by Mark Alpert
The president and his Secret Service agents made their way to the South Lawn, where Marine One had just touched down. Bracing themselves against the rotor wash, they jogged across the grass and boarded the helicopter. Within seconds they were in the air, heading southeast toward Andrews. The agents handed the president a gray suit, a white shirt, and a pair of black shoes, and he quickly got dressed in the helicopter’s lavatory. Then he entered the main cabin and took his usual seat.
The cabin was crowded. Sitting across from the president were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security adviser, the national director of intelligence, and the defense secretary. At the other end of the cabin were several generals from Central Command, which controlled military operations in the Middle East, and Special Operations Command, which oversaw all Special Forces units. And sitting all by himself in the cabin’s far corner was a young air-force major whose sole duty was to carry the black briefcase known as the Football. It looked very much like an ordinary briefcase, except that it had an antenna near the handle.
The president waited a moment, composing himself. Then he turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “What’s the situation?”
The chairman’s face, usually ruddy and fierce, was now pale and unshaven. He held a manila folder in his lap. “About an hour ago we detected a seismic event that had all the characteristics of an underground nuclear explosion. We thought at first that the Iranians had conducted another test, but the epicenter was north of Iran’s border. It was in the Kuruzhdey district of Turkmenistan, where our Ranger battalion is positioned.” He paused, his eyes avoiding the president’s. “We tried to contact the unit, but we couldn’t raise them on the radio. So we instructed our reconnaissance satellites to train their cameras on Kuruzhdey during their next pass of the region.” He opened his folder and removed a stack of photographs. “These images were taken thirty minutes ago. They show the area outside the entrance to Camp Cobra.”
The president inspected the photos. He’d seen earlier satellite images of the Camp Cobra site and remembered the topography: a band of flat ground running between two parallel ridges. But in the photographs the president was viewing now, one of the ridges had collapsed. A vast fan of rocky debris had spilled through a gap in the line of cliffs.
For about ten seconds he couldn’t breathe. When he finally did, he felt an ache in his chest. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Are there any survivors?”
The Joint chairman grimaced. “We’re preparing to send a search-and-rescue team from Afghanistan, but first we need to measure the radiation levels in the area. We’ve already dispatched a pair of reconnaissance drones to collect samples of the radioactive debris from the explosion.”
The president nodded, trying to stay calm. That was his job, to analyze the situation in a rational way and consider the appropriate response. But he was feeling anything but rational at the moment. It took all of his willpower to remain in his seat and nod at the general. He wanted to rush into the helicopter’s cockpit and grab the controls of Marine One and fly it directly to Turkmenistan. He wanted to land on the pile of debris he’d seen in the photograph and start digging through the rocks with his bare hands. “How could this happen? Was it an accident? The Rangers didn’t have any tactical warheads, did they?”
“No, sir, they didn’t. And this wasn’t an accident. About twenty minutes before the explosion, our radar systems detected two aircraft traveling south from Kuruzhdey to the Iranian border. And we intercepted a brief message that was sent from one of the aircraft to the Ashkhaneh nuclear facility.”
“They were communicating with the Iranians? With the Revolutionary Guards?”
“Yes, sir. The message was in Farsi. The English translation is, ‘Detonation in nineteen minutes.’”
The president nodded again. Now he understood why the Pentagon was rushing him out of the capital. Nearly a thousand American soldiers had just been killed in a nuclear attack. And more attacks could be coming. This possibility scared the hell out of him, but it also focused his mind. Get your shit together, he told himself. Step up and take control. He pointed at the Joint chairman. “Did the radar systems track the two aircraft?”
“They landed near the Ashkhaneh facility. By the time our satellites passed over the area, the Revolutionary Guards had hidden the aircraft, most likely inside the bunker. But the images show a company of armed men, which is probably the Iranian strike team. They must’ve discovered the location of the Ranger camp and launched a preemptive attack against it.”
