Out of the Dark by David Weber Page A

cronyism, as far as Sanders could see) had relatively firm control of the region. In fact, there’d been substantially fewer incidents in the city of Herat over the last five or six months than in Kabul itself. But internal Afghan bloodshed (or the lack of it) wasn’t the reason his battalion was being sent there.
    No, the reason for that was the tension between the Iranian régime and the West in general, and the United States and the State of Israel, in particular.
    Sanders didn’t really think of himself as an expert on international relations and diplomacy, but the commander of a combined arms battalioncouldn’t afford to be uninformed on such matters, either. For that matter, his superiors would have taken a rather dim view of such a state of affairs. Because of that, he was only too well aware of just how completely relations with Iran had gone into the toilet over the last few years.
    The régime’s brutal suppression of internal dissent—the “Green Movement”—had driven its relations with the outside world even farther into the wilderness. The mass executions which had followed the resurgence of protests in 2012 had completed Iran’s descent into pariah status, and the régime had reacted by becoming even more hardline, even more repressive. The U.S.-sponsored embargo on gasoline shipments which had finally been agreed to after the 2011 assassination of Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh by “parties unknown” had hurt the Iranian economy badly, and the régime blamed it (and similar Western pressures) for the subsequent upsurge of street protests. There was probably some logic on their side this time around, Sanders admitted, although their decision to have Mousavi murdered—or at least to refuse to hold anyone accountable for it (except, of course, for the agents of the Greater Satan, which had undoubtedly ordered the crime specifically to implicate
them
)—damned well had a lot more to do with it. And even if the embargo was making things still worse,
he
wasn’t going to shed any tears over their fury and what had to be a steadily growing inner sense of desperation. Their response, however, had included dropping the charade of “peaceful nuclear power” and openly announcing their intention to acquire nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible.
    Along, of course, with the renewed observation that the “Zionist entity” had no right to exist and had to be eradicated as soon as possible. Then there was that minor matter of the continued call for the universal caliphate which, for some odd reason, didn’t fill the non-Muslim world with joyous anticipation. For that matter, most of the
Muslims
of Sanders’ acquaintance weren’t particularly enamored of the notion of an
Iranian
-style caliphate.
    Despite all of that, Russia (which had worked hard to build influence in Iran for over thirty years, since the fall of the shah) had continued to supply Tehran with nonnuclear military technology up until about eight months ago. At that point, the Russian government had finally given in to Western pressure. Moscow had retreated from the military relationship with ill-concealed resentment, but the parlous state of its own economy had meant it couldn’t afford too open a confrontation with its Western trading partners, especially when the combination of new drilling in the U.S., the unfortunate coup which had overtaken Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, general globalconservation, and the current (relative) tranquility in the Sunni Middle East had conspired to drive down the price of their own oil so dramatically. So, as of six months ago, Russia had officially suspended all arms and technology shipments to Iran.
    Intelligence suggested that China was now sniffing around the opportunities presented by the Russian withdrawal, but it didn’t look as if there was going to be much upsurge in Chinese influence in Tehran. For one reason, Sanders suspected darkly, because Russia hadn’t really disengaged as fully as the Kremlin