by Vince Flynn
“Why on God’s green earth would they fire on their own ship?” Byrne asked.
“Because they want to make it look like we did it,” the president answered.
“Exactly,” England agreed. “The task force commander is sending the contact tapes as well as footage of the Iranian ship being hit.”
CIA Deputy Director O’Brien entered the room looking harried. “Mr. President, I just spoke to Rapp. He has confirmation that Kennedy’s kidnapping was an Iranian operation.”
The room went silent. The president asked, “What kind of confirmation?”
“One of the prisoners has confessed that he’s a member of the Quds Force. For lack of a perfect analogy, that means he’s Iranian special forces. He identified one of the other prisoners as his commanding officer, and the third he says is a member of Hezbollah.”
The president looked around the room at the other members of his National Security Team. “So this was no random attack by local insurgents?”
“No, sir, in fact we have an even more damning piece of evidence.” O’Brien looked over his shoulder and nodded to a tech who had followed him into the conference room. A series of photos appeared on one of the large plasmas. O’Brien pointed to the photo in the upper left corner and said, “These were surveillance shots taken of Iranian Intelligence Minister Ashani as he landed in Mosul this morning.” The deputy director pointed to a second photo. “Here he is shaking hands with our deputy director of operations, Near East Division. On the far left of the frame you can see a man walking in the opposite direction.” O’Brien’s finger moved to the second row. “This man walking right here toward the police vehicles.”
“Rapp took this photo,” O’Brien said, pointing to the last one, “and showed it to one of the prisoners, who did not know the man’s name but said he arrived in Mosul this morning and took over the operation to kidnap Director Kennedy. The man Rapp has been interrogating”—O’Brien looked down to consult a piece of paper—“a Corporal Tahmineh, says he was not told who they were kidnapping. Only that this man was adamant that it was a woman and she be taken alive.”
The president looked angrily at the screen. “Who is he?”
“It’s Imad Mukhtar, sir, the head of Hezbollah’s paramilitary wing.”
The president stared at the screen in absolute disbelief at the Iranians’ audacity. “You’re sure?”
O’Brien looked at the president with a partially dazed expression. “Well, sir, this information is coming in pretty fast, so we haven’t had the chance to source it properly. In fact the only photo we have of Mukhtar is nearly thirty years old.”
“So you’re not sure,” the president said with no attempt to hide his irritation.
“Let me explain further. Mitch called Minister Ashani and asked him who…”
The president interrupted, “Mitch called Minister Ashani directly?”
“Yes, sir.” O’Brien cleared his throat and said, “After the prisoner,” the deputy director stopped to consult his notes.
An irritated president Alexander said, “Corporal whoever…I don’t care what his name is. Tell me about Mitch’s conversation with Ashani.”
O’Brien looked extremely nervous about his next words. “Mitch told Ashani he was going to hunt him down and kill him unless Irene was released within the hour.”
“Good,” Secretary of Defense England announced.
Other members of the National Security team looked less enthused.
“How did Ashani react?” the president asked.
“This is where it gets a little tricky. Mitch said Ashani seemed genuinely surprised by the whole thing.”
“What do you mean, surprised?” The president pointed at the screen. “He rode in on the same helicopter as this Mukbar, or whatever his name is.”
“All I’m doing is relaying what Mitch told me. He thinks there’s a chance Ashani was kept in the dark.”
“Or he’s trying to save his own ass,” England said.
“Maybe,” replied O’Brien, “but he’s the one who identified the man as Mukhtar.”
“Can we corroborate that info with another source?” asked the president.
“Mitch is working on that right now.”
The president was about to ask how, and then he thought better of it. Instead, he clenched his jaw in anger and said, “I can’t believe they had the gall to launch this operation right under our noses, and think we wouldn’t find out.”
“I’m not sure we would have found out, sir, if Mitch hadn’t taken those prisoners.” This was O’Brien’s way of attempting to say he had been wrong about trying to put a leash on Rapp.
