The Lesser Evil

by Jim Magwood

  “Yeah. The book says they were fully capable of nuclear.

  No telling what’s on these, but, worst case…”

  “Oh, man! Any idea at all who sent them, Bob? Anything at all?”

  “No. These were supposed to have been scrapped, but who knows where anything went those days. It could be anyone. But, who’d have the guts to be shooting at Natanz? Or Esfahan? Those are Iran’s major nuclear development sites.

  Another Arab wouldn’t be doing it. We know Israel wouldn’t do it unless provoked. Would somebody just be trying to get something started out there?”

  “Yeah, could be, but who? On the other hand, think about Israel, Bob. Do you think they might have felt provoked, like you said, and pulled the trigger first? We know they’ve been sweating Natanz and Esfahan, a couple of other places, and the final developments out there.”

  “Yeah, that could be, if you wanted a scenario. But, I don’t know of anything they have in this area, the Gulf, and these sure didn’t come from Israel proper. Somebody floated those barges through the oil platforms to the north end of the Gulf without anyone waking up to them. I don’t think Israel could have gotten away with that. Besides, they’d likely fly in, don’t you think. That’s what they did in Syria a few years ago.”

  “No. They’d likely go with their rockets for an attack as far as Iran. They’d have to cross Iraq and all that. But, who knows? Listen, I’m going to get to the hot room right now.

  Hold on to those things tight, okay? Ring the hot room if anything changes. And pray nothing starts to move west.”

  “We’ve got it all on real time, Don, so we’ll be here for the duration.”

  As the rockets continued to move northeast, Bob and Carl, actually the whole of the Op Center, watched and kept calculating distances and times. They kept seeing signs of early warning devices coming alive as the missiles moved across the desert, and they saw some planes being launched.

  But, they knew the planes and gun batteries would be lucky to knock down missiles. They might be able to keep up with Israeli fighters, but they’d have no accuracy with skinny little birds going five or six hundred miles an hour.

  They saw the installations protecting the Esfahan and Natanz areas, even Tehran, light up. The missiles, though, had moved several miles apart immediately after being fired and then looked like they each drew their own line to their targets.

  That meant the defenders had to track and attack the three separately and had no chance of concentrating their defenses on just a single spot in the sky.

  “Bob, I’ve got a new triangulation,” Carl said. “If they don’t change, the lines apparently go directly to three sites, Esfahan, Natanz, and now Qom, or actually that base just outside it, Fardo. Unless the rockets realign a few degrees, it looks like they’re going to take out all three.”

  “Are you sure? Not Tehran?”

  “That’s where the lines go. Don’t know what’s going to happen ultimately, but that’s what they show right now. Right down the wires.”

  “How much do you think they’ll be able to take out?”

  “All depends on the warheads. They’re pretty good size bases, mostly underground and hardened, so conventional heads’ll cause a lot of damage, but it’ll be contained. Nuclear… That’s another ballgame entirely. That’d pretty much take all three places out for good. The Esfahan site, though, and Fardo—they’re just a few miles out of the cities with a few million people.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re not seeing anything hot from Israel, are you? Any signals at all?”

  “Nope, they’re quiet. Jeff’s been monitoring their broadcasts, and other than getting everything ready to move, nothing. From what we’re hearing, though, they could likely move pretty fast and with a lot of really big stuff—Jericho IIIs, probably. Maybe with some Popeye Turbos off the subs, too.

  Sea of glass, remember?”

  “All too well. And they’ve outfitted the F15s with long range travel equipment, but I don’t think they’d use them because of the flyover problems with Saudi Arabia and Iraq. If they’re going to go, they’ll go with the big stuff.” He paused, obviously deep in thought. “How much time, now?”

  “I figure it’ll all be over in about ten, fifteen minutes if they stay on the present tracks.”

  “Okay. Put out the warning to everyone to get their eyes and ears off the screens just before they arrive. We don’t want anyone getting themselves fried watching this take place. Any planes in the area?”

  “No, they were warned out immediately after the rockets took off. Everyone else close is under hard cover already.”

  “Okay. Start an earliest countdown at about five minutes so we can all be aware.”

