The Disciple

CHAPTER FIVE

Every morning when I arrived for work, I entered the little soundproof booth that I had built when I arrived in country. The wizards at Langley said it would defeat any bugs that the Iranians had planted in the building, or the Swiss. Once inside, I set up the satellite telephone, plugged it into the lead that ran to the small dish antenna on the roof-I had also installed that-and typed in the encryption code that I had memorized before I left the States.

Today I soon had Jake Grafton on the line.

We chatted a little bit about this and that, then he told me that I was onstage. Azari’s Iranian contact would contact me within the next few days.

“Tell me about this guy,” I prompted.

“Don’t know much to tell. Code name Rostram. Could be anybody. He’ll introduce himself with that name.”

It was a short conversation. After I said good-bye and broke the connection, I sat in my little plastic womb contemplating my navel. Azari’s Iranian contact now knew my name, or soon would, knew I was an officer in the CIA and would be looking for me. If Azari was indeed under the control of the MOIS, they would soon know what he knew.

I felt like the guy who wrote a letter to the Devil informing Him that his soul was for sale.

These ruminations didn’t get me anywhere, so I crawled out of the booth, tucked it in the corner, and went along the hallway to the Pit. Frank Caldwell was there, swilling coffee. As usual, he wanted to chat a while in Farsi to improve my grammar and diction. Today I wasn’t in the mood. I stayed in English, and he switched back.

“You look cheerful this morning,” he said. His medium-length hair was turning fashionably gray at the tips, and he wasn’t carrying any extra weight. He looked, I thought, like a model in a Cabela’s fishing catalog.

I tried to smile.

“Can’t let the world get you down, Tommy. Keep your chin up.”

A snotty remark almost leaped from my lips, but I managed to stifle it. I pushed the button to summon the first supplicant of the day.

Habib Sultani adjusted the large, heavy binoculars on the stand in front of him and turned the focus knob. He stared through the lens, trying to estimate how far he could see. Then he took his eyes away from the binoculars and once more surveyed the shore, sea and sky. It was a high, hazy day, with excellent visibility, yet the sky and sea seemed to merge out there somewhere, just fade into each other without a definite horizon.

Sultani was standing on a bluff on a promontory that jutted out into the Strait of Hormuz, which was about thirty nautical miles wide at this point. On both sides of the promontory, sand beaches marked the sea’s edge, but below the bluff there were rocks. If one listened carefully, one could hear the steady pounding of the long rollers being pushed through the Gulf of Oman from the Arabian Sea.

To his right, almost immediately below, in a small natural harbor formed by several large rocks, were three gunboats of the Revolutionary Guard. They were manned, with engines idling, their coxswains holding them in place. Each boat carried a Russian-made 37 mm gun mounted amidships.

Sultani glanced at the boats, then put his eyes back to the binoculars.

Yes, he could see ships in the strait. There was a loaded oil tanker off to his right, heading south, from right to left, after rounding the tip of Oman, which was on a peninsula that jutted out from the Arabian landmass. The tanker would pass about twenty miles out, eight miles beyond the twelve-mile limit for Iran’s territorial waters. Near the tanker was a warship-he could tell by the superstructure. That ship, of course, was American. Probably a destroyer or guided missile frigate. He scanned the binoculars. If there were other warships out there, they were hidden in the haze.

To his left Sultani saw an empty tanker heading north. He continued to scan. He knew that somewhere in the Gulf of Oman was an aircraft carrier, the USS United States. He knew because behind him three technicians were monitoring the UHF radio frequencies that the Americans used to talk to their planes when they were close to the carrier. English words and numbers were pouring out of the loudspeaker, profaning the Islamic Republic. Still, the American carrier could be anywhere. It was the technician with a radio direction finder who said they were to the southwest.

“I can hear the controller on the ship quite plainly,” the technician said. “The radio is line-of-sight. They cannot be over the curvature of the earth. But all the tactical channels are encrypted-all we can hear is a buzz.”

“How far to the ship?”

“Not far. We are about fifty meters above the water, and so is their antenna. A hundred miles, perhaps a hundred and twenty. Not much more.”

It would be terrific if the Americans would bring their floating airfield into the Strait of Hormuz on their way to the Persian Gulf, Sultani thought. They rarely did that, however, and didn’t appear to be doing it today.