“Mr. President.” A gray-haired, jug-eared army general raised his hand to get his attention. It was General Philip Estey of Special Operations Command. “Our analysts have come up with a possible scenario to explain what happened. The Camp Cobra site was a cavern with many passageways and entrances. The Iranian commandos must’ve discovered a tunnel that the Rangers weren’t guarding. And then all they had to do was place one of their nuclear devices inside the mountain.”
Again, the president wanted to jump out of his seat. He was enraged—no one in the Pentagon had mentioned this vulnerability before! How could all their strategists and experts have overlooked such an obvious thing? “Christ!” he yelled. “I don’t believe this! You didn’t—” But he stopped when he saw General Estey’s stricken face. He’d just remembered that Estey had been a close friend of McNair. “Hold on, I’m sorry. Was General McNair at Camp Cobra at the time of the explosion?”
Estey nodded. His face was as pained and sober as a preacher’s. “Yes, sir, he was there. McNair was strongly committed to the mission’s success and took a hands-on role.” He bowed his head and stared at the cabin’s floor. “I’m not giving up hope until we hear from the search-and-rescue team. But in all likelihood, Samuel is gone.”
Several other generals bowed their heads, too. For a few seconds the cabin was silent except for the thumping of the helicopter’s rotors. But the president had no time to mourn. He was still enraged, and now all his fury was directed at the Iranians. “All right, our first priority is defending against further attacks. Our forces in the Middle East should go on highest alert. All units return to their bases and hunker down.” He turned to the national director of intelligence. “Is there any evidence that the Iranians are preparing another nuclear strike? Either in the Middle East or here in the U.S.?”
The NDI shook his head. “No, sir. We still believe that their nuclear devices are inside the Revolutionary Guard’s Ashkhaneh facility.”
“Well, we’re not going to give them a chance to use another one. We’re going to destroy that facility. We’re going to make it disappear.” He turned back to the Joint chairman. “Get the stealth bombers in the air. Loaded with the B83, the bunker-busting nuke. As soon as we confirm that the Iranians were behind the attack on Camp Cobra, I’ll give you the authorization to deploy the warhead.” He jerked his head toward the air-force major who held the Football, the black briefcase containing the nuclear attack plans.
“How are we going to get confirmation?” the chairman asked. “If you ask the Iranians, they’ll just deny any involvement.”
General Estey raised his hand again. “Mr. President, in a few hours we should be able to analyze the radioactive debris collected by our reconnaissance drones. If the radioisotope signatures from the Camp Cobra explosion are similar to those from the Iranian test in the Kavir Desert, we can conclude that the same nuclear fuel was used in both cases.”
The president took a deep breath. It was a grave decision, with terrible consequences either way. But as commander in chief, his primary responsibility was to his troops. And he had to stop the Iranians immediately, before they could attack again. “That’s good enough for me. If we get confirmation from the debris analysis, we’ll launch the nuclear strike on Ashkhaneh. And then we’ll destroy the rest of the Iranian military with our conventional forces. I assume those plans are already in place?”
The Joint chairman saluted. “Yes, sir!”
By this
point, Marine One was descending. The president gazed out the helicopter’s porthole window and saw the runways of Andrews Air Force Base. About a hundred yards away was a 747 with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA written in gray letters along the fuselage. The plane looked similar to the other 747s in the Air Force One fleet, but the president knew it was very different on the inside. It was an E-4B, specially modified for use as a mobile command post, with hardened electronics that could withstand the electromagnetic pulses caused by high-altitude nuclear explosions. The Pentagon had given this aircraft the code name of Nightwatch. But it was better known as the Doomsday Plane.
38
AS BROTHER CYRUS HAD EXPECTED, THE IRANIANS AT THE ASHKHANEH nuclear facility weren’t happy. They didn’t like the fact that Cyrus had broken radio silence with his cryptic message in Farsi. And they were even more displeased when Cyrus and his men arrived in two Osprey tilt-rotor craft that looked like they’d just been stolen from the Marine Corps. The Iranian soldiers were scared enough already of an American attack, and they knew that the U.S. Air Force’s reconnaissance satellites were passing over the area every thirty minutes. So they rushed out of their bunker and quickly towed the suspicious aircraft into a hangar that the Revolutionary Guards had carved into the mountainside. The hangar was essentially a large cave with a wide mouth and an arched ceiling. The bunker was a separate network of caverns that had a concrete pillbox at its entrance and a spiderweb of sloping tunnels that ran twelve hundred feet below the mountain.
