by Dale Brown
“Stand by.”
He came back a few moments later to tell her that the bugs Nuri had placed in the complex had just gone off line due to explosions.
“I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Reid. “This hasn’t hit the network yet.”
“Go,” said Breanna. “I have everyone. We’re en route back to Dire Dawa.”
There was one more thing they had to do before leaving — blow up their gear.
Breanna had the Osprey circle over the hill. The mercenaries were in the rocks, sitting uneasily between the Ethiopians and the Sudanese.
“I want you to tell them to get away from the boxes,” she told Abul, going into the rear of the aircraft. “I want you to warn them that they’re going to be blown up.”
“We’re going to land again?” said Boston.
“No. We’re equipped with a PA system for crowd situations. We’ll use the loudspeaker.”
Abul followed her into the cockpit. He was shocked when he saw the empty seats.
“Who’s flying the plane?” he asked.
“It flies itself. Tell them.”
Breanna sat in the pilot’s seat and handed him a headset, channeling the mike into the PA. Abul handled it awkwardly, then began ordering the mercenaries to leave the hill.
They made no sign of complying.
“The hill is about to be exploded,” he said. “You must leave for your own safety.”
They responded by firing into the air at the Osprey.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Breanna told the computer.
The Osprey swung hard to the right, then rose quickly. Out the side window she saw the tracers flying toward them.
“Screw this,” she said, and detonated the gear.
The gunfire stopped.
“Computer, begin return flight to Dire Dawa as programmed,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
64
North of Tehran
“We have to get out now,” Danny told Hera, moving quickly to the door separating the warehouse from the office where Tarid and Aberhadji had met. He wanted to bug it.
“The crates.”
“Never mind them. Aberhadji’s car is coming up the road.”
Danny stopped short. The door was protected by a contact alarm system. He dropped to his stomach. He wanted to slip one of the bugs underneath the door, but the space was blocked by rubber weather-stripping that brushed along the metal threshold. Instead, he took a jumper and defeated the contact alarm, easing the door open just wide enough to put the bug on the edge of the kick plate.
The bug slipped as he started to close the door. He pushed it higher and squeezed the tiny, round, plastic disc hard against the aluminum.
Meanwhile, the Voice was giving him a running commentary on Aberhadji’s progress, narrating practically every step: The car rounded the hairpin, the car pulled past the video checkpoint, the car approached the front of the building. A figure got out. MY-PID analyzed the figure’s gait as it walked, and found a correlation with Aberhadji, concluding with “eighty percent probability” that it was him.
By the time Aberhadji unlocked the front door of the building, Danny was stepping through the window. Hera pulled the window down behind him, then tugged the jumper wire out, resetting the alarm.
* * *
Once inside, Aberhadji took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the light. Everything was slightly blurry; years of staring at motor vehicle forms had ruined his eyesight.
The stockpiled materials and the tools would be dispersed and hidden in several places around the country. For the most part, the hiding places were in buildings and mines well off the beaten track, obscure places where no one would think of looking, least of all a foreign intelligence service.
Aberhadji had decided, however, that the warhead would have to be taken someplace where it could be guarded — and where he could get to it easily if necessary. He had arranged for it to be kept at a small base about thirty miles away, controlled by the Guard and commanded by a man who had been a friend since his youth. The base was hardly secret, and Aberhadji worried that the government or regular army would sooner or later find out about the weapon. But it could be protected there from outside agents. And it was two miles from the airstrip at Tajevil, where the No-Dong A and its launching systems were stored.
The nuclear warhead was useless without a way to deliver it. For all the speculation in the West about how a cargo container or some other seemingly innocuous transport might be used, in the end the most reliable and practical way of launching a nuclear strike was by missile. Aberhadji had acquired the No-Dong A very early in his project. It was one of several delivered by North Korea during the late 1990s as part of the deal that helped Iran develop its nuclear capabilities. The No-Dong As had been studied and used as the basis for Iran’s own family of rockets.
This missile had malfunctioned on the test bed, then stored and forgotten — by all except one of the engineers Aberhadji recruited for his program when the disarmament talks began. It was refurbished and, while its range was limited compared to the weapons Iran subsequently developed, it was still quite adequate to deliver the warhead up to two thousand miles away — more than enough to hit Israel, for example.
Which, Aberhadji thought, he might someday decide to do.
First he had to make sure his project survived. Dispersing the material was only the first step; he would have to reevaluate everything he had done, examine where things had gone wrong. There was also the council to deal with — clearly his position within it needed to be considered. But he could only deal with one part of the crisis at a time.
Eyes focused, Aberhadji reached into his pocket for his phone. Before he could dial, however, it began to ring.
Aberhadji did not recognize the number, but the exchange indicated the call was coming from a government building. He answered immediately.
“Two dozen Israeli aircraft are reported to have flown into eastern Sudan,” said the caller in a low voice. He was an intelligence analyst, a friend to Aberhadji, though not on his payroll. “Some sort of bombing raid. They flew over Egypt and Ethiopia.”
