Peace

by Jeff Nesbit

  The current rage in best-selling women’s fiction was a time-honored theme that always struck at the very core of women like Su—stories of young children ripped somehow from the arms of a young mother, and then the frantic, desperate search through heaven and earth to either find or locate the missing or abducted child. Sometimes the children were found. Sometimes they were not.

  Su simply could not imagine what it would be like to lose a child. She could think of nothing worse than this, which is why writers always returned to the theme over and over again. A mother raising a child for the next generation was more important than anything she could possibly imagine, Su believed. Losing that child would be a devastation she hoped never to confront.

  Which is what made the report in her hands right now so deeply troubling, on so many levels. It represented one of the worst fears any mother could imagine.

  Kim Grace had raised three wonderful, loving children before she’d begun to question the North Korean military’s fascination with a cesium doomsday device and then its determination to build one. Su could imagine the life she’d tried to build for her children.

  The report included paragraphs on Kim Grace’s children and husband. For her husband, there was a brief description of his death. The analyst had pieced together a couple of items, which seemed to indicate that her husband had died at a camp and then been returned to his home for a quick, nondescript funeral service.

  For her three children, there was only a headline—“Missing, Presumed Dead”—followed by a brief description of the three children.

  The analyst speculated that the children had likely been sent off to prison camps somewhere in North Korea and had never been heard from again. The likelihood that they were still alive—based on history and statistical analysis—was slim, the analyst concluded.

  It was at that point that Su had begun to cry softly. She’d never met Kim Grace, and most likely never would, but she could imagine this brave woman somewhere in a terrible prison camp, wondering what had happened to her children. And the only news that Su, or anyone, could muster was that they were missing and presumed dead.

  After a few minutes of grieving, however, Su pulled herself together and was now prepared for whatever she needed to do next. She glanced at the tiny world clock she kept in her cubicle. She knew that if she Skyped Nash right now, she would most likely reach him. Nash always worked into the early morning hours, and she was able to reach him more often than not at this time of day.

  She put her headphones on and placed the Skype video call to him. Nash answered within two rings. He had a two-day stubble going.

  “Hey! I was just thinking about you!” Nash said brightly, then stopped. “Oh, I can see that something’s wrong. What’s up?”

  Su fought back tears. “I got the report back, Nash. The one on Kim Grace.”

  “And?”

  “And they couldn’t find any record of her children. It just lists them as missing and presumed dead. Her husband died in prison camp.”

  Nash reached out and lightly tapped the video camera. It was one of the things she liked so much about Nash. It was his way of saying that everything would be all right, even though he wasn’t physically sitting there to console her.

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t still alive,” Nash said. “We can work, somehow, to get her out of that camp under some sort of a prisoner exchange and then use the system to try to find them. Don’t give up hope, Su.”

  She blinked fiercely. She didn’t want to give up hope. “I was sitting here, wondering what it would be like if we lost all of our children like that one day—”

  “Don’t do that, Su,” he said quickly. “You’ll just make yourself crazy that way. Stay focused on what we would need to do in order to get this woman free of that prison camp. Look into that, okay? It will give you something to pursue.”

  Su nodded. She loved the way Nash jumped straight to the mission at hand. He was like a relentless, positive storm. “I will,” she vowed. “So what news do you have? How’s your father?”

  Nash didn’t even know where to begin. There were some things he probably shouldn’t be talking about over an open-source channel like Skype. But he filled Su in anyway on the back-channel mVillage discussions he’d been having, that very evening, with both Razavi and Ehsan in Tehran.

  Whether he meant to be or not, Nash was now involved deeply with the opposition leaders’ efforts to get to Shahidi and begin the process of arranging some sort of a dialogue.

  Nash knew it had been almost a generation since any American leader had even set foot in Tehran and that his efforts would most likely come to nothing, but he felt compelled to see the discussions through to some sort of conclusion.

  Nash was running every exchange, every nuance, past his father at every step of the discussion. His dad was encouraging him to press forward. Nash was making more progress, his father said, in a matter of weeks than entire divisions at State had managed in years of trying to open discussions.

  Still, Nash told her, they were a long way from any sort of face-to-face discussion with Shahidi. And anything short of that in the very complicated world of Sharia law and Islamic politics in Tehran would mean nothing. Shahidi was the key. He alone could determine Iran’s relationship with the United States and, by extension, the nation of Israel.

  Nash made certain that Su was calm before he said good night to her. He wished he could somehow help her with the search for Kim Grace’s missing children. But he knew that this was Su’s work, and it was something she would need to wrestle with on her own.

  58

  MOUNT VERNON SQUARE

  THE INTERSECTION OF 7TH AND K STREET NW

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The suitcase was innocuous enough and didn’t draw any unusual glances by the couples and workers who were beginning to gather there for the lunch hour. It was hardly out of place in the open air park in Washington—one of several within ten blocks of both the Capitol and the White House—where the homeless routinely left their belongings out in the open.

