142: Chapter 139 Karimi

The uniqueness of a port lies in it being a fluid, noisy place mixed with many unfamiliar faces, which serves as a double-edged sword for both the monitors and the monitored. Liaisons use this environment to complete signal transmissions in the crowd; monitors can similarly use it to deploy more people on-site without appearing conspicuous.

"Mahdavi," Reza turned to him, "do you have anyone in your administrative team who has worked at the docks—local employees with Basra faces, not those transferred from other provinces?"

"There are three. One was a warehouse manager at the original port, and the other two were stevedores," Mahdavi said.

"These three people know who is who, which face belongs to whom, and which path leads where. This is something Rajai's intelligence team cannot achieve," Reza said. "Have these three people report for work normally on the day the port restarts. Keep their eyes open. They don't need to follow anyone; they just need to tell the intelligence team which faces they don't recognize and whose behavior they find strange."

Mahdavi nodded and noted it down in his notebook.

"Second," Reza said, "Karimi, do you have any plainclothes personnel available for temporary use in Basra? Not intelligence analysts, but those with experience in tracking and surveillance?"

"I can transfer two from Ahvaz; they will arrive tomorrow," Karimi said.

"Transfer them and have them join Rajai's three-man team. With five people in total, divide them into two groups: one to watch the ships and one to watch the docks. The two groups should maintain contact via radio," Reza said. "Once contact is spotted, do not approach immediately. Wait for the contact to finish and for both parties to separate before tracking them individually. Prioritize tracking the local informant. The liaison is an outsider; he will return the way he came once he leaves the port. The informant is the one staying in Basra, the one we truly need to find."

After he finished explaining the plan, the room fell silent for a few seconds. Then Rajai asked, "When will the ship enter the port?"

"I don't know," Reza said. "So once the port restarts, this arrangement must be in place. We cannot wait until that ship is discovered to make temporary arrangements."

"The port's restart time," Mahdavi said, "is next Monday at the earliest."

"Then start the arrangements today," Reza said. "I'm giving you four days. Within four days, everyone must be in place, all assignments confirmed, and one rehearsal conducted."

When the meeting adjourned, Reza kept Karimi behind and said privately, "Once the local informant for Laurel Station is found, do not arrest him immediately."

Karimi glanced at him. "What do you mean?"

"Monitor him first. See where he reports and who he contacts," Reza said. "A local informant for Laurel Station might be connected to a network, not just acting alone. If we catch one, the network remains; once the next informant is activated, we'll have to start searching all over again."

"But if he sends back useful intelligence—"

"What can he send back?" Reza said. "Port cargo data? The location of the water station? Saddam Hussein's satellite photos can see those things too; they aren't secrets." He paused. "But if he transmits details of military deployments, then the communication channel must be neutralized immediately. We cannot let that information get out. You judge the specific boundaries; you have the experience."

Karimi went out.

Reza sat alone in the room for a while, looking at the map of Basra on the table.

The port was a small mark in the bottom right corner of the map, at the entrance of the Shatt al-Arab.

A city of seven hundred thousand people, an intelligence officer hidden in the crowd, and a ship taking a roundabout route from Umm Qasr.

These things combined to form the most concrete texture of his current life. It wasn't the sense of heroism found in movies, but an extremely precise, constant state of tension that required sustained attention. If he relaxed, someone would die, something would collapse, and two years of effort would spiral out of control at some point.

He wrote the key deployment points for today in his notebook, and then wrote a sentence at the end:

"Laurel Station wants to plant a nail in the port. What I need to do is follow that nail and find the wall behind it."

Then he stood up, went out, and headed to see what the South City actually looked like after the water station started supplying water.

It wasn't an inspection; he just wanted to walk around and see if those elderly people who were collecting water were still there today.

...

October 12, 1981, Port of Basra.

On the day the port restarted, Reza did not come, but his people did.

The two plainclothes officers Karimi had transferred from Ahvaz sat in a tea house at the dock.

Drinking cold tea, their eyes scanned every unfamiliar face.

Rajai's intelligence team was scattered in different positions: one in the cargo office, one among the stevedores, and one at a high point in the warehouse, monitoring the entire port with binoculars.

Mahdavi's three local employees wore work uniforms.

Moving through the crowd, their task was the simplest yet most critical: to point out who did not belong there.

