by Larry Bond
Shahin ignored the noise, his eyes fixed on the patrol car still trying to pull Nadhir off the road. He could hear the policeman using his loudspeaker now. That was a wasted effort, he knew. The younger Iranian didn’t speak or understand any English.
Weaving slightly under Zadi’s unsteady hands, the Nissan drifted up alongside the black-and-white police cruiser. Still pinned by heavy traffic, neither vehicle was moving more than twenty kilometers an hour. Shahin held his breath, waiting for the right moment. Closer. Closer. Now.
The two cars were less than two meters apart.
He poked the machine pistol above the door frame, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The Skorpion stuttered wildly, bucking upward in Shahin’s hands as he emptied a full magazine into the other vehicle at point-blank range. Sparks flew off torn metal, and glass shattered, smashed into a thousand fragments by the hail of gunfire. Blood fountained across the police car’s dashboard. Still rolling forward, the black-and-white slowly veered off the highway, spun around until it bounced into the hillside, and came to rest with its lights still flashing.
Inside the Nissan, Zadi flinched, panicked by the sudden deafening noise. He yanked the steering wheel left again and then back hard right, narrowly missing another car. More horns sounded angrily behind and all around them.
“Fool!” Shahin snarled. He glimpsed a road sign ahead and off to the right. They were practically right on top of the last exit before the bridge itself. They had done their part. They had brought Ibrahim Nadhir safely to the brink of Paradise. Now it was time to pull away—to live and fight and kill on another day. He grabbed Zadi’s shoulder and pointed. “There! The exit! Go! Go!”
Pale and shaking harder than ever, the older man obeyed. He jammed his foot down hard on the gas pedal. The Nissan sped off the freeway and flashed into an intersection without stopping. But they were moving too fast to make the turn that would have taken them back onto 101 heading north. Instead, Zadi skidded left, turning onto a small, two-lane road that snaked around and up the Marin Headlands, climbing ever higher along the sheer bluffs overlooking the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean.
Shahin whirled in his seat, straining to look through the Nissan’s rear window. Behind them, the gasoline tanker continued straight on down the highway. It roared steadily past the exit, driving toward San Francisco.
On the Golden Gate Bridge
Sitting tall behind the wheel of the tanker truck, Ibrahim Nadhir paid little heed to the chaos and confusion breaking out on the road behind him. Zadi and Shahin were there. They would do whatever was necessary to safeguard his mission.
The young Iranian smiled gently. All the long months of his training and religious instruction were close to fruition. His full awareness, his very soul itself, was focused on one overriding objective: the huge structure looming out of the fog in front of him. Everything in his life had come down to this one moment. This one place. This one act of faith.
He crossed onto the Golden Gate Bridge. The sound of the road beneath the tanker’s tires changed, becoming hollower and more metallic.
Taillights blazed a brighter red as the cars ahead slowed, preparing to wend their way through the tollbooth plaza blocking the bridge’s southern end.
Still smiling, Nadhir brought the big rig to a stop right in the middle of the span. The situation was perfect. Cars crowded with Americans hemmed him in on all sides.
He lifted his gaze from the road before him and looked east. A bright glow through the mist marked the rising sun and a new day. His eyes alight with an inner fire, he murmured, “God is great.”
Ibrahim Nadhir breathed in for the last time and reached for the detonator on the seat beside him.
The tanker truck exploded, spewing jagged pieces of steel shrapnel and ten thousand gallons of burning gasoline across the deck of the bridge. Vehicles inside the blast radius were shredded, smashed, and then set ablaze. Other cars and vans further out were hit broadside by the shock wave and blown completely off the span, plummeting into the icy waters below. Everywhere the gasoline landed, fires erupted, fed by new fuel from ruptured automobile gas tanks. Within seconds, the jammed center of the Golden Gate Bridge was a roaring sea of flame.
