Strike Force

by Dale Brown

  “Why is he calling you, McLanahan?” National Security Adviser Sparks asked.

  “I have no idea, sir.” Sparks scowled, not sure if he should believe him and deciding to check that out for himself.

  “I remembered talking to the cocky bastard,” the President said acidly. “He can lie and deceive with the best of them. If he thinks he speaks for the Iranian government, he’s up to something. I want to find out what.” He turned to Patrick. “Talk to him, Patrick, but don’t give him anything until we get a chance to check out whatever he says.”

  Jonas Sparks didn’t like junior staffers like McLanahan taking over his responsibility, and he decided to move quickly before this got completely out of control. “Mr. Minden, route the call to my office and I can take it in there.”

  “No, take it here,” the President said. Minden shook his head in surprise: the President never allowed any business other than his own done in the Oval Office—the place always seemed a madhouse, but the chaos always centered on him. “Patrick, talk to him. I’d like to hear what that bastard has to say.”

  The chief of staff looked warily at Sparks, worried that the President’s most senior advisers were being displaced by McLanahan, but right now powerless to do anything. He hit a second line button: “Signal, this is the chief of staff, verify that the voice translators are functioning and sending the real-time transcripts to the Oval Office…very well.” He went over to a hidden credenza beside the President’s desk, withdrew a tablet computer, logged in, inspected a script streaming on it, then hit the speakerphone button and motioned to McLanahan with a reluctant nod.

  “This is General McLanahan in Washington,” Patrick said. “To whom am I speaking?”

  In a thick Middle East accent but in very well-spoken English a young man replied, “Good evening, sir. My name is Kamran Ardakani, and I am a student of theology and government at the Faqih Sayyed Ruhollah Khomeini Library of Jurisconsult in Qom, in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am translating on behalf of General Hesarak al-Kan Buzhazi, the officer in charge of the military force here.”

  “How do I know you are translating for Buzhazi?”

  There was a rather long pause; then: “The general tells me to tell you that he knows that your black friend Briggs sent the assassin to kill him and that she begged for mercy like a diseased whore before he executed her…may Allah have mercy on her soul.”

  “It’s fucking him all right, the bastard,” Patrick said. Over ten years earlier, Patrick and a task force from the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Iranian anti-government groups attacked Iranian military targets throughout the country before the Iranian military, led by Buzhazi, could completely disrupt shipping through the Persian Gulf. The last target was Buzhazi himself, led by a female commando from the Gulf Cooperative Council’s special operations military force by the name of Riza Behrouzi. Hal Briggs had worked very closely with Behrouzi and formed a personal bond during the operation—but she was killed during the assassination attempt, and Buzhazi escaped. “So what does he want?”

  Another pause; then: “The general has ordered me to inform you of what has just occurred here, in my own words,” the translator said. “A force of approximately two hundred armed men has taken over the Khomeini Library here in Qom. The soldiers guarding this facility have been captured and the imam in charge has been killed, by the general’s own hand. Before the general’s raid, the library was being used by many members of the government, both clerics and laypersons, who sought shelter here following insurgent raids in Tehran.”

  “‘Insurgent raids in Tehran?’ I hadn’t heard anything about this!” Sparks exclaimed beneath his breath. Chief of Staff Minden immediately went to another phone to get confirmation.

  “I do not know the status of the imams and government officials who were staying here—the general is not allowing the staff to attend to them,” the student named Ardakani went on. “He and his men have barricaded themselves inside the library and appear to be preparing for a very large battle.”

  Patrick was silent for a few moments; then, to everyone’s surprise, said, “Ask General Buzhazi if he is requesting assistance from the United States of America.”

  National Security Adviser Sparks’s eyes grew wide in disbelief and he emphatically drew a finger across his throat. “Stand by please, General,” Patrick said, then hit the “MUTE” button on the speakerphone.

  “Are you insane, McLanahan?” Jonas Sparks thundered. “You’re asking Buzhazi, the nutcase who tried to start an all-out naval war in the Persian Gulf—with nuclear weapons, I might add—for our help?”

  “Buzhazi is up to something,” Patrick quickly explained. “I remember reading about him when I was at the Air Intelligence Agency. He was sold out by the clerical leadership and the Pasdaran at the end of the Gulf of Oman conflict. The leadership was afraid simply executing him would have incited the regular army to declare him a martyr and avenge him, so they demoted him and put him in charge of the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary force in Iran—sort of a militarized AmeriCorps. Speculation was that the clerics were hoping someone in the Basij would do the dirty deed.

  “Instead, Buzhazi went about purging the Basij of all the fundamentalist Islamists and just plain-old wackos, and in a few years’ time had transformed it into a real fighting force he renamed the Internal Defense Force. Rumor was that his IDF might actually take some duties away from the Pasdaran, like border security and rural police. But the Basij went down in numbers from almost a million to less than fifty thousand, still mostly very young or very old volunteers, so it was mostly disregarded as a military force.” He fell silent for a moment. “Qom is the religious center of Iran and the second most important Shi’ite Islam city in the world. The library he mentioned was built for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s burial site. When Khomeini’s body was moved to Tehran, the place was turned into a center of Islamic legal thought, training, and indoctrination—but its design makes it look more like a fortress.”

