The Colonel's Mistake Read Online Free PDF

settling old scores.”
    “Old scores?” said the DNI.
    “Well, of course Campbell had a long history with Iran.”
    “I wasn’t aware.”
    “Before the revolution in ’79, he helped coordinate training for SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. After the revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a review of all the old SAVAK records to see who’d been hunting down his followers, I’m sure Campbell’s name came up. Add to that the fact that Campbell took a hard line with Iran when he became the deputy sec. def., and it’s not hard to figure out why the mullahs might have targeted him. They’ve got long memories—they probably waited decades for the opportunity to present itself.”
    The DNI asked a few more questions, then said, “Well, you could be right. Maybe Campbell’s assassination doesn’t have anything to do with the troop mobilization we’re seeing. But Campbell was a big player in his time, and if the Iranians think they can take him out and get away with it, they’ve got another thing coming.”

Mark let himself out of the Trudeau House the same way he’d come in, walked the ten blocks back to his apartment, and sat down at his desk in his spare bedroom, intending to work on his book. But after five minutes of staring at his computer screen and seeing nothing but the mutilated bodies of his former colleagues flash across his memory, he realized he was kidding himself. He was in shock. He wasn’t going to get any work done today. Nor could he just ignore all that had transpired since the night before.
    Mark had helped train Daria. And as her station chief, he’d always looked out for her, just as he had the rest of his operations officers. Now that Logan was dead, she had no one in Azerbaijan to turn to for help.
    But the thought of potentially sticking his neck out to help her any more than he already had was setting off alarm bells in his head. Don’t go being some kind of delusional do-gooder, he told himself. Fifty-fifty he’d just make the situation worse by meddling. He’d seen it happen time and time again. Wait for the Agency to restaff. Let them handle this mess.
    But by then it might be too late.
    “Shit,” he muttered and picked up his phone and dialed. After waiting on hold for a long time, his contact came on the line. Mark spoke to him briefly and then hung up.
    Minutes later he was on the street, starting up his Russian-made Niva, a boxy four-wheel-drive car that he’d purchased after going on a professor’s salary.
    He headed north toward the center of the Absheron Peninsula, a scarred and grossly polluted spit of land fifty miles long that jutted out into the Caspian Sea. The roads were crowded with an unruly mix of sleek Western cars—BMWs, Mercedes, Land Cruisers—and old Russian jalopies that belched noxious fumes. He passed decrepit Soviet factories, some languishing, some completely abandoned, many of which sat right next to gleaming new high-rises. Gas pipelines, huge billboards with photos of the current president, and piles of garbage lined the sides of the road.
    Near the Balaxani oil fields—a purgatorial wasteland of oil sludge and rusting nodding-donkey oil pumps—he pulled over and bought pistachios from a guy who was selling them out of the back of his battered truck.
    Just beyond the oil fields the landscape opened up; interspersed among the hellish images of industrial waste were a few green fields. When Mark came to a collection of vacant buildings on the left-hand side of the road, he pulled into an adjacent gravel lot and parked in front of a tall cypress tree, next to a stray dog. A minute later a black Mercedes pulled up next to him. A driver got out of the car and opened the rear door.
    “It is really you, Sava?” The dark-haired man who emerged spoke in heavily accented English. He wore a charcoal-gray suit, a conservative red tie, and long and pointed black leather shoes that reminded Mark of witches. His face showed the beginning of a very