“Maybe not,” the president mused. Turning to the secretary of defense, the president asked, “What’s their endgame? What are they trying to accomplish?”
“I’m not sure. This isn’t exactly rational behavior.”
“Sympathy, sir,” announced Secretary of State Wicka as she walked up to the group, twirling her trademark reading glasses in her right hand. “I just had a very enlightening conversation with France’s foreign minister. He says he received a call from Iran’s foreign minister claiming that his country is under attack by the U.S. He requested that France sponsor a resolution in the UN condemning the attack and asking that the U.S. pay reparations for both the vessel and the nuclear facility at Isfahan. He urged that the UN Security Council hold an emergency session to vote on this issue. He said if the UN didn’t take care of the problem, OPEC would.”
“Oh God,” Byrne moaned. “We’d better find a way to defuse this before oil prices shoot past a hundred dollars a barrel.”
“Prices will snap back as soon as this thing is over,” England said dismissively. “The important thing is to make sure this damn Iranian sub doesn’t sink any of our ships, and that we get Director Kennedy back as soon as possible. I think the way to do that is to turn up the heat on these guys. I think you should hold a press conference and put the facts out there, and I think you should consider laying down an ultimatum for the release of Kennedy.”
“What kind of ultimatum?” the president asked.
“I would consider calling her kidnapping an act of war.”
“Whoa…” Byrne put his hands up in a cautionary manner. “I know this is going to sound callous to some of you, but it has to be said.” The chief of staff looked at the other key advisors. “Maybe this is the price we have to pay for taking out their nuclear program.”
“Ted,” England sneered, “we had nothing to do with taking out that facility.”
“I know…but we benefited from it.” Byrne could tell by the expressions on everyone’s face that they were not buying his rationale. “All I’m saying is that before we rush off to war, we take a look at the big picture. Losing one person in exchange for making sure Iran doesn’t get the bomb is not a bad deal.”
Secretary of State Wicka’s normally calm demeanor turned to one of overt irritation. In a voice laced with sarcasm, she said, “I think that is great advice, Ted. In fact maybe I could call Iran’s foreign minister and work out a prisoner exchange. You could take Irene’s place, and then we could just write you off.”
Before Byrne could respond, the White House press secretary entered the room and announced that President Amatullah was about to begin a press conference. The attention of everyone in the room shifted to the wall of large plasma TVs. All but one showed the bearded and tieless Iranian president stepping to the podium.
53
MOSUL, IRAQ
Rapp walked the hallway in front of the cells in an attempt to jog loose a strategy that he could use to interrogate the other two prisoners. Just knowing their names went a long way toward getting some honest answers out of them, but there was a bigger problem. If either man knew where Mukhtar planned to take Kennedy, the odds were that she was no longer there. Mukhtar would surely know by now that the two men had not made it back to the rallying point, which in turn would alert him to the possibility that his location was soon to be
compromised.
The Iranian connection had been passed on to General Gifford, who felt that there was little chance Mukhtar could have gotten her across the border into Iran. The military units handling the border had shut down the crossing points less than thirty minutes after the attack. Still, Mosul was a large, sprawling city of close to two million people. The odds of finding Kennedy without some hard intelligence were not good.
Rapp looked at the black rubber dive watch on his wrist and felt his chest tighten. He knew it was the first sign of an oncoming anxiety attack. He’d gone through his entire life without suffering one, and then with the loss of his wife they had started to pop up. He told no one. Not even Kennedy. He figured with the passage of time they would lessen. And they did to a degree, but he could still count on a night or two a month during which he would lie in bed and feel as if an anvil had been placed on his chest. The attacks were characterized by a feeling of overwhelming failure. Failure as a man, that he had not been able to defend his own wife. Failure that he had been so selfish as to ever marry her in the first place.
