by JT Brannan
Emelienenko shook his head. ‘Our people took him before he was able to transmit anything of value,’ he said confidently.
Again, Dementyev was silent as he thought. He drank from his cup of black tea and considered the matter. ‘If that is so,’ he said after his mind had calculated the problem, the solution, the possible opportunities, ‘then perhaps we can turn his presence to our advantage.’
‘My thoughts exactly, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ the president agreed. ‘If the Americans are working here in our backyard, it will perhaps give us some additional leverage, will it not?’
‘It will indeed,’ Dementyev said, his own eyes glistening now, icy blue like his president’s. ‘It will indeed.’
The White House Situation Room, created in 1961 on the orders of John F. Kennedy, was actually a complex of rooms spanning over five thousand square feet of floor space within the building’s West Wing. Meetings were routinely held in three separate conference rooms, depending upon the number of people attending and the needs of the group in question.
That day’s meeting of the National Security Council was being held in the main conference room, and President Clark Mason sat at the head of the long, polished wooden table.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Pete Olsen noted how Mason leant back into his chair, as if to reassure himself that it was indeed higher-backed than all the others in the room, and winced at the resulting sight of the man’s smug smile.
Clark Mason was not going to be a good president, that much Olsen already knew; the man was vain, power-hungry and entirely egotistical. Closer to home, it had also long been the stated aim of the man to close down the Force One program in its entirety and send everyone involved to jail.
However, even though Mason was now the president, he hadn’t followed through on his threats, and Olsen could hazard a good guess as to why that was. For – despite his new role in the world – Mason was still scared that someone at Force One could create a scandal for him.
The Ku Klux Klan sex tape had been a put-up job by Bruce Vinson, who had recruited the girl in order to gain leverage over Mason. The threat of the tape had kept the man quiet for the past few months, although Olsen knew that he had once again been plotting against them with the help of Colonel Manfred Jones, Murphy’s predecessor as Chairman of the Joint Special Operations Command, and Noah Graham, Director of the FBI.
However, due to some clever work by Aoki Michiko – Cole’s seventeen-year-old daughter and Force One’s resident computer genius – Jones had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, and Graham had been forced to resign from the Bureau.
Things had been quiet since, and even when Mason had become president and had to be officially briefed in on the unit’s existence, he hadn’t exercised his presidential right and disbanded the group, as everyone had feared; and it was clear to Olsen that Mason still didn’t want that tape to see the light of day, so early in his presidency.
What would happen later, however – when Mason was settled in, his own men and women in place throughout the government and within its national institutions – was anyone’s guess. But Olsen believed that Mason’s battles with Force One were far from over, and he had been reluctant in the extreme to brief the man on the unit’s current operations, along with the identities of its operatives. But Mason was the president, and had a right to know; what he might do with the information was – for now at least – frighteningly uncertain.
As it was, for the time being the president had bigger fish to fry – chiefly, a much bigger fish that went by the name of Iran.
‘Air strikes,’ Mason said from across the table. ‘Pete, how are they going?’
Olsen took a sip of bottled water before beginning his brief. He was really earning his money with this new guy in charge, that was for damn sure. Mason had no military experience, and it showed. He’d declared war on Iran, without waiting to check first with his advisors to see if such a thing was even possible. If he’d bothered to attend some of the earlier NSC meetings, Olsen thought sourly, when the plausibility of invading Iran had been discussed at length – and had been rejected every time – then Mason might have held his tongue during that first presidential newscast, when he’d promised to destroy the Islamic Republic.
But Mason had never had an interest in such things before, and – now that he had been forced to engage with the subject – Mason had thought only of the politics, and not of the reality. He had merely wanted to appear strong to the world at large, to make sure they knew his name immediately.
There was nothing wrong with that, of course – but if you made threats, you had to be able to back them up, and invading Iran was going to be one tough sonofabitch. But Mason didn’t want to hear about the problems, only the solutions. America is the most powerful country in the world, Mason had told his military advisers, that’s what you keep telling me; now prove it!
‘Strikes are going well so far,’ Olsen announced to the council. ‘We’re operating from Incirlik airbase in Turkey, alongside British and French warplanes. We’ve taken out a considerable amount of Iran’s own air force and some of its military-industrial infrastructure.’
‘Are we ready for boots on the ground?’ Mason probed, and Olsen felt his eye give a nervous twitch in response.
‘The situation is little changed,’ Olsen said. ‘Iran is not an easy country to invade. Its surrounded by mountains on three sides, and ocean on the fourth.’
‘The Caspian Sea is to the north,’ Mason argued, but Olsen only shook his head.
‘The Alborz mountain range sits between the sea and Tehran,’ Olsen reminded everyone, ‘and it is all but impassable. And even if the mountains weren’t there, the Caspian is enclosed, there’s no way for our Navy to get in there with ships big enough to offload an invasion force anyway.’
‘So what options do we have?’ Mason asked impatiently.
