The president turned and looked at Kennedy who was immediately to his left.
“Director General Freidman,” Kennedy said, “has not returned any of my phone calls.”
“Is that unusual behavior for him?” President Alexander asked.
“Not necessarily,” Kennedy said in an even tone.
Rapp kept his editorial comments to himself. He had known Ben Freidman for a long time and had worked very closely with the Mossad on at least a half dozen operations. Freidman would do whatever it took to protect his beloved Israel. He was unapologetic in his belief that Israel should be the one that benefited at every juncture of their relationship. Rapp respected the man’s abilities and tenacity, but he never lost sight of the fact that Freidman would sell him down the river if it meant giving his country the slightest edge.
“What are we hearing from Iran?” Alexander asked the group.
Wicka was the first to chime in. “Nothing official.”
“The National Security Agency is reporting a huge spike in communications,” Ozark answered.
“What kind?” Alexander asked.
“Everything. Cell phone traffic, Internet, military, civilian critical response, religious leadership, politicians…the whole country is talking.”
“What about the media?”
The secretary of state fielded the question. “Twenty minutes ago al-Jazeera broke into their newscast with footage of fire trucks and ambulances entering the base.”
The president pondered that thought for a moment and then looked at the plasma screen. “Brad, what are the Joint Chiefs telling you?”
“We had two AWACS on station.” The secretary of defense was referring to the Air Force’s E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System. “One over Baghdad and the other out over the Northern Gulf. Nothing moved through that airspace this morning that wasn’t either ours or the Brits’.”
“They’re sure?” the president pressed.
“Yes,” London hesitated. “There is, however, one extremely remote possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“If the Israelis have developed a stealth bomber, it is possible that they could have pulled it off, but the entire Joint Chiefs think this is not a realistic scenario.”
“Irene?” the president asked the director of the CIA.
“We’ve heard nothing along those lines. Our own B-2s cost over two billion dollars apiece. Their economy could never support that kind of expenditure, and even if they could, why would they risk flying it in broad daylight?”
“I agree,” said England.
“Satellite photos?” the president asked.
“The NRO should have a report for us within the hour.” Kennedy took off her reading glasses and set them on her briefing book.
“I have a preliminary report from my bomb damage assessment experts,” England announced. “They say they see no evidence of an air strike.”
The room went quiet for a full ten seconds and then the president asked, “So we’re left with what?”
Kennedy picked up a pen, tapped it on her leather briefing book a few times, and in a soft voice said, “Sabotage or disaster.”
“Disaster?”
“The Iranians aren’t exactly known for their stringent building codes. They’ve had structural engineering problems before, usually during earthquakes, but they did have a relatively new apartment complex collapse a few years ago. It turned out the builder was using substandard practices. Almost a hundred people died.”
“And you think they would allow substandard building practices on a project this important?” the president’s chief of staff asked.
“One would think not, but I’ve learned the hard way that the Iranians can be very hard to predict.”
President Alexander thought it over. After a few seconds he looked at Rapp and asked, “Any thoughts?”
Rapp briefly considered censoring what he was about to say and then decided it wouldn’t matter. “Without having all the facts I’d say there’s a ninety-five percent chance the Israelis are behind whatever happened. There’s a remote chance the collapse was due to shoddy construction, but I really don’t think it’s going to matter.”
“Why?” the president asked.
“The Persian ego will never admit to such a failure. Even if this thing collapsed on its own they will blame Israel. Either way they will be looking for blood.”
“I agree,” Secretary of State Wicka jumped in. “The only thing I would add is that they are likely to blame us as well.”
“Any chance you can get their foreign minister talking?” the president asked.
“I don’t think so. I expect them to close ranks on this one and let Amatullah do the talking. This would be a good time to use our back-door channel.”
Alexander looked surprised. “I wasn’t aware we had one.”
Kennedy cleared her throat. “After 9/11, sir, we opened a line with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. They are not big fans of al-Qaeda and the other Sunni terrorist groups. They had been keeping tabs on the Taliban and al-Qaeda for some time. They gave us crucial intel that helped us in the early months of the war.”
“Who do you talk to?”
“Azad Ashani. My counterpart.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Trust might be a bit strong, but I consider him to be pretty levelheaded.”
“All right. See what you can find out. What about the Israelis? Is it time for me to give the prime minister a call?”
“I don’t think so,” said Secretary of State Wicka. “I don’t want to put you in a position where he might have to lie to you. The rest of us should see what we can find out first.”
“I agree,” said Ted Byrne.
“Fine.” The president checked his watch. “I need to make a phone call. Let’s reconvene in an hour.” The president looked to his national security advisor and added, “I want all the key players in the Oval Office once we land.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander stood and looked at Rapp. “Mitch, would you come with me, please? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
12
TEHRAN, IRAN
It was dark by the time Azad Ashani arrived at the offices of the Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini-Nassiri. He was tired, and growing more annoyed with each coughing attack. It had been a grueling day that started with a 5:00 a.m. trip to the airport for the flight to Isfahan. He had just completed the return trip on a military flight after spending all afternoon at the nuclear facility trying to discern exactly what had happened.