Rapp held no illusions about who he was, or what he did. He’d been at war with radical Islam a good ten years before the country even knew there was a war. He’d threatened, beaten, tortured, and killed so many men it was hopeless to even attempt a tally. During all of that, though, he’d clung to the conviction that he was very different from the enemy. As strange as it would seem to many in a civilized society, he was able to live with what he did because of whom he did it to. Unlike the people he hunted, Rapp made every effort to make sure noncombatants stayed exactly that. Women and children were strictly off-limits. Thankfully, in the chauvinistic world of radical Islam, this was far easier to accomplish than one would think. The men Rapp hunted, however, made no such distinction. In fact, they sought out the innocent to amplify their terror.
Imad Mukhtar was such a man. Rapp knew the story of Mukhtar all too well. The highly reclusive leader of Hezbollah’s security section had cut his teeth in Beirut in his late teens. He was rumored to be behind the suicide attacks on both the U.S. Embassy and the marine barracks. What worried Rapp most about the man, though, was his involvement in the kidnapping of CIA Station Chief Bill Buckley. Mukhtar and his compatriots had squeezed every last bit of information out of Buckley over the course of a year and then hanged him. The thought of Kennedy suffering at the hands of such an animal was agonizing. With each passing minute, he feared his ability to save Kennedy was slipping away.
Rapp had waited long enough. Strategy or not, he needed to begin breaking these two and hope whatever he got out of them remained current. Rapp yanked open the cell door and approached the man on the stretcher.
As he pulled out his knife, Rapp said, “Name and rank?”
The man looked up at him with dilated pupils and a sweat-drenched face. The severed sex organ was still on his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Fine.” The man’s right pants leg had been cut away above the knee by the army medic who had treated his bullet wound. Rapp stuck the tip of the knife under the remaining portion of fabric and began slicing away. Rapp intentionally dug the blade into the man’s inner thigh just enough to draw blood. The prisoner yelled and jerked against his bonds.
“Sorry about that,” Rapp said as he cut away the rest of the pants, exposing the man’s underwear. “Do you have a preference…left nut, right nut…it doesn’t matter to me.”
“What are you talking about?” the man said with genuine horror.
“Which nut would you like me to cut off first? Your left nut, or your right nut?” Rapp fished the tip of the knife under the elastic band of the man’s briefs and with one yank, shredded the underwear.
“Wait!” the man screamed. “What do you want to know?”
“Your name, Captain. That’s right,” Rapp said in response to the look of shock on the man’s face. “I know quite a bit about you, so don’t even think about lying. Now tell me your name.”
“Captain Rashid Dadarshi, and I demand to see a representative from the International Red Crescent.”
Rapp laughed. “You demand?”
“Yes, it is my right!”
“And how is it your right?”
“My country is signatory of the Geneva Convention, as is yours.”
“Listen, if you had been wearing a uniform and fighting U.S. troops, I would be more than happy to call the International Red Crescent, but you weren’t. You’re just another piece-of-shit terrorist.”
“I am not. I am an officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
“Where’s your uniform? You didn’t wear it to work today?”
“I demand…”
Before Dadarshi could finish the sentence, Rapp stepped on his wounded knee. Dadarshi screamed in pain, and Rapp said, “I don’t want to hear that word come out of your mouth again. In fact, if you say it, I’ll carry out my threat, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask your friend from Hezbollah.” Rapp saw the admission on the man’s face and said, “That’s right. Your buddy Ali Abbas has been singing like a little girl. I actually had to cut one of his nuts off to get him to talk. Since then the guy’s been very helpful, giving me the location of your safe houses, and who your local contacts are. We’ve got people checking on them right now, and if it turns out he lied to me about a single location I’m going to cut off the other one. Now how about you?”
Rapp reached into his pocket and pulled out the surveillance photo of the man who had ridden in on the chopper with Minister Ashani. “The trick here is that I know a hell of a lot more than you think I do, but I don’t know everything. So if you feel like gambling with your family jewels, you go right ahead and try to lie to me. The man in this photo,” Rapp held it up, “who is he?”
