by Dale Brown
“I still believe there’s time to demand that the Iranian government take action,” said the Secretary of State. “That’s a better solution in the long run.”
“Nonsense,” said Bacon.
“We cannot let them point a missile at Israel — at anyone,” insisted Lovel. “Especially after they’ve declared that they don’t have any.”
“But this isn’t the government,” said Newhaven. “It should be handled in a completely different way. If their government stops it—”
“Would they? And in the meantime, we’re risking a nuclear catastrophe,” said Lovel. “Millions of people will be killed.”
“That’s not my point. I’m not in favor of not acting. I’m just saying that we should first encourage the Iranians to move, then act if they don’t. If we have twelve hours—”
“Gentlemen, let’s not get sidetracked here,” said the President. “We are going to remove this threat. We are going to assume it is real. And we are not going to rely on the Iranians. That would be too risky. All that will do is make our mission harder.” She looked to the right, at the screen showing the Pentagon ready room. “How long before the bombers are ready?”
“We can have planes in the air within the hour,” said the Defense secretary. “A pair of F-15Es are being loaded with weapons in Saudi Arabia as we speak. They’ll have four F-15Cs as escorts, along with two F-16s for antiair suppression as necessary. Additional Navy flights will be available from the Gulf. We’re still working on some of the support details.”
“How long before they reach Iran?” asked the President.
“Roughly an hour after they take off,” added Lovel. “With the Iranian air defense system not on high alert, their task is…robust, but not impossible.”
“What if they’re on alert?” asked Reid.
“Then things become trickier. Their aircraft and surface-to-air missiles will be ready to launch. We’ll have a second package of attack and fighter aircraft ready to go as a backup. But our people have trained for this. We will accomplish the mission, Mrs. President. I’m confident.”
“What happens when we bomb the warhead?” asked the President.
Lovel turned to an Air Force general who was an expert on nuclear accidents. The general began by citing a study that had been done in 1975. To everyone’s relief, Todd cut him short.
“General, the executive summary,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. Predicting with one hundred percent certainty is impossible. But — if the warhead is constructed properly, there will be little harm to it. The rocket fuel and the oxidizer explode, of course. You have a fire, etcetera.” The general waved his hand, dismissing the cataclysm.
“What about the explosive lens around the bomb?” asked the Secretary of State.
The general gave him a condescending smile. “We don’t really know what sort of design they’ve used, Mr. Secretary. Now I agree with you that it’s very likely that they’ve followed the North Korean mode. However—”
“Short answer, please,” said the President impatiently.
“All nuclear weapon designs do contain explosives. However, as a general rule, they can’t just explode. But if that were to happen, almost surely the warhead won’t be ignited.”
Reid noted the disclaimer — almost surely — but said nothing to the others. The CIA had concluded that the explosives would survive a bomb strike without igniting, citing accidents in the 1950s.
“The worst case scenario — short of something we don’t know about with the material,” said the general, referring to the uranium, “would be the explosives in the design getting on fire. But even if that happened — and I have to say it’s highly unlikely — even if that happened, the weapon would not go critical.”
“We have to recover the material once the missile is destroyed,” said Todd. “How do we go about that?”
“I don’t know that that’s feasible,” said Lovel.
“Will the material be scattered?” Todd asked.
“No ma’am,” said the weapons expert. “I mean, again to give you a definitive answer would require quite a lot of study, but the nature of—”
“Thank you. You’ve told me enough,” said Todd. She looked around the table, then back at the screen. “Charles, how do we get the remains of the warhead? What’s our plan for that?”
“We have a Delta Force unit in the region,” said Lovel. “They can recover it.”
“The material is not necessarily dangerous,” added Reid. Contrary to popular belief, an unexploded bomb presented no health hazard. “And as it happens, there is one person in the region who not only has been trained to deal with warheads, but has had considerable experience doing so.”
“Who?” said Todd.
“Danny Freah. The colonel disarmed a live nuclear warhead a few seconds before it exploded in South America during his Dreamland days,” said Reid. “And before that, he was tasked to a team that secured weapons following the fall of the Soviet Union.”
“Before he went on to bigger and better things,” said Lovel admiringly.
“Then the colonel is the person we want handling it,” said President Todd. “Fortune has put him in exactly the right spot.”
“There is one consideration,” said Reid. “He’ll have to be close to the bomb site when it is bombed. The rocket fuel can be quite unpredictable when it explodes. And it does explode with quite a lot of force.”
“Then he’ll have to keep his distance,” said Todd dryly. “I would assume he knows that better than we do.”
The President turned back to the Pentagon feed.
“Charles, work with Mr. Reid and Ms. Stockard to get a plan together. And get those bombers airborne as quickly as possible. I don’t care what it takes. We’re stopping that missile.”
73
Tehran
Tarid’s head cleared as the cab took him back to Tehran. He had to leave Iran; even if Aberhadji wasn’t out to kill him, not even the Guard would be able to protect him from the army’s wrath when the president’s plane blew up. Whatever life remained to him, it was as a permanent exile.
