Ammon glanced at her again, then reached over for her hand. He took her fingers and squeezed them gently. “Mom, you are strong enough to do this.”
Sara didn’t answer.
Ammon gestured to the back. “Luke is strong enough. I am strong enough too. We’re going to get through this. I promise you, we will.”
She turned toward him, and for an instant he saw her for what she was, a frightened little girl. “I love you, Mom,” he told her.
She nodded and pressed her lips together. “Thank you, Ammon.”
“It’s going to be okay, Mom. It really is.”
She squeezed his fingers, then pulled her hand back and looked ahead.
Behind them, Luke was reading from a small set of red, military-issue scriptures that had belonged to his dad, the last thing he had taken from his father’s bedroom dresser before walking out of their house.
Twenty minutes passed in silence. Then, without explanation, Luke started reading aloud:
“And I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land; and ye shall know that it is by me that ye are led.
“Yea, and the Lord said also that: After ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that I, the Lord, am God; and that I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction.”
There was peaceful silence for a moment.
“Cool,” Luke finally said.
Ammon nodded slowly.
For the first time in many days, Sara’s smile was genuine.
Downtown Chicago, Illinois
Azadeh Ishbel Pahlavi looked out through the dirty windows of the downtown office building, a five-story brownstone off Cage Park and Garfield Boulevard. The carpet under her feet was dirty, the walls cracked, the furniture worn, the wooden desks cluttered with papers and phones. There were a few pictures hanging haplessly on the wall but very little other decoration or office cheer.
Azadeh, trying her best to fit in, had taken on American fashion and was wearing a black skirt, white sweater, and leather belt. But she also wore a scarf covering most of her beautiful hair. A simple silver chain hung around her neck.
The American woman, a low-ranking member of the organization that had brought her to the United States from Iran, seemed friendly, but Azadeh didn’t know. She was a stranger, after all, and Azadeh was constantly on guard.
Everything around her was so unfamiliar: the smells, the heavy sounds of traffic, the many different colored faces,
the men who weren’t afraid to stare, the towering build-
ings, the food, even the tacky feeling in the air.
She truly was a stranger. She was in a strange land.
A crushing wave of homesickness welled inside her. She missed her village. She missed her father. She missed her people and her home. She missed speaking Farsi, the eloquent words and velvet sounds of her native tongue. She missed the food, the great mountain that towered over her village, the peaceful wail as they were called to prayer, the woolen prayer rugs, the dark eyes of little children watching the Ayatollahs rise to speak. She missed it all, and, listening to the strange sounds that emitted all around her, she felt her heart begin to tear.
She tried to fight the feeling, but it seemed her faith was set to fail.
She thought of the short walk she had just completed along the sidewalk in Chicago, the angry stares and hurtful names. She did not know the words, but the sound of cursing was universal, and she knew that the hateful expressions had been directed at her. The Americans, perhaps warm and welcoming in another time and place, definitely had their ideas of Eastern people now. The fact that she was Persian, the fact that she was fleeing an oppressive regime, that fact that she was a victim, the same as they were, none of that mattered anymore.
She felt a single tear begin to well and quickly wiped it away. She didn’t want to start crying now, not after all she’d been through. She wasn’t about to let it out. Not here and not now.
She took a breath and held it, fighting the homesickness, then forced herself to smile.
* * *
Balaam stood beside the young woman, whispering his evil thoughts into her mind. His voice was soft and smooth and tempting as he tried to draw her in. He had learned she wouldn’t listen if he screamed, so he talked tenderly, gently, his voice like dry honey, sweet but slightly grainy against her ears.
Azadeh was a trophy. He wanted her so badly he could hardly look at her. So he gave his best effort, concentrating all his skill. “They hate you,” he whispered softly. “They will always hate you. They’ll never forgive your people for what they have done!”
“But it wasn’t my people,” Azadeh countered in her mind.
Balaam kept his logic simple, his entreaties understandable, even reasonable. “It doesn’t matter. They are not smart enough to know the difference. All they see is the color of your skin and the darkness of your eyes. To them, you people are the same now, and they hate you all the same.”
Azadeh hesitated, her eyes falling to the floor. The woman from the rescue agency stared at her, her smile deceptively bright. Reaching out, she placed her hand on Azadeh’s shoulder, but the girl drew back instinctively.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked her. “You look like you might not be feeling well.”
Azadeh looked up with uncertain eyes. The woman spoke so quickly. All a jumble. All confusing. Why did they all talk so fast? It was impossible for Azadeh to understand them. She shook her head in despair. Yes, the woman appeared to be friendly, but Azadeh didn’t know . . . lots of people came across as friendly when they wanted something from you. And everyone wanted something. Everyone had an agenda.
“So does she! ” the thoughts continued in her head. “The world is full of enemies. Haven’t you learned anything? You are completely friendless here.”
