The Enemy Within

PROLOGUE

The accident scene looked real even to Shahin’s skeptical eyes. A crumpled Toyota Corolla sat sideways across the narrow on-ramp to Highway 680, surrounded by fragments of smashed safety glass and puddled oil. Four emergency flares cast a flickering red light across a spiderweb of concrete pillars and rusting railroad bridge supports rising above the freeway entrance. As a final touch of authenticity, the sharp, sweet smell of leaking gasoline hung in the chilly night air.

The short, bearded man nodded to himself, satisfied that his deception would hold for the brief time required. He moved off the road and into the shadows beneath the overpass.

His cellular phone buzzed softly. He flipped it open. “Yes?”

The muffled voice of Haydar Zadi, his lookout, sounded in his ear. “Two minutes.”

“Understood.” Shahin slid the phone back inside his windbreaker and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. Their first target, their chosen weapon, was on the way.

Perched high in the cab of his big rig, Jack Briggs saw the flare-lit wreck up ahead in plenty of time. He swore once and braked smoothly, coming to a complete stop near the foot of the ramp.

Like most independent truckers, he preferred making his runs at night and in the early morning to avoid the Bay Area’s god-awful traffic.. It was a routine that worked well usually. But not tonight.

Still growling to himself, he peered through the windshield. At least the Toyota’s driver didn’t seem hurt. The man had glanced around once when the rig’s headlights hit him, but then he’d gone right back to staring down at his car’s smashed front end. Might be drunk, Briggs decided. It was near closing time. Hell, only a drunk would wander off the main road into the little town of Benicia’s deserted industrial park at this time of the night.

He shook his head angrily. Well, tanked up or not, the clown was going to have to help push that Japanese pile of junk off the ramp and out of the way.

Pausing just long enough to square up his battered, oilstained baseball cap and shut off the engine, the trucker yanked his cab door open, jumped down, and started across the glass-strewn asphalt in long strides. He was still several feet from the Toyota when the other man suddenly turned to face him, bringing the pistol he’d been concealing on target in one smooth, deadly, flowing motion.

Briggs stared at the weapon in shock. His mouth fell open. “What the...”

A single 9mm bullet caught him under the chin, tore upward through his brain, and exploded out the back of his skull.

Shahin knelt, retrieved the spent shell casing from the road with one gloved hand, and dropped it into his pocket. Neatness was a habit that had saved him so many times over the past several years that he indulged it without thought. There were many others in the HizbAllah who were less careful, but none who could match his record of operational success. He rose to his feet and turned away without giving the American he’d murdered more than a single disinterested glance.

Another pair of headlights swung across the scene and steadied as a small car, an old blue Nissan Sentra, pulled up beside the dead man’s truck. Shahin stood motionless in the sudden dazzling brightness, waiting for the two other men who made up his special action cell to join him.

Haydar Zadi was the first out of the car. The lookout grinned in clear relief, showing a mouthful of yellowing, tobacco-stained teeth. “It went perfect, eh? Like clockwork!”

“Yes.” Shahin nodded curtly, biting down an urge to snap at the older man. Didn’t the fool know they had no time to waste? At most they had only minutes to clear away all signs of this ambush and move their prize under cover inside the warehouse they’d rented nearby. But Zadi was a “casual” a fundamentalist radical recruited out of the local immigrant community for this one mission. Snarling at him would only make him more nervous, more prone to panic. Instead, the Iranian gestured toward the dead truck driver. “Toss that thing in your truck, my friend. We’ll dispose of it later.”

Zadi’s smile vanished, wiped away by his first good look at the murdered man. In the glare of the headlights, the blood pooling around the American’s shattered skull glistened black. He swallowed hard and hurried to obey.

Shahin shook his head in disgust. He disliked being forced to rely on a squeamish amateur, but he had no choice. The HizbAllah was one of the Middle East’s largest and deadliest terrorist organisations, but outside of New York its network of covert operatives and sympathisers was still too poorly organized to support and conceal a larger force. He swung away and stalked over to the only other member of his small team.

