Damascus Countdown (50 page)

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

At Jazini’s order, everyone raced into the fortified bunkers at the rear of the facility, far from the missiles and well out of danger. At the Mahdi’s order, hundreds of missiles began to lift off all over Iran and Syria, screaming for Israel, all of them designed to create a blizzard of inbounds that would overwhelm the Israelis’ ability to track them and shoot them all down.

All at once, the massive roof started retracting above them, and the countdown for these six missiles began.

“T minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

Esfahani held his breath as the moment of reckoning drew near.

ROUTE 90, CENTRAL SYRIA

David and his team were twisting and turning through mountain passes. They were steadily descending to the plains where the Syrian capital was nestled in the shadow of the Golan Heights. David slowed slightly to come around a particularly sharp curve. Then, as he cleared the rocky ridges and approached a straightaway along the top of a large hill, he accelerated again and passed a bus and an oil tanker, along with a large truck carrying crates of fruit.

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

“. . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .”

The roof was completely open. Esfahani stared into the skies above and praised Allah for giving him the privilege of being part of this glorious rise of the Caliphate.

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

Director Allen was still on the phone with the president when Tom Murray and Jack Zalinsky realized the Iranians and Syrians were launching a massive missile strike. At first count, the commander of the Global Ops Center counted 169 rockets and missiles lifting off or in the air, each and every one of them headed for Israel.

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

This was it. The missiles’ engines roared to life. White-hot flames came rushing out of the nozzles below them, instantly incinerating all three men—one Syrian and two Iranians, all of whom Esfahani had once thought to be heroes.

The entire underground facility shuddered and quaked as the launchpads fell away and the Scuds began to lift off. Esfahani was beside himself with joy. The thought crossed his mind that he should turn and look at the faces of the Mahdi, the Ayatollah, and President Mustafa. Each was standing close beside him, and it would be fascinating, he thought, to see their reactions and compare them to his own. But he was mesmerized by the missiles beginning their launch. He simply couldn’t pull his eyes off the sight of the fire and the smoke. It was such a beautiful, glorious sight, one he knew he would cherish forever.

“You see,” said the Mahdi, “Zandi was a liar, and Allah hates liars—”

But then suddenly everything went white. The nuclear warhead in the nose cone of Missile Four detonated at an altitude of just five hundred yards. Temperatures surged into the millions of degrees. Everything and everyone on the Al-Mazzah base was instantly vaporized. The blast wave leveled all buildings and incinerated all life-forms for ten kilometers in every direction in a fraction of a second. Every bit of air and gas in the surrounding area was sucked into the center and erupted into a fireball as hot as the sun. The fireball roared across Damascus,
scorching anything and everything that was not already dead, and as it shot into the air and expanded and cooled, the distinctive mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation could be seen for hundreds of kilometers.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

Levi Shimon and Zvi Dayan sat in stunned horror. Every screen in the command center displaying satellite, drone, and radar feeds from the Syrian front suddenly went black. For a moment, Shimon feared that Tel Aviv had been hit with a nuclear weapon. But just as quickly the systems rebooted, and Shimon saw the sobering truth. It was Damascus, not Tel Aviv, that had just experienced a nuclear holocaust, but for the life of him Shimon’s mind could not register how.

ROUTE 90, CENTRAL SYRIA

Without warning, the most intense white light David and his team had ever witnessed burst across the Syrian skyline. Instantly blinded and completely disoriented, David lost control of the car. He tried to slam on the brakes, but at the high speed at which they were racing, the car swerved violently, then ran off the left side of the road, careened down an embankment, and flipped six times before smashing upon the craggy rocks below.

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

Jack Zalinsky was in shock. He stared at the screens in front of him. Both of the feeds from the Predators ended abruptly and did not come back. But from the Keyhole satellite feed, Zalinsky and his colleagues had watched the detonation in real time. They could see the mushroom cloud rising into the atmosphere. They were watching as the fireball annihilated the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. They just couldn’t believe what they were witnessing.

There was no evidence that any Israeli missiles had reached Syria, much less Damascus. So Zalinsky was certain Naphtali hadn’t yet ordered a nuclear strike against the Syrians. What then had happened? Had the Iranian nuke malfunctioned, and if so, how was that possible?

Behind him, he could hear President Jackson shouting at Director Allen over a speakerphone,
“What happened? What just happened?”
But Allen could not yet reply. He, too, was in shock.

For several minutes, Zalinsky and everyone else in the Global Operations Center just stared at the screens. They could see what was happening, but it still wasn’t computing. None of it made any sense. And then Zalinsky thought of David and his team. He reached for one of the receivers on the bank of phones in front of him. He knew by now that David had lost his satphone during the gun battle at Dayr az-Zawr. So he speed-dialed Steve Fox’s number. The phone rang once. Then five times. Then ten times and fifteen. But there was no answer.

He hung up and speed-dialed Nick Crenshaw’s phone. He waited through five rings. Then ten, then fifteen and twenty. But no one answered that line either.

Panicked, he tried Fox’s phone again. Then Crenshaw’s. He called Eva and told her to stop everything and just keep redialing those two numbers every two minutes for the next hour. But no one answered.

