The Icarus Prediction: Betting it all has its price (25 page)

Royal Palace

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Arnaud de Rothchild, director of the Israeli Mossad, inspected himself in the full-length dressing room mirror in the guest quarters of the royal palace. His Milan-tailored double-breasted suit fit him like a glove, but the expensive haberdashery was scant comfort for a man who was about to be taken to the royal woodshed.

The guest quarters—like everything in the palace—was oversized and garish, up to and including the gold-plated faucets in the bathroom. It reminded de Rothchild of Las Vegas, and given his dislike of the gaudy, he would be relieved to put this place in the rearview mirror. But first, to business.

There was a tap on the door and de Rothchild sighed. Might as well get on with it.

He opened the door and a household aide dressed in traditional white Arab garb greeted him. Standing discreetly to the side was a uniformed guard of the household cavalry.

“His Majesty awaits,” said the aide.

De Rothchild nodded and followed the aide while the guard pulled up the rear. The Israeli looked at his watch and saw it was almost midnight. For some reason, the Arabs tended to take care of business in the dead of night. He presumed it was related to oppressive heat of the desert in the daytime.

After weaving through a labyrinth of corridors, they approached a set of large double wooden doors flanked by another pair of guards.

The aide led them through without knocking and into a reception office where two male secretaries were working on word processors. The aide nodded to them as they walked past, and then he gave a slight rap on the door and pushed through.

“Doctor de Rothchild to see you, Your Majesty,” announced the aide.

King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud, custodian of the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina and commander of the Saudi National Guard, rose from his teakwood desk in his private study and came around to shake de Rothchild’s hand.

“Welcome to Riyadh, Doctor de Rothchild,” said the king in Arabic. “I hope your accommodations are satisfactory.”

“More than satisfactory, Your Majesty,” replied de Rothchild, also in Arabic. “The prime minister sends his regards.”

A nod, then the king motioned to the sitting area of the study as he asked, “May I offer you some tea?”

De Rothchild hated tea, but to refuse would be discourteous, so he said, “That would be most kind.”

The two men sat next to each other, making small talk, and as a steward set out the tea service and an assortment of sweet cakes, de Rothchild took his stock of the octogenarian monarch. The old man still possessed a suppleness of mind, but his body betrayed the frailness of his health. He was an elderly statesman in an impossible position. A genuine reformer beset on all sides by corruption.

King Abdullah reigned because he was voted into power by seven thousand Saudi princes who, in return, demanded annual stipends from the royal treasury that siphoned off the lion’s share of the Kingdom’s oil revenues. Overlaid on this was the abject poverty that half the population endured. The population had become more restive in the wake of the Arab Spring.

And then there were the arch-conservative Wahhabi clerics who provided Abdullah with his ecclesiastical legitimacy to rule but in return demanded strict adherence to their brand of Sharia law—as well as their own stipends.

And, of course, there were Iran’s nuclear aspirations across the Persian Gulf.

Abdullah had launched a series of expensive domestic reforms in education and housing—even giving women the right to vote—but to bring them to fruition he had to possess the funding to underwrite the reforms while also paying the hordes of princes and the clerics their stipends. To the outsider it would seem impossibly absurd, but the royal treasury was strapped for cash as never before.

Abdullah was a man under siege, so when the steward finally withdrew and the door was closed, there was an awkward silence. Finally, the king said, “I thought we had a deal.”

De Rothchild took a deep breath and replied, “We did have a deal, Your Majesty. Still do, in fact.”

The king was uncharacteristically curt. “You were supposed to take out the Russian and Turkish pipelines. That, plus the Iranian embargo would keep oil prices well above $90 barrel while we brought the Khurais field online. In return, we agreed to supply Israel with its domestic oil needs and allow Israeli jets to use Saudi airspace to carry out your raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But when I tune in al-Jazeera, I see that Shamil Basayev has been ‘neutralized’ and the Turkish pipeline is intact, while oil prices have dropped well below $70 per barrel. What happened?”

De Rothchild took another deep breath. “We found Basayev, financed him, and provided logistical support for him to take out the pipelines. He, of course, never knew it was coming from the Mossad. The Russian pipeline operation came off perfectly. But we had no foreknowledge that the Americans would intervene so effectively in Turkey.”

“The Americans?”