Ibrahim Nadhir was the youngest of them all, barely twenty. Taller than his superior, smooth-shaven, and slender, he stood staring up at the giant vehicle they had captured.

Shahin clapped him on the shoulder. “You can drive this monster, Ibrahim?”

“Oh, yes.” Nadhir reached out a single hand and actually caressed the side of the big rig. His eyes were dilated. “It is a beautiful machine. A perfect machine.”

Shahin suppressed a shiver. Tehran’s revolutionary mullahs had refined the brainwashing techniques originally taught them by North Korean and Vietnamese instructors. He understood the value of what they had done to Nadhir. But surely no man could be at ease in the presence of one remade into the living hand of Allah.

He followed the younger man’s fixed, adoring stare and smiled for the first time. The truck itself was nothing. Anyone with money could buy or lease such a truck. No, the real prize for this night’s work was the big rig’s cargo: a massive, cylindrical steel tank full of ten thousand gallons of highgrade gasoline.

The Marin County commuter tide was in full flood shortly before the sun rose. Tens of thousands of cars crept slowly south along Highway 101, inching through San Rafael, up the lone incline above Sausalito, through the Waldo Tunnel, and downhill toward San Francisco. Headlights glowed a ghostly yellow through the fog still shrouding the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Two vehicles ground forward with the rest. Four cars behind the lumbering gasoline tanker truck driven by Ibrahim Nadhir, Haydar Zadi gripped the steering wheel of his old, battered Nissan, darting occasional, frightened glances at the quiet, angry man seated beside him.

Shahin scowled at their slow, snail-like pace. As their local contact, Zadi had been responsible for scouting this section of their route. But nothing in the older man’s reports had fully prepared him for this halting procession of luxury sedans, sports cars, and minivans. It was grotesque an evil display of wasted wealth and power. Though a child on foot would arrive in San Francisco sooner, not one of these decadent, arrogant Americans could bear the thought of parting with his prized automobile.

Inside the Iranian, contempt warred briefly with envy. His scowl grew deeper. These people worshipped their creations of steel, chrome, fiberglass, and rubber above all other things above even God Himself.

So be it, Shahin thought with grim finality. The HizbAllah would teach these idolaters a harsh lesson a lesson scrawled in fire and blood. His dark eyes settled on the gasoline tanker truck up ahead. “How much further?”

“Two kilometers. Perhaps less,” Zadi answered. He cleared his throat nervously. “The last exit before the bridge is very near.”

Shahin nodded, ignoring the fear in his companion’s voice. The old man would have to hold his cowardice at bay a while longer.

He leaned forward to get a better look at their surroundings. The steep hillsides of the Marin Headlands rose to the west black masses still more felt than seen through the last remnants of night and fog. To the east, the ground fell away into the dark waters of San Francisco Bay. Distant lights twinkled along the eastern horizon, slowly fading as the sky paled before the rising sun. Ahead to the south, the Golden Gate Bridge’s massive towers and suspension cables were already visible, rising out of the mists.

Inside a sleek black-and-white cruiser parked just off Highway 101, California Highway Patrol Offficer Steve Dwyer sat sipping the last cup of coffee from his thermos, studying the cars streaming past him through bleary eyes. He yawned, trying to get some oxygen into his bloodstream. After a long shift spent scouting for drunks, joyriders, and other lowlifes, the steady crackle of voices over his radio and the lukewarm coffee were just about the only things keeping him awake, Dwyer stifled another jaw-cracking yawn and ran a hand over his scalp, frowning when his fingers along skin where only months before there had been hair. This god damned job was getting to him, he thought. Hell, he was only thirty-two way too young to be going bald. Maybe he could put in a stress claim and get the department health plan to cough up for some of that Rogaine stuff before he started hearing Kojak jokes and finding lollipops taped to his locker.

The sight of a gasoline tanker mixed in with the traffic streaming past him brought the CHP officer fully awake. For safety reasons, tankers and other carriers of hazardous materials were banned from the bridge and its approaches during rush hour. Everybody knew that, didn’t they? For damned sure, every trucker who wanted to keep his license knew that. Everybody except this idiot, obviously.