* * *
Lucifer stood beside the angel Balaam, observing his work. The Great Deceiver wasn’t a genius, even he knew that. (If he was so smart, how could things have turned out so poorly for him?) But he was old now, and experienced, and he had mastered his tragedies to a perfect art. He was a raging wolf with bloody teeth—there was no heart he wouldn’t shatter, no lie he wouldn’t tell to bring these mortals down—but he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, soft and inviting and so easy to believe. Seven thousand years of practice had shown him that such subtlety was the only way that some of the mortals, especially the young and innocent, would let him get close enough to really get inside their hearts.
“We have to do more than simply tempt them!” Lucifer often shouted to his flock. “Many times you can do far greater damage by whispering discouragements in their ears.”
“Why, God, if you love me, have you not blessed me when I needed you so? Why have you denied me the one thing that I need most?”
“Why, God, if I am worthy, do I continue to fail? I have done everything that I could think of, everything in my power, and yet I continue to fall short.”
“Why should I trust you? Why should I even try anymore?”
“I am not worthy of this blessing.”
“I am not worthy of your love.”
“These are the lies that you must tell them! These are the deceits that they must hear!”
* * *
Remembering his words, Balaam glanced anxiously toward the master, then leaned toward Azadeh and kept on whispering in her ear.
“This woman doesn’t care about you. She might pretend, but it’s not real.”
Azadeh looked around, confused. No . . . that couldn’t be. The woman seemed so nice.
“Don’t believe it, you fool. Do you really think she wants to help you!”
Azadeh took a step back, looking around the cluttered office. Everything was so unfamiliar, so uncomfortable.
“This will never be your home. No one here will ever care about you. The last person who ever lo
ved you was your father, and your father is dead. You are alone now, by yourself, and you will never have a friend!”
Azadeh shook, fighting the depressing thoughts in her head. “No, it will work out. I have my faith. I have my dreams.”
“No!” the angry voice hissed. “You will never feel at home here. You will never be happy. You will never feel joy again.”
Balaam circled around her, his lips pulled back in a frown, his dark eyes glaring at her as he hissed from ear to ear. Then he stepped in front of her and stared into her face, taking in the long hair and slender arms. He hated all her beauty and the light inside her soul. He could see it. He could feel it. And it made him hate her more.
He had been waiting for these young ones for more than seven thousand years. He remembered Elizabeth and her brothers and all the things that they had done. He remembered them. He hated them. And the only thing he wanted was to reach up from his pit and pull them down into despair.
So he leaned toward the young woman and continued talking in her ear. “They will always hate you. You will never be happy.”
He ranted on and on.
Lucifer smiled at Balaam as he listened. When it came to words of gloom and discouragement, this dark angel was pretty adept. Not all of the mortals would listen to such thoughts, but many of them would.
Staring at her, the Dark One had to wonder.
Would Azadeh listen to his angels? Could they drag her into hopelessness?
Chapter Five
The United States ramped up for war. No way would the country sustain a nuclear attack on its capital and do nothing about it. How could a quarter of a million people be killed, half a million left sick or wounded, a million more displaced, most without home or shelter, and the world not expect the United States to respond?
The Secretary of State eventually made it to Raven Rock. A few other cabinet members followed, then a couple of senior members of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sitting around the large conference table at the back of the Command Center, the remaining members of the government heard the cries for revenge.
They knew they had to act.
As a formal policy, retaliation didn’t make a lot of sense. By definition, it happened after the policy of deterrence had already failed, and it lost a lot of punch with the policy makers who were far more focused on preventing the attack in the first place than in going after blood sometime after the fact. But as a practical matter, in the real world of human emotion, which is where the most critical decisions of nation-states have always been made, the thirst for blood was simply too powerful to ignore.
The first thing the acting president did was order all U.S. forces overseas to return to the States. The military began to withdraw. From the Middle East and Southern Asia to most of Europe and the horn of Africa, the U.S. pulled back its troops. In the greatest military redeployment ever undertaken, thousands of aircraft, military as well as commandeered civilian airliners, began crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, ferrying U.S. troops and their equipment home.
The world watched in amazement, almost holding its breath.
Why was the U.S. pulling back from the fight?
To most, the answer was obvious.
* * *
Once the redeployment of the U.S. military forces was under way, the Raven Rock commanders turned their attention to the Office of Nuclear Forensics.
The key to a successful WhiteWolf operation was to properly identify who had attacked the United States. The organization tasked to do this was located in central Maryland. Small and little known, the Office of Nuclear Forensics (ONF) was suddenly the most important intelligence unit in the world.
Millions of people would live or die, depending on what ONF found.
* * *
By 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency was a broken organization desperately looking for redemption. It had been roundly thrashed for failing to prevent the September 11 attacks, then suffered an even greater hit to its credibility when it provided inaccurate intelligence regarding the threat of weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq.
In the following years, the agency faced an even more critical issue over nuclear proliferation. However, it quickly realized that nuclear forensics—the science of identifying and tracing the unique signatures of nuclear materials to their production sources—could provide the key to preventing a nuclear weapon from being transferred to a terrorist organization or hostile nation. Knowing that weapons-grade enrichment processes differ from one facility to another, nuclear forensic scientists believed they could identify the radioactive fingerprints left behind from a nuclear attack, in much the same way as it was possible to identify the perpetrator of a crime based on DNA evidence.
