The president was standing in front of his desk, facing the ambassador, with his feet spread slightly and his hands in his pockets. His head was down, as if a great weight were pressing on him. “No,” he said.
“No?” The ambassador’s voice rose. “No? You stand here in Washington, half the world away from those madmen, and you tell us no?”
The president’s head came up. “Israel’s survival depends on more than surviving a nuclear blast. If you make a first strike on Iran with your limited assets, you will use nuclear weapons.”
The ambassador stiffened. “The military has not-”
“I know, I know,” the president interrupted. “Your government hasn’t shared a strike plan with you. But I am telling you, without transports and commandos on the ground and enough planes, the only possible way Israel can neutralize those missiles before they are pulled into the open for launch is to use nukes on the tunnel entrances.”
The ambassador took the blow in silence. The president continued relentlessly, “If you do that, the Islamic world will never forgive you; Europe will never forgive you; and, truthfully, most Americans will never forgive you. Israel will have ignited World War III-which is precisely what Ahmadinejad hopes to accomplish-and no power on earth could save it from the holocaust that will follow.”
The ambassador looked around for a chair. He sank into the nearest one.
After a moment the ambassador said slowly, “I merely deliver the message from my government. I do not make the decisions.”
“I understand.”
“The weight of responsibility is not on my head.”
The president waited until the ambassador was looking up at his face. “I am responsible,” he said. “The weight of responsibility is upon me.”
The president turned back to his desk, his hands still in his pockets. Finally he parked a cheek on the polished mahogany. “When I ran for president, I never thought I would have to make decisions like this.” He rubbed his chin with his right hand, then wiped his forehead with it and dried it on his trousers.
“Be that as it may,” the president added, “I know I am right. You know it, too.”
The ambassador nodded.
“An airburst over Tel Aviv or Iran will doom Israel,” the president continued remorselessly. “That choice is simply between a quick death or a slow one.”
“Show us an alternative.”
The president glanced at Jake Grafton. “Let’s go to the conference room. You can brief us.”
Jake Grafton rose from the couch and led the way.
An hour later, after the ambassador had left, the president stood looking at the charts. “I pray to God, and Allah, that your plan will work,” he said to Grafton, who merely nodded.
“Come on, Sal,” the president said, looking at Molina. “Let’s go next door and call the Israeli prime minister. Now I have to sell him.” He and his aide walked out of the room, leaving Jake Grafton alone with the charts and maps.
After a while, the admiral packed up all the charts and maps, locked them in his briefcase, chained the briefcase to his wrist and went home.
Grafton was home alone that evening-his wife was at a faculty function at the university-sitting in his den sipping whiskey, when the telephone rang. He picked it up.
“Grafton.”
“Jake, this is Sal. The Israelis agreed to hold off.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They said that if one nuke goes off over Israel, they’ll massively retaliate. There won’t be two bricks left stuck together anywhere in Iran.”
Grafton shot back, “Of course the president told them that we would have airplanes over the country and boots on the ground.”
“He did,” Molina replied.
“Yeah,” said Jake Grafton, then slowly lowered the telephone onto its cradle.
That night G. W. Hosein and Joe Mottaki stole some army vehicles. They didn’t tell me where they got them or who they had to kill, and I didn’t ask.
The following morning Davar, G. W. and I set forth in an SUV painted army colors. We wore uniforms, even Davar, who had a heavy beard glued to her swollen face. At least the swelling was going down. Still, she looked as if she had been in a car wreck and smashed her face on the dashboard.
Joe Mottaki followed us in an army truck. His men, Haddad Nouri and Ahmad Qajar, rode in the back with AK-47s in their arms. They had a machine gun on the floor of the bed, near their feet, that they had liberated somewhere.
After a half hour of inching through traffic and avoiding roadblocks, we found ourselves in an area of finger ridges that came down from the mountains to the north. The Parliament building and other large government buildings were about half a mile to the south.
“The executive bunker is under that ridge,” Davar said, pointing.
“The main entrance,” she continued, “is under that prayer ground there.” She pointed again. “The Mosalla Prayer Grounds. It’s like a park, except one goes there to pray. The entrance to the bunker is in the basement of that small mosque. There is a tunnel that the people walk through to get to an elevator shaft. The head of the shaft is under twenty-five feet of reinforced concrete. Then they covered the concrete with ten feet of dirt.”
I looked at the buildings, trying to visualize the underground complex. “The main tunnel-it slopes down to the elevator room?”
“Yes,” Davar said. “It is precisely seventy-two meters long and ends at the top of the shaft. There are two elevators to take people up and down. Winding around the shaft is a staircase, in case the elevators cannot be used. The elevators take the people down seventy meters, then there is another room. Bombproof doors divide the room in two. Once through the doors, one finds another elevator shaft, and stairs, descending to the ground floor of the bunker. The floor of the bunker is a hundred and forty meters below the top of the elevator shaft.” She pointed. “Most of it lies there, under that ridge to our left. Between the top of the bunker and the surface is over three hundred meters of solid rock.”