Dwyer plucked his radio mike off the dashboard. “Dispatch, this is Five-Two. I have a HazMat rig trying to cross the Gate.” He squinted into the slowly growing dawn. “Plate number is Delta, Tango, Two, Nine, Four, Five, Three. I’m making the stop now.”

With its lights flashing, the CHP cruiser pulled onto the highway.

Shahin cursed as the American police car suddenly slid in right behind Nadhir’s truck. The Iranian bent down to tear open the gym bag between his feet. He tugged a Czech-made Skorpion machine pistol out of the bag and checked its twenty-round clip. Satisfied, he flipped the weapon’s folding wire stock into place and looked up. “firing that close to that police car!”

When Zadi hesitated, the Iranian lifted the Skorpion’s muzzle, aiming it casually at the older man’s stomach. His eyes were cold. “Do it,” he said softly.

Horrified, Haydar Zadi swerved left into the next lane and accelerated. Horns blared in outrage behind them.

Shahin ignored the noise, his eyes fixed on the patrol car still trying to pull Nadhir off the road. He could hear the policeman using his loudspeaker now. That was a wasted effort, he knew. The younger Iranian didn’t speak or understand any English.

Weaving slightly under Zadi’s unsteady hands, the Nissan drifted up alongside the black-and-white police cruiser. Still pinned by heavy traffic, neither vehicle was moving more than twenty kilometers an hour. Shahin held his breath, waiting for the right moment. Closer. Closer. Now.

The two cars were less than two meters apart.

He poked the machine pistol above the door frame, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The Skorpion stuttered wildly, bucking upward in Shahin’s hands as he emptied a full magazine into the other vehicle at point-blank range. Sparks flew off torn metal, and glass shattered, smashed into a thousand fragments by the hail of gunfire. Blood fountained across the police car’s dashboard. Still rolling forward, the black-and-white slowly veered off the highway, spun around until it bounced into the hillside, and came to rest with its lights still flashing.

Inside the Nissan, Zadi flinched, panicked by the sudden deafening noise. He yanked the steering wheel left again and then back hard right, narrowly missing another car. More horns sounded angrily behind and all around them.

“Fool!” Shahin snarled. He glimpsed a road sign ahead and off to the right. They were practically right on top of the last exit before the bridge itself. They had done their part. They had brought Ibrahim Nadhir safely to the brink of Paradise. Now it was time to pull away to live and fight and on another day. He grabbed Zadi’s shoulder and pointed. “There! The exit! Go! Go!”

Pale and shaking harder than ever, the older man obeyed. He jammed his foot down hard on the gas pedal. The Nissan sped off the freeway and flashed into an intersection without stopping. But they were moving too fast to make the turn that would have taken them back onto 101 heading north. Instead, Zadi skidded left, turning onto a small, two-lane road that snaked around and up the Marin Headlands, climbing ever higher along the sheer bluffs overlooking the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean.

Shahin whirled in his seat, straining to look through the Nissan’s rear window. Behind them, the gasoline tanker continued straight on down the highway. It roared steadily past the exit, driving toward San Francisco.

On the Golden Gate Bridge Sitting tall behind the wheel of the tanker truck, Ibrahim Nadhir paid little heed to the chaos and confusion breaking out on the road behind him. Zadi and Shahin were there. They would do whatever was necessary to safeguard his mission.

The young Iranian smiled gently. All the long months of his training and religious instruction were close to fruition.

His full awareness, his very soul itself, was focused on one overriding objective: the huge structure looming out of the fog in front of him. Everything in his life had come down to this one moment. This one place. This one act of faith.

He crossed onto the Golden Gate Bridge. The sound of the road beneath the tanker’s tires changed, becoming hollower and more metallic.

Taillights blazed a brighter red as the cars ahead slowed, preparing to wend their way through the tollbooth plaza blocking the bridge’s southern end.