The phones just rang and rang.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

“Abort the strike order!”
Naphtali ordered over his secure line to the IDF Operations Center.
“I repeat, abort the strike order.”

Dozens of Israeli missiles were already in the air, racing for Al-Mazzah and other key Syrian military bases, particularly those housing caches of chemical and biological weapons. Naphtali knew there was nothing he could do to bring those back. But he listened as Shimon immediately relayed the order to the chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force and the wave of fighter jets that were currently lifting off and en route to Syria were called back.

Naphtali couldn’t fully conceive of what had just happened. He had confidence his team would eventually piece together the puzzle and figure it out. But for now his instincts told him to do everything in his power to avoid the charge by the international community that Israel had vaporized Damascus. Had he ordered a massive strike on Syria’s military facilities? Absolutely. But he had not ordered the annihilation of an Arab capital, and he did not want the world to think he had. Israel was isolated enough. Neither he nor his people could afford to be charged with a crime such as this.

The Iranian and Syrian missiles were still inbound, however. Some of them were being shot down, but well over a hundred of them were hitting Israeli cities from Haifa to Beersheva. For some reason Jerusalem was being spared the deadly barrage, but at the moment that was little comfort. More than seven million Israelis were huddled in bomb shelters and wearing gas masks and riding out one of the
most devastating attacks in the modern history of the Jewish State. Casualty projections from the latest strikes were expected to be high. Dayan feared more than 1,500 Jews and Arabs could die in these latest missile attacks. But Naphtali felt certain that an Israeli retaliation was out of the question. What more could they do to Syria than had already been done? The great and proud and ancient city of Damascus was no more. It had been wiped off the face of the map, never to rise again. More than two million Arab souls had perished in a matter of milliseconds. It was a tragedy of epic proportions, but it was a tragedy of Iran and Syria’s own making. Naphtali had no reason to feel guilt, but he grieved nonetheless, and he wondered what all this would mean for the future of the Middle East.

To his astonishment, reports began to come in almost immediately from southern Lebanon and even from Gaza that the fighting had stopped. It wasn’t clear whether the forces of Hezbollah and Hamas believed that Israel had just nuked Damascus, but Shimon had begun forwarding reports from IDF commanders in the field that as news of the destruction of Damascus spread, the Arab forces were going into shock. They weren’t exactly laying down their arms, but they weren’t using them either. They were disengaging from the Israelis and beginning to retreat.

“Our commanders want to know, should they continue to engage the enemy? Should they press the offense?” Shimon asked Naphtali.

The prime minister considered that for a moment, but in the end he said no. Iran and Syria had been dealt a death blow. The Twelfth Imam was now dead. The Ayatollah—Iran’s Supreme Leader—was dead. So was Syrian president Mustafa and most of the Caliphate’s top military leaders and political advisors. The heads of two snakes had been cut off.

Nothing in the region would ever be the same. Tehran, Naphtali believed, would never be in a position to fund and supply Hezbollah and Hamas again. Nor, clearly, would Damascus. The horror of what had just happened would take time to sink in fully, but Naphtali was willing to bet an enormous sum that as the flow of funds and weapons to these terrorist organizations dried up, so would their spirit and
the threat they had once posed. Out of the fire and the smoke, a new world was being born, Naphtali realized, a world in which Israel’s most dangerous enemies had just been dramatically neutralized in the blink of an eye.

OAKTON, VIRGINIA

It was cold and dark, and northern Virginia was being pounded by a torrential rainstorm. Najjar Malik had woken up several times throughout the night to immense claps of thunder that made the windows and the walls shake. But though the rain and the thunder would still not let up, now he woke to the sound of someone knocking on the bedroom door.

“Just a second,” he said as he sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and tried to remember where he was and what time it was.

Najjar looked over at his beloved wife, Sheyda, snuggled up beside him, then at their baby nestled in the crib beside their bed. And then it all came back. He was once again in the custody of the CIA. He was back at the safe house from which he had escaped. There were more armed guards in the house now. There were bars on the bedroom windows and more surveillance cameras in the hallways and in the trees front and back, allowing the Agency to make certain none of them tried to slip out of their grasp again. It was a prison, basically, but at least he was finally back together with his family.

Najjar forced himself out of the warm bed, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. He threw on some blue jeans and a T-shirt and opened the door. His mother-in-law, Farah, bundled in a thick blue bathrobe, was standing there looking quite anxious.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“You have a visitor,” she said. “Someone from the Agency. I think something is wrong.”

Najjar suppressed a smile. Of course their visitor was from the Agency. All their visitors were from the Agency. No one else knew where they were, and some of the people who were looking for them
wanted them dead. Najjar nodded to the armed guard in the hallway, then rubbed his eyes again and headed downstairs, saying good morning to the guard at the bottom of the stairs as well as the two in the kitchen.

To his astonishment, Eva Fischer was standing there, looking pale and stricken.

“Agent Fischer, what a surprise,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “Can we sit down and talk?”

“Of course,” he said, then turned to Farah. “Would you mind making us some coffee?”

