by FX Holden
A week later Tamir had approached him. “The Syrians have complained to the UN about your little adventure.”
Amar had held his breath. “And?”
Tamir adjusted the yarmulke on his thin hair, something he only did when he was pleased with himself or making a joke. Amar relaxed. “They didn’t make a big fuss. Moaning through back channels, and some noise from the Russians who tried to claim you roughed up one of their officers.”
“That’s nonsense. They weren’t even there.”
“It doesn’t matter. There are no politicians talking about it in the Knesset and it didn’t make the papers. Our reputation at Camp Rabin just got a big boost and I made sure everyone there knows who led the raid. I don’t forget this sort of thing, Zeidan.”
He’d been true to his word. Soon afterward, Amar had been called to the IDF HQ at Camp Rabin in Tel Aviv and told he was being considered as successor to Gassan Tamir, should he be moved to other duties. “Keep your nose clean and your unit sharp,” he’d been told.
He’d done as he was asked by his Israeli leader, knowing his chance to do something truly important for his people would come one day. And two nights ago, that day had come much, much closer.
His contact had sent him a message through an encrypted dating app:
You are about to be promoted.
- What about Tamir?
He is moving on. You will be appointed commander of the Golani brigade this week. It is certain.
- Good news
Your time is about to come, Zeidan Amar. Lieutenant Colonel and Brigade Commander!
- I don’t care about that. I live for the day the Druze in Golan are free.
Not yet. But soon. You are clear about what is expected?
- Yes
Not yet? Amar was not blind. He’d watched the Syrians build up their army over the last five years with Russian armor, aircraft and troops, and Iranian missiles. He’d watched them roll into Turkey to successfully reclaim the land along their northern border, stopping only when they over-reached and ran into the wall of harm that was the US 1st Infantry Division. He’d watched and heard the Syrian leader hold speech after speech talking about Syria reclaiming its traditional lands in northern Syria and in the Golan Heights.
And he’d watched the Syrians, Russians and Iranians conduct their ‘exercises’ in the plains south of Hermonit. He’d read the intelligence reports on what they’d moved to their Southern Military District: 2,580 main battle tanks including 60 new generation Russian T-14 Armatas. One thousand two hundred armored personnel carriers, 1,200 artillery pieces of 120mm or greater, 50 guided missile launchers, 200 multiple rocket launchers. Twenty thousand ground troops, including an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps ‘Quds’ special forces battalion backed by Soumar mobile cruise missile launchers. Flying overhead, they would have at least four squadrons of Russian ground attack and multirole fighters, including 5th-generation Okhotnik and Felon stealth fighters.
Although he would be quickly reinforced by other units, against this Syrian and allied force the Golani Brigade could stand three battalions of heavy infantry, three companies of special forces and an electronic warfare signals company. But the IDF had learned the lessons of Yom Kippur, when it had faced 2,000 Syrian tanks with 200 in the Golan Heights, and it had already moved 500 Merkava main battle tanks and crews from its 36th and 7th Armored Divisions into depots just outside the DMZ.
Israel also had one other advantage in 2030 it had not possessed in 1973. The ability to bathe Damascus in nuclear fire. Amar doubted his commanders or the politicians in the Knesset would be willing to push the nuclear button just to defend 10,000 settlers and 1,200 square miles of ‘DMZ’ between Syria and Israel, but the option was there.
Your time is about to come, Zeidan.
As he kneeled on the floor of the bunker, Tamir’s shattered head in his hands, Amar knew now what his Syrian contact had meant. The groundwork for his promotion had been laid beautifully. Amar was primed to step into Tamir’s boots as commander of Israel’s elite Golani Brigade.
And the liberation of the Druze of the Golan was at hand.
White House Situation Room, May 16
US Director of National Intelligence, Lt. General (Retired) Carmine Lewis, looked around the White House situation room with a practiced eye. She wasn’t taking in the data on the banks of screens – she had already reviewed it before her staff loaded it up. She was counting the number and type of water glasses around the table. There was an entire White House staff, overseen by her own people, who prepared for these meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or NSC ExComm. Behind every meeting there were hundreds of analysts, data scientists, aides, specialists in every kind of intelligence from cyber to human source, but it was incredible how often her peers grumbled about only having still instead of sparkling water, or the temperature of the coffee, or the firmness of the fruit in the silver bowls sitting in the middle of the table.
It was their way of letting her know they weren’t enamored of this whole ‘ExComm thing’ and especially weren’t enamored of the idea that President Henderson had appointed her by National Security Action memorandum as its vice-chair. Not since the days of President Kennedy had a President convened an ‘ExComm’, hand picking certain members of the broader National Security Council and excluding others.
The idea had come from a conversation they’d had returning from one of the full-day NSC meetings. One which had felt more like three days.