Still smiling, Nadhir brought the big rig to a stop right in the middle of the span. The situation was perfect. Cars crowded with Americans hemmed him in on all sides.

He lifted his gaze from the road before him and looked east. A bright glow through the mist marked the rising sun and a new day. His eyes alight with an inner fire, he murmured, “God is great.”

Ibrahim Nadhir breathed in for the last time and reached for the detonator on the seat beside him.

The tanker truck exploded, spewing jagged pieces of steel shrapnel and ten thousand gallons of burning gasoline across the deck of the bridge. Vehicles inside the blast radius were shredded, smashed, and then set ablaze. Other cars and vans further out were hit broadside by the shock wave and blown completely off the span, plummeting into the icy waters below. Everywhere the gasoline landed, fires erupted, fed by new fuel from ruptured automobile gas tanks. Within seconds, the jammed center of the Golden Gate Bridge was a roaring sea of flame.

The Marin Headlands, above the Golden Gate Half a mile away and five hundred feet above the bridge, Shahin tightened his grip on the car door handle, grimly holding on as Haydar Zadi took another hairpin turn too fast. The speeding Nissan skidded wildly, sliding across the centerline with its tires screeching.

The sky behind them caught fire, lit red and orange by an enormous explosion.

Zadi screamed, half blinded by the sudden glare off his rearview mirror. Still screaming, he spun the steering wheel around in a frantic effort to stay on the road. He turned the wrong way.

Moving at more than fifty miles an hour, the Nissan Sentra flew over the edge of the cliff, tumbling end over end down a sheer slope in an avalanche of dirt, rock, torn brush, and shredded metal.

Building 405 had started its life as part of the Benicia Army Arsenal. Since the Army closed its base back in the early sixties, the warehouse had changed hands more than a dozen times, moving from owner to owner and landlord to landlord in a dizzying, confusing procession. All of them had valued its sheer size and easy access to the freeway, railroad, and waterfront. None of them had valued Building 405 enough to spend much time or money on maintenance. From the outside, the place looked more like a ruin than a going concern a heap of flaking, cracked concrete walls covered by moss, rust stains from an old tin roof, and spray-painted graffiti.

FBI Special Agent Michael Flynn stopped at the entrance to the cavernous warehouse to watch his investigative team at work. More than a dozen agents were scattered throughout the building, poking and prying everywhere with gloved hands as they looked for evidence. Others were busy stringing yellow police tape around areas marked for closer inspection. Camera flashes went off in a rapid, uneven sequence as photographers recorded every aspect of their search.

Flynn followed every move intently, fighting hard to control the fury surging through him. The tall, grim-faced FBI agent had just come from the explosion site at the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-four hours after the bomb blast, firemen and forensics specialists were still prying charred bodies out of mangled cars strewn across the span. More than one hundred innocent men, women, and children were dead. Dozens more were critically injured all of them badly burned or maimed by flying chunks of steel. The bridge itself would be closed for days, both by the investigation and by the need to make sure the fires set by the tanker explosion hadn’t affected its structural integrity.

He shook his head. Over the years he’d seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of murder scenes. But he’d never seen anything like that tangled, twisted slaughterhouse on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Flynn wanted the bastards responsible for this massacre. He wanted them more than he’d wanted any murdering thug he’d hunted in his twenty-six years with the Bureau. His hands clenched into fists.

He looked up as his top aide broke off a hushed conversation with some of the other agents and hurried over. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy?”

“Plenty.” Special Agent Thomas Koenig nodded toward one of the work benches surrounded by yellow tape. “We found some cut strands of detonator wire over there. And the chemical sniffers are picking up definite traces of plastic explosive. There and all over this dump.”

Flynn grimaced. “So this was the bomb factory?”

“Yeah,” Koenig said flatly. “The way I figure it is this: They popped that truck driver out near the highway.” He pointed to the two massive ramps that led directly from the street into the building’s interior. “Then they drove the tanker right up one of those ramps, parked it, and pulled down those steel doors. After that, they had all the time in the world to wire it up for the big show.” He shrugged. “No muss. No fuss.”

cshit,’

“Exactly.” Koenig looked up at him closely. “Get anything besides a couple of John Doe stiffs out of that wrecked Sentra?”

