128: Chapter 125 One Day

May 12, 1981, Ahvaz.

Reza slept until nine in the morning.

This was the first time since the Fao Peninsula that he wasn't woken up by a radio, a phone call, or the sound of gunfire. When he woke up, the light outside the window was already bright, there was no one walking in the corridor, and the signal light on the communication console was green—no emergency intelligence, no frontline war reports, no decisions that needed to be made immediately.

He lay in bed for nearly two minutes, waiting for the habitual sense of anxiety to wash over him.

It didn't.

He got up, washed his face, and changed into casual clothes—not his military uniform, but a gray cotton shirt that Fatima's people had bought for him in downtown Ahvaz; the tag was still on it.

He ate breakfast. Not at the headquarters, but at a tin table in the backyard of the military factory. Fatima's assistant brought bread, white cheese, and a cup of tea.

Fatima was sitting nearby, without a folder or a notebook. This was a rare state for her.

"You are actually resting," she said.

"I promised you."

"I thought you would say 'Wait one more day'."

Reza took a sip of tea and didn't answer that.

There were several banyan trees in the yard with large canopies. After the ceasefire, the security pressure on the military factory had eased, and workers sometimes sat under the trees at noon. Today, two young technicians were playing chess in the shade. One of them began to regret a move halfway through and repeatedly tried to take it back, while the other refused, and the two whispered and bickered.

Reza watched for a while and said: "Those two playing chess, how is their skill?"

Fatima adjusted her glasses: "The one on the left is in alloy materials; he participated in the design of the formula for the casing of the Persia-4 Missile. The one on the right is in electrical engineering, a backbone in anti-aircraft radar signal processing."

"Age?"

"Both are twenty-five or twenty-six, only a few years out of university."

Reza nodded and said nothing more.

He finished the rest of his bread, drank the tea, and sat by the tin table watching the play of light and shadow in the yard. The banyan leaves moved gently in the wind, and the sunlight leaked through the gaps in the leaves, falling to the ground in fragmented shapes.

Fatima took a small notebook out of her pocket, instinctively preparing to write something down, then stopped her hand and put the notebook back.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Thinking," Reza said, "if this war had never started, where would those two be now."

Fatima didn't reply. She knew Reza didn't need her to answer.

"Maybe in university," he continued, his voice very flat, "maybe abroad, maybe in some small company in Tehran, doing things that no one remembers."

"But the war started," Fatima said.

"Yes."

He stood up and set the teacup down.

"This afternoon I want to look at the specification document for that chip," he said, "I don't want you to go get it now, wait until this afternoon. This morning I'll go for a walk first."

Fatima looked at him, confirming that he said "walk" and not "inspect".

"The channel to the south has been repaired, and water has been brought in now," she said, "You can go there."

Reza walked out of the military factory alone.

Two of Hassan's men followed him at a distance of about thirty meters. He turned his head and looked at them, and they had no intention of turning back—this was the minimum security standard Reza allowed, and Hassan had insisted on it for a long time, eventually, he compromised.

He walked along a dirt road south of the factory.

Ahvaz after the ceasefire was different from when he first arrived. At that time, there were checkpoints everywhere in the city, there was a curfew on the streets in the middle of the night, shop iron gates were closed before dark every day, and planes would occasionally fly overhead, causing people to instinctively lower their heads.

Now, there was none of that.

On both sides of the dirt road were low shrubs and wasteland, and further south was the repaired irrigation canal. The water was yellowish-brown, flowing very slowly, and a few birds were walking around on the bank, not wanting to fly away even when they saw people approaching.

Reza stood by the canal for a while.

He remembered the sentence he wrote in the dark blue notebook last night—"I am twenty-one years old this year."

When he wrote it, he was just recording it truthfully, but after finishing it, he felt a bit strange. Twenty-one years old; in the twenty-first century, he would probably be just a sophomore in university, worrying about final exams, drinking a lot of coffee, sleeping very little, feeling that the world was big and life was slow.

Now he was on the edge of an irrigation canal in southwestern Iran, three days into a ceasefire, having defeated an opponent, taken over a city, and holding fourteen Scud Missile launchers of unknown location and a two-year negotiation clock in his hands.

He squatted down and touched the water in the canal with his finger; it was cold.

He didn't know if this counted as a kind of success.

Winning was true. Surviving was true. But what was the price of winning—three hundred and seventeen people killed in Basra, that was the figure for the last battle; adding in the ones before that, from the Pump Station all the way to today, he hadn't calculated the exact number.

It wasn't that he didn't have the ability to calculate, it was that he didn't dare to calculate it clearly.

He stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers.

The canal stretched eastward along the wasteland, the light hitting the water surface, blinding.

He walked for about twenty minutes, then returned the same way.

In the afternoon, at the military factory, in Fatima's laboratory.

The specification document for the Persia-4 chip was spread out on the table, and Reza was reading it page by page with his glasses on. Fatima was nearby, waiting for him to ask.

"This model," Reza pointed to a spot, "what is the export control level in Japan?"

"Civilian high-end electronics, theoretically not restricted by the 'Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls', but in practice, Japanese manufacturers need government approval to sell to Middle East countries."

"Can it be obtained after government approval?"

"If the buyer is a legitimate scientific research institution in Pakistan, the possibility of obtaining approval is very high."

"I need to write a letter to Zia-ul-Haq," Reza said, "not an official diplomatic document, but a private letter. Help me find a reliable channel."

"How reliable?"

"Without going through the Tehran Ministry of Foreign Affairs, directly into his hands."

Fatima paused: "For this, I need to go through Karimi."

"Okay, tell Karimi, the priority of this matter is higher than all intelligence organization work after the ceasefire."

She wrote it down.

"If the chips for the Persia-4 are in place, how long will it take from assembly and debugging to mass production?" Reza asked.

"If it goes smoothly, four months. If not, six to eight months."

"Calculate it based on six months." He wrote a number in the blank space of the document, "I need the quantity of the first mass-produced batch to be this."

Fatima looked at the number and raised her head: "The pressure is very high."

"I know, but Saddam Hussein still has fourteen Scud Missile launchers out there. If he is willing to use them under ceasefire conditions, there must be something that can intercept them."

"Using them would violate the ceasefire agreement—"

"The cost of violating the agreement may not be high enough for him." Reza closed the file, "A person driven by face will not throw away the cards in his hand just because of a piece of paper."

Fatima didn't argue further. She copied the number back into her own notebook.

"There is one more thing," Reza said, "those sixty-one captured T-72 Tank."

"In Basra, they haven't been moved."

"Let Rajai drive them to the Fatima military factory. I want to take them apart and see, learn everything that can be learned."

Behind Fatima's glasses, her eyes brightened.

"I have always wanted to touch that batch of tanks."

"I know you want to," Reza said, "before, it was a sensitive period of ceasefire negotiations, it wasn't appropriate. Now the agreement is signed, the captured war trophies are legal, no one can say anything."

He stood up and pushed the folder back to her.

"How much time is left?" Fatima asked.

"Are you asking me how much time is left for which matter?"

"All of it."

Reza looked at her.

"I don't know," he said, "so take it one by one, do it one by one."