Whiplash (39 page)

North of Tehran

I
T WAS COMPLETELY DARK BY THE TIME
D
ANNY AND
H
ERA
reached the stone wall twenty yards behind the building. They stopped there, making sure they understood the security system before continuing.

Whoever designed the system had counted on an intruder not being able to get past the substantial network of detectors that ran up the driveway. But that also left a hole they could exploit.

The rear of the building was protected by motion detectors, as well as video cameras posted on the back wall. There was no motion detector on the side or the front of the building, however, and the only video camera on that side of the property covered the front door.

The video from the bug on Tarid’s coat showed that the windows were protected by a simple contact alarm system similar to those used in many homes and businesses in the States. Even Danny could defeat it.

“We have to make a zigzag across the courtyard to the window,” Danny told Hera, drawing it on his palm with his
finger. “Just follow me.”

“Go.”

He started toward the stone wall. The Voice told him when to jump it.

Hera followed through the field as Danny crisscrossed toward the side of the building, trying to go step by step in his path. She was resigned to the fact that this was going to be her last mission with Whiplash, that Danny would dump her when it was over. She’d have to rebuild her career.

She was glad he’d taken her along tonight. It wasn’t so she could redeem herself—she knew it was because she spoke Farsi. But going gave her something to concentrate on. It was better than sitting with Flash or Nuri, who were watching Tarid at the hotel. There would have been too much time to brood, about McGowan, about everything.

Maybe she had been a bitch. It seemed like such a sexist label, something a man would put on a woman for things a guy would never be called on. But maybe, she conceded, maybe there was a tiny bit of truth in it.

Maybe it would have been more accurate to say she was conceited and thought she had a better way to do things.

The focus now was on the mission, not her. She continued through the field, moving with Danny to the building.

Danny had the current scanner out. “Only the wires,” he said, easing to the side.

Hera slipped a suction cup on the glass, focusing on the task. She cut around it quickly, concentrating on making the perfect scribe on the first pass with the cutter. Then she focused on pulling it away, then on jumping the wires.

“We’re good,” she said, pushing up the window.

They took a good look around the inside before going in, making sure there were no motion detectors or other devices nearby.

Danny climbed in first, entering a large storeroom, behind the one where the meeting had taken place. Most of the room was empty; there were large crates at the far wall. Danny turned around slowly, examining the walls. They were
painted and smooth, making it more difficult to find a place to put the bugs where they wouldn’t be seen.

Taking out a stick of gum, he wadded it into his mouth as he looked for a hiding place. He settled on the molding beneath the window. Once it was in place, he pulled off his rucksack and removed the pane of glass he’d brought to replace the small panel they’d cut through.

Hera walked over to the boxes and took out a radiation detector—a miniaturized Geiger counter sensitive enough to pick up a shielded weapon at a meter’s range. The screen lit before she could even get it calibrated.

“Bingo,” she said.

Danny came over and looked.

“This is it,” she said. “There’s uranium in those boxes. They may be all bombs.”

He looked at the readings, then the crates.

“I don’t know if any of these are warheads,” he told her. “There’s definitely material here, but it may be the residue from refining.”

“Let’s take them apart and find out.”

Danny bent down and examined them. They varied in size from about six by three feet to ten by eight.

“We don’t know how long Aberhadji’s going to be gone,” he said. “Let’s tag them, get out the chemical sniffer, check for chemicals—I’ll get the window ready in case we have to leave. Then we’ll see if we can get these open without being detected.”

“Can’t we just blow them up?”

Danny thought they might be able to rig something, but the explosion would only damage the warhead mechanism; the bomb itself could be salvaged. They’d have to take the warhead—or warheads—to permanently end the threat.

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” he told her. “Tag them while I get the window ready.”

There were two dozen crates; Hera only had enough tracking bugs for six. She bugged the box that had the strongest
radiation signal, sticking the tiny device between the slats at the very bottom. Then she tagged two boxes next to it, unsure whether she was picking up radiation from them or the larger crate. She placed the other three tags arbitrarily on more boxes, each a different size and shape.

When she was done, she took out the chemical sniffer and began examining the area around the crates.

The device was called a sniffer because it took air samples and then analyzed the contents. The sensitivity varied according to chemical, but certain substances—such as anthrax—could be detected in extremely minute amounts. About the size of a palm-corder, the device required a bit of patience and a steady hand, but its small size and power were light-years ahead of the devices used at airports and ports to detect bomb materials and other dangers.

There were traces of explosives. No biological agents. No chemicals used in warfare.

On the other side of the room, Danny chipped out the last of the glass and carefully put the new pane in place so no one would suspect they had broken in.

Or rather, he tried to—it didn’t fit exactly. The window was slightly smaller than the standard size, and he had to cut the pane they’d brought with them to fit. He got down on his hands and knees and etched the edge of the panel freehand, sliding the glass cutter gingerly so he didn’t break the glass. Twice he thought he was done, only to find he was still off by a few fractions of an inch. Finally he got the glass into place, rolling putty around it to keep it there.

Now came the hardest part—matching the color of the old putty. It had started out pure white, then faded with age. Danny worked with two jars of stain to get the right shade. He took off his goggles and used a flashlight, experimenting with the shade. It took several minutes before he found a reasonably close shade.

“What’d you find?” he asked Hera.

“Just explosives.” She explained how she had arranged the
bugs. “Which crate do we start with?”

“I don’t know. Go fix the window with the jumper so we can get out easily while I take a look.”

“Are we going to glow when we leave?” she asked, only half joking.

“Yeah. We won’t need our night goggles.” Danny smiled. “No, it’s not really that much. Fix the window.”

The amount of radiation emitted by a bomb before it exploded was minute; it posed no danger to the people handling the weapon. The amount they detected here was extremely small—the Iranians had every incentive to be very careful handling and preserving the material.

Danny spotted a nail in the wall and decided to plant a bug there before trying to open the crates. He climbed up on one of the boxes and stuck a bug just above it. He was just getting down when the Voice sounded an alert in his ear.

“Vehicle approaching. Similar in size and shape to vehicle observed on property earlier in the day.”

Aberhadji had returned.

Eastern Sudan

B
Y THE TIME
B
REANNA GOT BACK TO THE
O
SPREY, THE
radar had identified twenty-four individual planes, all flying on a path a few miles north of them. Most had already passed; the radar showed them gaining altitude quickly.

She took one look at their flight patterns and the plane types and knew two things instantly: They were on a bombing mission, aiming at a target in Sudan. And they were Israeli.

She took out the secure sat phone and called Reid immediately.

“Jonathon, I think the Israelis know about the Iranian plant in Sudan,” she told him. “They’re on their way to blow it up.”

“What?” said Reid.

“They’re at low altitude, flying at high speed not too far from here. The radar in one of the Ospreys picked them up.”

“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.”

North of Tehran

“W
E HAVE TO GET OUT
NOW
,” D
ANNY TOLD
H
ERA, 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.

O
NCE INSIDE
, A
BERHADJI 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.

H
ERA FOLLOWED
D
ANNY 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.”

A
BERHADJI 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.”

“T
HEY’RE TRANSPORTING THE CRATES
,” D
ANNY TOLD
H
ERA
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.”