Flynn nodded. Connecting the smashed-up Nissan they’d found at the bottom of the Marin cliffs with the bomb blast and dead CHP officer hadn’t required brilliant detective work, just common sense. “Weapons: a nine mil and a Czech machine pistol. They’re on the way to ballistics. Plus, we found a coil of wire and about a half-kilo block of plastic explosive in the trunk.”

Koenig whistled softly. “Curiouser and curiouser.” He frowned. “Think somebody else was out there yesterday morning cutting away a few loose ends?”

“Maybe.”

“Sir!” One of the agents manning their bank of laptop computers and secure phones waved him over. “A fax just came in from D.C. They’ve got positive IDs on both those bodies.”

Flynn arched a slate-grey eyebrow in surprise. That was damned quick work. Somebody was on the ball back at the Hoover Building after all.

He tore the paper straight out of the machine and scanned it rapidly. The Nissan’s driver was pegged as a man named Haydar Zadi, a legal resident alien and Iranian national. His eyes narrowed. Zadi had been on the FBI’s Watch List because of his reputed ties to Islamic radicals. No wonder they’d been able to identify him so quickly.

The biggest news was at the bottom of the fax. The other man they’d found wedged inside the crumpled Sentra was a bigger fish a much bigger fish. Though they didn’t have any fingerprints to match for a positive ID, the Bureau’s counterterrorist specialists were virtually certain the dead man was one Rashim Mahdi, alias Mir Ahrari, alias Mohammed Shahin.

“Son of a bitch.” Flynn ran his eyes down a long list of unsolved assassinations and bombings some in Europe, some in the Middle East. This Shahin character had been marked by a host of Western intelligence agencies as one of the HizbAllah’s key operational commanders. He looked up from the fax. “Put me through to the Director. Now.”

Outside the White House, the sun had long since set, bringing another cold, bray, and windy winter day to a dreary end. The streets around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were almost empty abandoned by the capital’s cadre of bureaucrats, politicians, and high-priced lawyers heading for plush suburban homes. Inside the executive mansion, however, staff aides, cabinet members, and uniformed military men still crowded the Oval Office.

Major General Sam Farrell knew it was considered an honor to be asked to offer advice to the President of the United States. Right now he was beginning to wish there had been some graceful way to decline that honor. He’d been invited to this high-level White House confab because he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters controlling all U.S. military counterterrorist units, including the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. That made him one of the Pentagon’s top experts on terrorism. So far, though, Farrell, a sturdy six-footer with an open, friendly countenance, had been asked precisely two questions: Did he want coffee or a soda? And could he please move his chair over to make room for the Chief of Naval Operations?

To the general, the seating arrangements for this meeting reflected the current administration’s fundamental priorities and power structure. The President’s political gurus and media advisors filled the overstuffed chairs closest to his desk. Beyond them, the Director of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General sat in an awkward row, wedged together on a couch that was just a shade too small for all four of them. The loins Chiefs of Staff, Farrell, and a few other subordinate officers were furthest back, relegated to seats lining the far wall.

At last, the President looked up from a thick, red-tagged briefing book he’d been devouring while the discussion raged around him. There were shadows under his eyes. Even in normal times the nation’s chief executive often had trouble sleeping. Now his fatigue showed plainly. He fixed his gaze on the FBI Director. “You’re sure the Iranian government was directly involved in this attack on us? That this wasn’t just a couple of whacked-out crazies on a killing spree?”

Farrell shifted slightly in his chair, concealing his impatience. They’d already been over this same ground several times. The others around him didn’t seem fazed. Apparently, marathon talkfests were the rule in this administration, not the exception.

“We’re as sure as we can be under the circumstances, Mr. President,” David Leiter answered carefully. At forty, the trim, telegenic FBI Director was young for his post, but he’d spent years as a prosecutor and he knew how to build a case.