‘Well, as you know, our land forces are in the process of building up both in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Olsen explained, ‘the idea being to launch a two-pronged attack on the northern strongholds from both the east and the west. Our best chance of success would be to attack initially from Iraq, and draw the Iranian land forces west, before hitting them with a secondary – in terms of timing, if not effect – strike from the east.’
‘From Afghanistan?’ Mason asked for confirmation.
‘Initially, yes,’ Olsen continued. ‘However, it would be more effective – and quicker – for our main invasion force to come from further north, in Turkmenistan.’
‘Okay,’ Mason said, ‘it sounds feasible, so why the delay?’
Olsen groaned inwardly. This was what happened when you let politicians get involved in military planning – they had no idea whatsoever about the practicalities.
‘The delay,’ Olsen replied evenly, ‘is for proper intelligence to be gathered from recon operations. There’s only so much that satellite images and signals intelligence can tell you. One of the major problems with invasion from the east are the Dasht-e Lut and the Dasht-e Kavir deserts. The second one is particularly nasty, its kavirs are like quicksand, a layer of salt covering thick mud. It would be disastrous if we were to take a mechanized brigade through that area without knowing if the desert could support the weight. That’s why we’ve got special operations forces there now, checking the lie of the land. But that kind of recon takes time, and that’s only one example. If we get into this thing too quickly, we’re going to have a lot of dead Americans on our hands.’
Olsen could see that this gave Mason momentary pause; dead Americans would be the last thing he would want, as it would do his chances of re-election no good whatsoever.
‘Pete’s right,’ Kathy Patterson said, and Olsen was pleased that Mason’s new Secretary of State was backing him up. ‘We can’t afford to take the risk with American lives. The public wants us to act, yes; but they won’t tolerate our boys and girls coming back from Iran in body bags for long. This is going to be a lot worse than Iraq, and
we’re going to suffer much more damage anyway; we really need to mitigate what threats we can, even if it means pushing the timetable back a bit.’
Olsen was impressed; as one of Mason’s appointees, he had been worried that Patterson might have been there merely to back up the president’s point of view. Luckily for the council, it looked like that wasn’t going to be the case.
‘And then there’s the weather,’ Olsen said next.
‘What about it?’ Mason asked impatiently.
‘It’s winter,’ Olsen said with an inward groan at the president’s inability to grasp even the basics of military strategy. ‘That means ice and snow, which will make some of those mountain passes all but impassable. Conditions like that are hard to fight in.’
‘They’ll have to fight in the same conditions too,’ Mason argued.
‘Yes sir, but they’re used to it. That’s their home territory at the end of the day, they know how to move and fight in it. They also know which places they can get through, which routes will be blocked off – another reason we need that elongated recon period, so that we have at least some of that knowledge before we go in ourselves.’
‘We invaded Afghanistan in October,’ Mason persisted.
‘Yes,’ Olsen agreed, ‘but winter hasn’t really hit by October. It was also designed to be over quickly – the first moves came on October seventh, and the Taliban regime was gone by the middle of December. This time, it’s already the middle of December, and – as we’re still awaiting UN support – it’s unlikely we’ll be able to start moving in before January, the height of winter.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It won’t be as easy as Afghanistan either, Iranian armed forces are far more professional, it’s a different prospect entirely. It’s going to take a lot longer, and if we attack too soon, a lot of the fighting will have to be done in less than ideal conditions.’
‘So what do you suggest?’ the president said angrily.
‘Wait until March,’ Olsen said. ‘We’ll have UN approval by then, our recon will be done, our troops will be trained and ready, and we’ll stand a much better chance of getting what we want.’
‘No,’ Mason said, discounting the idea immediately. Olsen had known he would, but he’d had to try. He couldn’t believe the arrogance of this man, completely unwilling to listen to the advice of his senior military advisor. It didn’t bode well for the future, he thought unhappily. ‘That is not acceptable,’ Mason continued. ‘From a political perspective, that’s too late. Right now, we have the support of about ninety percent of the world population, and things are never going to get that good again. We have allies everywhere, and almost every country wants in on the action. But the longer this drags on, the less support we’ll have. By March, most people will have forgotten what happened in November the year before, even something like this.’
Olsen seriously doubted that, but he recognized a kernel of truth in Mason’s argument. People’s attention spans were short, and the support an invasion enjoyed now might not still be there come March – which in turn would mean that the United States military would have to shoulder more of the responsibility for the attack itself. And whereas Olsen had nothing but the utmost conviction that his forces were the best in the world, he had to admit that he didn’t mind sharing some of the risk involved. If it meant less dead Americans on the battlefield, there might be some merit in it. The flip side of that coin, however, was that – as he’d just explained to Mason – a winter invasion was a much more difficult prospect, and a lot of American lives would almost certainly be lost anyway.
‘Waiting too long also gives the Iranians too much time to prepare,’ Mason added. ‘They can get their defenses in order, build up their forces, you name it. And that’s not to mention their potential nuclear capability. Our prior agreement with the regime shut things down, but you know as well as I that – in the face of an invasion – they might well spool things up again, and who knows how long it would take them to get a small nuke ready, something that could be used against us? And I’m not talking about on the battlefield, or in a missile, but in a suitcase, as a terrorist weapon. We already know that they’ll stop at nothing.’