  “What does that have to do with offering Buzhazi assistance, McLanahan?”

  “The translator mentioned ‘insurgent raids,’” Patrick explained. “What if the leadership in Tehran evacuated the city and moved to the Khomeini library in Qom? No Iranian in his right mind, religious or not, would dare invade a holy city like Qom—except a nutcase like Buzhazi. What if Buzhazi is the insurgency? He guesses or discovers that the clerical leadership evacuated the capital and hid out in Qom, and he went down there to…”

  “To what, McLanahan?”

  “To snuff them all out,” Patrick concluded, his eyes wide. “He’s getting his revenge on the clerics who stripped him of his rank and title.” He turned to the President and said, “He’s staging a military coup in Iran—and he’s asking for our help.”

  The President’s eyes widened in disbelief. “My God, that’s incredible,” he breathed. “What an opportunity…”

  “You can’t trust Buzhazi, even if he had a snowball’s chance in Hell of pulling it off,” Sparks said. “He’s just as likely to turn on his friends and allies as he is the clerics in his own country!”

  “But it’s worth a try,” Vice President Hershel said. “At least with an active and capable opposition group in Iran the place could be greatly destabilized for years—even if Buzhazi fails, any other home-grown anti-government groups might have a chance.”

  The President turned to his chief of staff and said, “Carl, call in the National Security Council and as many members of the Cabinet as you can convene in an hour. Have them bring every scrap of data they have on the current military, anti-government, insurgent, and political status in Iran. I want analysis of this situation and suggestions on an American response.” Minden was on the phone in an instant. To Sparks he asked, “Jonas, what seaborne strike assets do we have available in the Persian Gulf area right now?”

  “Not a whole lot, sir,” the national security adviser said, rattling off the information off the top of his head as presented to him in his daily stat
us briefings. After the devastating Russian attacks that destroyed almost all of America’s long-range land-based strike capability, the most common question from the President’s lips whenever a crisis was brewing was “Where are the carriers?” “There is one aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf now, but it’s scheduled to rotate out with another group in two days.”

  “That’ll have to be delayed for now.”

  “Yes, sir. The second carrier from Seventh Fleet is in the Indian Ocean, within two days’ steaming time to Iran, and another carrier group is a few more days behind in the South China Sea—with just ten carrier battle groups in the fleet now, we’re stretched thin. Fifth Fleet is reporting fully operational, but they are heavily committed to operations in Iraq already.” Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, was the U.S. Navy’s permanent presence in the Persian Gulf, but it normally had no aircraft carriers assigned to it except in wartime.

  “So the chances of sending a Marine Expeditionary Unit to Iran to help Buzhazi defend himself and rally the people to support his coup…?”

  “Dropping two thousand Marines into central Iran, with their entire military alerted? Slim to no chance, sir,” Sparks said. “General Glenbrook would have to give us the exact figures, but I would guess it would take several days of planning and a week minimum to mobilize those kinds of forces. An assault from the Persian Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be out of the question—that’s the first place they’d be watching for such a move—so we’d try a feint from that direction and bring the main force in overland from Turkey, Turkmenistan, or Afghanistan. That would take even longer to set up.”

  “But all of this is assuming we want to support a military coup in Iran,” Minden said. “As I recall, Buzhazi was one of the most aggressive military leaders ever in Iran. As far as we know, he was the architect of Iran’s nuclear program—he certainly made it clear he would use the few nuclear weapons we know were in his control. We need a lot more information before we’d ever contemplate supporting him—it would be akin to deciding whether or not to support a Saddam Hussein or Pervez Musharraf all over again.”

  “This is an opportunity we shouldn’t pass up, sir,” McLanahan said to the President. “Buzhazi has taken a small force of volunteers and captured one of Shi’ite Islam’s most holy sites, apparently along with several high-ranking members of Iran’s clerical government. There’s only one reason he’s taken a chance to track me down and call me in the middle of this operation, and that’s because he knows he’s teetering on the brink of success or failure. If he fails, the clerical government will purge the entire country of any other opposition and completely crush them. Iran will be driven even deeper into fundamentalist isolation for another generation…”

  “And if he wins, we could be looking at another military dictator in the heart of the Middle East, astride one of the world’s most important shipping routes, with trillions in petrodollars—and nuclear weapons—at his disposal,” Minden said.

  “We don’t know that, Carl,” the Vice President said, “but I agree with the former: if the clerical government survives, they’ll squash any group that even hints at opposing the government. We support a dozen Iranian opposition movements: the National Council of Resistance, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the National Liberation Army, a number of student anti-theocracy groups, and even surviving family members of the deposed monarchy. The Pasdaran will fan out all around the globe to track down any groups that might gain inspiration for another coup from Buzhazi.”

  The Oval Office fell silent. The President was stone-faced, masking his own doubt and indecision; after a few moments he motioned back to the speakerphone. Patrick hit the button: “General Buzhazi, are you still there?” Patrick asked.