“What was their target?”
“The service is still working on it.”
“Call me when you know more,” said Aberhadji, though he’d already guessed where the bombers were going.
* * *
Hera followed Danny to the stone wall behind the building, jumping over and hitting the dirt.
Danny waited for her to catch her breath, then began retracing their steps back through the field to the edge of the woods, not stopping until they reached the stepladder.
“Let me get my bearings,” he told her. “Hold on just a minute.”
* * *
Aberhadji felt the pickax stab his temples again, cleaving his head in two. The pain had never been this intense — it dropped him to the floor. There was complete agony for a minute, for two full minutes; everything was pain as all other sensations bleached away from him. He couldn’t see; he didn’t know how to see. He struggled to breathe.
Gradually he became aware of the room. The migraine lessened somewhat, the blades retracting a few inches. The room, invisible to him at the height of the attack, shaded from black to a dark brown, then lightened slowly to sepia.
The pain strangled the back of his neck, paralyzed his shoulders. He tried pushing himself to get up but could not.
Aberhadji had never believed the headaches were a sign or a curse from Allah; he had always accepted them as part of his self, a flaw in his biology, not his spirit. His view did not change now. His faith was unshaken, not just in God, but in his view of the universe, of the way things worked, and must work.
But the headache nonetheless revealed one great truth to him: He would never survive another attack. Even if the next was merely as bad as this one — if they continued to increase exponentially, as they had over these past weeks, he simply could not survive.
Logically, then, it was
time to initiate the plan. Israel had just bombed his plant — there could be no other place where their jets would go in Sudan.
Very possibly more fighters were on their way here.
The Zionists must be destroyed, and the traitor president killed.
This was not so much a decision as a realization, and it eased Aberhadji’s pain substantially. Though his head continued to pound, he was able to stand up. Only then did he see that two men were standing at the door.
One was a truck driver, the other a Revolutionary Guard officer he had called to help supervise the truck loading.
“I slipped, but I am all right,” he told them.
They would proceed as planned, except that he would go with the warhead, and divert it at the last minute.
The brothers would be needed to mount it onto the missile and prepare the rocket, and he would have to stay with them to supervise, as well as code the warhead at the final preparation. This meant neither they nor he could bring the bomb to the man who would plant it aboard the plane.
Who did he trust to do that job?
No one.
Tarid?
But perhaps Tarid had been the one to give away the Sudan location to the Israelis.
No, if he had done that, he never would have come back to Iran.
Not purposely. Perhaps he had made a slip.
If he had done so inadvertently, while still a sin, it was at least less mortal. And he could make up for it by placing the bomb in the plane.
“Are you all right, Imam?” asked the Guard member.
“I needed a moment to gather my thoughts. The articles must be transported. Load them into the separate trucks. I will give each driver specific instructions once you are ready to leave. In the meantime, I must make a phone call in private.” He reached into his pocket and took out the key to the large warehouse-style door. “Go to the side and begin your work.”
* * *
“They’re transporting the crates,” Danny told hera as the Voice translated what Aberhadji told the men inside. “He got a phone call. They must realize we’re on to them.”
Danny looked at the MY-PID screen. There were a dozen trucks gathered in the front lot. Each crate had to be going to a different location. They’d lose track of half of them.
He debated whether to try attacking. Besides the drivers, there were another twenty men, all with visible weapons, according to the Voice.
There was no way.
And even if the odds were better, what would the next step be? Blow up whatever was in the crates? If it was nuclear material, it would be spread all over.
Then what? Gather it and smuggle it out of Iran.
But if they failed, everything would be lost — the Iranians would find the bugs, realize they were being watched. The material — and the bombs, if there were any — would be lost again.
“How many soldiers are there?” asked Hera.
“Too many,” said Danny, rising. “Come on. Let’s get back to the van. We’ll pick one of the trucks and follow it.”
65
Washington, D.C.
President Todd had just finished shaking hands with the National Chamber of Commerce delegation when David Greenwich, her chief of staff, strode into the Oval Office. His lips were pursed, a signal that a serious problem was at hand.
Still, she kept her expression neutral. Her guests had come to press her on changes in the proposed universal health care bill. Not yet approved by Congress, it was the subject of intense lobbying. Everyone, it seemed, was for it — as long as it could be changed.
“The Israelis have just struck one of the sites Whiplash was looking at,” whispered Greenwich in her ear. “In the Sudan.”
“Thank you, David. You’re right. I guess I will have to take that call.” The President rose. “I will just be a few minutes,” she announced. “Relax for a moment — Peg will see to some coffee or tea.”
Todd smiled at them, nodded as they rose, then went with the chief of staff to the cloak room next to the Oval Office. Though called a cloakroom, as in many previous administrations it was used as a small getaway office by the President.
“What’s going on?” she asked as soon as the door was closed.