Dadarshi closed his eyes and said, “Imad Mukhtar.”
“Good answer, captain. And how do you know him?”
“I met him for the first time this morning.”
“Where?”
“At one of the safe houses.”
“And why did he come to Mosul?”
“To oversee the operation.”
“The attack on the motorcade?”
“Yes.”
“And who was the target of that attack?”
Dadarshi hesitated and looked to his left.
“Not a good question to gamble on.”
“The director of the CIA.”
“And where were you planning on taking her?” Rapp asked as casually as possible.
“We were going to try and make it across the border.”
“Where were your backup locations?”
“There was a warehouse, approximately halfway between Mosul and the border.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“You will have to get me a map.”
Rapp thought about it for a second and then grabbed the two-way radio. He pressed the transmit button and said, “Stan, did you hear that?” Rapp released the button and moved the radio away from his mouth.
“Yep.”
“Bring me some maps.” Rapp lowered the radio and studied the Iranian officer lying on the stretcher. “While we wait for the maps, I want you to tell me about the backup locations you have in the city.”
54
TEHRAN, IRAN
Based on his conversation with Rapp, Ashani had been certain the extra men at the airport were there to arrest him, but he soon learned he was wrong. An American submarine had sunk the Sabalan in the Strait of Hormuz. President Amatullah had declared a state of emergency and called for a meeting of the Supreme Security Council. Under normal circumstances Ashani would have had little difficulty believing that the Americans had acted so recklessly. All he had to do was revisit the tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655. On Sunday, July 3, 1988, the commercial airliner left Bandar Abbas for a short flight to Dubai, when it was shot down by the U.S.S. Vincennes. The Americans reacted to the tragedy by giving their cowboy captain a medal. In l
ight of Rapp’s phone call, however, Ashani had his doubts as to what may have led up to the Sabalan’s being sunk.
This time, however, Ashani got the feeling that it was Amatullah who was acting like a reckless cowboy. He remembered the first meeting they’d had in the wake of the disaster at Isfahan. How Amatullah had come strutting in with General Zarif and General Sulaimani in tow. His promises of making the Americans and the Jews pay. Ashani had never encountered a more duplicitous man than Amatullah. He was a master manipulator of public opinion.
Ashani looked out the window of his barely moving sedan at the sea of bodies marching rowdily toward the old American Embassy. Apparently, Amatullah had closed the schools and ordered mass protests against America’s aggression in the Strait of Hormuz. It was very convenient for Amatullah that Ayatollah Najar was in Isfahan with the Supreme Leader, meeting with aggrieved families from the tragedy at the nuclear facility. Ashani had so far been unable to reach Najar and was growing increasingly nervous. If Amatullah was crazy enough to kidnap Irene Kennedy, what would stop him from killing Najar, his chief rival?
The three-car motorcade finally reached the gates of the Presidential Palace. The normal security detail had been augmented by tanks from the Revolutionary Guards’ 18th Armored Division. As the soldiers made way for his sedan, Ashani got the sinking feeling that Amatullah would not hesitate to use these shock troops to seize power. He would feel much better when Najar and the Supreme Leader returned to the capital. After entering the palace Ashani was escorted to Amatullah’s office suite, where he found Foreign Minister Salehi, Brigadier General Sulaimani, Major General Zarif, and a handful of aides. They were all gathered around a large television watching a news conference, or so he thought.
As Ashani drew closer he could see that their focus was on President Amatullah, who was in the midst of delivering one of his impassioned speeches. He was dressed in his signature boxy tan suit with a dress shirt and no tie. Ashani found the fact that he was making a statement a bit odd since he had yet to meet with the Supreme National Security Council to discuss the situation, but then again, the man had a history of not letting facts get in the way of his message.
