by Jack Mars
“I love you.”
There was a long pause over the line. The delay accounted for part of it, yes, but it was longer than the delay. Much longer.
“I love you, too,” he said at last.
“I know,” she said, and a tear appeared at the corner of her eye. It broke free and slid down her cheek.
“Don’t die, okay?”
“I haven’t died yet, have I?”
Before she could answer, his voice changed. “Listen, I’ve got to run. I’ll talk to you soon.” Then he was gone.
“Don’t go,” she said into the blank telephone.
The Secret Service man poked his head in the door. He was holding his earpiece to his ear. “Madam President?”
“Yes?”
“I’m just getting word. They need you in the Situation Room. There’s a problem.”
* * *
“Hello, Yonatan,” Susan said.
She looked around the Situation Room at the tired, shocked faces that surrounded her. Kurt was here. Kat. Several others. Everyone looked like they had already been hit by a bomb. Everyone in the room was holding a phone to their ear, to listen to this call.
“Susan, this is a courtesy call,” Yonatan Stern said. “We have made our preparations for war. We can no longer wait. As of five minutes ago, we have begun a full mobilization of Israeli civil society. Everyone is being sent to the bomb shelters. Our nuclear silos are reporting readiness as we speak. Within thirty minutes, we will begin our attack.”
“Yonatan, we sent a team of covert operators to you. They’ve risked their lives. You said you would give this plan forty-eight hours. That was the time frame your own people came up with. The plan is working. They have one more site to confirm. You can’t just—”
“Susan, we can and we will. We are already doing so. Are your listening stations not tuned in to the chatter on Iranian military networks?”
“I’m sure they are,” Susan said.
“They are aware that there are infiltrators inside their country, attempting to discover the location of their nuclear sites. As a result, they have moved to a state of full readiness. They are not going to wait for the United States to come in and destroy their weaponry. More than eighty percent of their missile silos are now prepared to launch, with more coming on line all the time. They are just waiting for the order. That’s what we’re hearing.”
“They’re waiting for the order, Yonatan. They have not launched.”
“I’m sure you’ll understand that we cannot wait until after they launch. We must strike first.”
Susan shook her head. “What good will that do you? You launch first, they launch three minutes later. You both get destroyed. I hate to see your society destroyed, Yonatan, don’t get me wrong. However, that’s your decision, and your affair. But by doing this, you’re also putting tens of thousands of Americans in Qatar and Iraq at risk. And you’re putting millions of people around the world at risk. Many people who don’t live in Israel, and who don’t live in Iran, will die from radioactive fallout. I really don’t like you doing that.”
“There is a chance…” Yonatan said. “If we launch first, and we hit them with everything we have, there is a chance that—”
“There’s no chance, Yonatan. Give up on that idea. There’s no chance. Almost all of your people will be killed. Your country will be turned first to flames, and then to dust. A toxic shroud will envelope the Earth, leading to sickness and starvation for millions throughout the Middle East and Asia. Eventually the effects will reach everyone in the world. Is that what you want?”
“I won’t be here to see it,” Yonatan said. “I cannot just sit here and allow my country to be destroyed. They started this war. Not us. They attacked us first. We are going to launch a full-scale conventional attack on their military bases. We are not launching nuclear weapons. If they should respond with nuclear weaponry, as they have claimed, then we shall retaliate. Good day, Susan. Good evening for you. You are very far from danger. I am afraid your relative safety has clouded your thinking.”
“Yonatan, you’re the one whose thinking—”
The phone went dead. For the second time in the past half hour, a man had hung up the phone on her in a wholly unsatisfactory manner.
Kurt didn’t even bother to make his customary throat-slicing gesture. He simply put his phone down in its cradle. Susan did the same.
She looked at Kurt. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Bomb Iran,” Haley Lawrence said. “We have B-2 bomber sorties outfitted with thirty-thousand-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, along with fighter escorts, flying at the limits of Iranian airspace right now. They are prepared to make their runs at a moment’s notice. We have three sites confirmed. We bomb those with precision strikes. And we bomb that national park back to the Stone Age. We hit the whole thing. Carpet bomb it.”
A military man in dress greens shook his head. General Kirby had long ago gone home, or wherever it was that generals went.
“It would take at least a hundred sorties to bomb that entire park,” the man said. “It’s larger than the capital city. We don’t have that many airplanes in place. We don’t have that many GBU-57s.”
“Hit them with MOABs,” Haley Lawrence said.
The man, a colonel, shook his head. “Secretary, you’re showing the limits of your expertise a little bit. The MOABs won’t go deep enough. If you wanted to wipe out villages, they’d be fine, but they’re not bunker busters—they’re not going to take out nukes buried deep underground. And villages bring me to my next point.
“There are more than a dozen villages inside the confines of that park. The decision to carpet bomb would mean killing thousands of civilians. It wouldn’t work anyway, because we just can’t do that many bombing runs inside Iran—it would take hours. And after the first few strikes the Iranians would know what to expect, and they have robust anti-aircraft defenses. We could lose a lot of men, and a lot of equipment in there. Also, if we didn’t hit the nukes on the first try, what’s to stop the Iranians from launching? We either know where those missiles are, and we hit them with a handful of deep bunker busters, quick precision strikes, or we can’t go in.”