Physical evidence from the site of the bridge massacre and the dead terrorists definitely linked the HizbAllah to the attack. And where the HizbAllah went, Iran was always close behind. Tehran’s radical Islamic regime had helped create the shadowy terror group in the early 1980s. Tehran provided it with safe havens, training camps, and supplies. Tehran held the organization’s purse strings and kept its ideological fervor burning at a fever pitch. For all practical purposes, Iran owned the HizbAllah. Given all of that, the consensus opinion among America’s senior counter terror experts was clear: The HizbAllah’s leaders would never launch an operation of such magnitude without direct authorization by Iran’s Supreme Defense Council.

After all, Iran had plenty of its own reasons to strike hard at the United States. Since the fall of the Shah, the two countries had been more or less in a state of undeclared war. Iranian-sponsored hostage-takings had been met with American economic sanctions. During the 1980s Iranian attacks on neutral shipping during its war with Iraq had led to a series of fierce naval clashes in the Persian Gulf. In recent years Tehran’s ambitious efforts to acquire missile and nuclear technologies had encountered stiff American resistance at all levels. With the collapse of the old Soviet Union, Iran’s radical mullahs viewed the United States the Great Satan as the last remaining obstacle and threat to their revolution. And Tehran’s state-controlled press had been quick to openly celebrate the “heroic martyrs who have plunged this dagger into America’s heart.”

Leiter paused, letting that sink in, and then pressed on. “Finally, Mr. President, we have hard evidence of official Iranian involvement.” He nodded toward the CIA chief. “Several years ago, our intelligence services started making contacts in Eastern Europe’s arms industries. We knew their desperate need for hard currency would make it difficult to completely block explosives sales to terrorist front groups. So we did the next best thing. We persuaded them to blend distinctive mixtures of inert chemicals into every batch of plastic explosive they manufacture. Essentially, every separate production run carries its own unique molecular signature.”

The FBI Director paused again. “Our labs ran a trace on the explosives used in the Golden Gate Bridge attack. They came straight out of Iranian military stockpiles, Mr. President. Stockpiles the government of Iran purchased less than six months ago.”

“I see.” The President bit his lower lip, apparently still reluctant to make a final decision.

Farrell understood his hesitation. By their very nature, military operations involved killing. They were also inherently hazardous both physically for the men tasked to carry them out and politically for the national leaders who approved them.

Still frowning, the President shut the briefing book in front of him and glanced toward the small man seated to his left. “Any thoughts, Jeff?”

Balding, scrawny, and often dressed in worn suits that were ten years out-of-date, Jefferson T. Corbell blended oddly with the rest of the button-down crowd inhabiting the White House. Despite that eccentric appearance, Farrell knew, the man wielded enormous power.

Corbell was the President’s top political tactician, the keeper of his prospects for reelection.

“We have to hit the Iranians back, Mr. President. Hard.” Corbell at least had no doubts. He leaned forward, stabbing the air with a finger to emphasise his points speaking forcefully through a soft southern drawl. “When the American people find out who was behind this attack, they’ll want action on this not finger-wagging or U.N. resolutions.”

The diminutive Georgian glared at the Secretary of State as if daring him to disagree before he turned back to the President. “Our focus groups all say the same thing: You can’t afford to appear weak or indecisive. God knows, we can’t afford to let this thing linger on much longer. This foreign policy shit is dragging all your poll numbers down.”

Farrell hid his distaste for Corbell’s reasoning. It shouldn’t take bad polling news to push and pull this White House into retaliating for one of the worst acts of terrorism ever conducted on U.S. soil, but he’d been around Washington long enough to know that domestic politics played a role in every administration’s foreign policy decisions. Civics textbooks aside, that was the way the world worked, and you couldn’t ignore it.

The President seemed to read his mind. He smiled wryly. “Well, I guess I don’t often get the chance to win votes by doing the right thing. Admiral Dillon?”

“Yes, sir?” The white-haired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs straightened in his chair, expectation plain on a face weathered by years spent at sea in all seasons.

