Damascus Countdown (7 page)

“We’ve intercepted a call from the Iranian high command,” Zalinsky began. “It’s not good.”

“What?” David pressed. “What is it?”

Zalinsky paused. He seemed to be steeling himself for the conversation to come. David scanned the street around him. There were few people out and no one who looked suspicious. He looked behind him but saw no one following. Taking a deep breath, he braced himself for whatever was coming next.

“The Israelis missed two of the warheads,” Zalinsky said finally. “They seem to have gotten the rest, but they’ve missed two. How, I don’t know. But they’re out there somewhere, and we don’t know where. And that’s why I’m calling. The president is directing you to find both warheads fast and help us take them out before it’s too late.”

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

“We have a missile launch,”
shouted the IDF watch commander.
“Missile in the air—no, make that two Shahab-3s—just launched out of Tabriz.”

Five stories beneath the heavily fortified Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv, in a high-tech war room whose walls were lined with large-screen plasma computer screens and TV monitors, Defense Minister Levi Shimon looked up from a sheaf of briefing papers and scanned for the correct images. When he found them—stunning satellite images from the Ofek-9 spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit six hundred kilometers over northern Iran—his stomach tightened.

“Estimated targets?” he demanded.

“Looks like Haifa and Jerusalem, sir, but we’ll know more in a minute.”

Levi Shimon didn’t have a minute.

His country was being pummeled. Hundreds of Hezbollah rockets were being fired out of south Lebanon every hour. Dozens more rockets were being fired by Hamas out of Gaza. Israel’s missile defense systems were cutting down 75 to 80 percent of the incoming, but the sheer volume of rockets made it impossible to stop them all. Most of the inbounds had no targeting systems. But some of the more advanced rockets did. The problem was, the IDF commanders had no way to determine which were which.

Schools were being hit. Apartment buildings and hospitals were being hit as well. Synagogues and shopping centers were being decimated, along with power stations and cell towers. Millions of Israelis had been forced
into bomb shelters. All flights into and out of Ben Gurion International Airport had been canceled. Nearly a third of the country was suffering blackouts. No lights. No heat. No TV. No computers. No power whatsoever. More than three-quarters of the country had no mobile phone coverage. Worse, the death toll was spiraling. Over the past three days, nearly five hundred Israeli citizens had been killed. The casualties of the past twenty-four hours had been the worst—triple the rate of days one and two of the war. The number of injured was ten times that. Israeli hospitals were at their breaking point, and there was no end in sight.

But the rockets were the least of Shimon’s worries. They were deadly but not decisive. What Shimon feared most were the advanced ballistic missiles that Iran and Syria possessed, the kinds with highly sophisticated guidance systems and warheads that would be horrifying enough with conventional payloads but could be apocalyptic if they were NBC—nuclear, biological, or chemical. Damascus, oddly, had fired only three missiles so far—and conventional ones at that—in the first hour of the fight on Thursday. After the IDF’s Arrow system had shot all of them down, Syrian missiles had suddenly and inexplicably stopped coming. Iran, however, was firing five or six of their most advanced Shahab-3 missiles every hour. By the grace of God, the IDF was taking out almost all of these, but those that did penetrate Israel’s state-of-the-art missile defense systems were devastating. Fortunately none of them—so far—carried unconventional warheads. None of them were weapons of mass destruction. But they were still causing the most damage, Shimon knew, and wasn’t it only a matter of time until one of them created an extinction-level event?

KARAJ, IRAN

David hung up the phone with Zalinsky and started walking again, his mind reeling. How could the Israelis have missed two of the warheads? Where were they now? And how in the world was he supposed to track down either of them, much less both? He had no leads and couldn’t get a single one of his contacts to even take his call.

He had hoped for a longer run, but it was time to get back, brief his men, and come up with a plan. Maybe they’d have an idea. He hoped so because at the moment, he had no idea where to start.

As best he could tell, he was about three miles from the safe house. He began jogging back, taking a right down a side street. He spotted a little corner market a few blocks up and decided to sprint. When he reached the bodega, he slowed his pace, then entered the shop and bought a bottle of water and a banana. He wolfed down the fruit and discarded the peel before leaving the store, then chugged half the bottle of water. He pulled out his satellite phone and once again dialed Dr. Birjandi.

Nothing. Again he tried Rashidi, then Esfahani, and again he came up empty. This particularly infuriated him, since these were the two who had insisted David take enormous risks to find, buy, and smuggle into Iran several hundred of these satphones for the Mahdi and his key men so they could be reached at all times. Rashidi and Esfahani were both members of the Group of 313, the Twelfth Imam’s most elite warriors, operatives, and advisors. They were personally responsible for overseeing the creation and smooth functioning of the Mahdi’s own private communications system both here in Iran and in whatever foreign countries he traveled to. And now neither of them were answering their satphones.