“How many people were in that room today?” Henderson had grumbled as he rode back to the White House with Carmine for his next meeting. Which was another unpopular affectation. Henderson took the DNI with him everywhere lately and preferred to ride with her, rather than with his Chief of Staff, Karl Allen, or any of his senior advisors. It had started more than a few rumors, especially considering Henderson was a widower and she a divorcee. But he’d never once shown that kind of interest in Carmine. Not so much as a single lingering glance at her legs or a peek at her decolletage. She’d done nothing to confirm or deny the rumors, knowing that the uncertainty gave her a modicum of additional power in DC that she might need to leverage one day. Being inside Henderson’s innermost circle without people daring to question her fitness to be there was a situation she knew wouldn’t last, but which she used every single opportunity to earn.
“Around the table or like, in the room, in the room?” she asked, smiling.
“Both.”
“Around the table, twenty-three. Used to be twenty-two, but you went and split out the Cyber Security Directorate from NSA and appointed a Director of National Cyber Security…”
“Your idea. And Tonya was your pick…”
“And she’s a fantastic pick. Or will be, as soon as she gets over the fact she’s sitting at the Big Table now and starts telling us what she really thinks.”
“Twenty-three? Remind me why Dick was there?”
“Special advisor on Food Security. You appointed him during the wheat dispute with China.”
“We had the Secretary of Commerce there. Why do I need them both?” Henderson was drumming his fingers on the window of the limo. “You add in all the aides and hangers on, there were fifty people in the room. If we get a fast-moving situation, we can’t manage it in a room with fifty people.”
“You have the Principles Committee,” she pointed out. “Just cabinet members, me and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”
“Better, but still too many. Every one of them brings their aides and we still spend half the time looking at damn slides or videos. I want the smallest group possible, no damn screens, just people I trust, who know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to say what they think about it.”
So ExComm had been born. Or resurrected, if you wanted to look at it that way.
In Kennedy’s time it had consisted of the President and his Vice President, LBJ, the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, the Attorney General and Kennedy’s brother, Bobby
Kennedy, the National Security Advisor, Director of the CIA and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
After some toing and froing, Henderson had settled on a similar group. His Vice President, Benjamin Sianni, Defense Secretary Harold McDonald, Secretary of State Kevin Shrier, Homeland Security Secretary Allan Price and his Chief of Staff, Karl Allen. The only military man in the room would be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Clarke. Carmine had looked over his ‘final’ list and raised her eyebrows.
“What?” he’d asked.
“That’s a lot of old white men in one room. You planning to sit around smoking cigars and drinking whisky at these things?”
“I want people there for their ideas and opinions, not their age, gender or skin color. And you’ll be there.”
“If you want ideas, you want Tonya Dupré. And not for her skin color.”
“I put Cyber Security in the room, every branch of the forces are going to be whining even more about being left out. Besides, I don’t know her well enough.”
“I vouch for her. You said you want ideas? This situation gets hot, you need someone in that room who has spent their time already fighting the next war, not the last one. It was her AI that revolutionized our All Domain Kill Chain capability.”
“That was her?” The All Domain Kill Chain was a long-held US military wish for an AI-supported system that would feed targets to long-range strike systems such as missiles, rockets and drones by combining and analyzing data from land, sea, air, space and cyberspace in real time. As a young programmer, Dupré had led the team which had created the AI that finally made it possible. One of the coders on her team had named it HOLMES, short for Heuristic Ordinary Language Machine Extrapolation System. The breakthrough HOLMES had enabled was that battlefield commanders, even soldiers, could give orders to HOLMES in plain language over a radio, and HOLMES could respond to them, also in plain language.
And when ordered, it could act. Instantly, and with prejudice.
He grunted. “Alright. But she sits there with those big moon eyes just watching everyone else talk, she’s out.”
Tonya Dupré had been Carmine’s recommendation for Director of Cyber Security, the agency newly created to coordinate the activities of the many disparate cyber defense and warfare arms of the US government – inside the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, Treasury, Defense Cyber Command, the CIA and FBI’s cyber security teams. A former white hat hacker, born of Colombian and African American parents, only 42 years old, she’d been a deputy director at NSA for eight years and no one knew cyber warfare better than she did. And she’d worked in two of the agencies her new directorate was put in the world to coordinate, NSA and US Cyber Command. But she was still a little overawed at having been pulled out of the trenches and sat at the mahogany table so quickly. Carmine was mentoring her. She’d either sink or swim, but she’d earned the chance to prove herself.
As Carmine stood fixing herself a cup of coffee at the machine on a side table, the others started filing in.
The VP, Sianni, arrived first. He’d taken the lead on the US response to the Syria-Turkey conflict, nudging President Henderson step by step into greater involvement. Defense Secretary McDonald was next, together with Admiral Clarke, fresh from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and both looking worried. For a Defense Secretary he was more a dove than an eagle, and tended to play to Henderson’s natural tendencies to caution. Right behind him was Homeland Security Secretary Price, an old college friend of Henderson’s who had followed him as Governor of North Carolina before taking on Homeland Security. He had only one string to his bow, and he played it with bulldog determination and monotony, ‘what’s in this for the USA’? Dupré came in next, and made a beeline for Carmine without saying hello to any of the others.
She grabbed a coffee cup and Carmine was glad to see it wasn’t shaking. But she wasn’t pleased at her first words. “What am I doing here, Carmine?”
