Tabas, and as they were trying to call for help with their phones, we projected an image onto the screens of Allah leading them to the cave. By the time they huddled inside, the sarin had worked on their nervous systems. It is a one-two punch. We can control their minds and kill them. It just depends on the impact we want to have.”
“Good work,” Parizad said. “But why my hometown?”
Parizad had moved his mother and sister to Tehran when he joined the Quds Force nearly thirty years ago. He had little connection to Tabas other than the emotional tie of where he lost his father and the place that the ayatollah had named him the Lion of Tabas.
“These were prisoners that had been released during last year’s COVID-19 outbreak. The police gathered them, unfortunately some with their wives and children, and bused them to the mountains about ten miles from Tabas. I chose that location based upon its remoteness, not even thinking about it being near your hometown.”
“That’s okay. If what you’ve developed and tested there has the effect we want in America, then maybe everything will have come full circle.”
Noora coughed and looked at Parizad. “All the experiments combined indicate that you should be able to achieve the effect you seek.”
They walked to another cell along the cinder-block corridor. Inside was a man pawing at the wall, drool running out of the corners of his wide-open mouth. He looked like a street mime pretending to be locked in an invisible cell. His hands pressed against the block, and then he removed it, staring at the spot where his hand had just been.
“We can batch Demon Rain so that it has more hallucinogenic properties or go the other way and scale more sarin into it. This is a variation of the Demon Rain hallucinogenic combination,” Noora said. “Watch.”
Noora opened the door and walked in, Parizad following. Noora tapped the shoulder of the man, who had been oblivious to their entry. He turned toward them with wide eyes and a smile. The black beard on the man’s face was an inch long. His white teeth bared in an open-mouthed smile as if he were experiencing some type of wonderment that only he could see. He was sweating profusely.
“Name?” Noora asked.
“I’m Daniel,” the man said in a perfect American dialect.
“Where are you from, Daniel?”
Daniel huffed his chest and said, “I’m from Virginia in the United States.”
Noora handed him a phone and said, “Tell me what you see.”
The man stared at the phone and lifted it up toward the ceiling as if he were taking a selfie.
“Jesus,” the man said.
“What is he saying to you?”
“That I’m to kill you,” Daniel said. He giggled slightly as if he’d just spilled a secret.
“Who can you tell about this mission?”
“No one,” Daniel said.
“Then why did you just tell us?”
His faced screwed into a puzzled knot as his eyes widened, still looking at the smartphone screen.
“I wasn’t supposed to,” he said.
“Correct. What are you to do if you accidentally tell someone about your mission?”
“Kill myself,” Daniel said.
“Can you show us how you would do that?” Noora handed Daniel a pistol.
Daniel grabbed the pistol without breaking eye contact with the screen. “Yeah. Just like this.”
He put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. The explosion from the gun boomed in the small room. Red mist sprayed onto Parizad’s face and black tactical clothes. The bullet bored through Daniel’s head and smacked into the wall. Daniel slumped to the floor, dead.
Noora turned toward Parizad and said, “So we’ve still got some work to do.”
Parizad smiled. “Yes, but not bad.”
“He was just a somebody I had coffee with the other day. Spiked it, and he followed me here.”
“Interesting,” Parizad said.
“One more,” Noora said.
They exited and walked along the hallway until it opened into a larger cell with a plexiglass viewing area directly beneath them. There were fifteen rooms off the larger common area. Parizad and Noora were looking down through the clear flooring like looking into a barren terrarium filled with pets. The common area was the size of half of a basketball court. Noora pushed a button on the wall, which opened the doors to each of the fifteen cells. The subjects stood, held up their phones, and started walking, following the images on their screens. Their necks craned as they lifted their phones and moved slowly toward Parizad and Noora above them.
“This is a better example. The mass effect of the technology and drugs. The combination creates a type of swarming. The Americans have been testing drone swarming for twenty years now, as have we. Given all our testing, I reverse engineered it into something that might work on humans. It’s hypnotic.”
The men and women in the cell were now climbing over each other, their faces misshapen, contorted, as if in agony. They formed a sort of unorganized human pyramid that resulted in one person climbing to the top, pressing his face against the plexiglass as if seeking oxygen. Breath fogged the pane beneath their feet.
