11: Chapter 11 CIA Agents

The car was stuck.

It was stuck deep. Reza heard the sound of the metal chassis scraping against the mud, and the mud flung by the spinning wheels splattered against the car body with a rhythmic patter.

The Toyota Land Cruiser behind slammed on its brakes, but the braking distance in the deep mud was far too long, and its front end rammed directly into the rear of the Land Rover.

Both vehicles were stuck in the mud pit.

The car doors opened. Several dark figures leaped out—in the pouring rain and mud, their movements were clearly professionally trained, but mud and torrential rain were obstacles no amount of training could overcome.

Reza made out the number of people: six. All were wearing dark windbreakers; two held short-barreled submachine guns, while the other four had bulging waists—concealing pistols.

Six CIA special operations personnel, a standard assassination squad configuration.

Under normal circumstances, these six could have breached the outer defenses of the Governors Mansion, eliminated their target, and vanished into the night within ten minutes.

But now, they were waist-deep in mud, struggling even to walk.

Reza raised his hand.

Forty guns pointed simultaneously at the center of the mud pit.

"Do not fire," he shouted in Persian, then switched to English, "Drop your weapons and get on the ground. You are surrounded."

The dark figures in the mud pit froze instantly.

There was a silence of a second or two. Only the sound of the pouring rain remained.

Then, a voice came from the mud pit—in English with an American Southern accent—

"Fuck you."

Immediately followed by gunfire.

It wasn't from Reza's side. It was one of the people in the mud pit, raising a submachine gun and spraying fire in the direction of the voice.

Bullets struck the earthen wall of the abandoned shepherd's shed, sending clods of mud flying.

"Return fire! Aim for the legs! Don't hit vital areas!" Reza roared.

Forty G3 rifles opened fire simultaneously in the pouring rain.

The sound of gunfire was largely muffled by the storm, but the density of the barrage was enough to tear everything in the mud pit to shreds.

Reza's order was to "aim for the legs," but more than half of the forty men were raw recruits; being able to hit a human-sized target in a stormy night was already impressive enough, let alone precision shooting.

Fortunately, the opponents were stuck in the mud, making them essentially sitting ducks.

The firefight lasted only twenty seconds.

In the mud pit, two people no longer moved—judging by their fallen postures, one had been hit in the chest, and one in the head. Two others were still struggling in the mud but had lost their combat effectiveness. The final two raised their hands.

Reza led his men to charge forward.

The mud was up to his knees. Holding a pistol in one hand, he grabbed the collar of one of the men who had surrendered and hauled him up from the mud.

The flashlight illuminated that face—

Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Around thirty-five years old. He had been shot in the left arm, and the blood was washed into a pale pink by the rain, dripping down mixed with the mud.

It wasn't Brennan.

But judging by the brand of his military boots and the model of his windbreaker—standard issue from a US military PX store—he was one hundred percent CIA.

"Name?" Reza asked in English.

The man kept his lips tightly shut, refusing to say a word.

"Doesn't matter. I can find out even if you don't tell me." Reza released his collar and said to Hassan, "Six men, two dead, two severely wounded, two can talk. Take the ones who can talk. Bury the dead and the severely wounded here; bury them deep, so they cannot be found."

"What about the cars?"

"Push them into the river. Don't even leave the license plates."

Hassan led his men to dispose of the scene.

Reza stood in the pouring rain, looking down at the two motionless corpses in the mud pit.

The blood of the Americans mixed with the Persian mud and water, slowly being diluted in the torrential rain.

He crouched down and fished a waterproof bag out of the inner pocket of one of the corpses. Inside was a document, well-sealed and barely touched by the water.

By the light of the flashlight, he opened the document and glanced at it.

It was typed on an English typewriter. The header was in the internal format of the CIA.

The content was—a memorandum regarding the "Secret Agreement between King Pahlavi and the US State Department." It detailed the amount of secret funds King Pahlavi had received from the CIA every year since the 1953 coup, the list of benefits conceded to American oil companies, and the specific locations where the US was permitted to deploy monitoring facilities in Iran.

Every item was hard evidence.

If any one of them were made public, it would be enough to ruin King Pahlavi's reputation.

Reza stuffed the document into the inner pocket of his own waterproof jacket.

This document was likely intended as "cleanup material" for the operations team—if the assassination had succeeded, they would have placed the document beside Reza's corpse to create the illusion that "the Prince was silenced because he possessed the King's secrets," framing SAVAK.

Killing two birds with one stone: eliminate the disobedient Prince, and incidentally deepen the rifts within Iran.

But now, this "framing material" had become a nuclear weapon in Reza's hands.

He straightened up, rain streaming down his cheeks.

"The interests of Persia are paramount," he said softly, then turned and walked toward the jeep.

The two living CIA agents were hog-tied and thrown in the back seat. One had already passed out from the pain, while the other kept his eyes open, his face wearing an expression of pure disbelief—

They were one of the most elite squads of the CIA's Middle East Operations Division, having executed high-risk missions in Lebanon, Yemen, and Libya without ever failing.

Yet they had ended up falling in a Persian mud pit.

Falling at the hands of a good-for-nothing Prince they thought only knew how to ride horses and drink.

The jeep started up, crushed through the mud, and vanished into the pouring rain.

Behind them, the floodwaters of the Karun River were swallowing all traces.