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Privateers - A Blog Novel

Chapter 1: Mud.

Rain in the desert has the effect of being both welcome by the inhabitants and particularly cleansing for the surroundings and yet totally disruptive to both things at the same time. A host of things that may have survived intact for a thousand years or more in the dryness of the desert can be washed away into total obscurity with just a few moments in the rain. Once those small seemingly insignificant drops of water join together, the force can move the mountains and redefine the borders of countries. Rain, it has been said, by its absence or abundance can change the history of man.

Rain, and its ability to hide and obscure the actions of man would serve once again as the process by which change would come to the deserts of the Middle East.

The Iranian City of Ilam

For six days, a slow moving warm front had lingered across the mountains that span the western provinces of Iran, turning the ground of the desert into a literal quagmire. Mountain streams, creek beds, and finally the rivers had their fill of the rain and began to overflow. The populace as well, had more than had its fill of the most unseasonable rain. Because of the rain, because of the number of washed out bridges that occurred through the region, because of the mud making mire where once was once a road; ground travel in the western part of the Islamic Republic had come to a stand still at the worst possible time of the year.

The rain and its after effects on the desert were making the annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Samarra more difficult for the Shiite inhabitants of Iran than it had been for many, many years. Throughout the western provinces, the followers of the Shia sect of Islam had found themselves delayed on their spiritual journey not by politics, war, pestilence or disease, but by of all things, the unlikely abundance of water in the desert.

The monotonous thumping drumbeat of the helicopters of the Iranian Revolutionary Army moving about the countryside around the city of Ilam replaced sounds of trucks on the highway, reminding the local inhabitants of all the small towns of the western provinces that not everything in the world had come to a complete standstill because of the rain. The Islamic Revolutionary Army was still on duty, defending the faithful from the infidel, both at home and abroad. The thumping sound on the horizon was a constant reminder.

Each time the blades of the helicopters bit into the air with the characteristic “THWAP-THWAP-THWAP” as they moved about, the sound was to the man in the streets of Iran a reminder of their place in the world much like the bark of dogs to an intruder. Police dogs, prison dogs, military helicopters; the impact on the psyche of the populace at large was the same, and as such largely ignored except when noted by their absence.

In the pre-dawn hours just after a passing line of thunderstorms that precipitated out of the unseasonable warm front, the population of Iranian city of Ilam heard and all but ignored the sound of helicopters as they moved across the city and into the mountains just east of town. Like a great magic trick where all is in clear view to the audience and yet no one sees a thing, the inhabitants of Ilam had all failed to take any notice of this act of deception that was cloaking the actions of people who were working behind the scenes to disrupt their lives.

What the inhabitants did take notice of occurred an hour later when the electrical power that fed into the city of over 30,000 suddenly ceased to be. When the authorities noticed this and tried to call other parts of the Islamic Republic to find out why such a thing had occurred; they also noticed that the telephone exchange for their region was also no longer functioning.

It was going to be a long day in halls of government of the city of Ilam, and yet, the sun was not even completely above the horizon. When the helicopters returned from the mountains just east of the city and passed directly overhead and turned south, no one on the ground in Ilam made the connection that the two events might somehow be connected.

There was no reason to take notice of the helicopters. The military commander of the local garrison watched as they flew low over the garrison compound and half-heartedly waved at them as he had done a hundred times before. The pilot of the lead aircraft looked down, smiled and half-heartedly waved back, just has a hundred other pilots had also done before. And why not, they were just five helicopters of the Iranian Revolutionary Air Force, clearly marked and of the same 1960’s vintage American Bell 204 “Hueys” that had made up the core of the Iranian Armed Forces Helicopter ranks. They flew over the garrison fortress on the edge of town as per standard procedure and then along the highway going south along the border with Iran and Iraq, just as they always did hundreds of times before.

The garrison commander should’ve looked closer at the helicopters, but he had no reason to. That was the whole idea; only he didn’t know it at the time.

After six days of rain turning the region into an impassable mess, the city of Ilam was full of Shia pilgrims on their way to Samarra, trying to cross the border into Iraq to travel to the shrines of the Shia Imams. Now to complicate matters, the power was out, as well as the phones. The Islamic revolutionaries of Iran had often touted themselves as a way to return the faithful to a world much like the glory days for Islam of the 9th Century. It was at times such as this that the populace was reminded of just how easy it was to accomplish this so called “revolutionary” goal.

Military helicopters, their comings and goings, simply didn’t raise an eyebrow by anyone in this part of the country, in this time of year, in this type of emergency.

Morning prayers would have to come first. The military governor would have to be advised in person of the situation with the power and the loss of phone connections to headquarters. The inhabitants of the town could only prepare to survive yet another humid day that was now matched with the monotony of listening to their neighbors gas powered generators as they all conspired to rattle the plaster off the walls of their homes, desperately trying to keep their refrigerators and televisions working. The clatter and the exhaust from all of these individual machines in all the homes around the city would make life in the city unbearable in a very short time.

Yet by noon, an entirely different set of helicopters would visit the garrison compound in the city of Ilam. The agenda of the men who would arrive that afternoon by helicopter would be along an entirely different course than that set in motion by the almost entirely unnoticed, yet very significant helicopters that were last seen moving south along the highway from the city.

(Note: Chapter 2 will appear on this site Feb 21th.)

Posted @ February 18, 2007 06:15 PM | Blog-novel

Posted by: brian at February 19, 2007 12:53 PM