  Within a few more minutes, Carl activated the countdown and then watched as three separate flares lit up his screen from the Iranian desert. It only took him another second to identify what happened and to announce, “They were nuclear. Esfahan, Natanz, Fardo? They’re gone,” and, within minutes, government offices around the world lit up.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Israeli Prime Minister Eli Yatom hung up the phone from the conversation he had been having with U.S. President Jeffery King, and sat back quietly, simply looking around the room at the other officials gathered. There wasn’t a sound, and every face registered shock. Within another minute, the entire State of Israel, which had not moved a muscle in any kind of offensive action while the attack had been going on, had gone to its highest state of alert and was ready for instant war, both defensive and offensive.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  In the days following the explosions, virtually every media office of any size in the world received a “You’ve Got Mail” notice with a message about the event. The message was simple: No one has the right to threaten anyone else with destruction because of ideological reasons. No one has the right to create weapons of mass destruction with the implication that they will be used unilaterally against any other nation. If the world will not band together to control rogue nations, especially against the use, or proliferation, of chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons, then individuals must take on that controlling function.

  CHAPTER 39

  Henry opened the box that had just been delivered and sat back, amazed, when he saw the stacks of obvious banking documents. This is impossible, he thought. There must be hundreds of them. How do these people get their hands on these things? They’ve got to have some of the most sophisticated machinery anywhere to be able to get through all the security that must surround stuff like this. What’s this—more than twenty or thirty of these big events now, and who knows how many little ones they may not even be broadcasting? He continued looking at the many documents and realized they were actual copies of banking activity records, with account balances, deposit and withdrawal amounts by date, and names and names and names.

  The names came from copies of documents used to open the accounts and they read like a who’s-who of the world’s society moguls and political leaders, with more than a few names of people much further down the list of respectability than the others. General Henri Forestierre, a major figure in military procurement with the French army; Senator Joshua Capri, senior senator from Utah; Roberto Blancard, a reputed drug dealer with ties to both Medellin and Paris; President Romulo Hande, the ‘butcher of Ethiopia’; three men who were senior leaders from the Ukraine; two Chinese leaders who were constantly haranguing the West for the decadence of their capitalistic ideologies; enough well known business leaders from around the world to build factories and start income producing ventures to support half the poverty stricken nations; names with criminal backgrounds that many government agents would dearly love to get information on; dozens of what looked like just regular people with much smaller accounts. Probably just folks trying to squirrel away some unnoticed funds for retirement, he thought.

  A number of names that he knew had supposedly clean backgrounds; never in the press for anything but ‘good’

  works; promoters of hum
anitarian efforts; politicians very close to ‘the top’; the very numbers of them was shocking as much as the names themselves. He looked at a list that had been included with the names of the actual banks that had been raided and realized that these few hundreds of people were just the tip of an iceberg. If all these people came out of just a dozen or so banks, what were the numbers if you could open the records of all the ‘secret’ banks, trust companies and so on? And the amounts of money? Unbelievable! Billions and billions!

  He punched his intercom and said, “Darla?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Another little copying job, please.”

  A moment later, his door opened and his assistant came in. She was grinning and swinging a pair of thin rubber gloves in front of her as she came to the desk, and he laughed.

  “Starting to come prepared?”

  “Well, I just presumed,” she said with a chuckle.

  “Yeah. I don’t imagine I’m going to be able to hold onto these for very long, so I’d better have copies to work from.”

  “Do you ever worry that these things are maybe going to come down and bite you someday? Whether there’s some bad guys out there that aren’t going to appreciate you putting out these stories?”

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that a few times. But, most of these are stories I’m not digging out of the dirt. I’m just reporting what’s already happened and what somebody else has given me. I can’t see how someone would take specific of-fense with me for just reporting. I’ve got a list of names in here that if I went to personally for a story, I can see where they’d likely be upset with me directly. But, just reporting what I’ve been given? Anyway, I hope not.”

  “Do you ever wonder if any of these people might be innocent of appearances? Might be getting set up or something?”

  “I’ve thought about that, too, Darla, but the materials in the packages have been pretty factual and detailed. I haven’t seen any maybes or guess work anywhere. A lot of signatures; pictures; recordings that have real clear voices on them. So far, I haven’t seen anything that I wasn’t clear about, myself.

  Nothing that I had concerns about.”

  “What about these things that are taking place now that look like civilians are taking up the vigilante work on their own? There are some where apparently innocent people have been caught in crossfires. Do you think this group you’re dealing with maybe has started some fires that we won’t be able to put out? Actions that really are wrong, and that are going to hurt people that are just in the wrong places?”

  “Hard questions, Darla, and, yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, too. Right now, I can’t answer you. Maybe, if you really think about it, we really should be taking some of these actions on our own. If the authorities can’t, or won’t do anything, maybe it’s not all wrong for citizens to take back the streets. It’s the way it used to be done—until we got civilized, anyway. But, yeah, if this civilian stuff starts to get out of hand, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, anyway, let me get started on this copying. Same?

  Two copies?”

  “Please.”

  She pulled on the gloves, carefully lifted the box and left.

  Henry continued to lie back in his chair and think about the comments and questions the two of them had thrown out.