Nearby sat a portable radar control van, or trailer, since it was usually pulled behind a truck. Sultani backed away from the binoculars and glanced at the white van festooned with antennas. On the other side of the van sat the dish, which was mounted on a large trailer that was still attached to the tractor that pulled it. Beyond it two diesel-powered generators snored steadily. Cables connecting all this gear together ran everywhere, seemingly hopelessly tangled.

“General,” Sultani said to the uniformed man beside him as he gestured to the binoculars. Everyone wanted to look; it was only human.

He was walking toward the van when the door opened and his nephew Ghasem came out and strode quickly toward him. “There are twelve planes aloft over the carrier,” Ghasem reported, “which is one hundred ten nautical miles away.”

Habib Sultani nodded his understanding. The Americans were doing military exercises, practicing, dropping bombs on floating objects, just as they often did.

Sultani led the way back to the van and through the door, with Ghasem at his heels.

The U.S. Navy F/A-18s were spread out in loose tactical formation, in two sections, flying at 12,000 feet. The lead’s wingman was a hundred feet out to his right and stepped slightly down and aft. Number Three was a thousand feet away to the leader’s left and three or four hundred feet aft. Her wingman was stepped out to her left and back slightly. This formation allowed each pilot to scan his instruments occasionally and stay updated on the nav problem without worrying about running into a comrade.

Lieutenant Commander Harry Lampert was the leader. He had his plane on autopilot as he studied the radar display of the strait ahead. The ships there showed up nicely on the radar screen. He played with several displays, then checked his ECM gear. In his ears was the bass tone of a search radar, which the tactical display showed was ahead and to his right, in Iran.

He glanced around, checking the position of his wingman, Sidney “Goose” Inglehart, and the other section, led by Lieutenant Betsy “Chicago” O’Hare. The pilots were all veterans. All except Number Four, Betsy’s wingman, Lieutenant (junior grade) Jackson L. “Hillbilly” Jones, the nautical pride of Wildcat, West Virginia. “Billy” Jones-predictably, his nickname was often shortened-was on his first cruise, and this was only his second flight into the strait.

As Lampert adjusted his fanny in his ejection seat, he got a call on the encrypted radio. “War Ace Leader, this is Black Eagle. We had some Iranian gunboat activity earlier this morning, then again about an hour ago.”

“Roger that,” Lampert replied. “We were briefed.” Black Eagle was an E-2 Hawkeye that was high above and well behind him. The Hawkeye, a twin-engine turboprop, carried a very capable area search radar and more ECM gear than could be packed into a tactical aircraft. The tactical coordinator in the Hawkeye would keep him informed.

I just hope the Iranians aren’t up to something nasty today, Lampert thought to himself.

Ahh… nothing will happen.

Sultani looked over the shoulder of the radar operator at the screen. He saw the blips that were Lampert’s four Hornets began to separate from the single spot of light as they came up the gulf. “Send the boats,” he told the military aide at his elbow. The man, a colonel, picked up the telephone. The wire had been run to this site just two days ago.

At the airbase at Bandar-e Abbas, one hundred nautical miles away, two SU-30 fighters were on five-minute alert, with the pilots in the cockpits, ready to start engines. Sultani looked at his watch. They could be here within twenty minutes. Their arrival should be a nice surprise for the Americans, if the Sukhoi pilots obeyed orders and left their radars turned off. The F-18s’ fuel state should be down significantly by then.

This might work, Sultani told himself. He found his nephew Ghasem looking at him. He made eye contact, nodded affirmatively and stepped outside. Nestled in the shade of a tree was a table that contained a computer. Wires led away in all directions to antennas spotted up and down the coast and at four sites inland. Two men were there, monitoring the signals coming in from the various sites.

The senior man, a Russian in a white shirt and dark trousers, turned toward Sultani when he saw him approach.

“Is your equipment working properly?” the Iranian asked.

“Yes. Quite satisfactory,” the Russian replied and glanced at Ghasem, who was two paces behind his uncle.

“A flight of four American fighters is coming up the Gulf,” Sultani said. “Our fighters are thirty minutes away. After the American planes pass us, I am going to have the gunboats sortie. They can make a run on that tanker there.” He pointed to a tanker far away, just visible against the haze that obscured the horizon.

The Russian looked in the indicated direction, held his hand to shade his eyes, then turned back to Sultani. “This may be interesting,” he said with a grin.

