Relentless by Mark Greaney;

Author:Mark Greaney; [Greaney, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-ONE

General Vahid Rajavi looked at his diamond-encrusted gold watch by pulling back the sleeve of his white shirt, then he sat up straighter in the cabin chair of the Airbus A320 and smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit coat.

As the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, he never wore military dress when he was outside official functions in Tehran. He instead preferred to blend in, at least as well as any man with eleven bodyguards can blend in anywhere.

He was the military intelligence chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran; the threats against him were manifest, so he and his team took every precaution possible.

The plane touched down at Baghdad International Airport at three fifteen a.m.; Rajavi was greeted by a Shia representative of the Iraqi government, and then they all piled into seven vehicles and left the tarmac in single file.

A minute later they were through the first gates and on Airport Street, an access road that would take them off BIAP property to the east on their way to the city. There was little conversation; it had not been a long or arduous flight, but the Iranians who climbed off the Airbus had a full day of clandestine meetings ahead of them, and while Rajavi was anxious to get started with them, his protectors were anxious to get him back onto the plane and back into Iranian airspace.

They rolled along in near silence. Next to them a Silk Way Airlines Antonov An-24 cargo plane landed on the runway, then slowed, turned onto a taxiway, and headed towards the terminal.

General Rajavi redirected his attention forward out the windshield as they drove to the airport exit.

The five men in the Quds Force commander’s vehicle just looked out at the road ahead of them through their headlights, each with different thoughts, all kept to themselves, and then, one instant later, they simply ceased to exist on this earth.

As far as the commander of Quds Force and the rest of his entourage were concerned, when the missiles hit, there was no sound, and there was no light.

The noise and the light came after, but Rajavi and his entourage missed it all. The impact of the four Hellfire missiles, fired simultaneously from a pair of U.S. Air Force Reaper drones flying forty-two miles from Baghdad and thirty-five thousand feet above the desert, sent a shock wave across the airport and lit a row of glowing pillars of fire.

While the scattered remains of the victims lay motionless along the road and in the brown grass alongside it, fires burned all around, and wreckage blazed and smoked.

It would take little time for locals to confirm the death of General Vahid Rajavi. His distinctive watch was attached to a severed left arm found sixty-four meters away from his burning SUV, and a charred and still body missing the same appendage sat motionless in the center of the fire.

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