  This particular part of DC was dominated by the unusual, elongated building that housed National Public Radio. The slim building was like a finger pointing directly at the park, just across the street. Two relatively new office buildings met at the intersection. The FedEx Kinko’s at one of the corners was a popular destination for hundreds of workers nearby.

  The suitcase was left on the ground between two park benches about one hundred feet north of K Street. A DC recreation center was just three hundred feet farther north and east from the spot.

  The location had been carefully selected. It was close enough to both the Capitol and the White House complex that the incident would have impact, yet far enough away that there were very few security cameras operated remotely at the intersection.

  Because it was in an open-air park—with lots of people around—it would be impossible for anyone to remember later who’d been in and out of the park. There were no cameras aimed at the interior of the park. It was an ideal location.

  Two men had driven a Honda Civic up to the park and had circled the city block twice until they were able to park about midway up the street. They’d waited inside for nearly ten minutes before exiting quickly. One man left first and walked up toward the park benches. He turned and, with a slight nod, signaled for the second man to follow behind him with the suitcase, which had been sitting carefully in the back seat.

  The men had, until quite recently, been servicing several QVStops in Frederick, Maryland. They drove a contract fuel truck and visited several stops on a daily basis.

  Though they didn’t realize it, the two men were quite fortunate that the FBI agent who’d first made the connection between QVStops, Venezuela, and Hezbollah at a remote gas station in Savannah, Georgia, had never managed to get his superiors to take the connections seriously. If they had, their mission might have been detected or even derailed before this day.

  The men were light-skinned, clean-cut, and w
ell-mannered. It was very difficult to tell their country of origin. Had someone asked for their visa papers and passport stamps, they’d have seen that both men had trained in Venezuela before coming to the United States to work.

  By all accounts, both men had come to the United States to give themselves a chance of a better life. They kept to themselves. They did not visit any local mosque—many of which were now regularly under some sort of homeland security surveillance, despite repeated protests from international human rights groups in the U.S.—and worshipped privately with a small group.

  They were respectful, law-abiding, gainfully employed foreign nationals working in a country that respected and welcomed all groups of people into a melting pot society. They were here to do their jobs and make a life for themselves.

  There was nothing, and no one, to lead anyone to suspect that they’d come to the United States with just one goal—to someday leave a dirty cesium-137 suitcase bomb in Mount Vernon Square, near NPR and a DC recreation center with hundreds of children, in downtown Washington.

  The two men had worked, trained, and acquired the necessary ingredients over the course of three years. The hardest piece—the cesium-137—had been easier to acquire than either man could have imagined. It simply disappeared from a nuclear medicine shipment one day and arrived in their hands the next.

  As they’d been taught, they carefully packed the cesium-137 inside as many sticks of dynamite as they could fit into the suitcase. They set the fuse with a remote signal relay, put the suitcase into storage, and then worked each day at their jobs, waiting for the word to reach them through channels from Tehran that it was time to deliver and set off the dirty bomb.

  When the word arrived, the two men didn’t say much to each other. They simply placed the suitcase in the Honda Civic, drove through rush-hour traffic toward downtown Washington, and went through the routine they’d trained for over the years.

  They’d been told to set the bomb off at 11 a.m., East Coast time, and then leave the area quickly. Both men knew there was some risk of contamination reaching them, but it was a risk they were more than willing to take. Both men believed that Iran and the United States were actively at war with each other, and they were both committed to doing the right thing for their country.

  Neither of them knew that, precisely at 11 a.m. in New York City and Boston, two nearly identical cesium-137 dirty bombs would also go off in open-air urban parts of both major cities. The combined death toll from the immediate explosions and later radioactive contamination would be in the thousands, the IRGC planners estimated.

  More importantly, up to ten city blocks in all three cities would need to be evacuated until the entire area had been sanitized and reclaimed. It would take all three cities months, and perhaps years, to recover from the three interconnected acts of state-sponsored terrorism.

  Meanwhile, at almost the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean, Tehran had given the signal to both the Hamas and Hezbollah leadership in southern Lebanon and Gaza to unleash the full extent of their rocket and missile arsenal. They were, they told their allies, retaliating against Israel for its strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and its decision to use tactical nuclear weapons near Shiraz.

  When all three suitcases were to be detonated in the three largest cities on the U.S. eastern coast, tens of thousands of missiles with significant and deadly payloads would be launched at every major city in Israel. The timing would be such that the missiles would rain on Israel’s three largest cities—Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem—just as people were in their cars heading home during rush hour.

  The IRGC knew the rockets, missiles, and payloads landing in all three Israeli cities would also inflict pain and suffering for Jews and Muslims alike. But it could not be avoided, the IRGC knew. There was no greater psychological pain that they could inflict on Israel—and no greater instrument of war they could bring to bear against their sworn enemy. They would accept the casualties.

