The Disciple

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Pentagon briefer, an air force major who wore an impeccably tailored uniform, pointed at the screen with a small penlight that emitted a red light. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today to do a preplanning brief. We will try to outline the military problem as we, the staff of the Joint Chiefs, believe it to be.”

No one had any comments, so the major continued smoothly, “We have identified twenty-five missile sites using satellite imagery. They are all located near a small population center, all have a military presence-ranging from a little to a lot-and all are underground, in what appear to be drift tunnels bored into cliffs.” Using the penlight, he pointed them out. “They are spread out over an eleven-hundred-mile arc that runs along the western and southern sides of Iran. These locations were obviously chosen for geological reasons, but siting them too deep into Iran would have given the enemy too much warning when the missiles were launched. Conversely, placing the sites too near the frontier would have made them easier to attack with air strikes or commandos.”

On the image projected on the screen, each site was depicted with a letter of the alphabet, starting with A.

“If you look closely,” the major continued, “you will see a ballistic missile sitting on its tractor-trailer launcher outside Tunnel Hotel.” The red light rested momentarily on the missile. “Each tunnel contains missiles, anywhere from one to fifty or more, and we believe all are on launchers. When the order comes to shoot them, the transporters are simply run out of the tunnel into the desert, a hydraulic ramp on each lifts the missile into a launching position, and when the systems are running and checked out, it is fired. It’s the old Soviet system, simple, reliable and-for a strategic offensive weapon-reasonably fast. Ballistic missiles will be launched from a vertical position, the cruise missiles from approximately thirty degrees of elevation. We estimate that a missile could be pulled from the tunnel and launched within twenty minutes.”

Jake Grafton looked around at the other thirty or so people listening to the brief. In the front row, beside General Heth, sat the president and Sal Molina. Arranged down the row and onto the next one were flag officers, including the entire Joint Chiefs and the heads of some major commands, including the U.S. Central Command, into whose jurisdiction Iran fell.

The briefer motored on, discussing missile guidance systems. The old Soviet missiles used gyro-based guidance systems, and the limiting factor on the speed with which the missile could be launched was the time required for the gyro to spin up to operating speed and be properly aligned. Gyros were wildly inaccurate-some of the Scud missiles fired from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War had missed Israel. Iranian missiles were thought to have updated guidance systems, perhaps an inertial nav system or even GPS, the global positioning system, either of which would dramatically improve their accuracy.

“The military problem is quite simple,” the briefer said. “For political reasons we must wait until at least one missile is in the air, and then react as best we can. Since we don’t know the Iranian launch schedule, one assumes that they will get more than one missile in the air before we manage to destroy the ones still on the ground.”

“There will be a lot more than one missile in the air,” General Heth said heavily. He spoke directly to the briefer. “Tell these folks how we think they are going to do it.”

“The limitation on the Iranians’ ability to launch a cloud of missiles has always been the number of trained technicians they have,” the briefer explained. “We believe it takes about eight men to fire one missile. If each site has five eight-man crews, that is a thousand trained technicians. That many, we believe, is about the practical limit. Analysis of the living quarters around these sites supports that.

“Our best guess is that they will roll out five missiles, each with its own crew, and fire all five. Then the technicians will go back into the tunnel and bring out five more. That implies a maximum launch rate of about two hundred fifty missiles per hour.”

There was more, a lot more, in the general overview, which didn’t go into details. Fifteen minutes into the briefing, the president asked to see a certain map again, one that had been displayed early in the brief. In a moment it filled the giant screen behind the briefer.

On this map were displayed the targets the CIA believed the Iranians wished to hit, almost fifty targets. The twenty-five suspected launch sites were depicted. Connecting the launch sites and possible targets were hundreds of black lines, lines generated by a computer based on probabilities, such as range of missile, terrain, flight time, defensive reaction time and a half-dozen other factors. No one suggested the map was accurate: It was merely a prediction.

“The whole purpose of their attack,” said William Wilkins, the CIA director, “if they attack, is to fire up Muslims worldwide and put Iran in the driver’s seat for World War III. They have to sell their story worldwide, and they don’t want doubts.”

