The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (8 page)

He could have worn the lead tunic under his clothes as the Jew had instructed. But his cousin, the doctor, had informed Kolabi that other radiation had already taken its toll. He felt his way down the ladder, turned to the cart and removed one of the new fixtures from its packing. The fixtures were manufactured in Russia. How the Israelis intercepted the shipment, he didn’t know. He did know these fixtures were heavy. The explosives, detonators, and radioactive cores—small but powerfully destructive—added extra pounds.

Kolabi hefted the fixture onto his right shoulder and struggled back up the ladder. One more level. He must finish. Tonight damnation would erupt throughout the Fordow facility. All four levels with the new, lethal light fixtures—three above and one below the banks of centrifuges on the level under his feet—would be destroyed. The Jew believed the reinforced concrete floors would breach under the power of the massed explosives and the resulting radioactive contamination would make Fordow uninhabitable for the life of a thousand suns.

He would be here to feel the eruptions, to watch the panic. Perhaps he would die tonight instead of in a few months, weeks. But he must be here. The ayatollahs were no fools. Anyone who did not report for duty or who left early would be suspect. They and their families would be judged without trial. If mercy reigned, those poor souls would spend the rest of their lives wasting away in a labor camp. But mercy seldom reigned. No. Kolabi would be here, protecting his family. Their future was also protected, the funds provided by the Jewish agent safely and secretly invested in a chain of food markets.

Kolabi completed installation of the light fixture, checked the wiring once more, flipped the switch to activate the timing mechanism, and hobbled back down the ladder.

One more level. Freedom called him on.

11:10 p.m., Abadan Oil Refinery, Iran

Colonel Avi Migdol released the four clamps holding the back panel in place. He pushed on the lever and cracked the panel open. Light filtered into the belly of the oil tanker truck, barely denting the impenetrable blackness they suffered through for the last several hours. The hazmat suits were claustrophobic, holding temperature and moisture against their skin, soaking their uniforms. But their respirators kept them alive during the long drive from Turkey, and the suits protected them from the burns their skin would otherwise suffer from the oil residue that coated the tanker’s interior.

Colonel Migdol had twenty soldiers at his back. Sabra, mostly. Field-tested, hardened, combat veterans. More importantly, for all of these men this assignment was a calling, a moment of divine intervention, an answer to whispered prayers, and the chance to avenge a lost loved one. They may die. But they would not fail.

Peeking through the opening in the rear panel of the oil tanker, Migdol watched the outside darkness for moving shadows. He slipped the visored hood from his head, held his breath, and listened. Still and quiet. He held up a gloved hand, keeping his soldiers in place. The colonel eased the back panel farther away from the truck’s body, just enough that he could slip through the opening and drop to the ground outside.

In the shadow of the tanker’s belly, Migdol’s black hazmat suit was invisible. In a squat, he pulled apart the strips of Velcro, and the top of the suit dropped around his waist. The Uzi was strapped against the black Kevlar vest on his chest. For a heartbeat, Migdol held the machine gun close to his heart, remembering why he was here. Then he turned its barrel away from him. Time to go to work.

He swung the Uzi in an arc as he quickly swept a three-sixty circle. Nothing moved. Off in the distance, the sounds of the refinery were distinct, carrying through the silence. The overnight shift, which kept the refinery’s pumps moving, the kilns and crackers cooking up more Iranian crude, paid no attention to the tanker trucks parked in this far corner of the refinery.

Migdol motioned with his left hand, his eyes ever searching the distance where he knew the workers toiled. Two soft, barely discernible thuds. He edged along the length of the tanker’s body as more soldiers dropped out of the belly of the beast. Certain of his cover, Migdol pulled apart the Velcro on the legs of the hazmat suit. He was free. Soggy, but free. He moved farther along the bottom of the truck until he came to the end of the shadow. He knew his men were behind him. It was his duty to lead.

The colonel and his men were alike in many ways—born in Israel, career soldiers in a nation of reservists, trained in stealth and destruction. And each had a personal reason to exact this revenge. Migdol’s mother and father were on the way to market, on the Egged bus to Kiryat Shmona. The bombers came across the border from Lebanon, with Russian weapons and Iranian explosives. Twenty-eight were murdered—blown apart or burned, no one knew for sure. There wasn’t much left to determine how they died.

