Damascus Countdown

by Joel C. Rosenberg

“Not sure,” Zalinsky said. “We’re running the images through facial-recognition software, but they’re not clear photos. They’re not head-on shots, and we’re not getting anything.”

  “They look like Revolutionary Guards to me,” said Mays. “Probably colleagues of the target.”

  “Got it; thanks,” David replied. “Bravo One, you ready to move?”

  “Ready to move on your command, Alpha One,” Torres replied.

  “Good—now hold your position and let’s see what these two do.”

  David didn’t want trouble. He wanted to isolate Omid and get him talking. This was a complication he did not need. If these two men really were colleagues of Omid, that meant they were armed and dangerous. David knew they couldn’t afford a repeat of the firefight at the hospital. He didn’t want to risk a bloodbath in the hallway. This op had to be fast and quiet and could not get the whole building involved or the entire Tehran police force responding. If these guys were really going to Omid Jazini’s room, David figured the best thing to do was let them get inside and then wait till they left. Then again, what if they were just friends of Omid’s? What if they were coming to hang out for the evening, to cook dinner and watch a movie? It could be hours before they moved on, and David didn’t have hours to spare.

  Movement caught David’s eye on the small monitor Fox was holding. He glanced at it. The elevator doors were opening. The two men got off the elevator and, sure enough, approached Omid’s room. David’s instinct was to move quickly and take these two out, but the fear of accidentally killing two potentially unarmed civilians made him hesitate.

  “Alpha One, we need to move now, before they get inside,” Torres said over the radio.

  “No, not yet,” David replied. “We don’t know if they’re armed, and I don’t want any prisoners beyond Omid.”

  “Bravo One is right,” Zalinsky chimed in. “You need to move now.”

  “Negative. Everyone hold your positions,” David insisted, furious that Torres and Zalinsky would question his judgment in the middle of an operation when they should be maintaining radio silence.

  But just then, David watched in horror as both men drew silencer-equipped pistols from underneath their jackets, kicked in Omid’s door, and went in, guns blazing. For a moment, David was too stunned to speak. So were Zalinsky and Torres, who gasped but didn’t say a word. But then David’s anger began to burn.

  “Let’s move—now!” he ordered.

  Bolting into the hallway ahead of his team, he sprinted toward Omid’s door with Fox close on his heels. He pivoted into the room, holding his pistol out front, and found both men staring down at the bloody corpse of Omid Jazini.

  “Put ’em down,” he shouted in Farsi. “Both of you—guns down—now!”

  Clearly startled, one of the men began to turn, his pistol in hand. David shot him twice in the chest.

  “Don’t do it!” David shouted again. “Don’t turn around. Don’t make any fast moves. Don’t even think about it. Just put the gun down now or you die like your friend.”

  The second man slowly set the gun down and put his hands in the air just as Torres and Crenshaw reached the room.

  “We need to get inside,” Torres said in English. “Before someone sees us out here.”

  David nodded for his team to enter and close the door, which they did, but he kept his pistol aimed at the second man’s back and told him to lie facedown on the floor. The man slowly, carefully, cautiously complied, but then he stunned them all.

  “You speak English?” the man asked in English, with an accent that wasn’t Persian. David couldn’t quite place it. “You’re not Iranian?”

  “Shut up and stay still!” David replied in Farsi, ordering Torres to cuff and search the man.

  Torres did but found no wallet, no ID, no keys, nor any other personal possessions on the man.

  “Who are you guys?” the man asked, again in English, pushing his luck.

  Maybe it was the circumstances. Maybe it was all the adrenaline coursing through his system. David wasn’t sure. But he knew that accent, and he was kicking himself for not thinking clearly enough to place it. He glanced at Torres, who shrugged. He glanced at Crenshaw, who was guarding the door, and Fox, who was guarding the window. They didn’t know either.

  “Are they dead?” David asked Torres in Farsi.

  Torres felt the pulses of the two bodies on the floor. “Omid is,” he said, but then, to everyone’s surprise, he said the other one wasn’t.

  “Search and cuff them both,” David ordered.

  Torres complied, dealing with the conscious gunman first and discovering he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

  “Professionals?” said David.

  Torres nodded.

  “Turn them both over,” David now directed. “I want to see their faces.”

  Alive, sure, but the first one was in severe pain.

  “I think you broke my ribs,” the man groaned.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t double-tap you to the head,” David replied. “Actually, I still might. Now who are you two and why are you here?”

  “We could ask the same of you,” the second man said in English.

  “You could, but we’re holding the guns, so you’ll be the ones answering the questions just now,” said David.

  “Well, we’ve got nothing to say,” the first man groaned.

  David was about to respond when Zalinsky came over the radio and told him to stop talking, take a snapshot of both men on his satphone, and upload the photo to Langley. David did, and as he waited for the results, he told Fox to search Omid’s room for phones, computers, and files of any kind.

  David heard Zalinsky curse. “What is it?” he asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “They’re Israelis,” Zalinsky replied. “They’re Mossad.”