“This may sound ridiculous,” the president replied, “but we don’t want to wind up on the short end of the political stick either. If only a few cruise missiles squirt out of Iran and we whack them hard, believe me, the Iranians and Al Jazeera will say we attacked first, and the Iranians launched a few in self-defense.”

General Heth weighed in. “Mr. President, if everything goes perfectly, and in war it never does, there is no way we can smack all those missile sites before the second salvo. We took a hard look at the Special Forces option, which was inserting Green Berets near enough to the launch sites that they could launch antitank weapons at the tunnel entrances and effectively shut them down. Unfortunately, every one of those sites is guarded. We think there are perhaps five sites where we can insert teams that have a reasonable chance of surviving until missile launch. Five! Believe me, a cloud of missiles is going to come out of Iran.” General Heth gestured at the map on the wall.

The president stared at the map, which was certainly an impressive piece of work. General Heth filled the silence. “We can’t keep forty planes airborne over Iran until Ahmadinejad gives the launch order. Our forces must be outside Iranian airspace. A lot of them will be on the ground when the first missile is rolled out, which creates another problem. If we launch then, on first rollout, the Iranians may not shoot, and our birds will run out of fuel and have to be landed. Then they’ll do it.”

Sal Molina muttered to the president, “This is what has the Israelis in a tizzy. We must shoot down the missiles in the air.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs spoke up. “One nuke detonating anywhere in the Middle East, such as over an airbase in Saudi Arabia, will change the world as we know it. I want everyone in this room to understand: If one single nuclear weapon detonates over Israel, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, our task forces in the Arabian Sea-anywhere-life on this planet will never be the same. We are playing a game for all the marbles, with the collective lives of our nation and our allies all on the line. And the lives of millions of human beings.”

In the silence that followed, someone said, “I don’t believe there is a chance in a million that they will launch a nuclear weapon. No sane man would initiate nuclear war.”

The president didn’t bother to reply to that. He motioned for General Heth to continue the briefing. Everyone else thought this was a “What if” exercise, but the president didn’t. He had received a Top Secret memo this morning relating the facts of Tommy Carmellini’s telephone call.

Of course, Jake reflected, maybe the president didn’t believe Ghasem’s warning. Jake didn’t even know if he believed it himself. No doubt the National Security Council would have a fiery debate later today on the value of the intelligence. The experts would debate the credibility of the message, the history of the source, the lack of confirmation from other sources-in short, all of the factors one had to consider when weighing intel.

Intelligence came from many sources. Some people believed that a trained ear could discern which bits of noise were true and which weren’t. Unfortunately, we humans tend to give more weight to information we expect to hear than news that we don’t. Yet even if Ghasem’s message was labeled a lie, an Iranian attack on Israel and American assets within range of its missiles was a serious possibility.

“What we are going to have to do,” General Heth said, “is try to cut down the number of missiles that get launched. It will take hours for them to launch everything in their inventory. While they are hard at it, there are some things we can do.” The briefer then took over, referring to the map with a red dot pointer.

Ten minutes later, when the briefing broke up, Sal Molina stood and motioned to Jake Grafton. He waited in the back of the room until Molina came over.

“The president wants to hear your plan for slaying the dragon,” Molina said. “As you predicted, the president isn’t going to approve invading Iran for any reason under the sun. The army and air force say they can’t destroy those deep bunkers without adequate forces on the ground. They are talking armored brigades that can be heavily reinforced, and that ain’t gonna happen.”

After the crowd filed out, there were only a half-dozen people in the large briefing room. The president sat in the same chair he had occupied for two hours, seemingly quite comfortable. Near him sat the National Security Adviser, Jurgen Schulz, William Wilkins, General Heth, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Sal Molina dropped into a chair on the end. Jake Grafton started to sit down beside him, but the president motioned him up. “I saw the memo that Wilkins sent to the White House this morning, and the copy of the document that was attached. Will you explain to these gentlemen what was in it?”