“I already have a pot brewing,” she replied. “I’ll bring it over when it’s done.”

Najjar and Eva went into the family room. She took a seat on the couch. He sat down in a large, overstuffed chair.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s brought you all the way out here to see me?”

“There’s been an explosion,” Eva began. “A detonation, actually.”

Najjar tensed, not wanting to hear what was coming next. But Eva told him anyway. She could not share classified details, of course, but she told him what was being reported on the news. The Agency had denied the Maliks access to television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Until his debriefings and the criminal investigation into his recent activities were completed by the Agency and the FBI, the U.S. government didn’t want Najjar or his family to have contact with the outside world or much knowledge of it either. So this was the first Najjar had heard of the Damascus tragedy.

“The devastation is beyond anything you or I can comprehend,” Eva said. “Damascus is no more.”

Najjar sat for a moment without speaking, trying to process all that he was hearing.

“So,” he said quietly at last, “the prophecies came true.”

“What do you mean?”

“The prophecies—you know, in the Bible, the ones in Isaiah and Jeremiah that say in the last days Damascus will be obliterated as a city—they just came true.”

Eva clearly had no idea what he was talking about, and she asked him to explain. He did so, but he had questions of his own. Having been one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists for years, Najjar asked for more technical details about what the Agency had ascertained about the cause of the blast. Eva bent the rules a bit and told him what she knew. She made it clear that there was no evidence this was an Israeli nuclear strike. Rather, she said, it appeared that the warhead detonated moments after the Scud-C lifted off. She gave a few more details. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Najjar to posit a theory.

“This was deliberate,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

“Nuclear warheads don’t detonate during launch unless the man who built them is either an idiot or a suicide bomber,” Najjar said. “None of the scientists on Dr. Saddaji’s team were idiots. They were brilliant, brilliant men. But none of them besides Tariq Khan had been recruited by Saddaji to be part of building bombs.”

“So what are you saying?” Eva asked.

“I’m saying one of those men knew he had the chance to take out the entire Iranian and Syrian leadership in one shot and stop the Mahdi’s nuclear weapons nightmare at the same time,” Najjar said. “And he took it.”

It was a radical theory—one Eva said the top officials at the CIA had not even considered in these early hours. She pursued it for several minutes, peppering Najjar with one question after another until Najjar abruptly changed the topic.

“So does this mean Reza Tabrizi will be coming home soon?” he asked. “The man saved my life and my family’s lives. I would very much like to see him again. I would like to say thank you.”

The question hung in the air for a while. Eva looked away and said nothing. Farah came into the room and set a tray before them with two mugs of hot black coffee, along with a small pitcher of creamer, a bowl of sugar, and some spoons.

“Is that not possible?” Najjar now asked. “Is that against the rules?”

“No, it’s not that,” Eva said finally. “It’s just . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“What?” Najjar asked. “If it’s not against the rules, then what?”

Eva picked up one of the mugs and took several sips. “Najjar, I’m not sure how to say this the best way,” she began. “So I’m just going to be straight with you. Reza is . . . I’m afraid Reza is missing, and . . .”

“And what?” Najjar pressed.

“And presumed dead.”

Najjar gasped, as did his mother-in-law. She knew all the stories of what Reza Tabrizi had done for them. Indeed, she—like all of them—had been praying night and day for Reza’s soul as well as his safety.

Just then Sheyda came downstairs, still wearing her pajamas but wrapped in a thick gray sweatshirt. “What happened to Reza?” she asked, coming around the corner and taking a seat next to Eva. “I don’t understand. Where is he now?”

Eva greeted Sheyda and reminded them that there were some things she wasn’t authorized to say. “What I can tell you is that he and his team were hunting two Iranian warheads that the Israelis missed in their initial air strikes,” she said. “The hunt took them out of Iran and into Syria. They were headed right into Damascus when the missile lifted off and exploded. We were tracking his team with a drone. But when the explosion happened, we lost contact with the drone and with Reza.”

“But he could still be alive, right?” Najjar asked.

“Anything’s possible,” Eva said. “But I . . .” She began to choke up.

Farah ran to get a box of tissues and gave several to Eva, who dabbed her eyes and apologized for her lack of professionalism.

“Anything’s possible,” she said again. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath, Najjar. As I told you, the devastation is beyond belief. We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world. Believe me, you don’t want to see the satellite photos. It’s . . . well . . . I don’t see how anyone could have survived.”

The room was quiet for several minutes, and then Sheyda asked Eva a question. “You two were very close, weren’t you?”

Eva was clearly caught off guard by the question, but she chose to answer it anyway. “We’d become good friends, yes,” she said.

“Just friends?” Sheyda asked, but Najjar reprimanded her and quickly apologized.

“It’s okay,” Eva replied. “Your wife is a very perceptive woman. The truth is, I guess I was hoping for something to develop between us. But it never did. And even if he had lived, honestly, I don’t think it ever would have happened.”

“Why not?” Sheyda asked, more gently this time.

Eva sighed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue again. “He didn’t love me,” she said, her bottom lip quivering. “He loved someone else.”