“Interesting,” Parizad said. “Based on what Gottlieb and the CIA did seventy years ago?”
“Mostly,” Noora said. “The CIA conducted thousands of tests on unwitting Americans. In many ways, it was worse than what the Nazis did in Germany.”
The subjects continued to claw like zombies.
“Among other things, I’m wondering why they’re drawn to us.”
“They’ve been in isolation for days, maybe weeks. They are completely broken. They’re seeing what I choose to show them on their phones.” Noora turned, opened a door to their left, and entered a small control room, where a young Iranian man was typing on a keyboard.
“They’re seeing you, Commander, standing above them and waving them forward as you promise them release.”
Parizad stared, looked at Noora, looked at the computer monitor again, smiled, and said, “Well done, Doctor.”
Below, the subjects continued to claw their way toward them, climbing over one another, mouths open, drooling, eyes wide, silent screams frozen on their faces. Noora spun a dial that released a gas, and the people crawling over one another froze in place, dead, phones held outward, fixed in their rigid hands.
“Also very effective,” Parizad said.
“Yes, so we have some options,” Noora said.
“We have options but no time,” Parizad said.
“Of course,” Noora said. “Which is why the product is already in America with Mahmood at the farm.”
9
AS PARIZAD WAS TESTING Demon Rain and other concoctions, I was in our team house stretching for a run as my teammates got a rare moment of relaxation. We had spent enough time in Tampa that JSOC had purchased a Spanish-style, six-bedroom home on Carolina Avenue in the Venetian Isles community of Saint Petersburg, across Tampa Bay from MacDill Air Force Base. The house saved money in the long run and turned out to be a decent investment for the government, which purchased the property back in 2012 at the market low. Instead of staying in hotels and eating in restaurants, we were able to crash here when in town and eat healthier meals. While I approved the decision, it was for the troops, who appreciated the ability to have some modicum of normalcy when not deployed. It was one of the few genuine perks I’ve seen in my career.
Standing in the backyard next to two palm trees painted white around the trunks—something to do with rat control—I thought of Fillmore’s office a few miles across the water. Hobart and Van Dreeves were spotting one another on the bench press in the corner while Jackson and Brown were drinking beer and shooting the shit in the pool.
When Sally McCool came walking out of the house, all heads turned in her direction. Probably the most physically fit member of the team, she was wearing a Swiss Army one-piece racing suit that left little to the imagination. She smiled and said to Jackson and Brown, “Don’t let me interrupt your workout.” Then she shook her head, tugged a race cap and goggles on, dove into the twenty-meter pool, and began a workout.
I turned around, walked past them, and said, “One hour. SCIF.”
I jogged onto Carolina Avenue and threaded through the bayfront community at a decent clip. As I ran, my mind circled back to my team of handpicked warriors. Over the course of a career, any leader has the opportunity to choose those he wishes to mentor along the way.
* * *
MY FIRST OPPORTUNITY came along the banks of the Sava River separating Bosnia and Croatia, in December 1995. I was a major in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division about to transition back to the Rangers when the U.S. Army Europe commanding general asked for help deploying a force that had for fifty years been training primarily to defend Germany against the anticipated Soviet horde.
“Give me your special operators. Your rapid-deployment guys,” I’m told the commander in Europe had said to the Airborne Corps commander under whom I served.
I was in Heidelberg, Germany, a day later and spent a month helping the First Armored Division command team figure out how to “rapidly” deploy across the European continent into Bosnia. I was the only soldier wearing the airborne signature maroon beret, an Eighty-Second Airborne Division patch on my left shoulder, and a First Ranger Battalion scroll on my right shoulder, which signified my combat experience in the Panama raid to free the Panamanian citizens from the vise grip of then dictator Manuel Noriega’s criminal enterprise.
After bouncing between Wiesbaden, Bamberg, Heidelberg, and Grafenwöhr, I was summoned by a general to “pack my shit” and head with him to Županja, Croatia, the border village where the army had chosen to cross the river into Bosnia. We landed in a helicopter on a snow-covered hill overlooking the engineer base camp that had been swallowed by the annual flood of the Sava. The genius commander had placed his unit inside the dike of the river, because it seemed like an easier place from which to do their job of building a ribbon bridge across the Sava. The technique was to use downstream bridge erection boats pushing against interlocked bridge sections to counter the current of the river and hold the bridge in place.
