Damascus Countdown

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  The room was silent.

  “You’re telling me two Iranian nukes are loose?”

  “Not exactly loose, sir,” Allen corrected. “Not in the sense that they are outside the control of the regime.”

  To the president, it was a distinction without a difference.

  “But you’re saying the Ayatollah and the Twelfth Imam have two working, operational, fully functional nuclear warheads, and we don’t know where they are?”

  “I’m afraid I am, Mr. President.”

  It was again quiet for a few moments, and then the president got up and began to pace the room.

  “How do we know this? I mean, are we guessing, or do we have actual confirmation?”

  “We have an intercept, sir.” Roger Allen reached into his black leather folder and pulled out copies of the NSA’s Farsi transcription and the CIA’s English translation. “This is a phone call that the National Security Agency picked up from one of the satphones our man in Tehran was able to put into the mix.”

  “You’re talking about this agent you’ve code-named . . . ?”

  “Zephyr.”

  “Right—Zephyr—and this is the source you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Allen replied. “Zephyr has been a godsend for us. Now, as you know, I wasn’t convinced he could actually penetrate deep into the regime. But he has completely exceeded expectations. He’s a gifted operative, and he’s also had a string of remarkable luck. He’s gotten these satphones into the inner circle, and they’re bearing fruit.”

  “And this call—who’s talking to whom?”

  “Mr. President, it’s a call between the Twelfth Imam—whom you’ll see designated as TTI on the transcript—and General Mohsen Jazini, who, as you know, sir, is the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

  “When did the call take place?”

  “About twelve hours ago, Mr. President.”

  “Twelve?” Jackson said, incredulous. “Why am I just hearing about it now?”

  “Well, sir, we’re . . . we’re doing the best we can, sir,” Allen stammered, caught off guard by the intensity of the president’s reaction. “As I said, the phones have been distributed by aides to the Ayatollah and the Mahdi to nearly all the members of the high command inside Iran. That’s the good news, and it is good. Amazing, actually. But we’re struggling with the volume of calls we’re now having to process. It’s skyrocketing. The Iranian leadership has taken the bait. They trust the phones, sir, but our systems are not prepared for the sheer volume of information we’re getting. We’re talking about several hundred phones, distributed high and low on the chain of command. In most cases, we don’t know which phone has been assigned to what user. The users often don’t identify themselves or each other. They’re avoiding mentioning where they are as much as possible to keep operational details to a minimum. They’re referring quite a bit to secure e-mails they’re sending each other. That’s apparently where most of the sensitive information is getting passed back and forth. All that to say, it’s been an enormous challenge sorting all the incoming data.”

  “No, no—that’s absolutely unacceptable, Roger,” the president fumed. “I don’t need to tell you how serious this moment is. We absolutely have to stay on top of these calls.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand, but—”

  “But nothing,” Jackson shot back. “Don’t tell me the CIA and DIA and NSA and all the rest of you don’t have the resources you need. I’ve approved every budget request you’ve given me—everything you’ve asked for. And you’d better start getting me information in real time. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir. We will, Mr. President.”

  Jackson’s face was red, and Allen couldn’t hold his angry glare for long. He looked down at the page in front of him, hoping the president would follow his lead. A moment later, the chief executive mercifully turned to the intercept as well.

  TTI: I was praying, and your face came before me, Mohsen. Allah is with you, and you have news.

  JAZINI: I do, my Lord. I was going to wait and bring you the news in person, but is it okay to speak on this line?

  TTI: Of course. Now speak, my son.

  JAZINI: Yes, my Lord. I have good news—we have two more warheads.

  TTI: Nuclear?

  JAZINI: Yes, two have survived the attacks.

  TTI: How? Which ones?

  JAZINI: The ones Tariq Khan was working on. The ones in Khorramabad.

  TTI: What happened?

  JAZINI: The moment Khan went missing, the head of security at the Khorramabad facility feared for the safety of the warheads. He feared Khan might be working for the Zionists. Since the warheads weren’t yet attached to the missiles, he decided to move them out of his facility and hide them elsewhere. I just spoke to him. He’s safe. The warheads are safe.

  TTI: I thank you, Allah, for you have given us another chance to strike.

  The president looked up from the transcript and stared at the CIA director.

  “So where do we think they are?” he asked.

  “That’s the problem, Mr. President,” Allen conceded. “At the moment, we have no idea.”

  “And they could be fired at Tel Aviv or Jerusalem at any moment, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Allen said. “Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or, Mr. President, they could be headed here.”

  4

  KARAJ, IRAN

  Few people on the planet knew David Shirazi’s real identity.

  Not a single person in the White House, State Department, or Pentagon knew. Only four people in the Central Intelligence Agency knew, and Roger Allen, the director, wasn’t one of them. The truth was that David was the CIA’s top NOC—nonofficial cover agent—working deep inside Iran. He was known to the president of the United States by the code name Zephyr. He was operating as a German passport–holding telecommunications specialist by the name of Reza Tabrizi, and he had penetrated deeper and faster and higher inside the Iranian government than any agent in CIA history. The question, however, was whether any of that mattered. If Zephyr succeeded, few would ever know, and he was legally prevented from ever saying so. But if he failed, the impact could be cataclysmic.

