Operation “Stray Dog”. Chapter 8

A Call from the Underworld

14:35 EST (02:20 Pyongyang time). Over the Sea of Japan. On board the Mi-8 helicopter “Octopus”

The helicopter shook like an old Paykan on a mountain road. Takeshi-san, the pilot in the Hawaiian shirt with a kamikaze headband, held the cyclic with one hand and tried to open a jar of pickled ginger with an army knife with the other.

“Turbulence, Alavi-san!” he yelled over the roar of the rotors and the Japanese pop blaring from the speakers. “The crabs are nervous! The ginger won’t open! Bad feng shui!”

“Watch the horizon, Takeshi!” Alavi barked, trying to keep his balance on the crate labeled “Tentacles: Special Edition,” upon which he was sitting.

He pressed his Nokia to his ear. The connection over the sea was as lousy as an Iranian pensioner’s mood on payday.

“Zahra!” he shouted. “Did you call her?”

Zahra’s voice broke through the crackle of static and the noise of the sea:

“I called! She’s not picking up!”

“Why?! Does she have finals? Or is she sleeping? Or was she abducted by aliens?”

“Worse! She has ‘personal boundaries’! She declined me three times! She texted that she’s ‘choosing herself’ and she has yoga!”

“What is she choosing?!” Alavi choked on air. “Yoga? Zahra, tell her that if she doesn’t pick up the phone, she won’t have anything to choose from except the radiation level in Massachusetts! What the hell kind of yoga is this when the world is going to Tartarus?!”

“She turned off her phone! I can’t get through! Amirkhan called too, Nasrin wrote in all caps… It’s useless. She’s in her ‘safe space.’ She’s on a retreat.”

Alavi looked down at the plastic box beneath him. The situation was becoming so absurd that even his thirty years of intelligence experience were failing him. The world hung by a thread, a nuclear apocalypse was approaching at Mach 1.5, and a girl in Boston was playing the offended daughter and doing womb breathing.

“Dictate the number,” Alavi said decisively.

“Why?”

“I’ll call her myself.”

“She won’t answer a call from an unknown number. She’s ‘choosing herself,’ remember?”

“She won’t pick up from an Iranian number. But here I have…” he looked at the phone screen, where the icon of the North Korean operator Koryolink had finally caught a signal from a coastal tower, “…here I have something exotic. A Pyongyang number. Code +850. That should intrigue her. Curiosity is stronger than resentment. A Persian woman can forgive an offense, but she cannot ignore a mystery.”

“Alavi, are you sure?”

“Zahra, I am sitting on a crate of pornography in a Japanese smuggler’s helicopter over the East Sea, while somewhere out there a nuclear missile with vacuum cleaner navigation is flying. The only thing I am sure of is that Allah went on a smoke break and left the keys to the world with idiots. Dictate the digits!”

He wrote the number on the cuff of his white, once-expensive shirt using a marker borrowed from Takeshi (there was no paper; General Kim had stolen the napkins for his own needs).

“Takeshi!” he shouted to the pilot. “Do you have a satellite booster?”

“Of course!” Takeshi nodded at the dashboard, where next to a plastic Buddha icon and a Hello Kitty talisman, some black box with an antenna was taped down. “I use it to watch live baseball! Yankees versus Red Sox!”

“Crank it to max! I need to reach America! And turn off the music, for the love of all that is holy!”

Takeshi flipped a switch.

Alavi dialed the number.

A ringtone. A long, drawn-out, American ringtone.

Another ring.

“Come on, girl,” he thought, gripping the phone so hard the plastic creaked. “Come on, Zee-Zee. Forget about your therapist and your traumas. Remember whose daughter you are. Remember that you are Persian. And Persian women are as curious as cats and as hard to kill as cockroaches.”

The ringing stopped. A click.

“Hello?” a voice full of bewilderment and fear came through the receiver. “Is this… sushi delivery?”

Alavi smirked.

“Almost,” he said in the impeccable English he had learned in London back in the Shah’s days. “Delivery of problems to your doorstep. Hello, Zeynab. This is Asadollah Alavi. And I have bad news for you…”

Chapter 9. The Effective Antichrist and World of Tanks →
← Isfahan
← Shiraz
← Fordow
← Operation “Stray Dog”