In the cockpit of his F/A-18 Hornet, Harry Lampert could see mountain peaks to his right poking up through the haze. They were about a hundred miles away, he guessed, in Iran. To his left, on the Arabian Peninsula, he saw several lower peaks, probably six thousand feet in elevation, but they were far away, indistinct, barely visible in the yellow sky. Yes, the sky over Arabia was yellow… Perhaps the sun reflecting from the sand and rock and packed earth of that desert hellhole upon the dust and dirt suspended in the atmosphere. Whatever, the yellowish tint to the sky extended up, up, up. Lampert thought the air over Arabia must be laden with dust well into the stratosphere.

He turned back to the business at hand, checked his radar, then his wingmen, listened to that steady beep as the Iranian radar beam swept him every few seconds, turned the plane slightly to stay in the center of the channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Causing an international incident by violating foreign airspace would not be career-enhancing.

In the Number Four plane in Lampert’s flight, Hillbilly Jones was also looking at the yellow sky over Arabia. Dirt in the air, he thought. He wondered what that dirt was doing to the engines as they sucked it in. Nothing good, that’s for sure.

Hillbilly wasn’t worried about navigation or even paying much attention to the location of the flight. The senior guys could worry about that. All he had to do was follow Number Three, Chicago O’Hare, wherever she went. In the unlikely event Chicago got lost, he would be, too, but probably she would stay found, and so would he. All in all, being a junior officer was pretty simple.

Ol’ Chicago’s plane was suspended in this goo, as were the other two away to the right. They looked sort of like fish lying there motionless in the sky. They were all moving, of course, but only the relative motion could be seen, and with good formation pilots, there was damn little of that. They looked, he thought, as if they were painted upon that featureless, hazy backdrop.

Hillbilly Jones made a mental note to say that when he wrote a letter to his girlfriend this evening. She was studying for a master’s in English lit and liked it when he described how stuff looked.

He sighed and tried to rearrange his testicles so the parachute harness didn’t cut him so much.

The undecked open gunboats were about fifty feet long and were driven by two powerful V8 engines; they were capable of forty knots in relatively calm water. Amidships, three men stood by the 37 mm, one to optically aim and fire, the other two to load magazines as necessary. Eight other men armed with AK-47s rode forward. Their job, if the captain ordered action, was to sweep people from the decks of the victim ship while the 37 mm tore at her guts. The gunboats were cheap and effective patrol boats. Or pirate boats, depending on one’s political persuasion.

Out of the harbor, the three boats set up in a left echelon formation. Soon they had worked up to twenty-five knots and were on course to intercept the tanker that Sultani had pointed out to the Russian technician, a tanker that was barely visible on the horizon to the men in the gunboat.

The captain of the lead boat, whose name was Omar, kept increasing speed as he found his boat was manageable in the swell. He got to thirty knots, decided the ride was rough enough, then backed off a few hundred RPMs on his engines. The boat pounded the swells, and the unmuffled engines sang loudly behind him. Standing at the helm with his knees bent, the sea wind streaming his hair and filling his nostrils with that clean salt smell, Omar felt as if he had died and entered Paradise. He concentrated on holding the tanker on a constant angle of bearing, not letting it drift toward the bow or stern.

“The boats are out,” the Black Eagle controller told Harry Lampert. “They are behind you about sixty miles, three of them, apparently on their way to intercept a tanker. Your orders are to provide cover for the tanker.”

The standing rules of engagement under which the U.S. Navy operated said that the Iranians would not be allowed to stop shipping in international waters. On the other hand, the rules also said not to fire at an Iranian boat, ship or airplane unless fired upon. The rules went on for six pages and read as if they had been written by lawyers, which was the truth of it. Like policemen who had only seconds to make life-or-death decisions, the naval officers who had to deal with these confrontations knew that their superiors would scrutinize their actions at their leisure. Fitness reports would be written and, if necessary, courts-martial convened.

Harry Lampert wasn’t thinking about any of that right now. He had the tanker headed south and the nearby destroyer on radar and began descending and accelerating. When he was twenty-five miles out, he saw the tanker’s wake, then the destroyer’s. The tanker was a leviathan, making about twelve knots, carrying every gallon of crude oil the captain could get in her. Even as he watched, he saw the destroyer turn to cross the tanker’s wake to the east side, and he saw her wake grow longer. She was accelerating.

Lampert stopped his descent at five thousand feet and motored on inbound, doing about four hundred knots. The wakes of the gunboats came into view at ten miles.

Harry concentrated on the gunboats as he closed and flew directly over them. He extended out and set his planes up in a loose circle around the tanker. All the while the gunboats came steadily on.