  Some 6,331 miles away from the White House Situation Room, in a CIA safe house not far from Tehran, David could feel the enormous weight on him growing. He desperately wanted to deliver for his president and his country, but he also increasingly believed failure was the more likely result.

  He had miraculously escaped the burning Jamkaran Mosque in Qom only to very nearly die at the hands of an Israeli fighter pilot he was trying to rescue. Now, three days later, he was back at the safe house. He was unharmed—but he worried he was being ineffective as well.

  David wondered if the president or the secretary of defense or the secretary of homeland security or anyone inside the American national security establishment who was cleared to even be aware that Zephyr existed knew Washington’s inside man was the youngest and least-experienced NOC the Agency had ever deployed.

  Except for his age, David was in many ways the Agency’s dream recruit. He was tall, athletic, and brilliant, with a near-photographic memory, multiple degrees in advanced computer science, and a near-perfect fluency in Farsi, Arabic, and German, aside from American English, his actual mother tongue. His parents had both been born and raised in Iran and had raised David with a rich cultural heritage that now helped him hide in plain sight inside their native country. His father, Dr. Mohammad Shirazi, was a renowned and highly successful cardiologist. His mother, Nasreen, had graduated in the top one percent of her class at the University of Tehran and had been offered full scholarships to study and eventually teach at almost every institution of higher learning in her country. But she turned down all the scholarships and instead took a job working as a translator for the Iranian Foreign Ministry under the Shah on various U.N. issues, rising rapidly in her division and winning a dozen commendations.
Later, the Canadian Embassy recruited her to become a translator for them, a post she eagerly accepted, working her way up to the role of translator and senior advisor to several Canadian ambassadors.

  When the Shah was overthrown and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power during the Islamic Revolution in the early, chaotic months of 1979, the Shirazis feared for what their country was becoming. They couldn’t bear to see the growing bloodshed and the tyranny that was engulfing their homeland, so they fled, helping an endangered American couple escape as well. Eventually the Shirazis received asylum in the United States as political refugees, and later they achieved full citizenship. They settled in central New York and established an entirely new life.

  No one in David’s family—not his parents and not his two older brothers—could ever have predicted what he was doing now. Indeed, only David’s father knew his youngest son worked for the Agency and was operating deep inside Iran. David had told him only recently, swearing him to secrecy.

  With short-cropped jet-black hair, olive skin, and soulful brown eyes, David may not have been born in Iran, but he was straight out of central casting. He seemed to instinctually understand the culture and the rhythm of Iranian society, and it hadn’t been difficult for him to appear a devout and increasingly fervent Shia Muslim, even a devotee of the Twelfth Imam. And the cover story his handlers at Langley had cooked up for him had been effective. None of his contacts or sources imagined for a moment that he was an American, much less a spook.

  But no matter how well-bred or prepared David was for this mission, it had now come to a screeching halt. Israel was under attack from multiple directions, and the Israelis were fighting back with overwhelming force. David was safe, at least for the moment, but he had no idea what to do next.

  He picked up his phone and dialed again. But for the thirty-sixth call in a row, no one answered. Another voice mail, another dead end. A moment later, he dialed a thirty-seventh number and waited. Again no one answered. He tried the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth but got voice mail each time. Slamming down the phone, he continued pacing around his tiny room, seething. Indeed, it was all he could do not to throw the phone against the wall or out the window. Where were all the sources he had so carefully cultivated? Where was Daryush Rashidi, the president of Iran Telecom? Where was Abdol Esfahani, Rashidi’s operations deputy and closest ally in the country? Where was Dr. Alireza Birjandi, who despite his age and blindness had been by far David’s most helpful source? Why weren’t they answering their phones? Why weren’t they feeding him information? He hadn’t even been able to reach Javad Nouri, the man he had rescued just three days before. He needed a breakthrough. He needed a miracle. He couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. There had to be more he could do. But what?

  Against enormous odds, David had done everything the Agency had asked of him over the past few months. He had taken enormous risks. He had gambled his own life—indeed his own soul. But what good had it really done? He hadn’t been able to stop Iran from building a single nuclear warhead—they’d built nine. He hadn’t sabotaged Iran’s nuclear facilities to at least slow down their progress. He hadn’t stopped the war from starting. Now the entire Middle East was on fire. The American economy was at risk of plunging back into a recession, as was the global economy, if the war continued. Oil prices had already shot past $325 a barrel, and gasoline back home was now $7 a gallon and certain to go higher. Israel’s skies were raining rockets. Iran’s skies were raining bombs. And here he was, holed up in Safe House Six just outside Tehran.

  David had a first-rate CIA paramilitary unit that had come to help him. But he had no new information, no new leads, and no idea what to do or where to go next. For three days they’d been sitting around making calls and sending e-mails and text messages and making pot after pot of coffee but effectively twiddling their thumbs. David couldn’t stand it any longer. They had to move. They had to take action. They needed a target. They needed a mission. But Langley wasn’t giving them one, and he was out of ideas.