Every eye in the place went to Grafton’s face. “We just acquired a list we believe to be the target list for Iran’s nuclear missiles,” he said. “A dozen locations are on it. One of them is Tehran.”

“They are going to nuke their own capital?” the chairman asked, his face expressing his doubt.

“Yes, sir,” Jake replied.

Schulz turned to Wilkins. “Where’d this hot tip come from? How reliable is it?”

“I’m not going to share any of that,” the director of the CIA said frankly. “Grafton received it, and we discussed it thoroughly. We think this information is genuine, and we are not going to open that assessment to debate. I said precisely that in the memo to the president that he just mentioned.”

In the silence that followed that remark, the president motioned for Jake Grafton to continue. “President Ahmadinejad wants to lead a holy war against Western civilization,” the admiral said. “He recently remarked to his chief lieutenants that Iran must be a martyr nation. That implies, to me, that he is willing to sacrifice tens of millions of Iranian lives to smite his enemies. Still, being a victim isn’t going to get him where he wants to go. Victimhood didn’t do it for Saddam Hussein, and it won’t do it for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He must position himself as a leader who went forth boldly on a jihad to slay Israel and America, the Great Satan. Then the millions of dead Iranians will be seen as casualties in a holy war-martyrs-and Ahmadinejad will be the leader to rally around.”

“But he isn’t going to wait for us to retaliate and nuke Tehran?” Schulz said.

“No,” Jake Grafton said. “He obviously believes that if you want something done, you’ll get better results if you do it yourself.”

“After all,” the president interjected, “just because we said we’d retaliate to a nuclear attack on our allies doesn’t mean we’d really do it. I can see Ahmadinejad musing on this and asking himself, Why take the chance? Jake, give us the target list.”

Grafton used his pointer. “Two ballistic missiles are targeted at Tel Aviv. If they aren’t shot down, they will hit in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt. We are talking air bursts of one or two hundred kilotons.

“Moving right along, Baghdad International is on the list, as well as Balad, Mosul, Al Asad, and Tallil airbases in Iraq. In Kuwait, they have targeted Al Jaber Air Base, Camp Arifjan and Kuwait International Airport. In Qatar, it’s Al Udeid Air Base. And, saving the best for last, Tehran.”

“Admiral Grafton,” the chairman said, “Ahmadinejad must assume he will survive a nuclear exchange.”

“Oh, yes, sir. He plans on being very much alive when the fallout settles or blows away.” Jake aimed a red laser pointer at the satellite photo of Tehran hanging on the wall at the side of the room. “He’s going to ride it out with his chosen lieutenants here, inside a bunker two hundred feet underground.”

The president rose from his chair and shook out his trouser legs. “General Heth, I appreciate all the work that went into the plans that were briefed this morning. Much of that can be used. However, we are not going to invade Iran. If that means their hardened nuclear sites remain intact, so be it. We are going to shoot down any missiles that they launch-and unfortunately we are going to have to let them launch some, to prove to the world that they struck first-and then we are going to decapitate the Iranian government. That’s it. That’s all we are going to do.”

He looked from face to face.

“I am putting Admiral Grafton in charge of the entire effort. I want everyone in and out of uniform to report to him. He will brief me on the plan. If it becomes necessary to alter it for political reasons I will order him to do so, and we’ll go from there. Any questions?”

“Political reasons?” the chairman murmured.

“The Israelis are demanding a first strike-I’m trying to talk them out of it,” the president said. “I can plead and beg and twist arms, but with the Israelis, there is a very real limit. The life of every Israeli is on the line. I spent an hour last night with the Israeli ambassador. He asked me what I’d do if the missiles were in Havana and were going to be launched at America.”

No one else had any other comments. The president walked out, with Sal Molina trailing him.

Jurgen Schulz studied Grafton’s face. “Did you know that was coming?”

“No. And I didn’t ask for it.” Grafton rubbed his forehead and eyes, then said, “Well, gentlemen, we’ve been told what to do. Let’s figure out how we’re going to do it.”