The Marin Headlands, above the Golden Gate
Half a mile away and five hundred feet above the bridge, Shahin tightened his grip on the car door handle, grimly holding on as Haydar Zadi took another hairpin turn too fast. The speeding Nissan skidded wildly, sliding across the centerline with its tires screeching.
The sky behind them caught fire, lit red and orange by an enormous explosion.
Zadi screamed, half blinded by the sudden glare off his rearview mirror. Still screaming, he spun the steering wheel around in a frantic effort to stay on the road. He turned the wrong way.
Moving at more than fifty miles an hour, the Nissan Sentra flew over the edge of the cliff, tumbling end over end down a sheer slope in an avalanche of dirt, rock, torn brush, and shredded metal.
JANUARY 16
Building 405, Benicia Industrial Park
Building 405 had started its life as part of the Benicia Army Arsenal. Since the Army closed its base back in the early sixties, the warehouse had changed hands more than a dozen times, moving from owner to owner and landlord to landlord in a dizzying, confusing procession. All of them had valued its sheer size and easy access to the freeway, railroad, and waterfront. None of them had valued Building 405 enough to spend much time or money on maintenance. From the outside, the place looked more like a ruin than a going concern—a heap of flaking, cracked concrete walls covered by moss, rust stains from an old tin roof, and spray-painted graffiti.
FBI Special Agent Michael Flynn stopped at the entrance to the cavernous warehouse to watch his investigative team at work. More than a dozen agents were scattered throughout the building, poking and prying everywhere with gloved hands as they looked for evidence. Others were busy stringing yellow police tape around areas marked for closer inspection. Camera flashes went off in a rapid, uneven sequence as photographers recorded every aspect of their search.
Flynn followed every move intently, fighting hard to control the fury surging through him. The tall, grim-faced FBI agent had just come from the explosion site at the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-four hours after the bomb blast, firemen and forensics specialists were still prying charred bodies out of mangled cars strewn across the span. More than one hundred innocent men, women, and children were dead. Dozens more were critically injured—all of them badly burned or maimed by flying chunks of steel. The bridge itself would be closed for days, both by the investigation and by the need to make sure the fires set by the tanker explosion hadn’t affected its structural integrity.
He shook his head. Over the years he’d seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of murder scenes. But he’d never seen anything like that tangled, twisted slaughterhouse on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Flynn wanted the bastards responsible for this massacre. He wanted them more than he’d wanted any murdering thug he’d hunted in his twenty-six years with the Bureau. His hands clenched into fists.
He looked up as his top aide broke off a hushed conversation with some of the other agents and hurried over. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy?”
“Plenty.” Special Agent Thomas Koenig nodded toward one of the work benches surrounded by yellow tape. “We found some cut strands of detonator wire over there. And the chemical sniffers are picking up definite traces of plastic explosive. There and all over this dump.”
Flynn grimaced. “So this was the bomb factory?”
“Yeah,” Koenig said flatly. “The way I figure it is this: They popped that truck driver out near the highway.” He pointed to the two massive ramps that led directly from the street into the building’s interior. “Then they drove the tanker right up one of those ramps, parked it, and pulled down those steel doors. After that, they had all the time in the world to wire it up for the big show.” He shrugged. “No muss. No f
uss.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly.” Koenig looked up at him closely. “Get anything besides a couple of John Doe stiffs out of that wrecked Sentra?”
Flynn nodded. Connecting the smashed-up Nissan they’d found at the bottom of the Marin cliffs with the bomb blast and dead CHP officer hadn’t required brilliant detective work, just common sense. “Weapons: a nine mil and a Czech machine pistol. They’re on the way to ballistics. Plus, we found a coil of wire and about a half-kilo block of plastic explosive in the trunk.”
Koenig whistled softly. “Curiouser and curiouser.” He frowned. “Think somebody else was out there yesterday morning cutting away a few loose ends?”
“Maybe.”
“Sir!” One of the agents manning their bank of laptop computers and secure phones waved him over. “A fax just came in from D.C. They’ve got positive IDs on both those bodies.”
