“Really?”
“Yes, just across the border. Less than a hundred kilometers north of here.”
Brother Cyrus smiled. Praise the Lord, he thought. Praise Him in His mighty heaven.
While General Jannati found the case of Courvoisier and opened a two-hundred-dollar bottle of XO Imperial, Cyrus took Nicodemus aside and told him the good news. Then he quietly ordered the True Believers to remove the X-ray laser from the Osprey, carry it out of the hangar, and put it in position at the target point. He reminded them to do the job slowly and carefully. There was no need to rush, he said. The U.S. Air Force wouldn’t launch its retaliatory strike until nightfall, when the B-2 Stealth bombers would become impossible to detect.
After an hour and a half, the True Believers completed their task and returned to the hangar. By this point, General Jannati was stone drunk. He sprawled on a wooden crate, his head drooping as he clutched the bottle of cognac with both hands. Cyrus stood nearby, keeping a watchful eye on the general and smiling behind his head scarf. They were on the threshold of the kingdom now, just inches away. Cyrus reviewed his preparations one last time to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. The only flaw in their plans was the fact that the Turkmen Army hadn’t captured Olam ben Z’man yet. But Cyrus didn’t consider Olam a serious threat. Even if the Israeli tried to warn the Americans, it was very unlikely that anyone at the Pentagon would take him seriously.
As General Jannati took another swig from his cognac bottle, the radio on his belt let out a squawk. A tentative voice came out of the radio’s speaker, posing a question in Farsi. After a few seconds, the voice repeated its question. The Revolutionary Guards were obviously wondering when their commander would return to the bunker. Jannati ignored the radio transmissions for as long as he could, then groped for the handset and began shouting into it. When he was finished, he tossed the radio aside and turned to Cyrus. “Idiots,” he muttered. “They can’t do anything on their own. Always waiting for my orders.” He shook his head. “I told them I’d shoot the next person who radios me. Maybe I’ll get a little peace now.”
Cyrus nodded. “A wise move. You’re teaching them discipline.”
“Exactly! Every army must have discipline.” Jannati pointed at the True Believers who stood at attention on the other side of the hangar. “Look at your men, how dutiful they are. How do you manage it? I suppose you pay them well enough, eh?”
Cyrus nodded again. To convince the Iranians that he was a smuggler, he’d demanded $15 million for the uranium. “The money helps,” he said. “But the most important thing is belief. Your men must believe in you.”
Jannati leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “You and your men are religious, yes? Faithful Christians of some type?”
Cyrus stared at the general, who perched precariously on the edge of the crate. The Iranian was more perceptive than he’d realized. “That’s correct,” Cyrus replied. “We believe in God.”
“Yes, I suspected as much.” Jannati raised the bottle of cognac and took another swig. “Tell me something else, Mr. Black. What’s in the aluminum cylinder that your men unloaded from the aircraft a while ago?”
Cyrus jumped. The question had come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t get a very good look at the thing, but it seemed familiar. You placed a similar device at the Kavir site before the nuclear test, didn’t you?”
Damnation, Cyrus thought. He’d hoped that the Courvoisier would distract Jannati from any discussion of Excalibur. “My apologies. I thought I explained all this in our previous meetings. I have another client I’m not at liberty to reveal, another government that’s very interested in nuclear testing. They paid me to install and monitor the scientific instruments at the test site. The data collected by the instruments will help this client advance its own nuclear program. Your commander in chief approved this provision when we made our agreement.”
“Yes, he was a bit desperate, wasn’t he? He would’ve agreed to anything as long as you gave him the uranium. Our own enrichment plants weren’t producing the fuel fast enough, and he was under a great deal of pressure to conduct a test this year.” Jannati covered his mouth and belched. “But now the situation is changed. My superiors have instructed me to ask a few questions about your scientific instruments.”
Cyrus was alarmed, but he kept his voice steady. “Certainly. What would you like to know?”
“Well, first off, why are you installing additional instruments now? We’re not planning any more nuclear tests.”
Cyrus nodded. He’d hoped to avoid this confrontation, but that was impossible. General Jannati had become a threat, and all threats to the Redemption had to be eliminated. Cyrus stepped toward him. “The explanation is simple.” He extended a gloved hand. “Come with me, General. I think you’ll find this fascinating.”