I was going to work every morning, trying to pretend that I didn’t know jack about the Iranian mullahs’ plans to declare war on civilization in order to rid the world of unbelievers. I knew things were winding up to the breaking point here in Tehran-I could feel it in the air-and I was stuck in the middle. So were Davar and Ghasem and the folks at the Swiss embassy, not to mention all the other spies and tourists and naive Iranians who lived in this third-world hellhole.

The prospect of being caught in the middle of a nuclear war has a remarkable cleansing effect on the mind. Survival bubbles right to the top as your number one priority; everything else fades into insignificance. You stop worrying about your waistline, your job and how your IRA is doing.

I would have been hunting for a hole to hide in with all the fervor of a rat running from a rabid cat had it not been for Jake Grafton. “Give me the locations of the nuke missiles,” he said. Being a flesh-and-blood human, I was tempted to blow him off, tell him that I would send him a postcard from Rome or Buenos Aires, Cape Town or Timbuktu.

Of course, my only possible source of information that hot was Ghasem Murad, who was spending his days at the Defense Ministry. He said he’d help, of course, but he wasn’t around. I thought about trying to put some pressure on his cousin Davar, but all she wanted to do was curl up in a quiet place with me.

Ol’ Ghasem knew what I wanted, and he knew the stakes-literally, the survival of the Iranian people-so I was waiting for him to call, which on a good day is one of my least favorite things to do, and on bad days is torture. If I ever get the job of running hell, I’ll put a telephone in every cell and tell the inhabitants that they can leave when it rings. But it would never ring. Ever.

I was musing along these lines one morning as I opened the diplomatic mail, and there it was-a tourist visa for one Abdullaziz Nasr Qomi. I dug through the envelope… and found another, one for Mostafa Abtahi.

So Jake Grafton came through. Good on ’im.

What if, before they left for America, Ahmadinejad shot off his missiles and Israel or America retaliated? These two guys who never had a chance would be cremated alive or have their hides burned off or be poisoned by radiation. All because they were still here, still trapped in this fascist shithole.

I put the visas in my pocket, locked everything up and headed for the stairs. I had both their addresses, so why not deliver the visas?

I went after Qomi first. The map I had in the government sedan suggested that the street he lived on might be in a workingman’s slum on the southwest corner of town. Only one way to find out. I got the car in motion and threaded it into traffic.

I drove along for a while before I remembered the MOIS. What if they were following along? Well, they had seen Qomi enter the embassy, so…

On the other hand, maybe they didn’t know why he went there. Maybe if they found out that he had actually scored a tourist visa, they would take his passport and visa away from him, send some suicidal jihadist to America in his place. That possibility was, I reflected, probably one reason State was in no hurry to give these damn tourist visas out to sheet-heads. Thank you, bin Laden.

I pulled over when traffic allowed and checked the radio frequency band for beacons. Apparently, no.

I had to park the car on the edge of what I hoped was the right neighborhood and go walking. The streets narrowed and the pavement ended. The houses were huts, jammed together. Most of them lacked electricity.

I found Qomi’s place, finally, after talking to four people. Needless to say, he wasn’t there. I settled down to wait. And wait. And wait.

If I hadn’t been so fixated on nuclear war, on what this neighborhood was going to look like in ashes, maybe I would have given up, written him a note or something. But I didn’t.

It was in the hour before dusk that he appeared, walking slowly on his crutch. He was dirty, and his clothes were, too. He had obviously spent the day at manual labor.

He saw me and paused. Stood staring. Finally started my way, walking as fast as he could.

“Meester Carmala,” he said. “Meester Carmala.”

“I have your visa,” I told him in Farsi. “When can you leave?”

“You have it?”

I pulled it from my pocket and showed it to him. It was in English and Farsi, so he could read some of it, anyway. He bent down, afraid to touch. When he stood up, he was beaming. A smile split his face almost in half.

“When can you leave?”