De Rothchild nodded. “From various sources we have learned an American CIA team intercepted Basayev and killed him before he could detonate the Turkish pipeline. In a twist of irony, my own station chief Eli Manon, in Ankara was on the scene and lost his life trying to protect Basayev.”

“What? I had not heard of this.”

De Rothchild pursed his lips. “It is true, and this is not to go beyond your ears Your Majesty, but the prime minister also authorized me to undertake the assassination of the Turkish antiterrorist chief, Bulent Koksol, to muddy the waters.”

“Muddy the waters? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that from here I have to travel to Washington to mend fences. The Americans want to know why my station chief tried to kill one of their people. I will tell the Americans my agent went rogue with the Turkish antiterrorism director and had been bought off by Basayev, and I took swift measures to retaliate. I regret I have to besmirch the reputation of my own good and loyal agent, but to keep our deal under wraps it is necessary.”

There was silence as the king absorbed all that de Rothchild had told him. Finally, he spoke, “All that does not change the situation. The demands on the treasury have become onerous. It is imperative that oil prices return above $90 a barrel even after our Khurais field comes up to full production. The price of West Texas Intermediate fell below $70 this morning.”

De Rothchild nodded. “I understand. And I am now in a position to assure Your Majesty that oil prices will go well past $90 per barrel for a long time to come.”

The old monarch eyed him warily. “How can you give me that assurance after what has just happened?”

The Jewish spymaster sighed. “A decision has been made. Iran is flooding the market with oil, despite the embargoes. As you know, this is depressing the true price of oil. We are going to change that.”

Over the next ten minutes, de Rothchild explained the details, and the octogenarian monarch’s olive complexion turned starkly white.

C
HAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Central Park

New York, NY

With the sun setting peacefully in the distance, Jarrod walked in Central Park and looked down Fifty-Ninth Street at all the New Yorkers starting their evening festivities.

“How was your first day back at school?” Jarrod turned around to see Sarah glowing against the scenic backdrop. Her cammo gear had been replaced by a full-length black dress, her hair flowing down past her shoulders. She was stunning. He said nothing. He couldn’t stop himself and was compelled to draw her close and give her the kiss he had been waiting to give her since they had reunited. They continued to embrace well after the kiss was over, silently sharing the emotions between them as neither lightened their respective grasps. “So what will the future hold for us, Jarrod?”

“I’m not worried about the future,” Jarrod responded. “Right now, I’m worried about us missing our dinner reservations.”

“OK. I’m game,” Sarah said with a smile as Jarrod took her hand and they started walking.

*

Fordo Nuclear Facility

Qom, Iran

In the Persian Gulf, the Israeli submarine
Herev
cruised just below the surface. The captain of the vessel, just having received and urgent dispatch from his chain of command, did a double take on the government issued directive and then gave orders for a Tomahawk cruise missile to be fired through the forward torpedo tube.

The torpedo broke through the surface of the ocean and started on a long terrain-hugging journey across the Persian landscape.

At the Fordo nuclear facility near the Iranian city of Qom, the Mossad agent Saeed Rahimi was in the underground video monitoring guard station. He checked his watch frequently until the minute hand was at the top of the hour. He cased his surroundings. His two Iranian coworkers were blissfully unaware as they continued talking about the plight of the Iranian National Soccer team. Like he had rehearsed many times, Rahimi drew his sidearm, screwed in a silencer, and then unassumingly positioned himself behind his colleagues, saying nothing as he efficiently shot each one in the back in less than nine seconds. He then swiftly flipped some switches, and the three massive nuclear blast doors, each approximately forty feet in height at ground level began slowly retracting, setting off a number of piercing alarms. The blast doors were designed to protect the outside world in case a meltdown occurred. They effectively provided three layers of two-foot antinuclear protection when they were closed as they were supposed to be.

Saeed made sure no one witnessed what just occurred and briskly walked out of the surveillance center. Being almost a hundred feet underground, he took the elevator topside and exited, firing three shots into the cipher pad to ensure no one could take the elevator back down. Amazingly, the flurry of alarms that were set off didn’t result in any sort of panic. This was because there were numerous false alarms with the buggy control systems in the facility. Saeed knew that most everyone in the facility would assume that it was a false alarm that had to be reset. Although there were at least thirty soldiers who were tasked with protecting the facility at any given time, the only individuals who would pose a real threat would have been the two guard station solders outside the outermost blast door. This was because Saeed knew all the rounds and walking routes the other on-duty soldiers were on and knew they would not reach him in time. As Saeed walked down the long corridor to get to the outside, he saw one of the two guards walk toward him, yelling to him in Farsi when he was in earshot. “What is happening?”

