The Mingrelian (20 page)

“Sir, we don’t know. It just occurred 20 minutes ago.”

“What are the options?”

“We have the nuclear option, of course – everything from no nuclear weapons to complete annihilation of Iran with ICBMs. We have the kinetic non-nuclear options we talked about before, to take out their command-and-control and second-strike capability, and we could do nothing.”

“OK,” the president said, head clearing from sleep. “How long does it take to deliver a nuclear weapon?”

“A submarine in the Atlantic Ocean can deliver a nuclear weapon to Tehran in 20 minutes with a sea-launched Polaris missile. We can have one from a missile silo in Wyoming in about 10 minutes more.”

“Don’t do anything yet, let me get some more information,” the president said, handing the phone back to the waiting security officer without waiting for a response from CINCSTRAT. He rushed back into his bedroom and emerged moments later pulling up sweatpants and a presidential sweatshirt. He ran down the hall to the stairs to the basement and the Situation Room.

“Sir, we have an update from Central Command, there have been seven nuclear detonations in the Middle East,” an Army colonel announced as the president entered the Situation Room. A bank of news monitors showed no mention yet, and a live feed to Strategic Command and Central Command’s command centers showed frantic activity.

“Where?” the president asked, taking a seat and scanning the monitors.

“Sir, we have the acting commander from Central Command in Tampa.”

An Army brigadier general’s face filled the corner box in the CENTCOM monitor.

“Sir, I have an update. At 1123 hours this morning, a nuclear detonation of approximately 35 kilotons was detected near the Golan Heights in Israel. It appears to have been launched from Syria by some sort of missile, perhaps a cruise missile that malfunctioned. It landed only a few miles inside Israel, but the detonation took out most of their anti-missile defense in the northern third of the country. Israel responded immediately with two nuclear weapons that detonated along the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Five minutes later, all the missiles from Khorramabad, at least a dozen, launched.

“In addition, mobile launchers at Bandar Abas with medium range missiles launched six missiles targeting the Saudi royal family’s residences in Riyadh. Israel immediately launched ICBMs from several places within Israel that impacted Khorramabad, Parchin, near Tehran, and Bandar Abas at the Strait of Hormuz. All but two of the missiles from Khorramabad were intercepted by the Israelis or our Patriot Missile batteries in Israel, Jordan and Qatar. The two that got through were not nuclear armed and caused minor damage. There were no further nuclear detonations in Israel. Five of the six conventional missiles launched at Saudi Arabia were intercepted, the sixth hit the King’s Palace in Riyadh.”

“They launched non-nuclear ICBMs?”

“Yes, sir, that’s an attempt to jam the interceptors. We think they have a half-dozen nuclear weapons, but they launched twice that many missiles. We don’t know how many of the intercepted missiles were nuclear, but we’ll know in a few hours as the debris fields are analyzed. We have to assume they haven’t launched all they have. The Iranians may have a second-strike capability in submarine-launched missiles, similar to our Polaris missiles. We don’t know if they’ve loaded nuclear weapons onto their submarines or not.”

“So, it’s over?”

“No, sir. Iran could still launch those submarine-based missiles, and they might have some ICBM capability elsewhere we don’t know about. Saudi Arabia responded with some medium range missiles into Bandar Abas and toward Tehran. We think they were intercepted but don’t know for sure. Israel was already entirely mobilized for war. Now Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are mobilizing for war.”

A staffer called from the control room: “Sir, we need an interpreter. The Russian president is calling on the hot line.”

Verifications and passwords consumed several minutes while a complex party line was set up that allowed each side to have its own interpreter to verify that what each world leader said was accurately conveyed to the other.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” the Russian president said. It was already afternoon in Moscow.

“Good morning.”

“Our sources in Tehran tell me that that city has been devastated by a nuclear explosion. Is that yours or the Israelis’?”

“It came from Israel.”

“We also have detected detonations at Bandar Abas and Khorramabad. Theirs or yours?”

“Theirs.”

“Have you launched an attack?”