Carmine flashed a sideways glance at her, putting cream in her own coffee. “You’re here because you need to be.” She put a hand on her shoulder. “Tonya, you run an agency of 300 cyberwarriors and coordinate the cyber intelligence collection activities of NSA, US Cyber Command, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. You can sit and drink mineral water and chew the fat with six crabby men and this old girl. Now get your ass away from this coffee machine and work the room.”
Carmine sat herself next to McDonald as he unzipped his folder and papers spilled across the desk in front of him.
“Busy morning, Harry?”
McDonald looked over at Clarke, who Carmine was glad to see was talking with Tonya. “Joint Chiefs want us to move Navy and Air Force to DEFCON 2 in the Middle East.”
“That Iranian sub?”
“The nuke on that Iranian sub,” he said. He looked up from ordering his papers and shot her a glance. “Damn, is there nothing you don’t hear about before me?”
“I heard it’s not definitive.”
“Israel gets wind of it, it won’t matter. They’ve already got half the Syrian army running exercises on their eastern border. They’ll take no chances.”
At that moment Henderson walked in with his Chief of Staff, Karl Allen. Allen was an attorney by trade and had been a Commerce undersecretary in the last government. He and Carmine had an uneasy relationship since a lot of the discussions Henderson would normally have taken with his Chief of Staff – like the composition of ExComm – he was now taking with Carmine. Uneasy, but not hostile – yet, she reflected.
Henderson fixed himself a coffee and sat down. “Welcome to ExComm. Before you ask, yes, we are being recorded. If that changes how freely you will speak in this room, then I don’t know you as well as I thought I did and you are free to go.” There were a couple of chuckles, but no one left the room. A few shot glances at Tonya Dupré, but she was looking down at her own folder of papers.
Study the faces around you, not your damn briefing notes, Carmine silently urged her.
Henderson wasted no more time on pleasantries. “To the reason we are here … this morning, I received a phone call from the Prime Minister of Israel. He was a little worked up. I thought he was probably worked up about the fact there are about five thousand Syrian tanks with their engines idling on his eastern border, but I was wrong. He was much more worked up about a few Russian and Iranian ships sailing from Sevastopol to Syria. He claims the Iranian ships bound for Syria are carrying nuclear weapons, said he had asked his agencies to provide us with the proof, and he suggested we, and I quote, ‘coordinate our response to this new threat’. He’s asked us to help with a naval blockade in the Mediterranean to prevent the Iranian ships reaching Syria. I told him obviously I took his request seriously, I would look into it and get back to him.” He looked around the room. “Which is why you are all here. CIA has been saying for months the Iranians have North Korean nukes. It looks like the Israelis have reached the same conclusion and gone one further.”
“How soon can we get this Israeli intelligence?” Carmine asked.
“He said it’s on the way, via the usual channels, I assume.” He looked at Admiral Clarke. “What do we know about the Iranian navy being armed with nukes, Admiral?”
Carmine looked around the room. The lack of surprise on more than a few faces told her she and McDonald weren’t the only ones who’d been briefed about the Iranian submarine on their way to the ExComm meeting. But that submarine had been sighted in the Red Sea. The Israelis were saying there were nukes on the ships sailing with the Russian Black Sea fleet too?
Admiral Clarke looked at McDonald, who nodded, knowing what he was about to say. “Mister President. We just learned that Iran has sent one of its newest submarines into the Red Sea, and we believe it is armed with a North Korean nuke.”
Henderson frowned. “The Red Sea?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Well, forgive my high school geography, but isn’t the Red Sea on the opposite side of the Suez Canal
to the Mediterranean? The Israeli PM definitely said the Iranians he was worried about were sailing with the Russian Black Sea fleet, into the Mediterranean.”
“It’s a Blitz play,” Vice President Sianni muttered to himself.
“Speak up, Ben.”
“It’s a Blitz. A quarterback rush. They’re surrounding Israel with nukes. One in the Red Sea on that sub. Another in the Med, with the Russian fleet. Probably others with the Syrian forces on Israel’s Golan border. Israel is surrounded.”
“They’re planning to nuke Israel?!” the President asked.
“They would never,” Secretary of State Shrier exclaimed.
“They might, as a fallback strategy,” Tonya Dupré said, eyes still on her papers. “It’s part of an All Domain Strike.” She hesitated and looked over at Carmine.
Go on, woman, Carmine thought, nodding at her to continue.
“An all what?” Allen asked.
“All Domain,” Dupré said. “It makes sense now. We’ve been seeing a lot of chatter from Russian and Iranian hackers about a big strike coming up. They’re talking electricity grids, banking, communications…”
“But nuclear weapons? That would be mutually assured destruction … Israel would nuke Damascus to glowing green glass.”
“Nukes as a last resort,” Dupré said. “First, the cyber strike cripples Israeli comms and infrastructure. If that doesn’t get them what they want, they launch a land attack through the Golan and Lebanon supported by Russian air, sea and space assets. If Iran didn’t have nukes, Israel might respond by attacking Tehran and Damascus with nuclear weapons, but if Iran can place them right on their borders, then their anti-ballistic missile defenses are useless…”