  Four fire trucks—two pumpers, a hook and ladder, and a hazmat response unit—pulled off the tarmac and drove up to the administrative building, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Nearly twenty firefighters, fully suited up and ready to do battle, jumped out of the trucks and rushed inside. There they were met by Revolutionary Guards who immediately welcomed them, despite no evidence of smoke or flames or any other emergency. The fire chief checked the alarm control panel in the lobby but found none of the warning lights lit up. To the contrary, all the evidence suggested systems were normal and under control. Nevertheless, with the permission of the Mahdi’s head of security, the chief directed his men to rush up to the second and third floors to make sure everything was okay.

  On the third floor, six of the firemen went into a large, windowless supply room on the west side of the building. Moments later, six different men came out of that supply room.

  Following the plan laid out in General Mohsen Jazini’s memo, an elaborate ruse was being set into motion. Daryush Rashidi was the first to exit the room, dressed in a fire helmet, Nomex fire coat, pants, gloves, and rubber boots, an air tank on his back and an air mask over his face. Rashidi was followed by the Mahdi and four members of the Mahdi’s security detail, all similarly dressed and all but the Mahdi helping to carry several trunks that looked like they held firefighting equipment. They met the rest of the emergency crews in the lobby, and when the chief gave the all-clear signal, they all headed back to the trucks. Rashidi led the way for the other five, heading directly for the hazmat truck, a large, heavy-duty vehicle built by the Scania company in Sweden and painted a bright, almost-fluorescent yellow. He opened the back doors, let the five members of the team climb in, then shut the doors again and climbed into the front passenger seat and told the driver—another undercover IRGC commando—to follow the other fire trucks departing the airport grounds.

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Mossad chief Zvi Dayan scanned the incoming note on his secure PDA as Defense Minister Shimon informed Naphtali that the strike package was just a few minutes away from the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran
and pressed him for the authorization to launch their missiles.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister—we may have a change in plans,” Dayan said.

  “What do you mean?” Naphtali asked.

  “You may not have to bomb the airport after all,” Dayan said.

  “Why not?”

  “Something’s happening at the facility in question,” said the Mossad chief, now turning to an aide and ordering him to see if they could get the live images from the drone over the airport uploaded to the prime minister’s communications center.

  “What is it?” Naphtali asked.

  “We have reports that a group of fire trucks have arrived at the scene and almost two dozen firefighters have rushed inside,” Dayan reported.

  “Into the facility where you think the Mahdi is?” Naphtali clarified.

  “Where we know he is, sir,” Dayan noted. “It houses the central war room for the entire Revolutionary Guard system, and we have growing evidence the whole war is being run out of that building. What’s strange is that all these fire trucks have arrived when there’s no evidence of a fire. I mean, there are fires raging on the other side of the airfield—the military side—but as we’ve said, the civilian side has been untouched. And yet here are all these trucks and firefighters right at the moment we’re about to bomb the place to kingdom come.”

  “I haven’t given my authorization yet,” Naphtali reminded the Mossad chief.

  “Yes, of course, sir, I realize that. I’m just saying . . .”

  “You think the Iranians know we’re coming right now.”

  “No, not necessarily—not right this minute—but as I said before, we believe the IRGC is going to move the Mahdi, and this might be how they’re doing it.”

  One of the PM’s aides knocked, entered the PM’s office, and explained the video feed was now ready in the communications center. The three men quickly moved down the hall and found aerial images from the Israeli drone of the firefighters exiting the administrative building and getting back into their trucks.

  “You think the Mahdi is in one of these groups?” Shimon asked.

  “I do,” Dayan said.

  “Which one?”

  “The hazmat team.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at how they’re walking. They’re not walking like firemen. They’ve set up a perimeter around this one here—the one in the center. And look, they’re not taking their equipment off while coming out of the building. They’re getting into the back of the hazmat truck with their masks and air tanks on. That’s not normal.”

  “You’re saying that’s the Mahdi?” said Naphtali, pointing to the screen.

  “Yes, sir,” Dayan said. “If it were the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah, we would have seen him walking more slowly. Hosseini is seventysomething.”

  Naphtali watched the trucks head away from the airport complex, depart the grounds of the airfield, and pull onto Me’raj Boulevard, heading northeast toward Azadi Square. But all eyes were on the bright-yellow hazmat response vehicle, on whose roof was painted Unit 19 in large black letters.

  “Where’s the fire station?” the PM asked.

  “It’s right by the Azadi subway station,” Dayan said.

  “And what are you recommending?”

  “A missile strike on the hazmat vehicle, sir.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where, in Azadi Square?”

  “Absolutely, sir—but to minimize collateral damage I would definitely recommend a strike before the truck gets back to the firehouse.”

  Naphtali was running out of time. The hook and ladder and the two pumpers were already in the traffic circle that went around Azadi Square, just minutes away from the firehouse. The hazmat truck, however, was just entering the traffic circle.

  “This is it, sir,” Dayan said. “It’s now or never. If the Mahdi gets to the fire station and slips away in another vehicle or via some other escape route we don’t know about, we may never get another chance.”