Inside the hangar, Cyrus’s soldiers unloaded the promised shipment of enriched uranium, hauling the heavy, lead-lined cases out of the Ospreys. The Iranians carried the U-235 back to their bunker, eager to return to the depths of the cavern where they’d stored the previous shipments of nuclear fuel. Then General Jannati, the commander of the Ashkhaneh facility, entered the hangar with two of his lieutenants. Cyrus had met Jannati before. Because the general spoke English well, he’d become Cyrus’s main contact in the Revolutionary Guards. He was a short, skinny man in a ridiculous-looking uniform. He frowned as he approached Cyrus. “Good afternoon, Mr. Black,” he said.
Cyrus hadn’t revealed his true identity to the Iranians. They knew him as Cyrus Black, the masked leader of an international smuggling ring. “A pleasure to see you again, General. Please excuse us for violating your security rules, but we had to leave Turkmenistan on short notice.”
Jannati kept frowning. “You were supposed to arrive at night. And travel by car, not aircraft. Our agreement was very clear on that point.”
“A thousand apologies. But now you have the last shipment of U-235. And I brought a little something extra for you.”
The general glanced nervously at his lieutenants. Then he leaned closer to Cyrus. “Is it in the aircraft?” he whispered. “The Courvoisier?”
Cyrus nodded. Jannati had a taste for cognac, which was illegal in the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the general had found ways to privately indulge.
Jannati turned to his lieutenants and barked an order in Farsi. The two men saluted and marched out of the hangar. Once they were gone, the general grasped Cyrus’s arm and headed for the Ospreys. “You were lucky to get out of Turkmenistan,” Jannati said. “I just heard a report of an earthquake there.”
“Really?”
“Yes, just across the border. Less than a hundred kilometers north of here.”
Brother Cyrus smiled. Praise the Lord, he thought. Praise Him in His mighty heaven.
While General Jannati found the case of Courvoisier and opened a two-hundred-dollar bottle of XO Imperial, Cyrus took Nicodemus aside and told him the good news. Then he quietly ordered the True Believers to remove the X-ray laser from the Osprey, carry it out of the hangar, and put it in position at the target point. He reminded them to do the job slowly and carefully. There was no need to rush, he said. The U.S. Air Force wouldn’t launch its retaliatory strike until nightfall, when the B-2 Stealth bombers would become impossible to detect.
After an hour and a half, the True Believers completed their task and returned to the hangar. By this point, General Jannati was stone drunk. He sprawled on a wooden crate, his head drooping as he clutched the bottle of cognac with both hands. Cyrus stood nearby, keeping a watchful eye on the general and smiling behind his head scarf. They were on the threshold of the kingdom now, just inches away. Cyrus reviewed his preparations one last time to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. The only flaw in their plans was the fact that the Turkmen Army hadn’t captured Olam ben Z’man yet. But Cyrus didn’t consider Olam a serious threat. Even if the Israeli tried to warn the Americans, it was very unlikely that anyone at the Pentagon would take him seriously.
As General Jannati took another swig from his cognac bottle, the radio on his belt let out a squawk. A tentative voice came out of the radio’s speaker, posing a question in Farsi. After a few seconds, the voice repeated its question. The Revolutionary Guards were obviously wondering when their commander would return to the bunker. Jannati ignored the radio transmissions for as long as he could, then groped for the handset and began shouting into it. When he was finished, he tossed the radio aside and turned to Cyrus. “Idiots,” he muttered. “They can’t do anything on their own. Always waiting for my orders.” He shook his head. “I told them I’d shoot the next person who radios me. Maybe I’ll get a little peace now.”
Cyrus nodded. “A wise move. You’re teaching them discipline.”