“No.”

“Good, then the world is not completely mad.”

“No. This attack began with a detonation in Israel, a large one, and they responded. We think there have been a total of seven detonations. There was also a conventional attack on Saudi Arabia.”

“Do you plan to respond with nuclear weapons?”

“We haven’t decided.”

“It appears your allies the Israelis have gained the upper hand and retain the capability to respond again. There is no need for you to respond.”

“We haven’t decided.”

“I remind you we have pacts with Iran to support them.”

“I am unaware of any treaty with Iran that would require you to respond if they started a war with Israel. That would be foolhardy in light of threats they’ve made.”

“We are not required to respond.”

“Have you been in communication with the president of Iran?” the American president asked. “We’ve been unable to reach him.”

“No, my information has come from our facilities.”

“Do you have any contacts in Iran, someone to try to find out what their plans are? If they’re done, we can hold back. If they plan to launch more nuclear weapons, we will have to respond.”

“I will try to reach someone. Will you restrain your attack until I can find who is in control?”

“As long as they don’t launch anything else, I can.”

*****

A bright flash of light illuminated the tiny cell at Evin Prison in Tehran where Ekaterina Dadiani awaited her appointment with Ratface. She was nude beneath a simple cotton hospital gown that opened in the back, and she wore paper slippers. The only window was high on a stone wall, and still the light was so bright she was momentarily blinded by it. Twenty seconds later, the window shattered and the blast wave knocked her to the floor. The roof was blown off, and several walls collapsed. The heat from the blast set wood structures in the prison yard on fire, but the main building made of stone was only scorched. Then it was silent.

Chapter 37: American Embassy, Paris, France

aryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance, the political arm of the PMOI, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, adjusted her headset and settled into her chair in the secure teleconference room in Paris. She is the visible face of the clandestine organization bent on the overthrow of the Islamist dictatorship of Iran and its replacement with a secular democracy. A political activist since her college days, Rajavi was an organizer of the revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and went underground with the PMOI when Ayatollah Khomeini usurped the revolution for his own purposes.

She was tense. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were dead or dying, and her country was in flames two days after a nuclear exchange with Israel.

“Greetings, Madam President, I’ll be your interpreter,” a female voice in her earphone said in Farsi.

The screen showed a meeting room at the State Department, where staffers milled about, adjusting headsets, microphones and web cams. She recognized several staffers she knew from numerous negotiations with the Americans, and one of them sat at the head of the table and engaged her in small talk, recalling their last meeting some months ago and filling her in on some details the American government had about Tehran and surrounding areas.

Several other parties to the conference signed on, the last being the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The face of Eskander Khorasani filled one corner of her screen.

“Eskander, old friend. How have you been?” she asked as he adjusted his headset and looked, confused, into the camera.

“Madam President, good morning. It looks like our day might finally be at hand, if it pleases Allah,” he responded in Farsi.

“Allah be praised, it seems so.”

“Well, we’re here to vet Mr. Khorasani, and to pool our information,” the staffer at the head of the table said, calling the meeting to order.

“Eskander, who was my roommate at Sharif University when we were students there?” Maryam asked, letting a small smile crease her face.

“Ah,” Eskander smiled, “Yasmin Farrokhzad.”

“And, is she well?”

“She is, Allah be praised. She escaped the country after my last visit to Tehran. She crossed the Armenian border with our girls last week. Thank you for your concern.”

There followed 10 minutes of more focused questions. Eskander’s wife had been Maryam’s roommate in college, but he had no association with her that Iran's security organization could trace. He was a “clean” mole in the Iranian regime, and the primary conduit for information from the Tehran cell of the PMOI and other sympathizers in the regime. Gradually, the vetting ceased and the pooling of information expanded.

“How many are dead?”

“The local commander has told me the blast was at Parchin, two of them, actually,” Eskander said. “The first was a ground burst, the second a penetrator into the nuclear-weapons storage facility. The mountain east of Tehran protected most of the city from the shock wave, but the southern portion has been badly damaged. There is no power, thousands are dead.”