Lampert’s radio was ominously silent. The radar operator could see everything Lampert could see, so there was no need for chatter. The radar picture was data-linked to the carrier, where the battle group commander, Rear Admiral Stanley Bryant, and his staff could also see it. The admiral was in radio contact with Black Eagle and the destroyer that was now on the east, or gunboat, side of the tanker, whose wake was straight as a string as she plowed her way southward.

The admiral was the man on the spot. Did Iran want a confrontation, or did they want war? How far was the Iranian commander willing to go? How many chances could the admiral take with the action right beside a tanker loaded with crude oil?

The minutes passed as the gunboats crossed the twenty miles of ocean between the shore and the ships. The Hornets made more leisurely turns around the ships. The pilots had their engines throttled back to maximum endurance airspeed to save fuel.

Going round and round, watching the boats closing on the tanker… Harry Lampert felt helpless and frustrated. What were the Iranians up to?

In the radar van on the bluff, Habib Sultani glanced at the radar screen, then his watch, and said to the general sitting beside the telephone that connected directly to the airbase, “Launch the fighters.” The general picked up the telephone.

When they were about four miles from the ships, well into international waters, two of the gunboats changed course. The lead kept going toward the laden tanker, but number three turned south for the empty tanker coming up the strait. The second gunboat altered course to intercept the destroyer.

A half minute later the Black Eagle controller said, “War Ace Leader, remind the gunboats of your presence.”

“Roger that,” Harry Lampert said. He continued, “Betsy, stay high as cover. Goose, come with me.”

Goose was Lampert’s wingman, and he gave his lead a mike click in response. Unsaid was the implicit order for Hillbilly Jones, Chicago’s wingman, to stay with his lead.

Lampert reduced throttle and lowered his nose as he completed his turn. This time he would go right over the lead gunboat at fifty feet.

In the lead gunboat, Omar saw the two F/A-18s out of the corner of his eye. They looked funny, so he turned his head to see. They were very low and moving extremely fast. A cone of gray light seemed to trail each airplane. Although he didn’t know it, the Hornets were supersonic, and the gray cone was vapor condensing in the visible shock wave behind each plane.

In only a heartbeat the lead plane went over Omar’s boat, and the shock wave nearly ruptured his eardrums. The shock wave of the second plane, which passed fifty yards in front of his boat, so closely followed the first that it was difficult to distinguish the two. The booms of the Hornets’ passing were the loudest things Omar and his crewmen had ever heard, and they were followed by the howl of four jet engines in afterburner, a howl that rapidly dropped in volume as the two fighters raced away at nearly a thousand feet per second.

Omar had his orders. He stayed on course for the tanker, now about a mile and a half away. Considering the tanker’s speed, he would be alongside in about two minutes. In front of him, the men were shouting at each other and pointing at the fighters. One of them turned and pumped his fist at Omar. He shouted something, something lost on the wind. Then Omar realized what he had said. “God is Great!”

Ah, yes.

Harry Lampert came out of burner and did a four-G, 180-degree turn, then headed back toward the gunboats, which were rapidly closing with the tanker.

Worried that he might panic the tanker’s captain with a masthead pass, he elected to pass the tanker on a parallel heading about a half mile away, which proved to be outside the gunboats. Lampert got on the radio to Black Eagle, which was patching his comments straight through to the admiral in the TFCC, the Tactical Flag Command Center.

The second gunboat was charging directly toward the destroyer, which was doing about half the speed of the boat, on a collision course. Even as Harry looked that way, the gunboat turned at the last possible instant and went roaring down the side of the gray warship into her wake.

The third gunboat was still on course for the tanker to the south, and was still several miles away.

On the bluff overlooking the strait, Habib Sultani watched the action through his binoculars. He saw the low pass by the Hornets, saw the boat charging the destroyer, and he heard the buzzsaw sound of encrypted chatter on the radio. The Americans were getting excited.

“Where are the Sukhois?” he asked.

“They are airborne. Estimated arrival in ten minutes,” was the answer.

“Radio the gunboat leader and tell him to get in against the tanker and shout for it to stop. Have him shoot into the water ahead of it.”

The Hawkeye radar operator picked up the skinpaints of the Sukhoi fighters coming south along the coast from Bandar-e Abbas. They had been running low, partially masked by the peaks of the coastal mountains, but the Black Eagle controller had them now. He informed War Ace Leader of the closing fighters.

Harry Lampert was face-to-face with the tiger, and the news in his headset that Iranian fighters were just minutes away didn’t improve the situation. Suddenly he wanted to be upstairs, facing the fighters. The destroyer could deal with the gunboats near it.