Flynn arched a slate-gray eyebrow in surprise. That was damned quick work. Somebody was on the ball back at the Hoover Building after all.
He tore the paper straight out of the machine and scanned it rapidly. The Nissan’s driver was pegged as a man named Haydar Zadi, a legal resident alien and Iranian national. His eyes narrowed. Zadi had been on the FBI’s Watch List because of his reputed ties to Islamic radicals. No wonder they’d been able to identify him so quickly.
The biggest news was at the bottom of the fax. The other man they’d found wedged inside the crumpled Sentra was a bigger fish—a much bigger fish. Though they didn’t have any fingerprints to match for a positive ID, the Bureau’s counterterrorist specialists were virtually certain the dead man was one Rashim Mahdi, alias Mir Ahrari, alias Mohammed Shahin.
“Son of a bitch.” Flynn ran his eyes down a long list of unsolved assassinations and bombings—some in Europe, some in the Middle East. This Shahin character had been marked by a host of Western intelligence agencies as one of the HizbAllah’s key operational commanders. He looked up from the fax. “Put me through to the Director. Now.”
JANUARY 20
The White House, Washington, D.C.
Outside the White House, the sun had long since set, bringing another cold, gray, and windy winter day to a dreary end. The streets around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were almost empty—abandoned by the capital’s cadre of bureaucrats, politicians, and high-priced lawyers heading for plush suburban homes. Inside the executive mansion, however, staff aides, cabinet members, and uniformed military men still crowded the Oval Office.
Major General Sam Farrell knew it was considered an honor to be asked to offer advice to the President of the United States. Right now he was beginning to wish there had been some graceful way to decline that honor. He’d been invited to this high-level White House confab because he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters controlling all U.S. military counterterrorist units, including the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. That made him one of the Pentagon’s top experts on terrorism. So far, though, Farrell, a sturdy six-footer with an open, friendly countenance, had been asked precisely two questions: Did he want coffee or a soda? And could he please move his chair over to make room for the Chief of Naval Operations?
To the general, the seating arrangements for this meeting reflected the current administration’s fundamental priorities and power structure. The President’s political gurus and media advisors filled the overstuffed chairs closest to his desk. Beyond them, the Director of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General sat in an awkward row, wedged together on a couch that was just a shade too small for all four of them. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Farrell, and a few other subordinate officers were furthest back, relegated to seats lining the far wall.
At last, the President looked up from a thick, red-tagged briefing book he’d been devouring while the discussion raged around him. There were shadows under his eyes. Even in normal times the nation’s chief executive often had trouble sleeping. Now his fatigue showed plainly. He fixed his gaze on the FBI Director. “You’re sure the Iranian government was directly involved in this attack on us? That this wasn’t just a couple of whacked-out crazies on a killing spree?”
Farrell shifted slightly in his chair, concealing his impatience. They’d already been over this same ground several times. The others around him didn’t seem fazed. Apparently, marathon talkfests were the rule in this administration, not the exception.
“We’re as sure as we can be under the circumstances, Mr. President,” David Leiter answered carefully. At forty, the trim, telegenic FBI Director was young for his post, but he’d spent years as a prosecutor and he knew how to build a case.
Physical evidence from the site of the bridge massacre and the dead terrorists definitely linked the HizbAllah to the attack. And where the HizbAllah went, Iran was always close behind. Tehran’s radical Islamic regime had helped create the shadowy terror group in the early 1980s. Tehran provided it with safe havens, training camps, and supplies. Tehran held the organization’s purse strings and kept its ideological fervor burning at a fever pitch. For all practical purposes, Iran owned the HizbAllah. Given all of that, the consensus opinion among America’s senior counterterror experts was clear: The HizbAllah’s leaders would never launch an operation of such magnitude without direct authorization by Iran’s Supreme Defense Council.