A variety of emotions played across his face. He jerked his head, then led the way into his hut. One rude bed, a wooden-frame chair, a teapot, a little chemical heater and some clothes carefully folded on a small table. That was it. The toilet facilities, such as they were, were out back.

I took charge. “Your passport.”

He produced it from a pocket of his trousers. No use leaving that around for someone to steal.

I opened it, examined the photo. Yep, it was him, all right. I shoved the clothes out of the way and used the table, peeled the protective paper off the visa and glued it to a page in his passport.

Luggage? I looked around. There was nothing.

“A bag. Luggage. Something for your clothes?”

Qomi slowly lowered himself onto the bed. He bit his lip and shook his head.

“You have money for an airline ticket, don’t you?”

He shook his head, once.

I waved the passport at him. “You were going to sell this?”

He refused to look at me. Lowered his gaze to his hands.

I stood there feeling like a fool. All day I had been waiting, walking the neighborhood, looking at abject poverty in the fourth richest oil-producing nation on the planet. No fucking trickle-down around here, by God. The mullahs were latching on to every single petrodollar and squandering it on reactors and missiles and warheads.

“Well, you’re going,” I said to Qomi. “Get up, let’s go. Anything you want to take with you to America, better put it in your pockets.”

He stared at me. “Get up,” I roared in English. Then Farsi.

I must have looked like a madman standing there, waving that damn passport.

He amazed me. It began to sink in. America. He got up, balancing himself while he looked quickly around. He took a small photo that he had jammed in a crack in the wall over the heater, put it in a trouser pocket, then started for the door. I followed him.

At the Grand Bazaar I purchased him two sets of clothes and a small carry-on bag to carry the set that wasn’t on his back. We dickered with a shoe merchant over one shoe. He insisted we take a pair, which we did, for half price. Qomi put on the shoe he needed, and we threw the other away. Then we drove out to the airport and parked.

I got Qomi a reservation on Turkish Airways to Istanbul, then London, and United to New York. I put the tab on my spy American Express credit card. As I was signing the invoice, it finally hit Qomi that he was going and I was sending him. He began sobbing.

We spent the night in the airport terminal. I bought food, and we ate in a lounge. He snuffled a while, then slept. I walked around, looking, wondering when all this was going to be obliterated. If all these people I was looking at were going to be dead next week. The men, the women, the kids, the Revolutionary Guards with their submachine guns, infidels and faithful, sinners and saints, rich and poor, every last one of them.

At ten o’clock the next morning I shook Qomi’s hand, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into his hand and shoved him toward the security line.

“I can’t pay you back,” he said.

“Life isn’t about payback. Find a woman, have some kids, be a good dad.”

He pumped my hand one more time, then got in line. After he was through the pat-down, he disappeared through the door.

I waited until his plane was taxiing out before I turned to go.

My cell phone rang as I was hiking out of the terminal. It was Jake Grafton. “You get those visas?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Your voice sounds funny,” he said.

“Yeah. Thanks, Admiral. I owe you.”

On the way to my hotel I stopped at the mapmakers’ shop where Mostafa Abtahi worked. He was hunched over a drawing table in the back of the shop; I saw him as I walked past the racks of maps on display. A clerk asked me what I wanted in Farsi, and I pointed at Abtahi, who turned, saw me and came charging toward the counter.

I pulled the little envelope from my pocket and said, “Have your passport on you?”

“The visa?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He whipped the passport out and handed it to me. “Ghasem said you’d come through, oh, yes. He told me I was going to America, oh, yes. I didn’t believe him, but he said it would happen, oh, yessss!”

I stood there frozen, staring at him. “Ghasem?”

“Ghasem Murad,” he said, as if I were an idiot. “He and I share an apartment. Every night we talk about my dream of going to America. Ghasem said you were a good man, that my dream would come true.”

Although there are billions of people, it’s really a small world. Tiny, in fact. I wondered what else my buddy Ghasem had told Mostafa Abtahi about me.

The clerk was standing there watching, openmouthed. Abtahi noticed him now and hit him on the shoulder as he shouted, “I am going to America!”