  He was tempted to call Jack Zalinsky at Langley, but what was the point? Zalinsky was eight and a half hours behind him in Washington, D.C., which meant that while it was 8:40 in the morning here in Iran, it was only ten minutes past midnight at CIA headquarters. The only reason to call Jack at this hour would be to provide critical information, not to ask for any, and that knowledge set David on edge all the more.

  The last seventy-two hours had been wrenching on so many levels. The images he kept seeing of the war around him were hellish, and he seemed to have no ability to affect it. If that weren’t enough, just when he should have his attention laser-focused on the grave task before him, he’d had the wind knocked out of him with the news that halfway around the world his mother was now gone, having lost her battle with stomach cancer. Stuck inside war-ravaged Iran, he had missed the memorial service and the burial. His phone message and brief conversation with his father seemed pitifully small in light of his father’s loss.

  And then there was the completely surprising reappearance of Marseille Harper, the first and only girl he had ever truly loved. Seeing her again after all these years came with the terrible news that her father had recently committed suicide. David could not imagine Mr. Harper taking his life; it did not seem at all like the man he’d deeply respected since childhood.

  David grieved for Marseille. An only child whose mother had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, she was now all alone in the world. That, he figured, was likely the reason she had reached out to him out of the blue after years of silence. But after a wonderful, if slightly awkward, reunion at a restaurant in Syracuse, he’d been urgently called back to Washington. Then he’d been sent to Iran. He was legally prevented from telling Marseille he worked for the CIA, of course, so he had told her his boss was sending him to Europe on an emergency business trip. He’d felt terrible lying to her, but he hadn’t any other choice. He’d called her briefly from Germany, but had he called her from the road since then to comfort or encourage her, like any decent friend would do? No. Had he e-mailed or written her? No. How could he? He wasn’t authorized to make personal calls or send e-mails to family and friends, and all his calls and e-mails were monitored, recorded, and scrutinized by the Agency’s top officials and analysts. Did he really want Zalinsky or any of the senior management at Langley and the NSA scrutinizing his most personal communications? Hardly, and it wouldn’t just be them. Eva Fischer would be in the loop as well, complicating things all the more.

  Angry and confused and no longer able to stand the thought of pacing the halls of the tiny flat or staring at a laptop computer screen only to read more depressing news, David decided to get out and get some morning air. He changed into a T-shirt, sweatshirt, and shorts, then grabbed his phone and a Glock 9mm and let his team know he was going for a run. As he stepped outside, he could see dark clouds forming over the city and heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. The temperature hovered in the low fifties, and a strong wind was coming in off the Caspian Sea. David stretched his legs and scanned the area for trouble, for signs of anything amiss, but detected nothing.

  He looked down the street to the right and the left, both sides lined with dilapidated high-rise tenement buildings with laundry hanging from each balcony and a forest of satellite dishes stretching as far as the eye could see. The street itself, dotted with potholes, was littered with trash, empty plastic water bottles, and blue and green and pink plastic grocery bags. Everywhere he looked, trash was piled high and had not yet been picked up by a municipality that had effectively shut down since the hour the war began. The stench was worsening and nearly unbearable. A few birds sat atop a nearby dumpster. A few stray cats played in a nearby alleyway. But at the moment, not another soul was visible. So he headed north and began jogging through the quiet, deserted streets, praying desperately for wisdom, for a lead, for a scrap he could pursue before it was all too late.

  5

  TEHRAN, IRAN

 
The governments of Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco had just announced they were joining the Caliphate, and Indonesia’s parliament was holding emergency meetings to approve joining as well. These were positive developments, to be sure, but the bitter fact remained that the war was not going as he had planned. Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali, known to the world as the Twelfth Imam, entered a conference room off the main war room in the Revolutionary Guard Corps command center. He ordered an aide to summon Ayatollah Hamid Hosseini, President Ahmed Darazi, and Defense Minister Ali Faridzadeh without delay.

  “Of course, my Lord,” said the aide. “Anyone else?”

  “No, just those three,” said the Mahdi. “And have two armed guards posted outside this door. I do not want to be disturbed.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency. It shall be done as you wish.”

  When the aide left and shut the door, the Mahdi surveyed the room. In the center was a large, rectangular, highly polished mahogany conference table, around which were eight leather executive chairs. On the table were eight phones connected to a central switchboard in another part of the underground complex that could patch calls through to any Iranian military post or to any civilian phone inside or outside the country. The walls were wood paneled but devoid of any paintings or photographs. Instead there were two large flat-screen TV monitors, one at each end of the room, though neither of them was currently turned on, and several enormous maps on the side walls, including one of the Middle East and Persian Gulf region and another of the entire world. Over the door were six digital clocks, displaying the current time in Tehran, al-Quds (aka Jerusalem), London, Washington, Beijing. The sixth clock—the one in the center—was set at the local time of wherever the Mahdi was at any given moment. Since he was now in the IRGC’s command center ten stories underneath the largest air base in Iran’s capital city, the first and sixth clocks read the same: 8:52 a.m.