“Okay,” I said.
“There are three air shafts, which will be sealed off when the bunker is occupied. The air in the bunker is recycled through scrubbers, and oxygen is added as necessary. It is submarine equipment we purchased from the Russians.”
“How long can four hundred people live down there?” G. W. asked.
“There is food, water and air for six months. A shaft drilled down from the floor of the bunker holds human waste and garbage. It is three hundred meters deep.”
“How big is this bunker?” G. W. wanted to know. “How much floor space?”
“Almost two acres. It is cut up into living units, which are separated by fireproof doors. Each living unit has its own fire detection and suppression system. My father was worried that a fire in the bunker might kill everyone, so he designed the units and fire suppression systems. Each is self-contained.”
“Electrical power?”
“It is provided by diesel generators, which suck air down four shafts that are not sealed. The air is sucked down and passed through a complex filtration system to scrub out the dust and dirt, then sent to the generators and finally exhausted back to the surface. Even if the intake air is contaminated with radiation, the diesels should still run as long as they have fuel available. A tank in the bunker area contains enough for six months’ judicious use.”
“Communications?”
“Wires in a pipe laid in a buried trench. Of course, the trench is only ten feet deep, and it only runs to the nearest boulevard. Then the wires are on poles and go to the local telephone exchange.”
“Doesn’t sound as if they thought that out very carefully,” G. W. said.
Davar shrugged. “The blueprints called for a pipe buried fifty feet underground, running to a military switchboard in a bunker under the Alborz Mountains, but that installation was never funded or built. Consequently an airburst over Tehran would wipe out the radio stations and landlines, and the bunker would be isolated anyway.�
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“Have the bunker’s self-contained survival systems been tested?” I asked.
“My father has spent the last six months supervising the tests and repairing discrepancies,” Davar said. “He was satisfied.”
“Is there only one way in or out?”
“There is another way,” she said, “on the other side of the ridge. The heavy equipment and material needed to excavate the cavern for the bunker came in from a ramp dug on the other side, and the dirt had been removed that way. At the same time, the river below the ramp was straightened and widened, a construction job that provided cover for the bunker construction. When the bunker was complete, the ramp to the bunker was filled with reinforced concrete. A walkway, or ramp, runs through the concrete from the bunker to the riverbank. It is sealed with three bombproof doors, one just inside the entrance, one midway along it and one just outside the bunker. The walkway is almost a kilometer long.”
“Is your family going into the bunker?” G. W. asked.
“Yes,” she said simply, without inflection.
G. W. lit a cigarette with shaking hands. He sucked on it, then flipped ash out the open window, as Davar continued to describe her father’s creation. The ceiling of the bunker had been reinforced with lag bolts and massive steel beams.
“The elevator shaft lies fifty-two meters directly northwest of the center of that wall of the mosque,” she continued and pointed again. “It’s right under that parking lot.”
G. W. flipped his cigarette out the window and glanced at me. After our eyes met, he grabbed the steering wheel and put the truck in motion.
“I want to see the secondary entrance,” I said.
We had to drive a couple of miles through streets that led across the main ridge on top of the bunker, then cross a bridge over the river to get to the best vantage point.
With the truck stopped, I looked the entrance over with a set of binoculars. It was recessed under a rock shelf, set in the middle of what looked like a large highway tunnel filled with concrete. In fact, that was precisely what it was. I could see the roadway along the river where the big trucks had come and gone. The road had been bulldozed and the ground contoured, yet I could see where it had been.
“How long is the secondary tunnel?” I asked Davar.
“Over a kilometer. There are cutouts and bombproof doors at three places in the tunnel to ensure that a blast at the door doesn’t reach the bunker.”
I raised the binoculars and studied the ground above the entrance, which sloped away toward the crest of the ridge at perhaps a twenty-degree angle. The only place I could see that would allow a person to see both entrances was directly atop the brush-covered ridge, right over the center of the bunker. I wondered if that spot was too close to ground zero.
Well, sure as hell, I would soon find out.
As I was looking through the binoculars, G. W. asked Davar, “Who designed this bunker complex?”
“My father.” I sat frozen, staring through the binoculars, trying to control my face.
When I lowered the binoculars G. W. was looking at me with a bemused expression on his face. Apparently the irony of old man Ghobadi designing and building his own tomb had gotten to him, too.
As head of state, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not involved with the day-to-day political affairs of the legislature. His public appearances were mostly ceremonial and, since he was also guardian of the state religion, often religious. His visits to mosques were shown on television. However, he was the leader of the Party of God, the ruling political party; the IRGC and its intelligence arms answered directly to him; he was the commander-in-chief of the military; he controlled billions of petrodollars off budget; and Ahmadinejad’s government ruled at his pleasure. In short, he and Ahmadinejad were the two most important men in Iran and, some said, the entire Islamic world.
Today, outside the mosque, a television crew waited to film Khamenei as he exited the building. The cameraman began recording when a member of Khamenei’s security team gave him a Hi sign from the doorway, indicating the Supreme Leader had finished his prayers and was making his way toward the door.