“Chicago, come on down and fly around these boats. If they shoot at the tanker, sink them. We’re coming back upstairs.”

“Wilco,” said Chicago O’Hare and dropped her nose.

Out on her wing, Hillbilly Jones was in an information-overload condition. The radio chatter was coming thick and fast, enemy fighters were inbound, he got only glimpses of the tanker and gunboats below, and Chicago was diving toward the sea. He eased closer to her, now only fifty feet away, and concentrated on staying on her wing; someone else was going to have to run the war.

O’Hare and Jones were descending through two thousand feet when their ECM threat indicators lit up. The inbound Sukhois had turned on their radar and were probing for them.

Oh man, what now? Jones thought.

Harry Lampert couldn’t enter the twelve-mile exclusion zone of Iran’s territorial waters. He was checking his location, Black Eagle was relaying the admiral’s reminder, and his threat indicator was lighting up like a Christmas tree. If all that wasn’t enough, when he glanced down, he saw two waterspouts ahead of the tanker. Hell, that gunboat was firing warning shots!

Harry keyed the mike and relayed that information to Black Eagle, then asked for and received permission to fire a warning shot of his own. O’Hare had heard the transmissions, of course, but to make sure she understood, he said on the radio, “Chicago, put a burst in front of the lead boat.”

“Wilco,” said Betsy O’Hare. She was one tough fighter pilot, a Naval Academy grad, and she didn’t dither. She flipped on her master armament switch, selected guns, then adjusted her flight path so the rounds would impact a hundred yards or so in front of the leading gunboat, which was paralleling the tanker’s course, about a hundred yards to port. The gunboat had throttled back and seemed to be roughly matching the speed of the tanker. She would come in off the gunboat’s port beam, at enough of an angle that her 20 mm cannon shells wouldn’t hit the tanker if they ricocheted off the water.

Being human, she wondered what the Iranians manning those 37 mm guns were going to think about cannon shells in front of them. Since that was an unknown, she kept her speed fairly high, almost four hundred knots, as she closed, still descending. A short burst would be good enough. Let them see the muzzle blast.

Her wingman, Hillbilly Jones, was listening to all of the radio chatter-the Sukhois were coming in supersonic-and the audio from the ECM threat indicator, which was giving him audible cues on every Iranian radar out there, while the blue ocean and hazy sky changed places as Chicago maneuvered. His flying was getting ragged; he was behind the curve. It was all he could do to hang on to his flight lead. The thought that a safe course might be to break off so that he could fly his own airplane while observing this goat rope from a comfortable altitude never even crossed his mind.

He saw Chicago’s gun vomit a burst, but she didn’t pull up immediately, which surprised him. He had anticipated the pull-up, started pulling himself, so now he had to jam his nose down, steepen his descent to get back into position. The Gs and flying sensations had thoroughly disoriented him; the hazy sky without a discernible horizon didn’t help. His only attitude reference was his leader. The radar altimeter sounded a warning, but in the cacophony of sound assaulting his ears, he didn’t even notice.

O’Hare kept descending for a second, probably thinking about a low pass. When she did pull up, it surprised Hillbilly again; he was late matching her maneuver, and his sink rate was greater. He yo-yoed down toward the water. And hit it.

An object striking water at 415 knots reacts as if it had struck concrete. Even though it had struck the ocean a glancing blow, Hillbilly Jones’ Hornet disintegrated on impact, killing him instantly. The pieces traveled along for almost a half mile as they decelerated, making a rolling, continuous splash. Fuel and tiny pieces rained down on the gunboat and tanker as they steamed into the cloud.

Chicago O’Hare was the first American pilot to realize what had happened. She looked back as she climbed, saw the cloud of pieces and fuel and the roiled water and scanned for her wingman, who was nowhere in sight. She keyed her mike. “Shit, I think Hillbilly just went into the drink.”

Harry Lampert had his hands full. The incoming Sukhois had him and Goose locked up for missile shots; the wailing ECM audio told him that, as did the flashing missile light on the panel in front of him.

Now, on top of everything, he had a plane in the water. Did the Iranians shoot it down?

He had several decisions to make, and he had only seconds to do it. Should he turn on his ALQ-199, thereby defeating the Sukhois’ radars and electronically hiding his plane, or should he leave it off? Guess wrong and you die, Harry.

He couldn’t yet see the Sukhois, but he had them on radar. They were at thirty miles and closing.