Saeed said nothing as he got within fifteen yards; then he pulled out his gun and shot the guard between the eyes, not changing his stride in the process. As he made it outside, a blast of cool dawn air hit his face. He could see the last guard lying motionless in front of the main security gate outside the facility. His getaway driver had taken him out as planned.

As Saeed got in the vehicle, a number of shift workers off in the distance started yelling as they saw the dead body of the guard. He made a call to his station chief. “It’s done,” he said, as the vehicle sped off into the darkness.

About twenty minutes later, a number of facility workers walked out through the cavernous opening left by the retracted blast doors, trying to determine what was going on. The remaining soldiers prevented anyone from leaving as they tried to determine protocol in this situation. The workers who controlled the blast doors were all in the control room and were all dead now thanks to Saeed. Furthermore, they couldn’t get down to the control room because all the elevators were inoperable.

What the workers did not know was that a lone Tomahawk missile followed a precise track guided by satellite GPS signals toward the facility. As it approached the installation, a number of antiaircraft missiles fired off like roman candles, attempting to take down the Tomahawk. It was to no avail as the missile was moving too quickly for the antiaircraft artillery to take down the target. Almost mesmerized, the workers who had gathered near the outer open blast door, watched as the Tomahawk flew past the retracted steel blast doors at 625 miles per hour and disappeared into the granite cavern. For the workers who decided to flee, they were able to take about two and half steps before the Tomahawk made impact with the innermost wall that protected the nuclear fuel chambers. At impact, the Tomahawk’s half-kiloton tactical nuclear warhead detonated, creating a fireball that sent a blast wave down the elevator shafts to turn the centrifuge farm into radioactive chaff. The force of the nuclear blast vaporized everything in its way in a storm of 5000-degree superheated radioactive gas as it exited the blast doors in excess of 300 miles per hour. The unfortunate individuals in the thirty-mile radius of the blast, as well as three major oil processing plants, two refineries, and a few pumping stations, were taken out in the process.

*

Times Square

New York City

As Jarrod and Sarah walked down Seventh Avenue, the bright lights of New York brought them back to some sense of normalcy. People were going to shows and eating hot dogs and pretzels from street vendors, and tourists shopping until they dropped which was often induced by the lure of the Big Apple. Everything seemed right again. As they stood in the square looking to duck into Jarrod’s favorite restaurant and enjoy a wonderful evening, they both felt their cell phones buzzing. They looked at each other, laughing.

“OK. We both really need to turn our phones off.” Jarrod said. Sarah agreed with a smile. As they both took their phones out, the headlines changed on a number of digital signs. Everyone around them stopped too. Thousands of people were frozen in time on Times Square affixing their attention to the news ticker that flashed around the building that read:

Possible nuclear detonation in Iran with 100,000 feared dead or exposed to radiation.

Jarrod in shock looked at his phone. It was Sergei sending him a message. “Boss, oil now above $100 per barrel in European markets. Iran nuclear explosion.”

Sarah took a quick look at her phone. “The station director wants us at HQ in two hours. They think this was orchestrated and somehow related.” She continued to scan her phone. “And surveillance indicates a major attack by Iran on Abqaiq may be imminent.”

“Abqaiq, the refinery in Saudi Arabia? That would cripple supply across the globe for months, if not years.”

“Yes,” Sarah responded as she furiously texted. “I need to help stop this.”

“No.
We
need to help stop this,” Jarrod said as walked toward the street to hail a cab to the airport.

In the process, he walked past a ragged panhandler sitting on the sidewalk, a tin cup in hand and seemingly unaware of the breaking news. He stopped for a split second and recognized him as the same homeless man he’d seen weeks before in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Jarrod started reaching into his pocket, but then changed his mind. He quickly peeled off his watch and dropped it in the cup, causing a loud clang. The panhandler opened his eyes as wide as he could muster looking Jarrod straight in the eye.

Jarrod gave him a subtle nod. “I won’t be needing this where I’m going. It’s yours.”