  They could hear a man’s voice speaking in the background; then the young English-speaking theology student said, “The general wants to know who else is listening to this conversation.”

  “Tell the general it’s none of his damned business,” Patrick snapped. “Ask the general what he wants of me.”

  After a slight pause: “He says you have said it yourself, sir.”

  “I want the general to say it, in his own words,” Patrick said. “You don’t have to translate, Mr. Ardakani—we’ll do it ourselves.”

  There was a rustle on the line as the receiver was apparently passed from hand to hand. The President took the tablet PC in his hands to read the computer-generated translation himself. As the older voice spoke in the background, the streaming text read: “That cursed bastard McLanahan…” then: “Very well. The Internal Defense Forces under my command are committed to destroy the Pasdaran and the murderous religious regime that spawned them, or die trying. This so-called library is the birthplace of disaster, betrayal, and ruin for the Iranian people. It will become either the killing grounds of the new defenders of the people, or it will be known as the place where the people of Iran began to take back their homes and government from the religious tyrants. You can choose to help us, or sit in your comfortable chairs and do nothing.”

  “I still haven’t heard a request from you, General Buzhazi,” McLanahan said. “Make a request, sir, or this conversation is at an end.”

  The computerized translation noted several unintelligible words, interspersed with profanity; then: “Help me, General McLanahan. Send your stealth warplanes, your shadows of steel, and help me destroy the Pasdaran. I am outnumbered over fifty to one. I have killed or wounded a number of Pasdaran infantry when they tried to ambush me at Arān, but I discovered the plot against me and prepared a response. The rest of the Pasdaran are undoubtedly on their way to Qom to finish the job.”

  “How many?”

  “I estimate the Pasdaran have mobilized three infantry battalions, possibly one armored battalion, and one helicopter assault battalion against us,” Buzhazi responded.

  “Five battalions?” Sparks exclaimed. “Almost an entire Pasdaran division up against a few insurgents? There’s no way Buzhazi’s going to survive, no matter how good or lucky he is.”

  “What about the regular army, General?” Patrick asked.

  “The regular army has not been mobilized and remains in their garrisons,” Buzhazi responded. “We have intercepted communications between Tehran and the military districts commanding them to begin mobilizing for battle.”

  “Will they join the Pasdaran?”

  “If my forces are crushed, everything stays as before—they will stay quietly under the heel of the Pasdaran or face being purged,” Buzhazi said. “But if my forces appear as if they might prevail, they may join the revolution. I have attempted contact with several friends in the regular armed forces, but none have responded, so I do not know if I shall receive any help at all from anyone.”

  “Why should the United States join you if the regular army, the forces you once commanded, won’t?” Jonas Sparks asked.

  “Who is this? Identify yourself.”

  “This is National Security Adviser General Jonas Sparks, General Buzhazi,” Sparks said. “What does the United States get in return for helping you?”

  “You would want to see the clerical regime crushed too, I think, General Sparks.”

  “Only to be replaced by someone like you, General?” Sparks thundered. “You’re the one who tried to close off the Persian Gulf to every warship except yours. You were ready to destroy an American aircraft carrier with nuclear weapons…!”

  “All that was eleven years ago, Sparks,” the translated text read. “The only thing that has not changed is the bloodthirsty nature of the clerical regime. You know they have nuclear weapons, Sparks—they have many more than when I was chief of staff, and the Pasdaran is more ready than ever to use them.”

  “What makes you better than the clerics or the Pasdaran? Frankly, I don’t see much difference between you.”

  “Do not let your bigotry against all Iranians blind you, Sparks,” Buzhazi said. “The difference between us is I want Iran to succeed, flourish, and prosper—the current administration and th
e clerics only want themselves and their twisted brand of Islam to flourish, at the expense of all else. I want Iran to stop all foreign intrigue, stop sponsoring terrorism and revolution in other countries in the name of Islam, and stop threatening its neighbors. Iran can be the desert flower of southwest Asia and take its place among the great powers of the world if the theocracy can be defeated.”

  “How do we know this isn’t some trick?” Sparks asked. “You’d like nothing better than to shoot down a stealth bomber, spy plane, or special ops transport over Qom, wouldn’t you, Buzhazi? You’d become the defender of the holy city, the hero of Islam, the sword of Allah avenging the ass-whupping you got eleven years ago. You’d get your stars and your command back and look real good in the eyes of the ayatollah if you sucker-punched the United States, isn’t that right, Buzhazi?” They waited for a response, but nothing came. “The bastard hung up. Confront him with the truth, and he runs scared. It’s a bluff, Mr. President. He’s got something up his sleeve.”

  “It sounded to me like he was desperate, General,” Patrick said.

  “If half of what he said is true, I’ll bet he’s desperate,” the President said. He put away the tablet PC translator, rubbed his eyes wearily, then said, “A lack of judgment or poor planning on Buzhazi’s part doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part, no matter how interesting or important the opportunities may be. General Sparks.”

  “Sir?”

  “Meet with the National Security Council staff right away and come up with some recommendations,” the President ordered. “If you don’t have the intelligence data you need to make a decision, get it as quickly as you can. I’d like to hear your thoughts as soon as possible.”