After he had saved Mukhtar from the fate of falling to his death like Ali Farahani, things went from bleak to dismal. A cloud of dust and debris had come billowing into the elevator and coated every millimeter of Ashani’s body. He was forced to cower in the corner and take tight, shallow breaths through his dress shirt that he had pulled up to cover his mouth and nose. More than once he wondered if his survival was in question. With his eyes burning from the dust and each breath growing more difficult than the previous, he thought of his wife and precious daughters and wondered how they would fend for themselves in a country whose future was so uncertain.
When the fine particles finally floated back to the ground, everything was covered with a thick film of gray concrete dust. Ashani rose from his spot in the corner of the elevator feeling as if someone had laid a heavy blanket over him. The dust cascaded off his body in sheets. He walked to the threshold of the elevator and looked out at the carnage. It was as if a long-dormant volcano had awoken and spewed its gray ash down upon the landscape.
Ashani stood at the edge peering through the settling dust at the destruction beneath him and felt a deep sadness for his country. He had not been a supporter of the nuclear program, and he surely wasn’t a proponent of taunting the West before they had achieved the weapons to back up their rhetoric, but this was simply too much to take for the fragile Persian ego. An ego that relied on accomplishments that were thousands of years old. Such total and absolut
e destruction was unthinkable.
It was one thing to see a building with a few relatively small holes where bunker-buster bombs had penetrated. They had discussed this many times. The consensus was that the bombs would not be able to penetrate the first layer of defense, let alone all four. It was conceivable that the upper floors would be ruined. There was even a little-known plan that had been discussed only at the highest level. If the Jews and their handlers were lucky enough to penetrate every level and destroy the reactor, they were going to lie to the world and their own people. They would tell them the facility had survived. True or not, it was deemed the people would need to hold on to the illusion that their engineers could stop anything the Americans and their lapdog could throw at them.
But, this, Ashani thought as he looked over the edge. The total and complete destruction of the facility will be impossible to hide. Their inferiority was now laid bare for the entire world to see.
He stood in awe of the Americans and their technology. Israeli pilots or not, it was still the Americans who had developed some new bomb able to defeat the best that the Iranian engineers could construct. How had they so precisely targeted the facility as to get it to implode on itself? Had they known all along that they could totally annihilate the facility at a time of their choosing, and if they did, had they intentionally allowed his country to pour a billion dollars into the project? As someone who had played in the arena of espionage for more than two decades, Ashani was momentarily unnerved by the possibility that his enemies had masterminded such an operation.
Rescue workers snapped him from his literal pit of despair. Using ropes they pulled Ashani and Mukhtar out of the elevator. The two men were given water to clear their eyes and cleanse their mouths. Medical personnel looked him over, and before Ashani knew it he had an entirely new set of problems to worry about. Breathing in concrete dust was bad enough, but if it were radioactive he’d be lucky to live to the end of the month. Ashani and Mukhtar were stripped naked and run through decontamination tents where they were hosed down, scrubbed three separate times, and given blue worker’s coveralls to wear. A doctor working in conjunction with one of the scientists who had been lucky enough to be out of the building at the time of the attack told them the levels of radiation were acceptable. Ashani did not find their views reassuring. Understating problems to the populace was just the type of thing for which his government was notorious.
The coughing had started almost immediately. The doctor told him tiny concrete particles had lodged in his throat and lungs. He counseled him that the coughing was his body’s natural way of cleansing itself. The quack told Ashani he’d begin to feel better in a day or two. Ashani knew better. He had seen the documentary Sicko by Michael Moore. A brilliant piece of anti-American propaganda, the movie followed a handful of rescue workers who had worked at Ground Zero in the massive cleanup effort after 9/11 as they tried to navigate America’s crass, profit-driven medical system. Years later those men were still suffering from horrible respiratory problems, and more than a few had died.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that Ashani began to realize that he might be looking at things the wrong way. Rescue workers in protective gear were lowered into the massive chasm to see if there were any signs of life. Iran was no stranger to earthquakes, so the first responders had been trained to pick through the rubble with dogs and a variety of devices that helped detect potential survivors. After being assured again by an army officer that the radiation levels were acceptable, Ashani returned to the edge to watch. It was then, peering down into the chasm, that he began to recognize that his initial assumptions had been wrong.
The gray dust covered everything, but you could still see cracks and heaved slabs of concrete. Nowhere, though, were there any round holes with twisted and smashed rebar marking the spot where the bombs had penetrated the roof and first floor. Ashani walked the entire perimeter, stepping over debris while he searched for the telltale sign that was always left by a bunker-busting bomb. When he was done encircling the pit, he looked skyward and it occurred to him for the first time that something entirely different may have happened.