Jannati swayed on his crate, grinning blearily. “What? You want to go somewhere?”
“Not very far. Just a few steps outside.” Cyrus placed his hand on Jannati’s back. After a moment’s hesitation, the general shrugged and let Cyrus guide him out of the hangar.
Once they were outside, they turned left and walked alongside the foot of the mountain. About four hundred yards west of the hangar was a stretch of flat, sandy ground. Several weeks ago, while the True Believers had been preparing Excalibur for the Kavir test, some of Cyrus’s men had borrowed a bulldozer from the Iranians and dug a thirty-foot-deep hole in the sand near the base of the mountain. Then they’d borrowed a crane to lower a large steel chamber into the cavity. Finally, they’d refilled the hole, but left a tunnel in place so they would still have access to the buried chamber. Cyrus had told the Iranians that he was installing a monitoring device that would measure the seismic echoes from the Kavir test, but that was a lie. The impact chamber would be the final resting place for the Russian X-ray laser.
Cyrus escorted Jannati into a trench that ran down to the mouth of the tunnel. The entrance was a rectangle braced with timbers, about twelve feet high and eighteen feet wide. It looked like the entrance to a two-car garage, except for the low wall of sandbags. Nicodemus and two other True Believers stood in front of the dark rectangle, cradling their carbines. Cyrus gave a signal to Nico, raising two fingers in the air. Then he turned back to Jannati. “This X-ray laser is almost identical to the one we placed at the Kavir site, but it was built by the Russians. They copied the American prototype.”
The general nodded drunkenly. “What did you say? A laser?”
They walked into the tunnel, which sloped downward like a steep ramp. Nico followed them, turning on his flashlight. “An X-ray laser,” Cyrus repeated. “It converts the radiation from a nuclear explosion into high-energy laser beams.”
“But I told you, we’re not planning any more—”
“Wait just a moment, General. Then everything will become clear.”
The tunnel was less than a hundred feet long, so they soon reached the impact chamber. It was fitted with a large viewing window, about the same size as one of the windows in a public aquarium. Cyrus and Jannati stopped in front of the window and Nico shone his flashlight at the thick sheet of glass. Inside the chamber was the long aluminum cylinder that Cyrus’s men had just positioned. The sliding panel on the cylinder was open, and Cyrus could see the twelve laser rods inside, each four feet long and composed of hundreds of slender strands that had been bundled together. The rods were held in place by struts projecting from a central pole. The assembly resembled the skeleton of a folded umbrella, with the rods corresponding to the umbrella’s ribs, all of them aimed at a focal point inside the cylinder. The Omega Point.
Cyrus stared for a moment at the laser rods, enraptured by their beauty. Then he turned back to Jannati. “Are you familiar with the B83 warhead?” he asked.
“B83?” The general looked befuddled. His eyes darted back and forth between Cyrus and the window of the impact chamber. “Isn’t that an American nuclear bomb?”
Cyrus nodded. “It was originally a gravity bomb, but the air force gave it a GPS guidance system and turned it into a bunker buster. It’s designed to burrow below the surface before exploding, so it can maximize the damage to an underground facility. To destroy an installation like yours, located in a cavern under a mountain, the best target would be a patch of sandy ground next to the mountain’s base.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see what this—”
“We’re standing at the target right now. In a few hours a Stealth bomber will deliver a B83 that will strike the ground directly above this chamber and burrow twenty feet through the sand. The target was preplanned, you see, and I already knew the coordinates when we dug this pit. And military GPS is very precise. Any targeting error would be less than a meter.”
Jannati was silent for a few seconds. Then he burst out laughing. “Very good, Mr. Black! And now you’re going to tell me that you’re an American spy? And you delivered the uranium to the Revolutionary Guards just to give the U.S. Air Force an excuse to blow us up?”
“No, not quite. I had to arrange a more significant provocation to ensure that the president would retaliate with the B83. The earthquake in Turkmenistan was actually a nuclear explosion that incinerated a hidden army base called Camp Cobra. And I planted very convincing evidence of Iranian involvement in Cobra’s destruction.”
The general stopped laughing. He rocked unsteadily on the balls of his feet. “All right, enough of this nonsense. What’s going on?”