The Sudan was the first place they would look; then they would get to Somalia, Egypt, and Kenya, hunting him down at the other parts of the network he had tended. Turkey wouldn’t be safe, either.
His best bet at the moment was Europe, though the thick Iranian spy networks would make staying for a long term problematic.
The one thing he had was money, squirreled away in Swiss and German bank accounts. The first step would be to rearrange those accounts, in case Aberhadji had been on to the skimming. And then he would decide where to go and what to do.
Leaving by plane was out of the question. He’d have to sneak over a border on foot, or take a boat.
Calm settled over him as they drove to the city. It was only a veneer, a brittle shell that could be broken by even a light shock, but he was functioning again. Even if he was only a shadow of the man he’d been — or thought he’d been — in the Sudan, he was still a capable and formidable opponent, a man who had lived by his wits for many years in the most hostile environments.
He had told the cab driver to take him to the hotel, but that was only to give him a destination to head toward while he figured out where he really should go. He finally decided that his best plan would be to take a bus westward, to the coast. But realizing the stations in the city could easily be watched, he had the driver turn around and head west, to a small suburban station he knew.
By now the cabbie was scared of his passenger and complied without protest. He’d stop talking since the man with the gun had flagged him down. His only thoughts were of his two children. He wanted desperately to remain alive; if he died, there was every chance his wife would take them to live with his in-laws.
* * *
“Where’s he going?” Flash asked Nuri as they left the highway.
“No idea. Maybe he has to report back in. Maybe he’s running away.”
“Why
didn’t he just get on a plane at the airport, then?”
“Don’t know.”
Flash checked his pistol, double-checking that no one had messed with it in the brief time it had been out of his possession. They’d swung back to grab their gear; he’d hoped to get something to eat as well, but the shop had closed.
Nuri leaned over and glanced at the fuel gauge. They were starting to run low.
Especially in the dark, the towns around Tehran looked similar to the close-in towns around capitals in the West, with clusters of apartment blocks punctuated by small lots of single-family houses. Except for the spirals of the mosques lit by spotlights in the distance, they could have been practically anywhere in the developed world, at the edge of Brooklyn or Naples or Moscow, Istanbul, Berlin.
“Maybe he’s looking for a McDonald’s,” joked Flash. “I could use one of them myself.”
“You’re not full from dinner?”
“There’s always room for a Big Mac.”
“There’s no McDonald’s in Iran.”
“Shame.”
The Voice told Nuri that Tarid’s cab was stopping three blocks ahead. Flash closed the distance just in time to see Tarid leaning in to pay off the driver. He was in front of a bus station.
“Get out and get the cab,” Nuri told Flash. “Have him stop two blocks down.”
“Tarid’s going to see me.”
“Don’t worry about it. We have to scan the interior. We don’t need him anymore.”
Flash opened the door and got out, walking briskly toward the cab. Tarid turned, saw him, then darted in front of the cab, running across the street to the bus station.
“I need a ride,” said Flash in English.
The taxi driver pretended he didn’t understand. Before he could start away, Flash grabbed and opened the rear door.
Sure he was about to be killed, the driver stepped on the gas. Flash threw himself into the taxi, diving into the backseat and pulling himself up. The driver swerved down a side street, then back up another.
The tourist gig wasn’t working. Flash decided to take a different approach.
He pulled out his pistol and placed it at the man’s neck.
“Stop,” he told him.
The driver started to shake his head.
“Stop.”
Flash pressed the barrel harder against the driver’s flesh. He reached into his pocket and tossed the bills he had on the front seat. It was a considerable sum, more than the driver ordinarily made in a month.
“Stop,” said Flash, poking the gun hard into his neck.
The bills allayed just enough of the driver’s fear to make him stop.
Nuri pulled up behind him and sprang from the car. He carried the sniffer in both hands, holding it in front of him as if it were a divining rod.
“Do not worry,” he told the man in Farsi as he pushed the detector toward the open window. “This will not harm you or your car. We will leave you alone in just a minute.”
He didn’t get a read. He opened the door to the back, bending in as Flash slid to the side, still holding the gun at the man’s neck.
The detector was set to pick up traces of chemicals used in Semtex and other plastic explosives. It was negative; there were no traces in the cab.
Though extremely sensitive, the sniffer could be defeated. A very careful bomb maker working in a clean room could, for example, wrap the explosive very securely and make sure that there were no stray traces on the bag. But in Nuri’s experience, that simply didn’t happen; bombs were almost never constructed that carefully.
“Nothing?” asked Flash.
Nuri started to back out of the vehicle. The president’s plane would be inspected before it took off. The Iranians undoubtedly had equipment similar to his, though not as powerful nor as portable.
So a plastic explosive would be discovered.
Fuel, though…
“Wait here,” Nuri told Flash. He stepped to the side of the road, closer to the street lamp, and recalibrated the device. Then he took a second sample from the back, pushing the sniffer right against the floor.