Again, Olsen was forced to agree; the possibility was a real one, as was the prospect of the regime substantially increasing its chemical and biological weapons output. Factories producing such things were among the most important targets of the ongoing air strikes, but Olsen knew there might be other facilities that they still didn’t even know about. US intelligence was working with the Israeli Mossad, but there was still too little specific intelligence on the ground to be completely positive, and the Iranians’ prospective use of chemical weapons on the battlefield was a real risk indeed.
But these were exactly the sort of things that made invading Iran a bad idea – everywhere you looked, there were problems.
Some people felt that it would just be one hell of a lot easier to nuke the bastards and – despite his hatred of such weapons – a part of Olsen had to agree.
But he knew that such a monstrous move could never be taken. Even during a conventional invasion, there would be civilian casualties, that was unavoidable. But if the US – or any of its appropriately-armed allies – decided to launch a nuclear attack, then millions of innocents would die as a result. The regime would never allow the people to flee the cities, but would keep them there as human shields – and no democratic nation would accept the consequences.
Which left a land invasion, however impossible it seemed.
‘I understand, sir,’ Olsen said. ‘I’m just explaining the difficulties with a winter operation.’
‘Okay,’ Mason accepted, ‘point taken. But we need to get going as fast as we can. The clock’s ticking, and I want things to get moving as soon as this thing clears the UN. So make your plans accordingly, okay?’
‘Yes sir,’ Olsen confirmed.
‘We also have a political problem,’ Patterson interjected.
Mason turned to her with a raised eyebrow. ‘And that is. . .?’
‘Turkmenistan,’ she answered. ‘From a geographical point of view, it makes sense to use their territory. However, our relations aren’t the best. They didn’t suffer any major losses from the terrorist attack in London, and might not be inclined to help us. After all, Iran is a valued neighbor and they will be worried about the ramifications if our invasion doesn’t work out.’
This was another good point, Olsen knew; military strategy was one thing, but actually getting the political approval to launch land forces from Turkmenistan was something else altogether. He waited with interest to see what the president’s response would be.
‘The new oil pipelines mean that Turkmenistan and Russia have a good working relationship,’ Mason said, ‘and I think we will be able to use that.’
‘But Russia hasn’t offered us anything in the way of concrete support,’ argued Catalina dos Santos. She was right, too; despite being a signatory of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the US, China and Russia, that tripartite deal had been agreed under the old president, Vasilev Danko. The new man in charge, Mikhail Emelienenko, was a different character entirely, and his motives were at best unclear. He hadn’t been present in London – which set some suspicious minds onto the path of conspiracy theories – and had so far only offered words, but no actions.
What made Mason think he would use his influence in Turkmenistan to help them now?
‘He hasn’t even promised to back us in the UN, if this goes to the security council,’ dos Santos said, forcing the point home. ‘Our air force – and special ops – are already operating within Iran without a UN mandate, which hurts our legitimacy.’
Dos Santos was right about that, too; there was little doubt that the motion would be passed by the general assembly when Iran inevitably refused to bow to UN demands, but it was still unclear how things would play out in the security council after that. Olsen knew that Russia and Iran were strategic partners, but he had hoped that the London attack would have made
Emelienenko at least a little sympathetic to the American cause.
China had also thus far refused to promise cooperation on the issue, and Olsen – along with many members of the NSC – found it frustrating in the extreme that the other two members of the tripartite Mutual Defense Treaty had both failed to lend their support to the United States.
But, Olsen reminded himself, that treaty had been signed by Ellen Abrams, Vasilev Danko and Tsang Feng, none of whom were still in charge of their respective nations. Danko had retired through ill health, and Abrams and Tsang were both dead – the American president in the recent drone strike, the Chinese president during a military coup. The three men now in charge of the countries that had signed the MDT were a long way removed from those original signatories. Mikhail Emelienenko had proven himself to be an aggressive strongman in the Soviet mold; Chang Wubei – while not being as overtly dangerous – had thus far refused to hand back the Diaoyu Islands and Taiwan, which had been forcibly taken by China during the brief dictatorship of his immediate predecessor; and Clark Mason was a power-hungry politician whose ego would always come before the good of his country. None of their motives were clear, and the sheer opacity of the situation heralded ill omens for all.
‘You let me worry about the Russians,’ Mason said with a wry smile, bringing Olsen’s attention back to the table. ‘I’ve spoken to Emelienenko this morning, and we’re working something out. Once the security council meets, I’m sure he will give us what we want.’
‘And what will he get in return?’ dos Santos asked.
Olsen saw the angry glare Mason gave her, before softening his features with a smile. ‘You let me worry about that, Cat,’ he said kindly. ‘You just let me worry about that.’
Olsen watched as dos Santos turned to look at him across the table, and he could almost read her mind.