The first ship entered the port at ten in the morning, under a Kuwaiti registry, carrying edible oil and daily necessities.

The second was at eleven, an Iranian ship carrying construction materials.

The third was at one in the afternoon, again under a Kuwaiti registry.

When that ship entered the port, the plainclothes officers in the tea house put down their teacups.

The ship number matched.

Departing from Umm Qasr, registered in Kuwait, the captain's name was Captain Hassan Abdullah. This was information provided by the Scouts.

Karimi's men transmitted the signal to Rajai's group via radio.

The rhythm of the entire port did not change; the stevedores continued loading and unloading, and the office staff continued their work, but five pairs of eyes were now fixed on that ship.

The liaison appeared at 2:40 PM.

He was a middle-aged man of about thirty-five, wearing decent but inconspicuous clothes and carrying a briefcase. He walked into the Port Customs Office. He stayed there for eighteen minutes, and when he came out, the briefcase was still with him, but the contents inside had changed.

This process was recorded in the minds of Rajai's intelligence team.

The liaison left the port, got into a taxi, and drove toward the city. One of Karimi's plainclothes officers followed, maintaining a distance of three cars.

But the real target was not him.

The real target was the person who had received the briefcase.

Inside the Port Customs Office, a man in his forties received the briefcase and put it in his drawer. His name was Abdul Karim, the Deputy Director of Port Customs. He had been in this position since before the war and remained after the ceasefire.

He stayed in his office for twenty minutes, then got up and walked out of the port.

Another of Rajai's plainclothes officers followed him.

Karim did not go straight home. He first went to a barbershop and stayed there for forty minutes. The owner of the barbershop was a man in his sixties. When Karim entered, there were no other customers in the shop.

When he came out, Karim's hair had not changed.

Ten minutes after Karim left, the barbershop owner closed the shop door.

The plainclothes officer did not go inside. This was Reza's instruction: do not alert the target, and do not expose the surveillance in the first instance.

Karim went home to a two-story house in South City. His wife greeted him at the door, and two children were playing in the yard. Everything looked normal—the regular life of a port worker.

But the briefcase never appeared again.

At eight o'clock in the evening, Rajai sent the report of the entire tracking process to Reza.

After reading the report in Ahvaz, Reza already had a clear picture in his mind.

Liaison, Karim, barbershop owner—this was a transmission chain. the briefcase was exchanged in Karim's hands, but the actual information might have been transferred in the barbershop, or Karim himself was a transit station, and the real informant was the barbershop owner.

"The barbershop owner," Reza said to Karimi, "check his background."

"It's already being checked," Karimi said. "His name is Muhammad Ali, sixty-three years old. He ran a barbershop in Basra before the war. He has a son serving in the Iraqi army, currently in Nasiriyah."

A son in the Iraqi army. This was an excellent cover identity.

"What about Karim?"

"Deputy Director of Port Customs, a civil servant for thirty years with a clean family background. His wife is a teacher, and both children are in school," Karimi said. "But there is one detail: his brother works in Baghdad, Iraq, as a merchant doing import-export business."

"A brother in Baghdad," Reza repeated. "That is an excellent information channel."

He drew a simple structural diagram in his notebook:

Laurel Station → Liaison → Karim → Barbershop Owner → Son (Nasiriyah)

Or:

Laurel Station → Liaison → Karim → Brother (Baghdad)

Both lines were possible.

"Continue monitoring," Reza said. "But do not move. I want to see how far this line extends."

"How much time is needed?"

"One month," Reza said. "Within a month, I want to know all the nodes of this line."

Karimi noted it down and went out.

Reza put the report aside and picked up another document—the latest progress on the Persia-4 sent by Fatima.

The chips hadn't arrived yet, but the modification of the Target Missile was complete. The first round of tracking tests was scheduled for October 20.

Two things were advancing simultaneously: one was an invisible network war, and the other was a visible weapon war.

Reza wrote a sentence in his notebook:

"The port informant and the anti-aircraft missiles are both preparations for the same thing: to let Saddam Hussein know that we are watching him, we are guarding against him, and we are waiting for him."

Then he closed the notebook and glanced at the night view of Ahvaz outside the window.

The October night wind blew past, and the city lights swayed in the wind.

There were still nineteen months left.