Avi Migdol joined the army that day. He trained and waited. He fought in Lebanon and waited some more. Tonight the waiting ended.

Far southwest of Tehran, along the northern edge of the Persian Gulf and hard against the border with Iraq, the oil refinery of Abadan was Iran’s largest. Over 320 thousand barrels of oil flowed through its pipes and onto tankers every day, only half the amount that it did before the West imposed economic sanctions on the recalcitrant regime. Even so, the oil pumped from Abadan and Iran’s five other major refineries was the life’s blood of the staggering Iranian economy. Without the income from this oil, even more Iranians would suffer. Without the hope that someday these refineries would return to full capacity, the new president, Hussein Rakhsha, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Ghorbani, would be in greater risk of losing their death grip of fear and reprisal. Iran could fall.

Migdol’s team of demolition experts carried a new generation of phosphorous chemical explosive, like napalm on steroids. Once the charges were in place, the sequential detonations would build, one upon the other, sucking the Iranian oil into an expanding conflagration that would melt the metal catwalks and leave the refinery a molten, smoking disaster. Another assault group was at Bandar-e Abbas tonight, the nation’s third-largest refinery, with the same mission. They were the only two refineries on the Iranian coast, but accounted for more than forty percent of the nation’s oil capacity. Two parts of what Migdol surmised was a larger plan—a plan to destroy the government of Iran and its capacity to pose a significant threat to Israel.

Tonight was the night he had waited for.

Migdol knew exactly where he was in the refinery. He had memorized every pathway, tank farm, and building. He scanned the landscape, the narrow spires of metal chimneys and ductwork illuminated by hundreds of bare red and white lightbulbs, large pipes sidling through the spires and catwalks like an endless, giant gray snake. No alarm—no running feet, no shouting voices. Only the rhythmic clanging of chains holding the tanker ships at anchor in the gulf.

He pointed right, and seven soldiers padded off, skirting the pools of white and red light, moving to the refinery’s edge nearest to the harbor. Migdol watched their backs and tilted his head to the left. Seven more melted into the night toward the far eastern fences—three demo experts, two snipers, and two gunners lugging Dror .30-caliber machine guns. That team needed to be on time. They were the fuse lighting off the chain reaction of the explosives that would rip through the refinery from east to west. If they acted too soon, some of his men would get fried before they could escape. Too late, and all of them would be exposed in their most vulnerable position.

Migdol patted his chest, pointed forward, left the lee of the truck body, and double-timed it across a gravel berm that fell away into a dirt ditch, part of the dugout surrounding one of the refinery’s storage tanks. A forest of these circular tanks ran along the northern flank of the refinery, each one surrounded by a square, sunken, earthen enclosure. Blowing the storage tanks would ignite an incredible fire, but the Israeli commandos were there to destroy the refinery, not simply to torch fuel tanks. Migdol and his men used these massive foxholes as cover, scrambling up and down the sloped sides as they made their way to the center of the refinery, where the cracking ovens were located—also where most of the refinery’s workforce concentrated.

The demolitions experts in Migdol’s squad worked deftly. The explosive devices were contained in metal tubes that looked like, and were painted the same color as, the piping system running through the refinery. Moving through the labyrinth of pipes, the bombers would stop at a selected location, twist off the top of the device, and trigger a cellular receiver. Replacing the top, they attached the devices in a way that looked perfectly at home in the refinery’s maze.

With precision, the squad moved laterally, section by section, toward the western edge of the refinery and the gulf, snipers in advance on point and trailing behind to watch their backs. The heavy guns, with Migdol in the middle, were ready to unleash a lethal downpour on any Iranian who ventured near. The refinery crew was skeleton at best. No one noticed their passage.

Migdol caught a faint wisp of seawater through the pervasive oil smell as he stopped his team’s progress. The first squad, their explosives set, should be in the section to his west, some guarding the perimeter, some releasing the inflatables they hoped would take them to rendezvous with the still-submerged submarine lurking in the shallows of the Strait of Hormuz, far off the shipping lanes. Migdol clicked the small, square microphone attached to his shoulder. One click came back, a pause, then another click. His men stood as a unit and moved rapidly through the shadows, joining the first squad just short of the ring road that surrounded the refinery.

