Damascus Countdown

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Then David saw a streak of light out of the corner of his eye, coming in from the right and moving fast. It took a split second to register what was happening, and then David realized Zalinsky had just said yes. Slicing across the sky was a Hellfire missile, and sure enough, an instant later he watched the helicopter ahead of him explode into an enormous fireball, the pilot and the sniper having never seen the missile coming. Fire and smoke and twisted scraps of molten metal came raining down from the sky. But Mays never slowed, and David didn’t want him to. They still had to get out of this city to one of the three hotels in the suburbs that they had preselected as possible rendezvous points, and then they had to wake Nouri up and get him talking before it was too late.

  26

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  “Asher, it’s Levi. I need to speak with you immediately,” Defense Minister Shimon said when the PM came on the line.

  “Of course, Levi; what is it?”

  “No, not over the phone. I need to meet with you in person—you and Zvi,” Shimon said, referring to Mossad chief Zvi Dayan.

  “Then come,” Naphtali said. “Is it about Dimona?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?” Naphtali insisted.

  The defense minister hesitated for a moment before saying, “It’s about the Twelfth Imam. That’s all I can say.”

  “Then come quickly,” the PM said. “And be safe.”

  “Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.”

  TABRIZ, IRAN

  General Mohsen Jazini stood in the shadows in the corner of the garage, lighting up a Cuban cigar and watching the proceedings with great interest. Jazini said nothing, but Jalal Zandi had no doubt the general was monitoring his every move. Zandi could have done without the open flame as they were topping off the gas tanks of both ambulances and loading in the two large wooden crates, one into the back of each vehicle. The warheads he was not worried about. Those could not be set off without the proper codes. But he couldn’t help imagining himself dying in a petrol-induced fireball because the commander of the Caliphate couldn’t control his nicotine fix for five more minutes.

  They didn’t die. By five o’clock on the nose, the fuel tanks were full. The warheads were safely loaded. Eight more heavily armed Revolutionary Guards had arrived in the past hour, detailed to this mission from a nearby base. Two IRGC counterassault team members climbed in the back of each ambulance to babysit the warheads. Two more Guards took the front seats, one to drive and the other to navigate. All that was left was for Jazini and Zandi to climb into the trail car—a brand-new charcoal-gray Toyota Sequoia, which Jazini’s men had commandeered from the widow of the base commander, who had been killed in the recent air strikes—along with their driver and Jazini’s security detail. By 5:10 p.m., they were on the road.

  “So,” Zandi asked, “where exactly are we headed with these things?”

  He assumed the missile bases either in Kerman or in Rasht but was stunned when he heard the answer actually come out of Jazini’s mouth.

  “Damascus.”

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Supplying satellite phones to the upper echelons of the Iranian political and military leadership had seemed like a masterstroke at first. Now it seemed to Eva Fischer like a millstone tied around her neck.

  With Eva’s help, David had personally smuggled dozens of satphones built by the Thuraya corporation, located in Dubai, into Iran—and the Agency had managed to send in scores more. Thuraya’s system was comprised of forty-eight LEO, or low earth orbit, satellites operating at an altitude of about 1,400 kilometers—roughly 870 miles above the earth. The company also operated four more satellites at all times as backup units. The satellites transmitted calls to one another in the frequency band of 22.55 gigahertz and 23.55 gigahertz, while the Thuraya phones themselves used L-band transponders, allowing callers on the ground to talk to one another using frequencies in the band of 1616 to 1626.5 megahertz. Each phone Eva had supplied to David to give to the Mahdi and his associates operated on a specific, designated, and trackable frequency on one of 240 separate channels, allowing the NSA to intercept the calls off the satellites in real time without installing a bug that could be detected by Iranian counterintelligence and without the intercepts being detectable by the Thuraya corporation.

  The problem was, the plan was working too well. Now that much of Iran’s power grid was down because of the Israeli air strikes—and now that much of Iran’s mobile phone system had been knocked out as well—the Mahdi and his top commanders were no longer using landlines or mobile phones. Rather, they were using the satphones almost exclusively. That meant nearly every call they made was being recorded and transcribed by the National Security Agency.

  In theory, that was a godsend, allowing the NSA and then the CIA to listen to every call and thus tap into a good deal of the discussion under way within America’s most dangerous enemy. In reality, however, the U.S. intelligence system was being severely overloaded, and it was creating the risk that incredibly valuable material would be lost.

  It wasn’t just the sheer magnitude of material that was coming in that made their lives so difficult, however; it was that the NSA and CIA Farsi translators—of which there were only a dozen—often didn’t know who was talking to whom. Hundreds of calls were being made each hour. Thousands upon thousands of calls were being made each day. Some of the calls were between high-ranking officials. But most were between colonels and majors or between lieutenants and sergeants or between bodyguards and drivers or between advance men and pilots, and so forth. Much of what was said was too cryptic or too brief to be properly understood.