“That is what I’ve been told by my contacts there. What of Grand Ayatollah Mashadi?”

“The local commander says he is alive in Evin Prison. PMOI fighters are concentrating there, ready for an assault.”

“It is essential that we free Ayatollah Mashadi,” she said, addressing the staffers in Washington. “He is an essential element in forming a new government.”

“They still have a functioning government?” the staffer leading the meeting asked, directed more at the whole group than to Maryam and Eskander.

“The nation is in a panic, but the military is still functional,” another staffer responded.

Eskander added, “The regime is leaving Tehran.”

“Why wouldn’t they leave before they started a war?” the staffer asked.

“They weren’t ready for it to start yet,” Eskander said. “They set up Hezbollah with a nuclear weapon with the expectation they would wait for Tehran’s order to fire it. They didn’t wait.”

“It did seem kind of ad hoc.”

“Now they’re scrambling to get out of town. They expect more detonations.”

“Where is the president of Iran?”

“My contacts think he’s been assassinated,” Eskander said.

“We’ve been frantically trying to find someone to negotiate an end to this thing, and there’s nobody there,” the State Department staffer said.

Maryam said, “The Revolutionary Guard is in charge. They always have been, and you can’t get them on the phone.”

“Madam President, why did Iran attack Saudi Arabia, and why did they limit their attack to the royal family? That seems odd.”

“The royal family of Saudi Arabia is a hereditary monarchy, forbidden by the Holy Quran,” she said sternly. “As they control the Holy City, Mecca, and the City of the Prophet, Medina, and are haram – unclean because of their sin against Islam – they can be punished by any Muslim. It is a duty.”

“So you have no problem with that?” the staffer asked, somewhat incredulously.

“It is inevitable, but hardly necessary at this time. Not wise at this time, in my opinion,” she responded thoughtfully, softening her tone from the first statement about the Saudi royal family.

Boyd Chailland, slumped in a seat next to Eskander Khorasani in Tbilisi and listening to the English translation of the conversation, poked Eskander's leg under the table.

“Oh, there’s another point,” Eskander added. “My contact in Tbilisi for the past year, Ekaterina Dadiani, has been abducted and is also in Evin Prison. Any plans to break out Grand Ayatollah Mashadi should include her, too.”

Chapter 38: Persian Gulf

rince Colonel Turki bin Muqrin Al Saud of the Royal Saudi Air Force pushed his F-15C into afterburner and accelerated through 30,000 feet over the Persian Gulf. He was followed by a flight of 11 other aircraft spread out in tactical formation. Drones and cruise missiles had preceded them into Iranian airspace, plastering the main fighter base remaining on the Persian Gulf side of Iran. Intermediate-range conventional missiles from Israel had hit the air-defense network around Tehran, destroying its central control and many of the surface-to-air missiles there. It was a fighter pilot’s turkey shoot: plenty of bad guys, no SAMs and a reliable radar vector from your own AWACS.

“Bandits climbing through 12,000 feet,” crackled in his headset. It was a message from a Saudi AWACS plane loitering within Saudi airspace but watching the coast of Iran with side-looking radar.

He’d been training for this moment since he was a cadet. All the arms and training Saudi Arabia had absorbed during his lifetime had been for the purpose of opposing Iran in a confrontation that might, or might not, include the United States or any other world power. If Saudi Arabia was to stand as a nation, it must someday confront Iran. Today was that day. The Israeli nuclear weapon that had hit Bandar Abbas at the Strait of Hormuz had blown a big hole in Iran’s anti-aircraft radar defense, and his flight was streaming through it. Ironic, he thought. As a young man, he assumed he’d be going to war
against the Israeli air force, but now in the background noise he could hear an American AWACS plane vectoring them into Iran in another sector. Lest there be any confusion, he’d been lectured by his grandfather on who were Saudi Arabia’s friends and who were adversaries, and now his grandfather was unaccounted for in the rubble of the King’s Palace.