It was at that very moment that panic set in among the rescue workers. Several of the men down on the pile were carrying Geiger counters. One of them announced that he’d found a hot spot that hadn’t been there minutes before. One by one the other Geiger counters began chirping like canaries in a coal mine. It was as if an unseen and deadly fog had begun to roll across the pile of destruction. This was what the scientists from the Atomic Energy Organization had most feared. The reactor had melted down. Highly radioactive fission products were releasing into the environment from beneath the debris. The scientists had an emergency plan in the event of a reactor failure, and they wasted no time putting it into play. The rescue workers were ordered out of the hole and decontaminated while the calls went out to the local quarries.
Twenty minutes later the first cement truck pulled up and dumped its load into the billion-dollar pit. Another truck arrived a few minutes after the first. Within an hour twin-axle mixing trucks were lined up two dozen deep, two trucks dumping at a time. The hopes and pride of the Iranian people were unceremoniously buried under a slag heap of radioactive concrete.
A military transport brought Ashani and Mukhtar back just before dinner. President Amatullah had called an evening meeting of the Supreme National Security Council or SNSC. Ashani stopped home just long enough to shower and put on a suit. He kissed his wife and daughters and left for his office, where his deputy ministers were waiting to brief him. With only twenty minutes to spare he listened while each deputy reported on what they were hearing. The quick briefing confirmed Ashani’s belief that the entire government was operating under the premise that the Americans or Jews had decimated the facility with a surgical air strike.
Ashani asked if air defenses had picked up any radar contacts before or after the attack. Two deputies gave contradicting reports. A third deputy interjected that he had talked with an Iran Air pilot who told him he saw Israeli jets in the area. By now the story was all over the news. Ashani told his deputy to call the pilot back immediately and make sure the man was not fabricating the story for his own self-aggrandizement. The Persian populace had a unique way of inserting themselves into the periphery of a national crisis like this. Ashani stressed that the deputy tell the pilot he would be thrown in jail and tortured mercilessly if he found out the man was lying to him.
Ashani left for the office of the Supreme Leader at a quarter past eight in the evening. By the time he arrived he had a splitting headache. He knew the upcoming meeting was the cause. The blame game would be in full swing. The peacock president would be intolerable. Ashani normally held his tongue in these meetings, especially when the Supreme leader was in attendance, but tonight might be different. The realization that he had almost lost his life earlier in the day made him feel less circumspect.
Gripped by another coughing fit, Ashani wondered if a quarter of a century had just been taken from him. If he would spend the next year or two struggling for every breath. And for what? That was the big question. None of this had been his idea. He was the one who had advised against seeking the bomb for this very reason. He had known for some time that Amatullah and his cronies were bad for the future of Iran, but tonight those feelings were suddenly crystallized and pushed to the surface. Ashani decided that he would no longer sit by quietly and allow Amatullah to misstate the facts.
13
AIR FORCE ONE
The president’s office on Air Force One was right next to the conference room, just a few steps away. The proximity left Rapp only a few seconds to ponder the commander in chief’s character and why he had taken such a sudden interest in him. At forty-six Alexander ranked as one of the youngest men elected to the top office. He was easy to like, but Rapp had a deep-seated distrust of all politicians. Too often their party and their own political careers took a front seat to national security. Agencies like the CIA were a dumping
ground for problems, regularly used as a pawn in the game played by the two parties. If something went right it was the politician who took credit, but if something bad happened they were quick to lay the blame at the feet of Langley. They weren’t all that way, of course. Rapp knew of a handful of senators and congressmen who could be counted on. Men and women who knew what was at stake. Men and women who knew how to provide oversight and keep their mouths shut.
Rapp followed the president into his office. At six-two Alexander was an inch taller than Rapp. He was thin, maybe 190 pounds, with a full head of sandy brown hair. His hazel eyes had an alertness that stopped just short of being overly intense. Alexander walked straight across the room between his desk and credenza. He sat in a fixed, high-back leather chair identical to the one in the conference room. The chair could be swiveled and moved as well as locked into position for takeoffs and landings. An identical chair sat across from the desk up against the starboard side of the craft. Rapp eyed the long leather couch and decided it looked less confining. He plopped down, spread his arms out across the back and crossed his left leg over his right.
Alexander eyed a piece of paper on his desk. When he was done reading it, he tore it in half and fed it into a shredder. “You’re probably wondering why I asked you to join me on the trip back to Washington.”
“When presidents call on me, I assume I’ve done something to piss them off.”
Alexander smiled, producing a set of elongated dimples. “I wouldn’t know about that. My immediate predecessor holds you in very high regard.”
Rapp nodded. There had been some rough patches, but for the most part he had gotten along very well with President Hayes. “Did he also tell you I can be a real pain in the ass?”
The smile stayed on Alexander’s face. “He didn’t have to. In that regard your reputation precedes you.” Alexander pushed a button on the side of his chair and the back reclined. He spun the chair and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. “You are very good at what you do, Mitch. One of the last things President Hayes told me before leaving office was to use you wisely.”