Damascus Countdown

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Najjar sat for a moment without speaking, trying to process all that he was hearing.

  “So,” he said quietly at last, “the prophecies came true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The prophecies—you know, in the Bible, the ones in Isaiah and Jeremiah that say in the last days Damascus will be obliterated as a city—they just came true.”

  Eva clearly had no idea what he was talking about, and she asked him to explain. He did so, but he had questions of his own. Having been one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists for years, Najjar asked for more technical details about what the Agency had ascertained about the cause of the blast. Eva bent the rules a bit and told him what she knew. She made it clear that there was no evidence this was an Israeli nuclear strike. Rather, she said, it appeared that the warhead detonated moments after the Scud-C lifted off. She gave a few more details. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Najjar to posit a theory.

  “This was deliberate,” he told her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nuclear warheads don’t detonate during launch unless the man who built them is either an idiot or a suicide bomber,” Najjar said. “None of the scientists on Dr. Saddaji’s team were idiots. They were brilliant, brilliant men. But none of them besides Tariq Khan had been recruited by Saddaji to be part of building bombs.”

  “So what are you saying?” Eva asked.

  “I’m saying one of those men knew he had the chance to take out the entire Iranian and Syrian leadership in one shot and stop the Mahdi’s nuclear weapons nightmare at the same time,” Najjar said. “And he took it.”

  It was a radical theory—one Eva said the top officials at the CIA had not even considered in these early hours. She pursued it for several minutes, peppering Najjar with one question after another until Najjar abruptly changed the topic.

  “So does this mean Reza Tabrizi will be coming home soon?” he asked. “The man saved my life and my family’s lives. I would very much like to see him again. I would like to say thank you.”

  The question hung in the air for a while. Eva looked away and said nothing. Farah came into the room and set a tray before them with two mugs of hot black coffee, along with a small pitcher of creamer, a bowl of sugar, and some spoons.

  “Is that not possible?” Najjar now asked. “Is that against the rules?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Eva said finally. “It’s just . . .”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “What?” Najjar asked. “If it’s not against the rules, then what?”

  Eva picked up one of the mugs and took several sips. “Najjar, I’m not sure how to say this the best way,” she began. “So I’m just going to be straight with you. Reza is . . . I’m afraid Reza is missing, and . . .”

  “And what?” Najjar pressed.

  “And presumed dead.”

  Najjar gasped, as did his mother-in-law. She knew all the stories of what Reza Tabrizi had done for them. Indeed, she—like all of them—had been praying night and day for Reza’s soul as well as his safety.

  Just then Sheyda came downstairs, still wearing her pajamas but wrapped in a thick gray sweatshirt. “What happened to Reza?” she asked, coming around the corner and taking a seat next to Eva. “I don’t understand. Where is he now?”

  Eva greeted Sheyda and reminded them that there were some things she wasn’t authorized to say. “What I can tell you is that he and his team were hunting two Iranian warheads that the Israelis missed in their initial air strikes,” she said. “The hunt took them out of Iran and into Syria. They were headed right into Damascus when the missile lifted off and exploded. We were tracking his team with a drone. But when the explosion happened, we lost contact with the drone and with Reza.”

  “But he could still be alive, right?” Najjar asked.

  “Anything’s possible,” Eva said. “But I . . .” She began to choke up.

  Farah ran to get a box of tissues and gave several to Eva, who dabbed her eyes and apologized for her lack of professionalism.

  “Anything’s possible,” she said again. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath, Najjar. As I told you, the devastation is beyond belief. We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world. Believe me, you don’t want to see the satellite photos. It’s . . . well . . . I don’t see how anyone could have survived.”

  The room was quiet for several minutes, and then Sheyda asked Eva a question. “You two were very close, weren’t you?”

  Eva was clearly caught off guard by the question, but she chose to answer it anyway. “We’d become good friends, yes,” she said.

  “Just friends?” Sheyda asked, but Najjar reprimanded her and quickly apologized.

  “It’s okay,” Eva replied. “Your wife is a very perceptive woman. The truth is, I guess I was hoping for something to develop between us. But it never did. And even if he had lived, honestly, I don’t think it ever would have happened.”

  “Why not?” Sheyda asked, more gently this time.

  Eva sighed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue again. “He didn’t love me,” she said, her bottom lip quivering. “He loved someone else.”

  Epilogue

  PORTLAND, OREGON

  Looking out over the twenty young faces in her classroom, Marseille Harper knew she had done the right thing coming home to Portland. She needed some semblance of normalcy, needed a sweet routine to make it possible to keep breathing. Her heart and mind had taken so many turns, felt so many blows in the past two weeks. It was a miracle she wasn’t under the covers of her bed, just weeping or numb. Of course, there had been several nights since her return to her responsibilities in the classroom when she had sobbed herself to sleep. She thought of the psalmist who wrote about his tears being his food, and she felt like a kindred spirit had written that especially for her.