“Exactly! Every army must have discipline.” Jannati pointed at the True Believers who stood at attention on the other side of the hangar. “Look at your men, how dutiful they are. How do you manage it? I suppose you pay them well enough, eh?”
Cyrus nodded again. To convince the Iranians that he was a smuggler, he’d demanded $15 million for the uranium. “The money helps,” he said. “But the most important thing is belief. Your men must believe in you.”
Jannati leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “You and your men are religious, yes? Faithful Christians of some type?”
Cyrus stared at the general, who perched precariously on the edge of the crate. The Iranian was more perceptive than he’d realized. “That’s correct,” Cyrus replied. “We believe in God.”
“Yes, I suspected as much.” Jannati raised the bottle of cognac and took another swig. “Tell me something else, Mr. Black. What’s in the aluminum cylinder that your men unloaded from the aircraft a while ago?”
Cyrus jumped. The question had come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t get a very good look at the thing, but it seemed familiar. You placed a similar device at the Kavir site before the nuclear test, didn’t you?”
Damnation, Cyrus thought. He’d hoped that the Courvoisier would distract Jannati from any discussion of Excalibur. “My apologies. I thought I explained all this in our previous meetings. I have another client I’m not at liberty to reveal, another government that’s very interested in nuclear testing. They paid me to install and monitor the scientific instruments at the test site. The data collected by the instruments will help this client advance its own nuclear program. Your commander in chief approved this provision when we made our agreement.”
“Yes, he was a bit desperate, wasn’t he? He would’ve agreed to anything as long as you gave him the uranium. Our own enrichment plants weren’t producing the fuel fast enough, and he was under a great deal of pressure to conduct a test this year.” Jannati covered his mouth and belched. “But now the situation is changed. My superiors have instructed me to ask a few questions about your scientific instruments.”
Cyrus was alarmed, but he kept his voice steady. “Certainly. What would you like to know?”
“Well, first off, why are you installing additional instruments now? We’re not planning any more nuclear tests.”
Cyrus nodded. He’d hoped to avoid this confrontation, but that was impossible. General Jannati had become a threat, and all threats to the Redemption had to be eliminated. Cyrus stepped toward him. “The
explanation is simple.” He extended a gloved hand. “Come with me, General. I think you’ll find this fascinating.”
Jannati swayed on his crate, grinning blearily. “What? You want to go somewhere?”
“Not very far. Just a few steps outside.” Cyrus placed his hand on Jannati’s back. After a moment’s hesitation, the general shrugged and let Cyrus guide him out of the hangar.
Once they were outside, they turned left and walked alongside the foot of the mountain. About four hundred yards west of the hangar was a stretch of flat, sandy ground. Several weeks ago, while the True Believers had been preparing Excalibur for the Kavir test, some of Cyrus’s men had borrowed a bulldozer from the Iranians and dug a thirty-foot-deep hole in the sand near the base of the mountain. Then they’d borrowed a crane to lower a large steel chamber into the cavity. Finally, they’d refilled the hole, but left a tunnel in place so they would still have access to the buried chamber. Cyrus had told the Iranians that he was installing a monitoring device that would measure the seismic echoes from the Kavir test, but that was a lie. The impact chamber would be the final resting place for the Russian X-ray laser.
Cyrus escorted Jannati into a trench that ran down to the mouth of the tunnel. The entrance was a rectangle braced with timbers, about twelve feet high and eighteen feet wide. It looked like the entrance to a two-car garage, except for the low wall of sandbags. Nicodemus and two other True Believers stood in front of the dark rectangle, cradling their carbines. Cyrus gave a signal to Nico, raising two fingers in the air. Then he turned back to Jannati. “This X-ray laser is almost identical to the one we placed at the Kavir site, but it was built by the Russians. They copied the American prototype.”
The general nodded drunkenly. “What did you say? A laser?”
They walked into the tunnel, which sloped downward like a steep ramp. Nico followed them, turning on his flashlight. “An X-ray laser,” Cyrus repeated. “It converts the radiation from a nuclear explosion into high-energy laser beams.”
