Whiplash

64

“We have to get out now,” Danny told Hera, moving quickly to the door separating the warehouse from the office where Tarid and Aberhadji had met. He wanted to bug it.

“The crates.”

“Never mind them. Aberhadji’s car is coming up the road.”

Danny stopped short. The door was protected by a contact alarm system. He dropped to his stomach. He wanted to slip one of the bugs underneath the door, but the space was blocked by rubber weather-stripping that brushed along the metal threshold. Instead, he took a jumper and defeated the contact alarm, easing the door open just wide enough to put the bug on the edge of the kick plate.

The bug slipped as he started to close the door. He pushed it higher and squeezed the tiny, round, plastic disc hard against the aluminum.

Meanwhile, the Voice was giving him a running commentary on Aberhadji’s progress, narrating practically every step: The car rounded the hairpin, the car pulled past the video checkpoint, the car approached the front of the building. A figure got out. MY-PID analyzed the figure’s gait as it walked, and found a correlation with Aberhadji, concluding with “eighty percent probability” that it was him.

By the time Aberhadji unlocked the front door of the building, Danny was stepping through the window. Hera pulled the window down behind him, then tugged the jumper wire out, resetting the alarm.

Once inside, Aberhadji took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the light. Everything was slightly blurry; years of staring at motor vehicle forms had ruined his eyesight.

The stockpiled materials and the tools would be dispersed and hidden in several places around the country. For the most part, the hiding places were in buildings and mines well off the beaten track, obscure places where no one would think of looking, least of all a foreign intelligence service.

Aberhadji had decided, however, that the warhead would have to be taken someplace where it could be guarded — and where he could get to it easily if necessary. He had arranged for it to be kept at a small base about thirty miles away, controlled by the Guard and commanded by a man who had been a friend since his youth. The base was hardly secret, and Aberhadji worried that the government or regular army would sooner or later find out about the weapon. But it could be protected there from outside agents. And it was two miles from the airstrip at Tajevil, where the No-Dong A and its launching systems were stored.

The nuclear warhead was useless without a way to deliver it. For all the speculation in the West about how a cargo container or some other seemingly innocuous transport might be used, in the end the most reliable and practical way of launching a nuclear strike was by missile. Aberhadji had acquired the No-Dong A very early in his project. It was one of several delivered by North Korea during the late 1990s as part of the deal that helped Iran develop its nuclear capabilities. The No-Dong As had been studied and used as the basis for Iran’s own family of rockets.

This missile had malfunctioned on the test bed, then stored and forgotten — by all except one of the engineers Aberhadji recruited for his program when the disarmament talks began. It was refurbished and, while its range was limited compared to the weapons Iran subsequently developed, it was still quite adequate to deliver the warhead up to two thousand miles away — more than enough to hit Israel, for example.

Which, Aberhadji thought, he might someday decide to do.

First he had to make sure his project survived. Dispersing the material was only the first step; he would have to reevaluate everything he had done, examine where things had gone wrong. There was also the council to deal with — clearly his position within it needed to be considered. But he could only deal with one part of the crisis at a time.

Eyes focused, Aberhadji reached into his pocket for his phone. Before he could dial, however, it began to ring.

Aberhadji did not recognize the number, but the exchange indicated the call was coming from a government building. He answered immediately.

“Two dozen Israeli aircraft are reported to have flown into eastern Sudan,” said the caller in a low voice. He was an intelligence analyst, a friend to Aberhadji, though not on his payroll. “Some sort of bombing raid. They flew over Egypt and Ethiopia.”

“What was their target?”

“The service is still working on it.”

“Call me when you know more,” said Aberhadji, though he’d already guessed where the bombers were going.

Hera followed Danny to the stone wall behind the building, jumping over and hitting the dirt.

Danny waited for her to catch her breath, then began retracing their steps back through the field to the edge of the woods, not stopping until they reached the stepladder.

“Let me get my bearings,” he told her. “Hold on just a minute.”

Aberhadji felt the pickax stab his temples again, cleaving his head in two. The pain had never been this intense — it dropped him to the floor. There was complete agony for a minute, for two full minutes; everything was pain as all other sensations bleached away from him. He couldn’t see; he didn’t know how to see. He struggled to breathe.

Gradually he became aware of the room. The migraine lessened somewhat, the blades retracting a few inches. The room, invisible to him at the height of the attack, shaded from black to a dark brown, then lightened slowly to sepia.

The pain strangled the back of his neck, paralyzed his shoulders. He tried pushing himself to get up but could not.

Aberhadji had never believed the headaches were a sign or a curse from Allah; he had always accepted them as part of his self, a flaw in his biology, not his spirit. His view did not change now. His faith was unshaken, not just in God, but in his view of the universe, of the way things worked, and must work.

But the headache nonetheless revealed one great truth to him: He would never survive another attack. Even if the next was merely as bad as this one — if they continued to increase exponentially, as they had over these past weeks, he simply could not survive.

Logically, then, it was time to initiate the plan. Israel had just bombed his plant — there could be no other place where their jets would go in Sudan.

Very possibly more fighters were on their way here.

The Zionists must be destroyed, and the traitor president killed.

This was not so much a decision as a realization, and it eased Aberhadji’s pain substantially. Though his head continued to pound, he was able to stand up. Only then did he see that two men were standing at the door.

One was a truck driver, the other a Revolutionary Guard officer he had called to help supervise the truck loading.

“I slipped, but I am all right,” he told them.

They would proceed as planned, except that he would go with the warhead, and divert it at the last minute.

The brothers would be needed to mount it onto the missile and prepare the rocket, and he would have to stay with them to supervise, as well as code the warhead at the final preparation. This meant neither they nor he could bring the bomb to the man who would plant it aboard the plane.

Who did he trust to do that job?

No one.

Tarid?

But perhaps Tarid had been the one to give away the Sudan location to the Israelis.

No, if he had done that, he never would have come back to Iran.

Not purposely. Perhaps he had made a slip.

If he had done so inadvertently, while still a sin, it was at least less mortal. And he could make up for it by placing the bomb in the plane.

“Are you all right, Imam?” asked the Guard member.

“I needed a moment to gather my thoughts. The articles must be transported. Load them into the separate trucks. I will give each driver specific instructions once you are ready to leave. In the meantime, I must make a phone call in private.” He reached into his pocket and took out the key to the large warehouse-style door. “Go to the side and begin your work.”

“They’re transporting the crates,” Danny told hera as the Voice translated what Aberhadji told the men inside. “He got a phone call. They must realize we’re on to them.”

Danny looked at the MY-PID screen. There were a dozen trucks gathered in the front lot. Each crate had to be going to a different location. They’d lose track of half of them.

He debated whether to try attacking. Besides the drivers, there were another twenty men, all with visible weapons, according to the Voice.

There was no way.

And even if the odds were better, what would the next step be? Blow up whatever was in the crates? If it was nuclear material, it would be spread all over.

Then what? Gather it and smuggle it out of Iran.

But if they failed, everything would be lost — the Iranians would find the bugs, realize they were being watched. The material — and the bombs, if there were any — would be lost again.

“How many soldiers are there?” asked Hera.

“Too many,” said Danny, rising. “Come on. Let’s get back to the van. We’ll pick one of the trucks and follow it.”