“Put your forces in motion.”

The still, calm waters of the Persian Gulf exploded, blasted apart by a missile surging skyward from below the surface. Boosted at first by a solid rocket, it climbed rapidly, deploying tail fins, stub wings, and an intake for its jet engine. As soon as the airfoils bit into the air, the Tomahawk cruise missile arced over, diving for the concealment offered by low altitude.

The sea erupted again, eighty yards further north. Another missile roared aloft. Tomahawk after Tomahawk followed, taking flight at precise, thirty-second intervals.

Several miles away, a four-engine, propeller-driven plane orbited slowly above the water.

Lieutenant (jg) Pat Royce sat in the right seat of the Navy P-3C Orion, watching the launch through binoculars, counting the missiles. They fanned out slightly over the deep blue water of the Gulf, speeding away to the north at just under the speed of sound. Not terribly fast for a jet, Royce thought, but compared to this bus, that’s pretty zippy.

He keyed his mike, using the intercom to be heard above the thrumming roar of the Orion’s engines. “I’ve got six good birds so far, all heading in the right direction, Dave.”

The pilot and mission commander, Lieutenant Commander Dave McWhorter, nodded. He spoke into his own mike. “Sparks, pass the word, ‘Launch made on time, proceeding smoothly.’ ”

Except for quick scans of his instruments, the P-3 pilot kept his own eyes on the skyline, ready to throw the Orion into evasive maneuvers at the first sign of trouble. So far the launch area was clear of air and surface traffic, and the Tomahawk missiles were working as advertised. But they were still attacking a hostile foreign power, close to its shores.

McWhorter could feel the sweat beading up on his forehead. There were Iranian jet interceptors based at Bandar-e Abbas, scarcely two hundred miles east. Loitering like this to observe and report on the missile launch wasn’t terribly covert, and trouble could arrive a lot quicker than his old, lumbering turboprop could get out of it.

Six minutes began to seem an eternity.

As exposed as McWhorter and Roycc felt two thousand feet above the surface, Commander Mark Marino felt even more so a hundred feet under it. USS Helena, a Los Angeles class attack submarine, lived by stealth, and the explosions of water and spray above him sounded like a combination brass band and steam calliope. And in order to fire its salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his boat had to steer a straight course at periscope depth at creep speed, ghosting north at no more than four or five knots. The noise also blinded many of his own sonar arrays. Not that they were much good anyway in the warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.

If any of the ultra-quiet diesel subs the Iranians had bought from the Russians were lurking close by, Marino and his whole crew could be dead before they even knew they were under attack.

Duckling that unprofitable and unnerving thought, he scanned Helena’s control room.

Chief Walsh, the boat’s senior fire control technician, hovered over his board, making sure that if the automated sequence went wrong, it didn’t get any worse. Not far away, Master Chief Richards, chief of the boat, manned the diving panel, working hard to keep the boat level. Each Tomahawk weighed almost two tons. With that much weight leaving the submarine’s bow every thirty seconds, Richards was kept busy trying to compensate for the rapid changes in Helena’s trim. The other officers and ratings packed into the control room were equally attentive to their duties.

Marino allowed himself to relax minutely. Except for a slightly greater air of concentration and a tendency to speak even more softly than usual, his crew might almost have been conducting a routine peacetime drill.

In a way, that wasn’t surprising. Once started, the launch process was virtually automatic. The sub’s navigation system gave the Tomahawks their starting point. Preloaded data packs fed in their destinations. Launch keys were turned and the fire control computers took over.

That all sounded deceptively simple, but Marino knew the reality was fiendishly complex. It had taken Navy planners days working around the clock to lay out and punch in each missile’s flight path. Even with the space-based global positioning system GPS to help guide the weapons, landmarks had to be found, defences plotted, and search plans determined, so that each Tomahawk had a near-perfect chance of reaching its target.