All fourteen men were pressed down against an embankment, some looking forward, some looking back for the third and last squad—and any unwelcome intruders. Colonel Migdol trained his eyes on the light-and-shadow maze of pipes and catwalks, willing his mind to wait patiently for the click from the mic on his left shoulder.

Gunfire erupted at almost the same instant as floodlights sprang to life throughout the refinery, bathing the facility in a garish, faux daylight. Migdol heard the keystroke rattle of the Uzis and the deeper thump of the .30-caliber Dror machine guns, but the sound of his squad’s defense was nearly obliterated by a growing crescendo of automatic weapons, the sound of battle rolling through the metal thicket—and coming closer.

“Boats.” The first team scrambled up the embankment toward the shore while Migdol’s team ran toward the refinery compound, ten meters to a ditch and a berm, where they spread out and lay in the dark. Migdol stole a glance at his watch and then looked back into the tangle of pipes. Fewer bursts came from the Uzis. The fighting distant enough that Migdol could not see the gunfire flashes through the brightness of the light flooding the refinery. The sounds seemed to be fading.

He’s leading them away. Good man. Good men.

Migdol looked to the soldier on his right, held up his right fist with his thumb sticking up, and then pushed his thumb down as if pressing on a button. Or a trigger. For a long moment, the soldier held Migdol’s gaze, then turned to the touch pad in his hand. He tapped the screen. Tapped once again. Looked up at his colonel. Migdol nodded. The soldier tapped the screen for the third time, and the first of the explosions sent a ball of fire into the sky. Like an insatiable beast gathering strength and size, an all-engulfing tide of riotous flames and blinding, white light began flowing in Migdol’s direction. “Out. Now.”

The colonel lingered a moment, looking into the growing conflagration, turned to follow his men, and saw the demo expert to his right with his head down, the touch pad still in his hand. Migdol scrambled to his right, grabbed the soldier’s shirt, and pulled him off the ground. “Out!”

There was no more gunfire. Only the birth of a second sun, this one on earth, and coming closer. Migdol and the soldier ran hard, crossed the ring road, and sidled through the cuts in the perimeter fence. They sprinted across a gravel flat and each rolled over the gunwale into one of the waiting inflatables, which immediately pushed out into the dark waters of the Persian Gulf.

Seated in the back of the inflatable, his legs up on the gunwale, Colonel Avi Migdol could feel the heat on his cheeks as the enormous fireball spread across the refinery and consumed everything in its path. Like his own, the eyes of any defender would be riveted to the conflagration. But Migdol didn’t see the flames, only the faces of the seven soldiers being incinerated.

11:10 p.m., Iran Central Bank, Tehran

They didn’t know each other. Once a month they were on the same shift. Different parts of the Central Bank of Iran complex, but the same late-night shift.

Aheem Tavana got an email the day before from the national library. A book he reserved was available. There was no book. Tavana, a bachelor, didn’t sleep that night.

Famid Hussein received the coded text message before he left for work that evening. Aliyia and the children were out shopping. There was no one to wish goodbye.

Bezalel Khomeini, of the famous name, was sitting in the Chitgar Forest Park by the Kan River—one of the few places in Tehran where a person could escape some of the city’s deadly air pollution—when he was Tweeted. Six words from his fictitious uncle, Rashid. He picked up the towel upon which he rested, rolled it up under his arm, and started walking to the bus stop.

The plan was simple, though none of them knew it. Each individual’s responsibilities were segmented, compartmentalized, and independent of the others. There were six in all—three coming in to work for the night shift; three finishing their shifts. Each of the six carried a piece of a device. Tavana, the building’s messenger, was the collector. As he made his rounds of the Central Bank—the huge, blue cube in the heart of Tehran—Tavana distributed and gathered up parcels and interoffice messages. Of all the parcels he collected that night, Tavana had four small packages tucked inside a canvas bag on a shelf under his cart. Those packages would not be offered up to the Revolutionary Guard for inspection.