A small Office of Nuclear Forensics, code-named Snapper, was set up and tasked with a nearly impossible job: to successfully sample, define, identify, and isolate the unique characteristics of any nuclear material produced by a hostile government.
Russia and all of her former republics, China, Israel, North Korea, India, Iran, and later Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Afghanistan, all were suspects who were added to the list of targeted governments from which Snapper tried to collect nuclear material samples. It proved extremely difficult, and in some cases virtually impossible, to collect viable samples from all of the sites, for Snapper had to rely on HUMIT, or human intelligence (i.e., foreign agents), to get the job done. Still, the working group was remarkably successful. Once a sample had been collected, the nuclear forensic specialists began the painstaking and time-consuming process of identifying and coding the fissile material, making it impossible for that foreign government, at least, to become an anonymous dealer of nuclear-weapons-grade material or nuclear bombs.
After the nuclear detonation over D.C., the small group of scientists inside Snapper worked literally twenty-four hours a day. Air and ground samples had to be taken from the bomb site, the material had to be broken down and analyzed, coded, and then matched to the existing database. The supercomputers, some of the most powerful in the world, spun through the computations, a billion calculations every second.
When they got their initial results, the director of Snapper shook his head in disbelief. “Do it again,” he demanded. “That can’t be right.”
“We think it’s right, sir,” his subordinates answered confidently.
“Do it again. I’ll give you another day.”
“Another day! We need another week!”
“You have another day! I want the answer. Get to work!”
Back to the site of the destruction. More samples taken. More frantic work. Thirty hours later, they had the same results. There was absolutely no question where the bomb material had come from.
The scientists took it again to their boss, then stood back and watched as another shock wave blew through Raven Rock.
The nuclear weapon detonated over Washington, D.C., hadn’t come from North Korea or Iran or Syria or any one of half a dozen countries the United States would have willingly bombed back to the Middle Ages.
The bomb that destroyed D.C. had come from Pakistan.
Pakistan. The nation’s closest ally in Central Asia.
Not Jordan, not Tajikistan, not any of the former Soviet states.
Pakistan. The only nuclear power in the region with a pro-West and democratically elected (if only barely) government.
Pakistan. One of the United States’ only friends.
The brains inside Raven Rock realized that although a group within the Pakistani government may have provided the weapon, they couldn’t have acted alone. And the Americans weren’t completely clueless as to what had been going on. For years the CIA had been tracking the Pakistani scientist who had been working with one of the princes from the House of Saud.
Though they couldn’t prove it, they were certain the attack had been coordinated and financed by the new king of Saudi Arabia.
And he surely had more weapons. This was not the end of his game.
Twenty
-four hours after Snapper provided the nation’s new leaders with their results, the orders were given.
Five nuclear warheads were targeted for the capitals of Riyadh and Islamabad.
Before sending nuclear-tipped warheads from the ICBMs buried in the barren plains of North Dakota, and from the hidden nuclear submarines a hundred miles off the coast of Oman, the provisional government inside Raven Rock warned the nations of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to evacuate their capitals. They would give them three days; then the missiles would fly.
Three days to evacuate their cities.
Just enough time for the rest of the world to go insane.
Israeli satellites watched as Iran began to fuel its long-range missiles. The United States, China, and Japan watched as North Korea did the same thing. India went to the highest level of alert. The entire Middle East sat on the edge of a razor—Hezbollah soldiers moving to the southern Israel border; Hamas (or what was left of them after the previous nuclear attack against Gaza) declaring open war against Israel from the northern Gaza strip; Jordan and Syria forming an alliance and moving most of their military forces into Lebanon and the Golan Heights; Egypt declaring (to everyone’s amazement and despair) that they had developed their own nuclear warhead and would conduct an underground nuclear test; Chechan rebels attacking again in Moscow; twenty million Muslim citizens rioting throughout Western Europe’s streets.
The list of crisis locations was pages long: a hundred years’ worth of pent-up hatreds, imagined grievances, hostilities, jealousies, and darkening evil bursting like a rotted egg, the poison and decay finally rupturing the fragile shell.
Iran fired first, bent on reaping revenge upon Israel for attacking their fellow Shiite brothers in Gaza. For years the Iranians had threatened to wipe Israel off the map and they knew this would be their best chance to take their shot.
When Israel detected the Iranians preparing their long-range missiles, they launched their own missiles in a preemptive attack. Forty minutes later, the missiles passed each other in suborbital space. The difference between the outcomes was the fact that Israel had spent twenty years and more than five hundred million dollars on a missile shield defense. The Green Pine search and fire control radars saw the incoming Iranian missiles. The Citron Tree Battle Management Command and Control Centers targeted each of the seven warheads. High-altitude Arrow missiles killed the first four. The three remaining missiles penetrated Israeli airspace. U.S. Patriot missiles went after them once they had descended below 50 kilometers. Two of the remaining nuclear missiles were defeated, leaving only one to get through. Its target was Tel Aviv, but it had been knocked off course, missing the city by almost eight miles.
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