The flood’s carnage of the base camp was complete, though, and there was no ribbon bridge. Tents floated downstream beneath remnants of the existing Route 55 bridge, which had been destroyed by Serb missiles. Previously, the mile-long bridge had connected Županja, Croatia, and Orašje, Bosnia.
The tops of large shipping containers poked above the silty brown water like rocks in a stream. Humvees drifted with the current. Bridge pontoons were askew, spinning in the rapids. Random firefights between the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croatians sparked in the distance. It was a shit show of the highest order, and the fiasco was being dutifully captured by an attentive media set up on the remaining chunk of bridge that spanned maybe a third of the river, like a scenic overlook, before some sawhorses and yellow tape identified the jagged, shorn edges of the bombed-out bridge deck.
Soon, a lieutenant colonel appeared, eyes downcast, as he moved to salute the general. I reached out quickly and shook his hand to prevent him from the single worst combat zone faux pas, which was saluting a man who might be in a sniper’s scope a mile away. The colonel looked at me as the general said, “Thanks, Sinclair.”
We were wearing combat gear, including helmets and body armor, and carrying weapons and ammunition. I had an M4 rifle and a Beretta pistol, standard issue back then, and a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, or dagger, which was not standard issue.
The general’s two-man security detail carried M4s, as well. They were privates, who had disembarked from the whirring chopper, which inexplicably remained in place atop this hill in the middle of an unfamiliar combat zone.
“Pardon me, General, but this helicopter should leave,” I said.
“We’ll only be a minute,” he said.
In my experience, that was all it took to kill a bunch of soldiers.
“I’ll be right back,” I said and walked to his security detail.
“Fucking airborne guys,” the general muttered.
Both security soldiers were on one knee outside the arc of the chopping helicopter blades. They wore new battle dress uniforms, the black-and-dark-green patterns in stark contrast to the white landscape upon which we had landed.
I shouted, “Follow me!” and we jogged fifty meters through the snow until we reached a good vantage point on the downward slope of the hill, and I said, “Use this rock as cover, and watch for snipers across the river.”
I looked at their name tags for the first time as they prepared to scout.
“Roger that,” Private Joe Hobart said.
“River is a mile wide,” Private Randy Van Dreeves added.
“Look over there, too,” I said. To the west, the river turned south, where some boats were struggling against the current.
“Any reason you can think that boats would be in this water?” I asked.
“Scoop up army shit floating down the river, because that dumbass colonel made a stupid decision,” Van Dreeves said.
“Attack,” Hobart said.
Even as an eighteen-year-old private, Hobart had a keen eye and a penchant for brevity. Both men could have been right, but Hobart’s assessment was my concern. The Serbs weren’t happy with the Dayton Peace Agreement, which imposed a temporary cease-fire on their pillaging of Bosnia and Croatia. From what I was seeing so far, the war was still raging. What better way to nix the deal than to stuff the American army at the river in a flare of incompetence?
I nodded and said, “Van Dreeves, you watch the town across the river. Hobart, you watch the boats.”
“Some already across,” Hobart said.
Between our position and the boats that were struggling against the floodwaters was the bridge full of journalists with cameras. There were about fifty engineers walking through the mud a quarter mile to the north.
“Rocket!” Hobart said.
I knelt next to them and looked through my binoculars. A Serbian wire-guided missile was smoking from a hidden position across the river in our direction. We weren’t the target, though.
I bolted back up the hill as the missile exploded into the helicopter and a fireball ballooned outward and into the sky. The heat licked my face as I dove to the ground and rolled down the hill. Spinning to one knee, I ran back up to find the flames too hot to penetrate, but the general and colonel, as well as the helicopter crew, did not make it out of the explosion.
Hobart shouted, “Taking fire!”
The boats on the river had fully crossed to the Croatian side and had disgorged Serbian infantry that were moving toward the bridge with the journalists, who were caught in the dilemma of recording the helicopter explosion and reporting on the attacking infantry.
“Stay low,” I said. “Provide cover. I’m grabbing those guys.” I pointed at the engineers who were now all looking up at the burning chopper.