After all, Iran had plenty of its own reasons to strike hard at the United States. Since the fall of the Shah, the two countries had been more or less in a state of undeclared war. Iranian-sponsored hostage-takings had been met with American economic sanctions. During the 1980s Iranian attacks on neutral shipping during its war with Iraq had led to a series of fierce naval clashes in the Persian Gulf. In recent years Tehran’s ambitious efforts to acquire missile and nuclear technologies had encountered stiff American resistance at all levels. With the collapse of the old Soviet Union, Iran’s radical mullahs viewed the United States—the Great Satan—as the last remaining obstacle and threat to their revolution. And Tehran’s state-controlled press had been quick to openly celebrate the “heroic martyrs who have plunged this dagger into America’s heart.”
Leiter paused, letting that sink in, and then pressed on. “Finally, Mr. President, we have hard evidence of official Iranian involvement.” He nodded toward the CIA chief. “Several years ago, our intelligence services started making contacts in Eastern Europe’s arms industries. We knew their desperate need for hard currency would make it difficult to completely block explosives sales to terrorist front groups. So we did the next best thing. We persuaded them to blend distinctive mixtures of inert chemicals into every batch of plastic explosive they manufacture. Essentially, every separate production run carries its own unique molecular signature.”
The FBI Director paused again. “Our labs ran a trace on the explosives used in the Golden Gate Bridge attack. They came straight out of Iranian military stockpiles, Mr. President. Stockpiles the government of Iran purchased less than six months ago.”
“I see.” The President bit his lower lip, apparently still reluctant to make a final decision.
Farrell understood his hesitation. By their very nature, military operations involved killing. They were also inherently hazardous—both physically for the men tasked to carry them out and politically for the national leaders who approved them.
Still frowning, the President shut the briefing book in front of him and glanced toward the small man seated to his left. “Any thoughts, Jeff?”
Balding, scrawny, and often dressed in worn suits that were ten years out-of-date, Jefferson T. Corbell blended oddly with the rest of the button-down crowd inhabiting the White House. Despite that eccentric appearance, Farrell knew, the man wielded enormous power.
Corbell was the President’s top political tactician, the keeper of his prospects for reelection.
“We have to hit the Iranians back, Mr. President. Hard.” Corbell at least had no doubts. He leaned forward, stabbing the air with a finger to emph
asize his points—speaking forcefully through a soft southern drawl. “When the American people find out who was behind this attack, they’ll want action on this—not finger-wagging or U.N. resolutions.”
The diminutive Georgian glared at the Secretary of State as if daring him to disagree before he turned back to the President. “Our focus groups all say the same thing: You can’t afford to appear weak or indecisive. God knows, we can’t afford to let this thing linger on much longer. This foreign policy shit is dragging all your poll numbers down.”
Farrell hid his distaste for Corbell’s reasoning. It shouldn’t take bad polling news to push and pull this White House into retaliating for one of the worst acts of terrorism ever conducted on U.S. soil, but he’d been around Washington long enough to know that domestic politics played a role in every administration’s foreign policy decisions. Civics textbooks aside, that was the way the world worked, and you couldn’t ignore it.
The President seemed to read his mind. He smiled wryly. “Well, I guess I don’t often get the chance to win votes by doing the right thing. Admiral Dillon?”
“Yes, sir?” The white-haired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs straightened in his chair, expectation plain on a face weathered by years spent at sea in all seasons.
“Put your forces in motion.”
FEBRUARY 5
In the Persian Gulf, east of Qatar
The still, calm waters of the Persian Gulf exploded, blasted apart by a missile surging skyward from below the surface. Boosted at first by a solid rocket, it climbed rapidly, deploying tail fins, stub wings, and an intake for its jet engine. As soon as the airfoils bit into the air, the Tomahawk cruise missile arced over, diving for the concealment offered by low altitude.
The sea erupted again, eighty yards further north. Another missile roared aloft. Tomahawk after Tomahawk followed, taking flight at precise, thirty-second intervals.