  Naphtali knew Dayan was right in principle, but was he right in fact? Was the Twelfth Imam really in that yellow truck? If he was, then it would be a crime against the Jewish people, he calculated, not to take the shot and try to decapitate the Caliphate right here and now. But if Dayan was wrong and Israel killed six innocent, unarmed firemen in downtown Tehran, the international diplomatic community—which was already dead set against Israel and this war—would go ballistic. The U.N. Security Council condemnation of Israel would pass for certain. Not even the U.S. would veto it, certainly not under the leadership of President Jackson. The ramifications of that were serious indeed. Israel could be subject to economic sanctions, trade embargoes, and International Criminal Court proceedings, and those were just for starters.

  “Please, Asher, for heaven’s sake, we have to strike now,” Shimon insisted.

  32

  TEHRAN, IRAN

  “You’re Israeli?” David asked, incredulous but realizing that was the accent he’d been detecting—the sound of a native Hebrew speaker talking in English. He just couldn’t believe he was hearing it in the heart of Iran.

  “And you, are you the one they call Zephyr?”

  Now David’s eyes widened. How could they know that? No one outside the top echelons of the U.S. government knew he existed, much less his code name.

  David hoped the ski mask was covering the stunned expression on his face, on all his team’s faces. “We’re asking the questions. Who are you? Are you two Mossad?”

  The man said nothing, and David wasn’t sure if he was following security protocols at that moment or simply too surprised to answer his question.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” David said. “Are you the guys who took out Mohammed Saddaji?”

  “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” said one.

  “Sure you do,” David replied. “You—or your colleague—put a car bomb in his Mercedes. It was a nice piece of work.”

  The two men said nothing.

  “Look, I don’t have time to play games,” David said. ”You’ve got three seconds to let me know who you are, or we’ll end this now.” He chambered a round and aimed his pistol. “One . . .”

  Nothing but silence.

  “Two . . .”

  Still more silence, so David put the muzzle directly on the second man’s forehead, right between his eyes.

  “Three.”

  “You can call me Tolik,” one said.

  “Why are you here?” David asked.

  “Same as you,” said Tolik. “To shut down this war.”

  “But why here, why the apartment of Omid Jazini?” David pressed. “You didn’t come here to find him, to interrogate him, to shake him down and squeeze him for information. You came here to kill him.”

  “Omid is part of his father’s security detail,” said Tolik. “And his father was just promoted to commander in chief of the Caliphate’s military.”

  “We know.”

  “So our orders were to assassinate him.”

  “Why?”

  “To send a message to his father.”

  “What message?”

  “That we’re onto him,” Tolik said. “That we’re closing in. That they’ve got moles in their ranks who are talking to the outside world and that they can’t ever know whom to trust. We did our job. And believe me, word will spread fast through the top ranks of the Mahdi’s inner circle. Key men are being picked off left and right. We’re guessing you’re the ones who kidnapped Javad Nouri today.”

  David didn’t respond.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Suddenly Fox called from the master bedroom. “Boss, there’s something here you need to see.”

  Rashidi hated having the Mahdi out in the open. There were too many risks, too many threats. What if there was a sniper out there? What if there was a team of assassins? This wasn’t a bulletproof truck. The agents in the back had machine guns, but they didn’t have RPGs or heavy
firepower. And to minimize the risk of a leak, almost no one—including most of the security detail back at the war room—even knew the Mahdi was in this vehicle. But as General Jazini had explained, they had to take a risk if they were going to get the Mahdi to Kabul in time to meet President Farooq. The key wasn’t avoiding all risks, Jazini’s memo insisted; the key was doing everything possible to minimize the risks and then being ready for any threat you couldn’t rule out.

  They were nearly three-quarters of the way around the traffic circle, with Azadi Square on their left and Jenah Highway coming up fast on their right. In a few seconds, they would be on Lashkari Highway, taking a quick exit to the firehouse. That’s certainly where the driver thought they were going. But it was Rashidi’s job to make sure they never got to the firehouse.

  “Turn here—right now!” Rashidi shouted. “Yes, right here, onto Jenah Highway. That’s an order from the Mahdi!”

  The driver was completely confused, but he was a man trained to follow orders, so he turned the wheel hard to the right and exited onto Jenah Highway.

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Naphtali had just given the order to fire at the hazmat truck when he saw the vehicle make a sudden turn.

  “What’s going on?” Naphtali shouted. “Belay that order, Zvi. Belay that order.”

  “Abort, abort!” Dayan screamed into the phone in his hand.

  Shimon began cursing. The entire communications center erupted in confusion.

  “Why are you aborting the mission?” Shimon demanded to know.

  “Why is that truck turning?” Naphtali asked.

  “How should I know?” Shimon shot back. “We’ve got a clean shot. Let’s take it.”

  “No, not until I’m sure,” Naphtali said.

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure the Mahdi is in there.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, we can be even more certain the Mahdi is in that truck now,” Shimon said.

  “Why?”

  “Because whoever is driving doesn’t want to take him to the firehouse.”