  Moreover, the translators often had no idea where the calls were being physically placed from or where they were being physically received. If, for example, a caller said he was going to be sending a truck loaded with more Scud-C missiles to the recipient of the call, it was often unclear where that shipment was going to come from and where it was going. It was, therefore, not actionable intelligence. It was not information that could be used to any real or serious effect to destroy that shipment of arms. Which made it worse than irrelevant because it was a distraction from the intercepts that did provide actionable intelligence. But it still had to be read and translated and assessed, and that took time, of which Eva and her team had precious little.

  That said, several days of trial and error—mostly before Eva had been released from detention—had helped the translators pinpoint the frequencies of some of the specific phones being used by the Mahdi himself and by Ayatollah Hosseini and President Darazi. Every time a transcript of a call was made, across the top of the page was printed the time the call was made, the time the call ended, the precise frequency of the phone making the call, and the precise frequency of the phone receiving the call—if the receiving phone was a satphone. One call early on, for example, that had been positively identified as occurring between the Mahdi and Ayatollah Hosseini had helped the translators identify which phones had been assigned to the two men by the frequencies printed at the top of the transcripts. The translators had then asked the NSA computer geeks to route calls with those specific frequencies to a special computer database that they could prioritize more highly than all the other calls.

  But now a new problem had arisen: over the last forty-eight hours or so, the translators began noticing that other, lower-ranking officials were using those frequencies, rather than the Mahdi, Hosseini, and Darazi. The top brass at Langley were desperate to know why, but the translators couldn’t provide a solid answer. Their best guess was that the Iranian leaders were being handed satphones by their subordinates when they needed to make or receive a call, but either the subordinates were being rotated, or the phones they were using were being rotated, possibly to recharge them every few hours due to heavy usage.

  Whatever the reason, neither Zalinsky nor Fischer—the architects of the intercept strategy—had planned or prepared for such contingencies. Their plans had been built around stopping an Israeli-Iran
ian war from happening, not around processing the Niagara Falls of intelligence that was pouring in in the midst of such a war. They didn’t have the manpower to manage the deluge, and they were now drowning in their good fortune.

  Eva knew she didn’t have the time to translate every single printed transcript of every single intercept in the stack that was already in her office, especially not when new batches of intercepts were being dropped off on her desk every fifteen to twenty minutes. Her only hope was to quickly skim each transcript, mark any interesting tidbits with a red pen, and put them in different baskets on her desk. Basket one was top-priority material—any call that seemed like it might be from or to the Mahdi or a senior Iranian official that also contained specific points of interest (i.e., references to specific operations, flights, meetings, or war plans of any kind) that might be actionable, especially if compared with similar transcripts that other translators might be working on. Basket two was top-priority material from unidentified callers—callers that specifically were not the Mahdi, the Ayatollah, or the president—but contained actionable or potentially actionable intelligence. And so forth.

  Eva was working as hard and fast as she could, but after the way she had been treated, she was not doing any of it for the NSA nor for the CIA. She certainly was not busting her tail for President Jackson or Roger Allen or Tom Murray or Jack Zalinsky. Everything she was doing now was for David Shirazi—to save his life and get him out of Iran and back to Washington in one piece. She had no idea what motivated everyone else around her to work such grueling hours for such minuscule pay. But at the moment, she didn’t really care. She had gotten David into this mess, and she was determined to get him out of it. If it were up to her, she’d be on a plane to Incirlik, Turkey, and then HALO dropping into Iran to help David in person. But that, clearly, was not in the cards. This was what she had been assigned to do, and she wanted to do it well, fearing if she didn’t, she might never see David again at all.

  After scanning another thirty or forty transcripts without hitting pay dirt, Eva suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair. Her red pen started marking furiously. She opened a file on her computer and began typing up an English translation. When she was done, she went back to the top and double-checked her work, then checked it again. How had this been missed? she wondered. She had to get it to Murray immediately . . . unless there was more. On a hunch, she began leafing through her stack of transcripts, looking for any others that had time stamps similar to this one. After about a minute, she found one. A moment later, she found another. Then a third and a fourth. She carefully translated these, too, typed up her work, triple-checked, and then e-mailed everything by secure server to Murray. Then she picked up the phone and speed-dialed the Global Ops Center at Langley.

  “Tom, stop what you’re doing,” she said when she got him. “You need to open the e-mail I just sent you, and we need to talk.”

  ROUTE 21, WESTERN IRAN

  Jazini’s convoy raced along Route 21, heading southwest to Mamaghan. From there they continued along the same route to the town of Miandoab. Jalal Zandi was already fast asleep in the backseat, so the general felt comfortable unlocking his briefcase, pulling out his laptop, and powering it up. He had no intention of watching the increasingly lush Persian countryside, green with grassy hillsides and valleys and speckled with the colors of a hundred kinds of flowers, whiz by. This was not a family vacation. This was war. He had plans to make and refine—and precious little time to finish them.