Susan looked at him. “Colonel…”
“Colonel Criden, Ma’am. Buck Criden.”
“Well, Buck, that’s the most sense I’ve heard a man make all day.”
She looked at Kurt.
Kurt shook his head. “It leaves us without a plan.”
Susan sighed. “Here’s the plan. I want our people out of there. I want any nonessential, non-military people still loitering in Qatar and Baghdad evacuated, starting now. If Israel won’t wait, I want Stone and his team extracted from Iran. But we do everything in our power to buy Luke more time.”
She looked around the room.
“That’s my plan. Do you have a better one?”
“No.”
Susan clapped her hands. The claps were not nearly the thunderclaps that Kurt was famous for, but they got people’s attention. All around the room, tired faces snapped awake.
God help you, Luke, she thought. Come through for us.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
8:01 a.m. Israel Time (1:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Samson’s Lair – Deep Underground
Jerusalem, Israel
The command center was dead quiet.
Yonatan Stern sat at the head of the conference table without moving. Every set of eyes in the room, thirty pairs, were looking directly at him. They were waiting for him to give the final order—the order that would bring an end to their enemy Iran, of course, but also to themselves. It was an order that would dash the dreams of countless generations over two thousand years.
It seemed that insanity had won. It seemed that terror had won.
All along, for many years, his hope had been to reach a place where Israel achieved complete peace through unassailable strength. Eventually, Israel would become too powerful to attack, and their e
nemies would simply leave them alone. Or even better, become their friends. It hadn’t happened. Nothing of the sort had happened.
Suddenly, Efraim Shavitz spoke. The Model’s suit jacket was off and his shirt was rumpled. There were sweat stains under the arms. He had a day’s growth of beard, and his hair hung limp and dirty and mussed. He was the Model no more.
“Who are you, Yonatan? Who are you to make this decision?”
Yonatan shrugged. “I was elected. The people chose me to make this decision. I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life.”
“For what moment? The moment you gave the order to kill tens of millions of people? You’ve been preparing for that? It seems an odd thing to prepare for. And I’m sure no one elected you to do it. I’m sure your ancestors would cry to see you now. This isn’t what they wanted for Israel. They wanted to live in peace, and in prosperity, in God’s Holy Land.”
“What would you have me do?” Yonatan said.
“Wait. Wait until we hear from the infiltration team again. Give them the chance to do their jobs.”
“And if our enemies attack in the meantime?”
Shavitz shrugged. “Let our friends avenge us. And let them remember us by knowing that all we wanted—all we ever wanted—was to live here in peace.”
No one spoke. Unlike earlier, no one shouted Shavitz down.
A clock on the wall ticked.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Yonatan watched the second hand. It seemed to move with impossible slowness.
Tick.
Finally, he sighed.
“We will give them one more hour,” he said. “Pass that information to them, if they are still reachable. One hour. We cannot wait any longer than that.”
He looked everyone somberly in the eye.
“God help us if that’s too long.”
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
9:25 a.m. Tehran Time (8:25 a.m. Israel Time, 1:25 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Khojir National Park
Iran
“This should be interesting.”
Luke sat behind the wheel, piloting the black Mercedes limousine up into the mountains along a back country road. The Mercedes was a luxurious car. Deep leather seats. A dashboard like the control panels on a corporate jet. A thick glass panel between the front seat and the rear, which Luke had already lowered.
They were all wearing green Revolutionary Guards uniforms, right down to the baseball cap with the gold logo on it, that they had looted from the dead bodies back at the police station. Luke’s uniform was a pretty tight fit. Ed looked like he had borrowed some dress clothes from a ten-year-old boy. The hat fit okay, but the rest?
Ari had managed to wipe most of the blood off his face, so that was good. But he was pretty lumped up. Ed had started calling him Lumpy. Ari was wearing the uniform of a major. His Farsi was the best of the bunch.
The plan, such as it was, involved Ari pulling rank and shouting. It was a cockamamie plan, one that Luke had no faith in at all. It was all the worse because Luke was the one who had thought of it. It was all he could come up with.
Hey, at least the road had been cleared of snow.
Swann was watching them on a real-time satellite feed, at a fifteen- or twenty-second delay. Analysts had found a spot they thought might be the missile site. No one was sure. If it was wrong, Luke had no idea what they were going to do next. Each step that they took further down this path, the more it seemed like there was no way back out. Eventually, they were going to come to a dead end. The bottom of a missile silo seemed like about as dead an end as you could find.
“When you get to the top here in a minute, you’re going to come to a gate,” Swann said in his ear. “It’s got a couple of guards. You’re either going to have to convince them you’re legit, or you’re going to have to kill them. I don’t see a lot of other options.”
“Then what?”
“Then proceed further up the road half a mile to an outbuilding. It’s got a couple of guards, as well. Four, to be precise. We’re guessing that’s the elevator.”
“Pretty lightly defended, wouldn’t you say?” Luke said.
“I don’t like it,” Ed said behind him.