While they gabbled at full throttle, I glued the visa into the passport and shoved it at Abtahi. “The sooner the better,” I said. “Go as soon as you can.”

The future newest American looked at me quizzically.

“Damn country is filling up fast,” I explained. “Hurry on over while there is still some American Dream left to get.”

Hazra al-Rashid worked hard at staying informed about the activities of foreign spies in Iran. With over fifty thousand employees, the MOIS had suf ficient manpower to keep tabs on most of the foreign visitors, many of whom, Hazra believed, were spies.

Foreign diplomats got the full treatment, since all of them were spies. Their comings and goings and contacts were observed and reported and logged.

This American, Tommy Carmellini, had her stumped. Since he had arrived in Tehran, he had disappeared for hours at a time, on several occasions for as many as twenty-four hours. Slippery as an eel, he was undoubtedly an active spy milking information from traitors.

Yet, according to the MOIS daily reports, just two days ago he spent a day in a working-class slum in the southwestern section of town, met a one-legged laborer who had lived there for six years while working on residential construction projects-nothing for the government-then accompanied him to the airport, bought him a ticket to America and waited with him until he left. Abdullaziz Nasr Qomi. A nobody. His dossier made that crystal clear. He had lost that leg in the Iraqi war and had been doing common labor ever since. Attended mosque occasionally. Never worked in the defense construction industry. Qomi had an American tourist visa in his passport when he presented it at the airport. Carmellini had undoubtedly delivered it. Why? What could Qomi have done for the Americans that they would reward him with a visa?

Then Carmellini had gone to the Islamic mapmaker’s shop and delivered an American tourist visa to Mostafa Abtahi, who was the roommate of Ghasem Murad, the grandson of the deceased scholar, nephew of Habib Sultani, the defense minister, and cousin of Davar Ghobadi, al-Rashid’s conduit for passing misinformation to the CIA via Professor Azari in America. Abtahi was going to America, too.

Due to his relationship with Murad, Abtahi was a much more interesting person than Qomi. Abtahi could be a spy, a conduit from Ghasem Murad to Carmellini. Was he? What secrets had he passed?

Al-Rashid knew precisely how to find out. With a telephone call, she could have Abtahi picked up and interrogated by the MOIS. She could even assist in the interrogation. She knew from long experience that Abtahi would eventually admit all of his crimes against the Islamic Republic. He might resist at first, but he would talk. They all did.

But was that the right move at this time?

The day of reckoning was eight days away. On that date, Zionism would be smashed a fatal blow, and Iran would be catapulted into a leadership position in a worldwide jihad against the infidels.

Hazra al-Rashid rose from her desk and went to the window of her office, from which she could see the skyline of Tehran.

Assuming that Carmellini had learned everything that Ghasem Murad knew, which was everything that Habib Sultani knew, and had passed it to the CIA, would the spymasters in America believe it? The missiles, warheads, the targets, the date of launching…

Iran was but eight days away from seizing a leadership position in the Islamic world, one that would make her a major power and give her leaders a prominent voice in remaking life on planet Earth.

For the last few years the spymasters in Washington had received an impressive river of intelligence that said Iran was years away from being a nuclear power. The simple fact was that Iran’s nuclear program was too big to hide. Too many people of doubtful loyalty were involved; the truth would eventually leak out. So al-Rashid had done what Churchill recommended during World War II, given the truth a bodyguard of lies.

Humans, al-Rashid knew from hard experience, tend to believe those bits of data that support their political and religious views and prejudices, their framework for making sense of the physical and spiritual world, and tend to reject all data that don’t fit into the framework. This was a universal human trait.

If she went after Tommy Carmellini now, Hazra al-Rashid thought, she might give him instant credibility and force Washington to reevaluate whatever information he had been passing.

That didn’t strike Hazra al-Rashid as a wise move. Not just now.

On the other hand, hearing what Mostafa Abtahi knew from his own lips might give her information she did not have and provide some clarity to the intelligence picture.

Hazra al-Rashid picked up the telephone and asked for the number two man in the MOIS.