  Though he really had grown somewhat concerned about the civilian actions taking place, he didn’t have an answer for the question. And he certainly did like the money swelling his personal accounts. For a moment, he thought, I’ll probably need one of those secret accounts of my own pretty soon. Then he sobered again and wondered where this was all going to go.

  Would it end, or possibly go on for years? Would it become something that even he thought would need to be stopped? Right now, he was quite firmly on the side of the group and knew they were doing things the authorities couldn’t do, or had been stopped from pursuing. He thought, Maybe these actions would spur the governments and authorities into reining in the evil themselves—what they should have been doing all along— except that we stopped them.

  CHAPTER 40

  Andre Becker, the President of Switzerland and a major banker himself, was on a conference call with Hiditaki Komatsu of Japan, John Coleman from Canada, Jeff King of the United States, and George Westman of Australia, and the subject of discussion was banking and security. Following the raiding of the Cayman Island banks the previous week, the world’s banking community had almost become paralyzed with fear. What if was the big question. They all knew the situation with the so-called private, or secret, banks, but what if the next round of attacks was on major banks that were supposedly conducting honest banking activities? With the amount of money that flowed through and between their five countries, these men were more than simply concerned—they were almost panicked. Although none of their countries had yet been targeted, the what if question was on the tip of their tongues.

  “So, I am assuming none of us has seen any signs of attack on any of our national banking systems? So far, it has only happened in the Caymans?” Prime Minister Komatsu received agreement from the others, then asked, “Are any of you doing anything in particular to prevent attack, or do you all feel your systems are secure?”

  Jeff King replied, “I, for one, don’t think there’s anything more we can do for security. If this group could break through the security in the Caymans, and they’re using virtually the same security systems that we are, even more so, how can we get any tighter? Andre, do you know of anything more we could be doing?”

  “No, really I don’t. Most of the secret banking groups don’t have much more, or different, systems than any of us have. Their main protection for clients is that they refuse to share any information with the banking world, or the authorities, most of them by country law. If this group could break through their security, then there’s really nothing else out there we could be doing. The only peace I have in this situation is that the attacks were only on banks that were known to be the truly secretive ones. No open and regulated banks were attacked.”

  “Do you have a figure, Andre, as to how much money was diverted?”

  “John, the best I have at this time is approximately thirty billion dollars, based on American dollars. We aren’t being told specifically, but that’s what we have from inside sources.

  What have all of you been hearing about the depositors from your countries that have been affected?”

  Jeff answered, “From here, Andre, our authorities have known fairly well who might have been involved as depositors, but just haven’t been able to pin anything on them.

  We’ve been watching these people carefully over the past week and have seen, to say it mildly, a lot of unrest. The truly gangster types have been having some purging of the troops as one is unable to pay another, and so on. There’ve been others from the worlds of business and/or politics, for instance, who’ve almost immediately had their “empires” collapse with the attendant heart attacks, etc. Nobody is actually admitting the losses, and presumably will not be able to, but we’re seeing some financial collapses.”

  “It is the same here,” Komatsu added. “We had one bank close it’s doors yesterday because of apparent loans that had been made to several depositors in the raided banks, and there are rumors of several businesses that are now completely financially destitute and unable to pay bills. It is not really any more than we suspected before, but to have, as you say, the rug pulled out suddenly, has caused a stir that we really were not prepared to handle. We do know, of course, that most of these investors were of the shadier types, but it was still a lot of money to have been removed all of a sudden.”

  “I agree, and one of the major fears we have is whether there’ll be more attacks on supposedly reliable banks. We know, as you all do, that there are people here who are illegally gathering and hiding funds, and, if they are exposed, we’ll deal with them at that time. But, many small individuals, presumably honest banking clients, are worried whether, as you said,
Hiditaki, their own accounts might be the next to be raided.”

  “You haven’t seen runs on any of your banks, though, have you, George?”

  “No, we haven’t, Andre. Not yet. But, if even one bank suddenly looks like it’s been attacked, I could foresee a major panic throughout the country—and I presume all of you would see the same.”

  “It’s what I’m most fearful of at this point,” Jeff King said. “I’m hopeful that, as you said earlier, Andre, the attacks have targeted banks of “lesser repute” and are going to be held to that. If, for any reason, this group decides to just go bad with this pirating—well, I hesitate to even dream of the results and chaos.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone has seen or heard any hints of this pirated money being put into circulation anywhere?”

  The answer to Coleman’s question was negative from all, and he added, “Probably, we wouldn’t even know if it happened. There are simply too many ways to put money into activity in the market place. You don’t think these people will open their own banking plans, do you?”