“Right?” Swann said. “For a nuclear installation, it’s crazy. But they’ve been pretending for decades this place isn’t even here. That’s the only thing I can figure—they hide it by making it look like it’s nothing worth looking at. Either that, or we’ve got the wrong place.”
Through the snow-covered trees, Luke could already see the fence to his left. The guard gate was going to be right up ahead.
“Okay, I have to run,” he said.
“Hey, Luke,” Swann said. “Just a friendly reminder. You’ve got about thirty minutes until our friends unleash the Apocalypse. No rush. No pressure.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Shouldn’t you guys evacuate?”
“We’re waiting for you, buddy. And Ed.”
The road came around a corner, and there was the gate. The guards wore winter coats and heavy fur hats. It looked chilly up here. The views to the right were of undulating, snow-covered hills, with larger mountains in the distance. To the left, on the far horizon, was the city.
“Okay, Lumpy,” Luke said. “This is for all the marbles.”
“That’s fun,” Ari said. “This new nickname is fun. I hope I live long enough for it to catch on.”
“I think it will,” Ed said. “Since nobody knows your real name.”
Luke powered his window down as a young guard came up to the car.
“Orders,” the kid said in Farsi, his hand out. It seemed he was expecting Luke to give him a piece of paper. Luke shrugged and indicated the back of the car with a tilt of his head. Just the driver, nothing more.
“Orders,” the kid said again.
“There are no orders,” Ari said from the back seat.
The kid looked at him. “Sorry, sir. No orders, no entry.”
Suddenly Ari shouted. A blur of angry Farsi flew past Luke’s head. He tried to slow it down, pick out the actual words. He caught “Director of Accountability,” and “you better open this gate.”
Director of Accountability?
That sounded ominous. In the context of Iran, being held accountable did not seem like a good thing. The next words were easier to catch.
“You see my face? He did this! I’m a ranking officer! What do you think he’ll do to you? Open this gate. NOW.”
The kid hesitated, backing away.
“Now, I said!”
The kid unlocked the padlock and pulled the gate back on its rollers. Luke glanced at it. Twenty-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with looping razor wire. A fence like that kept honest people honest. Bad guys would beat it in a minute.
There had to be more ahead. Either that, or the fear of crossing the government kept even the bad guys honest.
Luke pulled through the open gate. The kid bent over and looked inside. “Do you know where to go?”
Ari snapped at him. “Of course we know where to go, you idiot.” He waved his hand violently. “Get away! Get away from my car!”
Luke pulled away slowly, suppressing a laugh. He powered the window back up. He glanced into the rearview mirror. Ari’s face really was a mess.
“That was pretty good, Lump. Looks like you fooled them.”
Ari shook his head. “I fooled them for the next five minutes, maybe less. In a moment, he’s going to go in that little guardhouse, phone his superiors, and find out that the Director of Accountability is dead.”
It was a short trip to the next stop. The concrete outbuilding was one story high, with a corrugated iron door. Four men with machine guns stood outside. They wore the same heavy coats and hats as the men at the gate.
Luke pulled the car up about thirty yards from the men, reached under the steering wheel, and untied the ignition wires. Ed had hotwired the car—Luke didn’t want the guards to notice there was no key.
They stepped out an
d crossed the small lot. An icy breeze blew, easily penetrating Luke’s uniform. Rolling snowy mountains surrounded them, though this was the highest point nearby. Maybe fifty yards to their left was a black tarmac—light wisps of snow and ice blowing across it. A helipad.
Ed had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to make the arms look as if they weren’t too short. There was nothing he could do about the pant legs. There was nothing he could do about the tightness across his chest, the buttons straining, holding on for dear life.
“You look like a stripper about to bust out of that thing,” Luke said.
As they approached, one of the guards punched a green button on the side of the building. The metal door slid upward, taking its time. Inside was a concrete foyer, and the door to an elevator. The guard went to the elevator, turned a key in the locking mechanism, and the door slid open.
“Bingo,” Luke wanted to say, but didn’t.
The guard seemed as if he would join them inside. Ari held up a hand as if to say STOP.
“Watch my car,” he said in Farsi. “Don’t touch it.”
The guard nodded and the door slid shut. Immediately the elevator began to drop. It moved slowly, inexorably, toward the center of the Earth.
“You’re getting pretty good at throwing orders around, Lump,” Luke said. “You might have a future as an officer in the Iranian army.”
“Or on the Special Response Team,” Ed said.
Ari put a finger to his lips.
The elevator had no windows. It moved smoothly along, barely making a sound, and going very slow. Minutes passed. There was nothing to look at. These missiles were deep underground. Luke began to wonder if conventional weapons could reach this far down. Nukes could do it, but they weren’t firing nukes. Had a bunker buster ever taken out something like this?
More time passed. How the hell were they going to get back out?
At last they stopped. The elevator bounced just a touch, and the door opened.
They stepped out onto a catwalk.
Below them was a vast cavernous space. Banks of ancient computer consoles were in the near foreground. The consoles had small video screens, clock faces, dials, and buttons. Every ten feet or so was a command keyboard.