“Gadget off, Goose,” he said over the air.

“Roger.”

“Chicago, did you see any flak?”

“That’s a negative. Looks like Billy went in when I pulled out from my shooting pass.”

Scanning for the approaching fighters, Harry asked, “Parachute?”

“Don’t see one,” was the reply.

“Don’t let the gunboats get near the wreckage,” Lampert told O’Hare, talking loudly over his ECM. Suddenly infuriated, he reached with his left hand and turned off the ECM audio. Enough of that shit!

He checked his armament panel. Still set up for guns. He flipped the switch for heat. Now the Sidewinders on his wingtips were hot. He bore-sighted the incoming Sukhois and headed right at them. If they launched a missile at him, at least he’d see the flame as the engine lit off. He turned the last fifteen degrees toward the approaching Iranian fighters.

Chicago O’Hare saw Omar’s gunboat slow and turn back into the area where the remnants of Hillbilly’s plane had impacted. She didn’t hesitate. Nose down, she steadied out, glanced at the ball to ensure it was centered and fired a nice two-second burst into the water in front of the boat. It turned away.

She was coming back for another pass when the destroyer’s bow gun began firing. Splashes landed in the wake of the gunboat, one after another, getting closer. Now the second gunboat was taking splashes in its wake.

The two gunboats within range of the destroyer were maneuvering wildly. Yet their crews did not open fire. To the south, the third gunboat was still at least a mile from the empty tanker, still heading toward it.

Suddenly, probably in response to a radio call, all three gunboats turned as one and headed back to Iran.

Harry Lampert and his wingman still had their troubles. As they closed the Sukhois, the missile light in both cockpits continued to flash. To make matters worse, now Harry saw that he was getting a launch indication of an SA-20 surface-to-air missile from Iran.

So was Goose, and he said so.

Another decision to be made: Was there a missile in the air, or were the Iranians faking it to provoke an American reaction?

“Leave the gadget off,” Harry said again. “These guys are just jerking us around.”

Now the Sukhois were beginning to grow in his windshield. Quickly. The fighters were coming together at a combined speed of twelve hundred knots, the Sukhois still supersonic.

Harry raised his nose a trifle, and they went by so quickly that he didn’t see a single detail, just a blur.

“Right turn,” he roared into the radio microphone in his oxygen mask. He whipped his plane around in a six-G pull and, coming out of it, locked the Sukhois up with his radar. He didn’t have a radar-guided missile aboard, but the Sukhoi drivers didn’t know that. Turnabout is fair play.

But the Sukhois were only making one pass. They made a long, gentle high-speed turn that carried them almost into Oman, then headed off to the north as they slowed to subsonic speed.

With the gunboats returning to base and an American destroyer sitting on the slowly settling wreckage of Hillbilly Jones’ Hornet-and presumably searching for whatever was left of Hillbilly-there was nothing for Lampert’s Hornets to do but return to the carrier. The admiral already had another flight of four Hornets on the way up the strait to cover this tanker, which was still steaming steadily south toward the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, then the Indian Ocean, on her way to America or Japan or Singapore or Europe or India or China with a load of crude to keep the wheels turning.

“Well?” Habib Sultani asked the Russian technician at the equipment under the tree. The Russian pulled off his earphones, leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“They never turned them on,” he said.

Disappointed, Sultani walked away with Ghasem at his side. “Too bad,” he muttered. “I was hoping they would use an ALQ- 199.”

“So it didn’t work,” Ghasem said.

“It was always a long shot.”

“You could have shot a missile at them-they would have turned it on then. Afterward, you could claim the launch was a mistake.”

“Would you have done that?”

Ghasem smiled. “No. The international situation is too tense. Ahmadinejad is in discussions with the French and Russians, and they would be outraged.”

His uncle nodded. “If we want to be a nuclear power, we must show the world we can be trusted, that our armed forces will always obey the civilian government. Accidents with missiles and bombs cannot be explained away.”

As they walked toward the car that had brought them to this site, Ghasem asked, “Why is it, Uncle, that you want me to spend so much time with you?”

“Your cousin Khurram is something of a fool. You know that.”

“But I am a scholar. That is what I want to do with my life.”

His uncle stopped and looked him in the eyes. “In the days that come I may need someone beside me with brains and good judgment, someone I trust. We cannot always choose our path. Sometimes Allah puts us where we are needed.”

“I understand,” Ghasem said, nodding.

Together they walked on toward the waiting car.