  No sooner had Jazini entered his password and opened his to-do file, however, than a call came in on his driver’s satphone.

  “Yes, hello?” the driver asked in Farsi. “Who’s calling? Oh yes, my Lord. Thank you, my Lord. He is right here. Please, one moment.”

  The driver quickly handed the phone to Jazini, who recognized immediately that it was the Mahdi and braced himself for whatever was coming next.

  “General?”

  “Yes, my Lord?”

  “Are you in motion?”

  “We are.”

  “Any problems?”

  “None,” Jazini said. “Everything is going very smoothly.”

  “Good,” said the Mahdi. “Now, you wrote about another matter in your proposal. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “Your idea is an excellent one, but we must move up the timetable. Tomorrow midday will be too late. It must be tonight.”

  Jazini was stunned. “Tonight, Your Excellency? With all due respect, my Lord, I don’t know if we can arrange matters so quickly.”

  “You must,” the Mahdi said. “Set it for midnight, and set into motion all the plans you laid out in the memo.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency, I will—”

  But before Jazini could finish his answer or ask another question—as was characteristic of a call with the Twelfth Imam—the signal went dead.

  TEHRAN, IRAN

  David pulled Marco Torres aside and complimented the paramilitary commander on his choice of their temporary safe house. The Tooska Park Inn, located in the southeast quadrant of Tehran, just off the Tehran South Highway, was a seedy-looking joint typically used by pimps and prostitutes. But now, with the war in full swing, the parking lot was empty. The place was completely deserted.

  Not surprisingly, the owner was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of guy who desperately needed the cash Torres had given him. And it wasn’t like he could have called the police anyway. The landlines connected to the motel weren’t working any more than the owner’s mobile phone was, a fact Torres had double-checked before directing Mays at the very last moment to take them there. The police had not been on regular patrols since the beginning of the war, so there should be no interruptions.

  David instructed Mays and Crenshaw to ditch their bullet-ridden van and steal two alternate vehicles, quickly. They couldn’t afford to be stranded. “Also, ask Nick to look at Javad’s phone,” David said to Torres. “See if he’s got a contact list. Who’s in it? Who is he calling? Who is he getting calls from? You know the drill.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  “And one more thing,” David added.

  “An extraction plan,” Torres said, seeming to read his mind.

  “Right,” David said. “Make one. Fast.”

  David had to get started, and he really didn’t know how to break Javad Nouri, how to get a zealot like him to talk. On the entire drive from the gun battle at the hospital, the question had been foremost on his mind. He didn’t have a lot of time to warm Nouri up, and the normal inducements of money and freedom and a new life in the United States weren’t likely to work on a top personal aide to the Twelfth Imam. What would work? Fear, perhaps, but fear of what? David had no answers.

  Pondering all that, and saying a silent prayer for wisdom, David opened the door to room 9 and stepped inside, Torres right behind him. As Torres closed and locked the door, David surveyed the room. It stank of stale cigarettes. A queen-size bed with a lumpy mattress and a thin blue quilt took up the center of the room. Along the right wall was a beat-up wooden dresser, on top of which sat an old television set covered in dust and looking like it hadn’t been used in twenty or thirty years, if that. He doubted it even worked. If it did, it looked like it might actually be black-and-white. Along the far wall was a small closet and a door, presumably leading to a bathroom. On the left side of the room was a battered wooden desk and a crooked lamp. The walls were painted a light blue but were dingy and smudged.

  Fox had taken up a position by the desk, occasionally peering through the threadbare plaid curtains, looking for signs of trouble, his weapon at the ready.

  As David had instructed, Javad Nouri was blindfolded and gagged, strapped to a wooden chair, his hands and feet tightly bound. Fox nodded when David glanced at him, letting him know Fox had, as directed, given Nouri an injection to wake him up but leave him in a somewhat foggy state of mind. David’s voice would be the first Nouri would hear in captivity, and a plan began to come to him.
It wasn’t foolproof by any means, but it just might work, and in the absence of an alternative, David decided to go with his gut.

  He walked behind Nouri’s chair and motioned for Fox to hand him a pistol. Fox gave him a black Sig Sauer P226 Navy, a 9mm handgun built specifically for the SEALs. David stared at it for a moment, weighing it in his hand. It felt colder than he’d expected and heavier. He walked over to Nouri, pulled back and released the slide, chambering a round, and held the 9mm to the man’s temple.

  “Javad, I know you can hear me, so I’m going to make this very simple,” David began. “I’m going to ask you questions. You’re going to give me answers—truthful answers. Got that?”

  Nouri didn’t move, didn’t nod, didn’t say a word, so David pressed the pistol harder against his temple. Nouri nodded ever so slightly.

  “You recognize my voice, don’t you, Javad?” David continued.

  Nouri nodded again.

  “That’s right, Javad. My name is Reza Tabrizi, and I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  27

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  “The Twelfth Imam has cut a deal with the Pakistanis,” Eva told Murray.