“The policy of deterrence requires the Pentagon to respond with a nuclear strike. And I have followers in Washington who’ll make sure that the president launches the attack on this facility. General Bolger of Global Strike Command is a True Believer, and so is General Estey of Special Operations Command.” Cyrus pointed at the top of the impact chamber, which was covered with a steel grate. “The warhead will enter the chamber there. Its nose will lodge in the grate and the bomb will explode. We’ve already pumped the air out of the chamber, so the radiation can travel through the vacuum to the laser rods. And because the warhead will be so close to the rods when it explodes, the energy delivered to them will be tremendous.”
Jannati stared at the chamber. A spark of fear belatedly flashed in his bloodshot eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he shouted, turning to Cyrus. “What the hell have you done?”
“You see how the laser rods are angled toward a focal point? The beams will converge inside the cylinder, in a specific pattern that will maximize the flow of data to the memory caches in that tiny volume of space. And when those caches overload—”
“Damn it, answer me! What have you done?”
“I’m trying to explain, General. We’re going to open the gates to the kingdom.”
Curling his lip, Jannati reached for his pistol. At the same moment, Nico slammed his flashlight into the back of the general’s head. As Jannati staggered, Nico removed the SIG Sauer nine-millimeter from the man’s holster. Then he grabbed Jannati’s hair, pulled back his head, and used a combat knife to sever the general’s throat.
Jannati landed on his back. He clamped a hand over his neck but the blood spewed between his fingers. Cyrus bent over him. “Well, we won’t have time for the full explanation. But we will meet again, General. In the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lord will gather all of us in His arms, every creature He ever—”
Jannati arched his back and spat a mouthful of blood at Cyrus. Then the general’s hand slid off his throat and the rest of his blood poured out of him.
Cyrus removed a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his clothes. The corruption of the world never ceased to amaze him. But it would be over soon.
He turned to Nico. “Go back to the hangar and retrieve the general’s radio. If his soldiers try to contact him again, tell them that their commander is indisposed.” He put the bloody handkerchief back in his pocket. “I don’t think the Iranians will give us any trouble before nightfall. But just in case they do, order our men to dig defensive positions around this tunnel.”
39
DAVID OPENED HIS EYES AND SAW MONIQUE. HE COULDN’T SEE HER FACE SO
well—his eyes were full of grit and stung like crazy—but he noticed that her cornrow braids were speckled with sand. It actually looked sort of cute, although he knew she’d be mortified if she saw her hair in the mirror. She bent over him, biting her lip and wiping tears from her eyes, and he wanted to say something about her hair, something that would make her laugh, but his throat was so sore he could barely swallow. Then he looked a little closer at her face and saw a jagged cut on her left cheek and another on her chin. And he started crying, too, partly because he hated to see her hurt, and partly because he was so glad she was alive.
He was inside some kind of vehicle, in a gray and boxy cabin, lying on a stretcher that jutted from the steel wall like a shelf. He tried to prop himself up and noticed that his forearms were covered in bandages. Because of the burns, he remembered, the sulfuric acid burns. Agitated, he sat up and grasped Monique’s shoulders.
“The mountain,” he gasped. “The soldiers. In the mountain. We have to go back. We have to see . . .”
Monique shook her head. “No, David. We can’t go back. The mountain collapsed. And there’s radioactive debris.” More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “I saw it from the air. Fire shot from the mouth of the cave. Then the cliff crumbled. And everything slid down.”
“Wait. You saw it from the air?”
“We’re in a helicopter.” She pointed to the front of the cabin, and David saw the cockpit. But there was no rotor noise, and they didn’t seem to be moving. “That’s how we spotted you. After we pulled away from the explosion, we saw movement in the ravine. We picked up you and seven other men, U.S. Army soldiers. It looks like they belong to a Special Operations unit.”
“Yes, they were getting ready to attack Iran. But there were hundreds of men in that cavern! You found only seven?”
“Those were the only survivors. Four of them were snipers posted on the slopes near the cavern and three said they left the cave because they were chasing you. We searched the rubble for a long time, and so did the pilots in the other helicopter. Then we flew about ten miles west and landed on this mountaintop. The wind is blowing east, so we should be safe from the fallout here. And now we—”