There was a very slight hit of an ammonia compound.
“You use rocket fuel to power your taxi?” Nuri asked the man.
The cab driver was baffled. Nuri reached into his pocket for some bills.
“I already paid him a fortune,” said Flash, getting out the other side.
Nuri tossed the money on the man’s lap anyway. “Forget tonight,” he told him. “It will be the best for you. Go home to your family and forget everything else.”
* * *
Tarid ran inside the bus station. There were only two buses at the queues, and neither was ready to leave. He glanced at the empty driver’s seat of the one at the head of the line, thinking he might steal it. But a bus would be too easy to follow, and besides, he wasn’t sure if he could even drive it. He trotted in front of it, crossing to the other side of the platform.
As he reached the other side, he saw a man walking briskly into the station across from him, his hand in his pocket. Tarid ducked behind a closed newsstand, moving to the opposite end. He started to look around the corner, but stopped as he heard the footsteps; the man was running toward him.
Tarid turned. The station had a low cement wall on the other side of the bus queue, with several openings to a nearby parking lot. He sprang toward it.
As he did, a shot rang out.
* * *
“They’ve put a bomb on the Iranian president’s plane,” Nuri told Reid as he got back into the car. “It has some sort of fuel in it — they’re probably going to set it into one of the fuel tanks or the wing area.”
“You’re sure?” asked Reid.
“There was some sort of fuel in whatever Tarid carried to the airport,” said Nuri. He was using the Voice to connect to Reid’s CIA phone, and there was a slight but noticeable delay as the transmissions synced. “I’m guessing at everything else.”
Flash backed the car up into a nearby driveway, then drove back toward the bus station.
“Where is your subject now?” asked Reid.
“He looks like he’s going on a bus ride. I’m going to follow. We may have a chance to grab him.”
“That may not be wise.”
“He’d be a great source.”
“You’ll have trouble getting him out. We may not even be able to get you out.”
“We’ll see what happens,” said Nuri. “I’ll be back.”
“Hey — that SUV is up on the curb,” said Flash. “And it wasn’t there before.”
Nuri realized it was similar to the truck that the man with the flashlight had been sitting in at the complex. He didn’t even need the Voice to make a comparison.
“Stop the car,” said Nuri. He grabbed the door handle. “Come on. Quick.”
* * *
Tarid felt the bullet hit him in the leg. the pain felt absurdly minimal, barely a sting from a bee. He was even able to stay on his feet, running behind a car and throwing himself down as two more shots sailed over his head.
It was only when he hit the ground that the real pain began. His leg felt as if it had been twisted below his knee. It was on fire. Then it seemed that something had grabbed his calf. It was a lobster claw, gripping and twisting.
He started to get up but his leg betrayed him. He no longer had control over it.
He was going to die here, in a parking lot outside of Tehran.
What a shame that he hadn’t made love to Simin.
Tarid began pushing himself forward, crawling away.
He heard the footsteps again, louder, coming for him. Desperate, he rolled himself under a nearby car, trying to quiet his breath.
For a few seconds it seemed as if he had escaped. The footsteps grew faint. The lot was silent. Tarid’s head began to float, his body entering protective shock.
Then something grabbed his good leg. He was dragged out from under the car.
The man who’d held the flashl
ight when he picked up the bomb was standing over him, grinning. He had a pistol in his hand.
Smiling, the man raised the gun to fire.
* * *
The Iranian assassin was so consumed with his prey that he didn’t hear Flash and Nuri running into the lot behind him. Nuri went to the left, Flash to the right.
Flash saw him down the aisle, raising his gun to fire.
Flash clamped his left hand to his right, leaning forward slightly — there was no time to think, or even consciously aim; he pointed the gun and fired.
The bullet hit square in the back of the assassin’s head.
Flash ran forward. He gave a double tap of the trigger into the already dead man’s skull, taking no chances.
Nuri raced from the other side of the lot. He slid on one knee next to Tarid.
“They’re going to kill you,” he told him in Farsi. “We will help you escape. Come with us.”
Tarid was in no position to argue. “Allah be praised,” he said, half delirious from the pain and shock.
74
Approaching Saudi Arabia
Breanna leaned back in the copilot’s seat and pulled off her headset. Then she pressed the Receive button on the satellite phone and held it to her ear.
“Stockard.”
“The President wants to recover the warhead after the bombers hit,” said Jonathon Reid. “She wants Danny to help recover it.”
“How?”
“The bomb material should be intact. The rest of the warhead will be mangled, of course. They’re pulling together a team of Delta people and a few other experts. I know Danny has done this sort of thing before.”
“Jonathon, I don’t know—”
“This is exactly the sort of mission Whiplash was conceived for,” said Reid. “Adjusting on the fly.”
There were adjustments, and then there were adjustments. Physically picking up a warhead wasn’t the problem. The mission would require them not only to stay in Iran after the bombing, but to stay near the site.
She worried about losing them. She worried about them dying. Whatever danger they were in now would be multiplied tenfold.