“There’s been an attack within the past fifteen minutes,” said Greenwich. “About a dozen Israeli jets came over the border into Sudan. They attacked two places, one of which we were watching. We’re still trying to round up information on the other.”
“How do we know this?”
“Our people were coming over the border when the planes passed. In addition, we’d put bugs in and around one of the targets. The raid was extremely well-planned — the Israeli planes weren’t detected at all. They must have flown right over Egypt, otherwise we could have picked them up. I’d guess they’ve been planning this for quite a while.”
“They must have been the ones who assassinated the Jasmine agent. This is part of the same operation.”
The chief of staff hadn’t made the connection yet. “Yes,” he said, nodding. As always, Greenwich was impressed not so much by his boss’s intelligence as by her ability to dive so deeply into the issue quickly.
“They should have told us,” he said. “If we’re allies.”
“That’s not the issue at the moment, David.” Most likely, the Israelis had learned their lesson during the previous administration, when the U.S. had all but vetoed an operation against Iran — and then blabbed about it a few months later. “Find out where Dr. Bacon is. I want to talk with him in twenty minutes. In person would be better than over the phone. Have Herman available as well. And Mr. Reid. I assume our friend Ms. Stockard is still away.”
“She’s the one who spotted the planes,” said Greenwich.
66
Tehran
Tarid spent a miserable afternoon and evening in Tehran. While initially relieved that Bani Aberhadji did not suspect him of skimming, the fact that his leader felt the operation had been compromised was nearly as bad. While Tarid didn’t want to believe it could be true, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that everything that had happened since he met the arms dealer named Kirk could have been arranged to increase his confidence in him.
Bani Aberhadji had checked the man out himself, and directed him to meet him personally. But that fact was unlikely to persuade Aberhadji toward any sort of leniency if it turned out that Tarid had brought the CIA to Aberhadji’s doorstep.
The hotel seemed particularly drab when he returned. Simin was out. The hotel owner was in a quiet, almost hostile mood. Tarid passed dinnertime in his room, lying on his bed, considering what he would do next. It occurred to him that he could run — flee not just Iran, but Africa as well. But there were few places he could go where Bani Aberhadji and the Guard could not reach if they wanted. No place was safe, short of Israel, and the idea of spending the rest of his life amidst Zionists seemed worse than death. He kept telling himself that he could persevere, that he had been in worse spots. His morale would hold for a few minutes, then fade.
For a while he dozed. When he woke, it was dark and his stomach growled. He decided to go out and find some food.
Tarid had just pulled on his shoes when his sat phone rang.
His fingers froze in a cramp as he grabbed it, paralyzed by fear when he saw the number on the screen. It was Bani Aberhadji. The only reason he could be calling, Tarid thought, was to tell him to initiate the meeting with Kirk.
He was standing at the edge of a precipice he had to jump from, yet he was too scared to edge forward.
Finally, he hit the Receive button.
“This is Tarid.”
“I need you to meet someone and make a delivery.”
“I—” Tarid was so taken by surprise that he didn’t know what to say. But there was no refusing Bani Aberhadji. “Yes,” he managed finally. “Tell me where and when.”
AFTER RENTING TWO CARS SO THEY WOULD HAVE TRANSPORTATION and a backup, Nuri and Flash spent the evening going from o
ne restaurant to another, lingering as they watched the hotel where Tarid was sleeping. Nuri drank so much tea that his whole body vibrated with caffeine. It had no noticeable effect on Flash.
“It doesn’t affect you at all?” asked Nuri.
“Not a bit. Coffee’s the same way.”
“You should leave your body to science.”
Nuri had decided he would bug the hotel room the next time Tarid went out. While Bani Aberhadji was now a more interesting target, Tarid might yet reveal a few more useful tidbits, especially if he returned to Sudan. So Nuri had prepared another bug to attach to his suitcase.
They were sitting in the restaurant directly across the street from the restaurant when MY-PID flashed the news of the Israeli attack on the Sudan facility. Nuri was still digesting the implications when the bug picked up Bani Aberhadji’s phone call to Tarid.
He put his hand to his ear, ducking his head to the table as he listened. From Tarid’s side of the conversation, it sounded as if Aberhadji was telling him to arrange for the meeting with Danny, aka Kirk. But within moments the text of the entire conversation was available via an elint satellite that had been scanning for the signal from Tarid’s satellite phone.
Something else was up. Though what it might be wasn’t clear.
“We need our car,” Nuri told Flash, rising and leaving some change for a tip.
They left the restaurant and walked down the block.
Tarid was going to be assassinated, Nuri thought.
If that was the case, it was a fantastic opportunity — if Tarid could be rescued just in the nick of time, Nuri reasoned, he would be grateful to his rescuers and have nothing to lose by cooperating with them. If he played the situation right, they would not only have a wealth of information about the Iranian weapons program, but statements and a witness who, in some form, could be used to implicate the Iranians in the wider world.
But arranging for Tarid’s rescue was a difficult task, especially for two people working on the fly.