  The obliteration of the Syrian capital and the deaths of more than two million people, including the Twelfth Imam and the top leaders of both Syria and Iran, had dominated the news and everyone’s conversations all week. The utter horror of it all had deeply penetrated the culture, Marseille had noticed. People talked about it constantly, always in hushed, somber tones. Conversations on completely unrelated topics seemed to be more subdued since the detonation as well. Even the children were asking questions about what had happened in the Middle East. Where was Damascus? Where was Syria? What was a mushroom cloud? Why did Mommy and Daddy seem so quiet, so sad?

  In a way, being asked these questions helped Marseille feel needed, like at least she was helping her little friends process the world-shaking event in Damascus in a way that was simple and brief. The hugs of the children were like a balm.

  On Monday morning, she had been waiting at Hancock Field in Syracuse, ready for the early-morning flight back to Portland. She had wanted to stay in Syracuse and help the Walshes as much as she could after the news of Lexi and Chris’s deaths. But she had a job to do back home. She’d signed a contract. She’d given her word, and she had to keep it. At least Lexi’s aunt lived nearby and seemed very capable of assisting the Walshes in their planning for the funeral arrangements. Lexi and Chris had a strong church community, and Marseille knew meals would be brought and friends would be there to listen and cry and pray.

  She remembered reaching her gate at the airport and sitting down with a cup of coffee to read her Scripture passages for the day. She had just started to pray about the verses in front of her when a wave of gasps and shock moved through the atmosphere at the United gate. People were suddenly standing and staring at the television monitors and shaking their heads. They were making phone calls and looking wide-eyed at one another. Marseille had not been sitting where she could see any of the TVs, but when she walked to the nearest monitor, she found a CNN breaking news story and a single, horrifying image—a mushroom cloud over Damascus.

  She had barely been able to believe what she was seeing. Her mind had been flooded with questions. How had it happened? What did it mean? Was David
safe, or had he been killed in the explosion? Though Tom Murray had told her only the day before that David was alive and well and doing his job—a job she had assumed was in Iran—she wondered if he could have been in Syria when this happened. If so, had he died instantly and painlessly, near ground zero of the blast? Or was he burned and dying a slow death somewhere on the outskirts of Damascus?

  Marseille tried to push such thoughts out of her head. She wanted to believe David was in Iran. But the doubts kept creeping in. Maybe he had been trying to stop this very thing from happening. If he was doing that, then maybe he had been right in the middle of it. She remembered one of the United reps calling her and her fellow passengers to board their flight at that moment, and she had forced herself to put one foot in front of the other. She told herself she would wait for Dr. Shirazi to call. No news was good news, right? Then she wondered if maybe she should call Mr. Murray again. Or maybe he would call her?

  She desperately wanted to believe that David had been in Tehran or some secret location far away from the nuclear blast, but over the last few nights as she cried herself to sleep about Lexi and Chris, she had shed many tears over David, too. Where was he right now?

  Thankfully, her class didn’t know about Lexi and Chris and of course had no knowledge of David. She could mourn her friends in private, in prayer, and wait for God’s comfort, if not his answers to why all this had happened. One thing was clear, at least. She’d been praying and studying and trying to understand for weeks if the Twelfth Imam was the Antichrist who would come and rule the world in the end of days as the Bible foretold. But he was gone now. He was not the Antichrist—not the final one, at least. Marseille wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. But at least she knew for certain.

  Tomorrow, she would head back into sorrow, flying to Syracuse early in the morning for the Saturday-afternoon memorial service of the newlywed couple she still had trouble believing were really gone. Then she would fly straight back to the West Coast early Monday morning, missing only one more day of class and, hopefully, bringing this chapter of tragedy to an end. It would be an incredibly fast trip, one she wasn’t sure she would handle well emotionally or physically, but she had to be there.

  She was still trying to seek God’s wisdom about whether she should visit Dr. Shirazi again while she was in Syracuse. She felt she should, but it would be so painful. And what right did she have to keep attaching herself to that family? She would already be involved in the Vandermarks’ memorial—only weeks after she’d been in their wedding, only a week after she’d helped with Mrs. Shirazi’s memorial, only months after her own father’s memorial . . . No, she couldn’t let herself start that line of thinking. It was all too much.

  She looked out at the heads bent over their chapter books. She was so proud of them and satisfied to see their reading progress since the school year started. She prayed that each of them would someday read the greatest Book of all and learn about the character of the heavenly Father who loved each one of them. She knew they would need his wisdom to navigate a world that seemed to lack any sense these days.

  The bell rang to bring the school day to a close, and the children packed up their backpacks and headed for their buses. Marseille hoped most, if not all, would be greeted by their moms at home with cookies and hugs. She hoped these little dear ones were still enjoying the simple innocent pleasures of childhood, despite the sad news that just kept on coming from the Middle East. Couldn’t they be shielded from it for a while longer?

  Getting into her pale-blue VW bug, she paused before heading to the homestead her father had bought on Sauvie Island, situated in the middle of the Columbia River about ten miles northwest of downtown Portland. She tried to thank God for the events of the last weeks. She thanked him that she had gotten to see David one last time after all those years, thanked him for the chance to make some things clear that had been left unsaid. She thanked him for the opportunity to serve the Shirazi family in a time of great sorrow and for the shared secret she now kept with David’s dad. She thanked the Lord that Lexi had known love, had known Jesus, had enjoyed a beautiful wedding, and had seen her dream of visiting the Holy Land fulfilled. Now she was seeing Jesus face-to-face, and this was another reason to thank him.