He got Khamenei centered in the viewfinder, with people right and left, as the Supreme Leader walked slowly toward the camera, looking right and left, nodding to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. There were always cheers. This was, perhaps, because Khamenei’s crowds usually consisted of handpicked members of the nonuniformed paramilitary force, the Basij, busloads of whom were ferried around to appear on camera at the proper moment.
The cameraman was taking it all in as the camera automatically focused on the central figure. So he saw the hand and pistol come out of the crowd, and he saw Khamenei recoil from the punch of the first bullet.
He heard muffled shots and saw that there were at least three men shooting into Khamenei, who went down under the fusillade. Still, the guns continued to fire at the figure sprawled on the steps.
Then the shooting stopped. The cameraman could see the crowd milling-he actually lost sight of Khamenei lying on the pavement-and hear the animal sounds from hundreds of human throats.
Then, almost as if by a miracle, a lane cleared and he glimpsed a dozen men stabbing one to death. He tried to keep the scene centered, but the jostling was too much. In seconds the crowd knocked him down.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in conference with his generals, trying to decide upon the hour of the launch. He thought perhaps a night launch would be best, but his generals were trying to talk him out of it.
“Americans fight best at night,” one said. “Every soldier wears night vision goggles, the pilots of their airplanes and helicopters wear them, they have infrared sights… If they should for any reason come over Iran to oppose us, we will give a better account of ourselves during the day.”
“The night doesn’t hide us from them,” the general in charge of antiaircraft defense said. “It merely hides them from us.”
Ahmadinejad frowned. He had bet everything that he could pull off a massive first strike on Iran’s enemies without the Americans getting wind of it. Literally, everything! Yet his generals assumed that such a deception was unlikely. Worse, they assumed that even though Iran knew how the Americans’ latest ECM magic worked and were prepared to defeat it should the Americans attack, they needed even more of an edge. The moral ascendancy of the infidels over his generals infuriated him. He opened his mouth to blast them, then thought better of it.
“There is a storm moving into the deserts of central Iran,” one general said. “Winds will exceed fifty miles per hour in places, gusts much higher, with a lot of dirt in the air. We hope it will dissipate by midnight Sunday, but it might not.”
Iran was full of foreign spies, and Hazra al-Rashid was dead, Ahmadinejad mused. Only Allah knew what the Americans believed now. Or if they would find the courage to fight Allah’s warriors. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to give his generals the advantage they sought.
“We will launch on Monday, two hours before dawn,” Ahmadinejad said. “If the enemy chooses to counterattack, they must do so during the day.”
The generals nodded their heads. This compromise seemed wise. A chart was consulted to determine the moment of sunrise. Dawn, they decided, could be defined as thirty minutes prior to sunrise. The first wave of missiles would lift off two and a half hours prior to official sunrise.
“Perhaps there will still be enough dirt in the air to hide the launches from the American satellites,” one general said.
Ahmadinejad looked Hosseini-Tash squarely in the eyes. “The missiles will be ready? The nuclear warheads installed?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“I want you to personally inspect each nuclear warhead after it is installed.”
Hosseini-Tash swallowed hard and nodded.
Only Hosseini-Tash knew the targets of the missiles, Ahmadinejad believed. His skin was pasty, yet covered with a thin layer of perspiration. Ahmadinejad could smell him. None of the others seem
ed overly concerned.
As the meeting was breaking up, Ahmadinejad asked for Hosseini-Tash to wait a moment. When the others were out of earshot he looked the general in the eyes and said, “I want you and your family in the bunker. Promise me. We will need you for the war to follow.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency. I promise.”
“Very good.”
Hosseini-Tash was walking out when a breathless aide came running in. “Your Excellency, Mr. President. Zionists have murdered the Supreme Leader. Three of them shot him down as he was coming out of a mosque an hour ago. The crowd killed the assassins on the spot.”
Ahmadinejad feigned surprise. “May peace be with him,” he muttered.
“A television camera was there and filmed most of it. With your permission, we wish to air the scene.”
“How do we know the assassins were Zionists?”
“Witnesses have come forward and swore they were Israeli agents.”
Ahmadinejad paused for a moment, as if to collect his thoughts, then said, “Of course, air the footage. Tell the world what the Zionists have done, and pledge revenge.”
“Yes, Excellency,” the aide said and hurried away.
When he was alone, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiled. Of course he had betrayed the killers, who had been told they would be allowed to escape, but they were worth infinitely more as dead Zionist assassins than as live, loyal MOIS thugs.
They were just three more unwilling martyrs for the glorious cause.
On the other side of the world, Jake Grafton heard about Khamenei’s assassination before he arrived for work in the morning. The director, William Wilkins, called him with the news.
“Well, that move was on the board,” Grafton said. “We wondered if and when Ahmadinejad would make it.”
“He’s doing a rant on CNN right now,” Wilkins said. “Ira ni an television was kind enough to provide them with a high-quality digital feed. The Irani ans also passed along footage of Khamenei being murdered.”
The Disciple Page 35