  The two men returned to the Honda Civic near Mount Vernon Square. They turned the radio on as they waited for 11 a.m. to arrive. They sat there listening to the end of the local broadcast of an NPR show as they waited. Neither man knew—or would have cared—that the employees working at NPR involved in bringing the broadcast to them were just a stone’s throw from their car.

  Precisely at 11 o’clock, one of the men triggered the remote relay. An instant later, there was a massive explosion, sending bits and pieces of both metal park benches flying in all directions. Big chunks rained onto the outdoor playground at the recreation center nearby, hitting several of the children.

  More than a dozen people sitting or standing near the immediate blast were killed instantly. Another two dozen or so were wounded by the bits and pieces of shrapnel and metal. Ambulances from four DC hospitals were on the scene within minutes, along with two dozen camera crews.

  No one realized, of course, that the blast had also released highly radioactive cesium into the air. It would be at least another fifteen minutes before the emergency crews detected the radioactive levels and began the chaotic evacuation process. By some estimates, hundreds of people were contaminated from the blast and subsequent dispersal of radiation.

  The blasts at the same time in Boston and New York inflicted as much damage and had likely contaminated even more people.

  But as horrific as the video and pictures were in the three American cities—all of which were on CNN within thirty minutes of the bombings—the scenes of devastation from the barrage of Zelzal-2 and Fajr-5 rockets in the three Israeli cities were far worse.

  Literally thousands of people were killed by the rain of rockets by the end of the first hour. The videos showed dozens of cars piled up on the sides of roads in all three cities, and any number of buildings that had collapsed under the blasts from the rocket payloads.

  Iran and the IRGC had stockpiled tens of thousands of rockets in southern Lebanon, parts of the Golan Heights controlled by Syria, and Gaza for years, waiting for this day of victory.

  There was immediate speculation and panic that some of the payloads were chemical. CNN and Al Jazeera alike quickly carried video of nearly everyone who was willing to venture outside in Israel wearing mandatory gas masks.

  So great were the scenes of violence and devastation in the United States and Israel that virtually no one could even bother to pay any attention to the sudden movements of troops in both Russia and China toward a mountainous, remote part of northeast North Korea.

  Even as Russia and China were moving troops toward their borders with North Korea, both countries were also systematically ordering the evacuation of major cities within two hundred miles of that part of North Korea. Russia was systematically ordering the evacuation of both Vladivostok and Ussuriysk, while China was moving people from Changchun.

  Neither country gave any public explanation for their actions—either the troop movements or the evacuations. But, in truth, there was too much else going on in the world at the moment for anyone to care or even ask.

  There were also reports that the Japanese government was sending vague warnings to residents of cities on their western and northern coastline to stay indoors as much as possible in the next twenty-four hours. The public announcement referenced the possibility of contamination in trade winds.

  The world’s press also largely ignored the fierce border clashes with Russian troops in Georgia and Azerbaijan over the fate of the Baku pipeline. The clashes were dismissed as a regional war, of almost no consequence beyond continued Russian interest in the states of the former Soviet Union.

  Also nearly consumed in the madness of the moment was the expected U.S. reaction to North Korea’s launch of its Taepodong-2. Even though the American ABM system had worked on the single rocket and had made sure it fell harmlessly into the ocean long before it came near Hawaii, the entire world knew that the United States would react in some fashion.

  The U.S. had placed every section of the DMZ on the highest possible alert. Li
ke Russia and China, it was massing troops close to the North Korean border, but for reasons much different than those of both Russia and China. No one knew, precisely, what would happen next. But everyone wanted to be prepared.

  As the sun began to set in Israel and hung high in the sky over scenes of devastation in three major cities in America, it was already a new day in North Korea. There, the sun was just beginning to rise over the mountains of northeast North Korea, Camp 16, and the underground nuclear facilities.

  Even as one day of devastation was ending in parts of the planet, a new day was dawning for the leaders in Russia, China, Japan, the United States, Iran, and Israel, who would make decisions in the next twenty-four hours that would determine the fate of the planet.

  Was a third world war inevitable?

  59

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Judah Navon gathered the members of the Knesset together for an emergency session in Jerusalem that evening, after the sun had set. Not all of the Knesset members were able to be there. Some were too far away from Jerusalem to make the trip. Two had been hurt in the missile attacks.

  Navon, like the rest of Israel, was badly shaken by the coordinated missile attack from Hezbollah, Hamas, and militia operating in parts of the Golan Heights controlled by Syria. The death toll was still rising as the population in three cities dug out from the rubble. It was, by far, the most serious threat to Israel in a generation.

  But Navon was under no illusions. He and every member of the Knesset knew precisely who was to blame for the attack. Unless something else intervened, Navon knew that a counterstrike into Tehran—as well as Damascus, south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon and Gaza—would occur almost immediately.

  He’d already heard several members of the Knesset talking about the use of offensive nuclear weapons in Tehran. They were entirely serious. Navon knew it would take a great deal of discussion to move some of the Knesset members away from this option, and he might not succeed.