  Marseille started the VW and connected her iPhone to the car’s stereo system.

  She sang along for a few minutes and resonated with the lyrics, straight from Psalm 103: “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” The song spoke of worshiping God from morning till evening, and as she sang, she offered her own sacrifice of praise, feeling it change everything in her heart, making it possible to hope, if not to smile. She was grateful that God was teaching her how to face the shock of searing losses by relying on him. She didn’t know how people outside of Christ could keep going.

  She drove onto the main street of her little town, contemplating dinner. Should she pick up Thai food or some Italian? But she quickly dismissed the thought. She’d been eating cereal for the past few nights and still had no stomach for much else.

  The fog hugging the streets and lampposts made the shops seem snuggled in for the evening, and she looked forward to one more night in her own bed before she got on another plane. Coming around the corner to the quiet neighborhood where she’d lived with her dad and grandmother, she took in the front porches and the toys the kids had left along the sidewalk. It was a nice place to come home to. But her train of thought ended there as she saw a man sitting on the front porch of her house.

  She almost lost control of the car and slammed into the garage door as she turned into the driveway. It wasn’t possible—it wasn’t possible at all. But there he was. David Shirazi was smiling at her from her front steps. He was bundled in a warm coat and hat. His arm looked like it was in a cast, and his face was covered in scars. But he was there, waiting for her. She wasn’t sure she had the strength to open her door, but it was okay because he was walking over to her car to open it for her. She looked through the rapidly fogging window, and suddenly the door was open and she was in his arms. She buried her face in his shoulder and began to sob, and he held her as though his life depended on it.

  She wasn’t alone in her tears. David seemed only slightly embarrassed by his, and they steadied each other as they walked up the steps to the house quietly and got out of the cold and into the warmth of the old-fashioned front room. She didn’t want to speak and break the moment, so she just sat down on the couch and expected him to sit beside her. But he didn’t sit. He lowered himself to his knee, not without a slight wince of pain but with a big smile. He took a small, carved wooden box from his coat pocket and cleared his throat, thick with emotion.

  “Marseille Harper, by God’s grace—his amazing grace alone—I have survived all that has happened in the past few days and weeks. I believe I know why God gave me a second chance at life. To come here and be with you. And I am here now to tell you that I have loved you since I learned to love at all. I want you to know—I need you to know—that I can only love you because the love of Jesus Christ now lives in me. I am his child. I’ve given my life to him, and he’s changing me day by day. And I believe he has given me the honor of serving you for the rest of our lives, if you will have me. I love you so much. Marseille, will you marry me?”

  She couldn’t believe her ears, and yet at the same time it seemed exactly right, as if her heavenly Father had written the most beautiful and miraculous story for her, and David was reading right from the script. And then she knew that was exactly what was happening. The author and perfecter of her faith had created a glorious scene, and this was her cue to walk onstage and answer with all her heart.

  “Yes, David, yes—I love you, and I am yours.”

  The rest of the evening was like a dream. David told her about racing toward Damascus when the bomb detonated. He told her about losing control of the car in the blinding flash, though he thanked God they weren’t close enough to be affected in any other way. He described crashing down the hillside and the deat
h of one of his two teammates in the crash. He explained how he and his one surviving colleague had somehow made it back up the ridge to the highway, despite their many injuries. Eventually they had acquired a car and driven to a remote place where they could be picked up by American special forces and taken back to the United States.

  As they talked, she made a pot of coffee while David built a roaring fire in the fireplace. Marseille kept asking questions, and David told as much of the story as he was able. She sat amazed to hear how Najjar Malik had come to Christ and how he’d wanted to defect from the Iranian regime. He briefly told her of his role in helping Najjar and his family get out of Iran and come to the U.S. She was delighted by the story of how Najjar had escaped the custody of his CIA handlers and how God had used him to preach the gospel to millions in Iran and the Muslim world. Now, David said, Najjar had been returned to the care of the Agency but also reunited with his family.

  Then she marveled as David explained how an old, blind friend had opened David’s eyes to the truth about Jesus.

  David explained how he’d called his father immediately upon escaping from Syria and how Jack Zalinsky had helped him get to Syracuse to see his father within twenty-four hours of being extracted from the war zone before being treated for his injuries. He described what it meant to him to give his father a bear hug and to be in the warmth and safety of his own childhood home. Though he and his father had spoken first of David’s mom, the memorial service, and the well-being of David’s brothers, the conversation had quickly turned to Marseille. David was deeply moved by the sacrificial love that his father said she had shown the family, how she had stayed and served. He was stunned but thrilled that in God’s providence he had allowed Marseille to know his secrets and to be proud of him. And when he had left Syracuse early Friday morning to fly to Portland, he had carried with him not only his father’s joyful blessing but his mother’s diamond engagement ring as well.