He glanced at the nearest clock. Precise timing had been as critical for this operation as it was for a space shuttle launch or an amphibious invasion. To make sure the missiles’ GPS receivers could pull down enough data to get good navigational fixes, there had to be a certain minimum number of GPS satellites overhead. To guarantee the Pentagon and the White House near-instantaneous damage assessments, the missiles would strike right before a slated midmorning pass by U.S. recon satellites. That way the low morning sun would provide the contrast and shadows so useful for accurate imagery interpretation. Finally, the Tomahawk strike had to arrive between prayers. Devout Muslims prayed five times a day, and if missiles hit home during any of those periods, it would be seen as a blasphemous slap at all Islam not just at Iran.

Helena shuddered one last time.

Marino had been counting silently to himself. He and Walsh straightened up at the same moment.

“Last bird’s gone, sir,” the chief reported formally.

Marino thought he heard a little relief creep into the older man’s voice. He shook his head, half to himself Helena, several of her sister boats, and the ships of a Navy surface task group had just fired what he hoped would be the first and last shots in a war. All in just minutes. Times had certainly changed.

He barked out a string of new orders. “Make your depth three hundred feet. Right standard rudder, steady on course zero four zero.”

It was time to get out of here, back into deep water.

By the time Walsh reported and Marino issued his helm orders, their last Tomahawk was twenty nautical miles downrange.

The eighteen-foot-long cruise missile skimmed the sea surface, first steering west around the radar station on Lavan Island, then turning a little east to dodge another radar at Asaleyeh airfield. There were several paths through the Iranian radar net, and the missiles salvoed by the Helens’ and the other attacking ships were splitting up to use them all at staggered intervals.

Flying at nearly five hundred knots, Tomahawk number 12 made its landfall just ten minutes after launch, flashing low over a desolate, barren landscape. It climbed steadily, threading its way through the rugged Zagros Mountains littering the southern half of Iran. Tehran lay far to the north almost at the outer limit of its range.

The weapon flew on, inhuman in the steadiness of its flight, the precision of its turns. Periodically, it would turn on its GPS receiver and fix its position. A conventional inertial guidance system could drift as much as half a mile over the flight time of a Tomahawk missile. The GPS unit would keep Tomahawk 12 accurate to within a few meters.

Six hundred seventy miles and seventy-five minutes after leaving the USS Helena, the missile crossed the Qom-Tehran Highway and came within sight of the Iranian capital.

Tehran’s skyline was already marred by thick, billowing columns of smoke. Even in broad daylight, a burning oil refinery lit the inside of one black cloud with an ugly or angered glow. The first wave of American cruise missiles had arrived only minutes before.

Although civil defense alarms were still sounding, the missile didn’t hear the sirens. It was busy making another navigational fix. With four satellites above its horizon, the Tomahawk’s GPS receiver established its position to within three meters just half its own length. Still flying with impersonal, inhuman precision, it skimmed over the city, ignoring the few antiaircraft bursts beginning to pepper the air around it. The gunners were too late. Helena’s Tomahawk 12 was the trailing edge of the American attack.

It passed over the Iranian Parliament building, already a shattered, burning ruin, and suddenly, matter-of-factly, dove down aiming for the old Exxon building.

After being abandoned by its American owners following the Shah’s fall, the ten-story concrete and steel structure had been taken over as headquarters for the Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran. Under their aegis, it also served as a center for planning terrorist raids. Members of the Pasdaran command staff routinely coordinated operations with the HizbAllah, provided its leaders with intelligence information, and supplied it with weapons and explosives.

Now the Pasdaran was paying for their actions.

Tomahawk 12 was the last of six cruise missiles targeted on the headquarters building. One missile’s guidance unit failed in flight, sending it crashing into the side of a mountain near the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. But all four of the others screamed straight in on target, gutting the structure with thousand-pound warheads. Ripped apart by the repeated bomb blasts, the Exxon building’s upper floors teetered and then collapsed into the street. Now this last missile dispensed tiny, HE-laden bomblets over the ruined Revolutionary Guards headquarters. Their rapid-fire detonations shredded steel and glass and flesh and anything else over a fifty-meter square area.