In desperation, David decided to try calling Esfahani’s secretary at Iran Telecom. Mina wasn’t exactly in the Mahdi’s inner circle. Though she was smart and sweet and highly effective at her job, Esfahani practically treated the woman like a slave. He cursed at her and threw things at her and made her life miserable, though she never complained and still worked hard and professionally every day. Then again, she wasn’t likely to be at work today with Israeli bombs falling all throughout Tehran. David scrolled through his contacts list and realized he no longer had her home number. He called her work number anyway, on the off chance that she had her work calls forwarded to her home number. But even as he dialed and hit Send, he realized how stupid that was. Most of the mobile phone system in the country was down, and what were the chances that Esfahani had given Mina, of all people, a
satphone? Sure enough, the call went to voice mail. David didn’t bother to leave a message. What was the point?

David shoved the phone in his pocket and started jogging again, heading for the safe house. He had taken only a few steps when the phone rang. He stopped, pulled out the phone, and was surprised to see Mina’s name on the caller ID.

“Hello? Mina? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Mina said. “Is this Reza? Reza Tabrizi? Are you okay?”

“Yes, it’s Reza, and I’m safe, thank you, Mina,” he said. “And you? How are you and your mother?”

“Praise Allah, we are okay,” she replied, though her voice was trembling. “We’ve been living in the basement of our apartment. I just came upstairs to get some more food and water, and the satphone rang. But when I picked up, you’d already hung up.”

“Abdol gave you a satphone?”

“In case he needed me to help him.”

“Are you helping him?”

“A little, here and there,” Mina said. “But no, not much.”

“Where is he now?” David asked. “I’m trying to find him and Mr. Rashidi.”

“I don’t know where Mr. Rashidi is. Mr. Esfahani has been trying to find him too.”

“Okay, but where is Abdol? It’s urgent, Mina. I must talk to him.”

“I just spoke to him about twenty minutes ago,” she replied. “He’s heading to Qom.”

“Qom?” David asked. “Why Qom? The Israelis are bombing the daylights out of the nuclear sites and military bases there.”

“That’s why he went.”

“I don’t understand.”

“His parents live in Qom,” Mina said. “Near one of the bases. His mother is terrified of all the bombing. She wants to leave, but his father, as you know, is a big mullah there. He won’t leave the seminary. He says leaving would show a lack of faith in Allah.”

“So why’s Abdol going?”

“To get them out of there before they are killed.”

David suddenly realized his best chance—maybe his only chance—to reconnect with Esfahani, or anyone inside the Mahdi’s Group of 313, was in Qom.

“Mina, I need an address,” he said, his mind already made up.

“For what?”

“For Abdol’s parents.”

“No, Mr. Tabrizi, please, you cannot go,” Mina said.

“I have to.”

“But why? It’s a suicide mission.”

“No, it’s not. It’s to help a friend.”

There was a long silence.

“Mina? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Please, I cannot let Abdol go alone,” David insisted, trying to come up with a plausible-sounding rationale for what clearly seemed to Mina an act of insanity. “Abdol’s life is too valuable to the Mahdi to let him die in Qom. I must help him get his parents to safety and then get him to safety as well. The fate of this war may very well depend upon it.”

It was silent again for a few moments, and then Mina relented and gave him the address.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

“Haifa is a confirmed target,”
the IDF watch commander said urgently.
“I repeat, Haifa is a confirmed target.”

“And the second target?” Shimon pressed. “You’re sure it’s Jerusalem?”

“No,” the watch commander said.

“Then where’s it headed?” Shimon demanded, moving quickly to the watch commander’s side to get a closer view of the images on the laptop.

“The computer says the second target is Dimona, sir—and now three more Shahabs have been fired and are heading toward Dimona as well.”

“No—you can’t be . . . Are you positive?”

“Computer puts it at a 97 percent confidence level, sir.”

Shimon felt physically ill. This couldn’t be happening. Dimona was a desert town, not even a city. Thirty-some kilometers south of Beersheva, it certainly wasn’t a major population center. Only about 33,000 Israelis lived there—nothing like the three and a half million who lived in and around metropolitan Tel Aviv. But Dimona had something Tel Aviv didn’t—Israel’s only nuclear power plant. The Iranians were gunning for Dimona, and if they hit it with ballistic missiles as powerful as the Shahab . . .

Shimon grabbed the orange phone on the console in front of him, chose a secure line, and hit number one on the speed dial.

“Get me the prime minister.”

HAMADAN, IRAN

Dr. Alireza Birjandi was startled by loud knocking on his front door.

He wasn’t expecting anyone. How could he be? He heard neither the sounds of cars on the streets nor the laughter of children in yards. He had, however, been woken up repeatedly by the sounds of fighter jets roaring overhead. He had heard explosions, one after another, and had felt the ground shake. The Israelis were here. They had bombed the nuclear facilities in the mountains just a few miles away. They had returned multiple times to make certain the job was finished. And from what he had heard on TV, before the networks were knocked off the air, a full-scale war of rockets and missiles had erupted.

Who, then, would be crazy enough to be pounding at his door?

The knocking grew louder and more insistent, but Birjandi would not be rushed. Now eighty-three, the internationally renowned theologian and scholar of Shia Islamic eschatology was in remarkably good health—aside from being blind—but he was growing slower in his old age and increasingly felt it every year. Groaning at the aches and pains in his knees and ankles and back and hips, he laboriously forced himself up from his recliner and, feeling for his cane and grabbing its handle tightly, slowly padded to the door as the knocking intensified still more.

“Dr. Birjandi? Dr. Birjandi? Are you okay?”