“Shalom!” boomed a familiar voice. “Is the instrument of
Keter
awake yet?”
Olam ben Z’man stepped into the helicopter’s cabin, still wearing the black clothes he’d put on for the raid at Yangykala. But before David could react to this remarkable sight, he saw someone else standing beside Olam. It was a tall, young man with unkempt hair and a bruised face. The young man turned his head slightly to the left, his eyes avoiding David’s, but he walked over to the stretcher without any hesitation and raised his right hand as if he were taking an oath. “Where were you?” he asked in an even voice. “I was looking for you.”
David also raised his right hand. This was the greeting he always used with Michael. The boy didn’t like to be touched. “I’m here now,” David said. “And I’m so happy to see you.” Then he turned his head away and covered his eyes. Emotion squeezed his chest and throat. He held still and waited until he could breathe again. The tears made his eyes sting even worse, but he didn’t care. He was so grateful.
The cabin was silent for a few seconds. By the time David removed his hand from his eyes, Michael had gone to one of the helicopter’s porthole windows and started tracing figures in the condensation on the glass. Monique touched David’s shoulder. “Six of Olam’s men are still alive,” she said. “Shomron, the radioman, was injured at Yangykala, but the rest are all right. They’re outside now, trying to send a radio message to the American bases in Afghanistan. There’s a transmission tower on this mountain.”
“Yes, that’s why we landed here,” Olam said. “The radios on the helicopters weren’t strong enough. It’s strange, but someone seems to be jamming the military frequencies in this area.”
No, it’s not strange, David thought. “It’s the U.S. Air Force,” he said. “They’re probably following orders from one of Cyrus’s True Believers. They’re jamming the airwaves because Cyrus doesn’t want anyone to know what really happened at Camp Cobra.” He remembered Cyrus’s round, pink face, so ordinary and familiar. “I saw him take off his head scarf before he left the camp. It’s Adam Bennett.”
Monique stared at David, her mouth half open. She raised her fingers to her lips. “What? The DARPA director?”
He nodded. “His whole confession in Jacob’s lab was an act. He just wanted us to find Olam for him. The guy’s crazy, but he has an impressive organization, probably funded with all the money he siphoned off from DARPA. And some of his followers have important jobs in the military. Like the Special Operations general who let him put a nuke inside that cavern.”
“Charah!”
Olam cursed. He turned his head toward the cockpit, his lone eye blazing. “I told you these
Qliphoth
were powerful! This is how they infiltrated so many agencies!”
“But this is insane!” Monique stood up suddenly. “Why would they blow up an American base?”
“Cyrus needed a more powerful explosion,” David answered. “To give the X-ray laser enough energy to trigger the quantum crash.”
“I still don’t—”
“He destroyed Camp Cobra to provoke a response. He knows the president will order a nuclear strike on the Iranians now. So Cyrus is going to put the X-ray laser at the target coordinates.”
The cabin went silent again. Monique scrunched her eyebrows together, and a vertical line appeared on her forehead, above the bridge of her nose. David knew exactly what it meant. She wasn’t scared or confused anymore. She was pissed. “Where’s the son of a bitch now?”
“Cyrus said he was going to a Revolutionary Guard facility near the Iranian town of Ashkhaneh. That’s the target for the American nuke.”
Olam pulled a map out of his pocket and unfolded it. After a few seconds he poked the center of the page. “Yes, Ashkhaneh. It’s about a hundred kilometers south of here. Also in the mountains, the southernmost ridges of the Kopet Dag.”
Monique grabbed Olam’s arm. “We have to stop this! We gotta get on the radio and call the fucking White House!”
Olam shook his head. “Even if we can manage to get a signal through all the jamming, how do we know that anyone will listen? If these True Believers have infiltrated the Pentagon, they’re not going to let us communicate with the president.”
“Well, what are we gonna do? Just wait here on this mountain until the universe crashes?”
“No. We’re not going to wait.” Olam folded his map and put it back in his pocket. “Five of my men can still fight, and we have seven Army Rangers. We also have two built-in machine guns on each of our helicopters. And we have enough fuel to fly to Ashkhaneh.” Turning around, he marched to the helicopter’s doorway and shouted at his men in Hebrew. Then he turned back to David and Monique. “Shomron will stay here and continue working on the radio tower. So you have a choice to make. Will you stay here or come with me?”
David heaved himself off the stretcher and rose to his feet. He felt a little rocky and his arms were bandaged and stiff, but he could still fire a pistol. He turned to Monique and she nodded—they were both going with Olam. But they would have to leave Michael behind.
David stepped toward the teenager, who was still tracing figures on the porthole window. “Michael?” he said. “Listen, you’re going to stay here with one of the Israelis, okay? Monique and I are going away, but we’ll come back as soon as we can. We’ll leave you some food and water, and maybe Shomron can give you a puzzle to work on. All right, buddy? You think you can handle that?”
The boy grimaced but kept his eyes on the window. David noticed that he was drawing a picture of a fire, with dozens of squiggly flames rising from a large bowl.
“I promise I’ll come back, Michael. You hear me? I promise.” And David raised his right hand again, as if taking an oath.
40
THE PRESIDENT SAT ALONE IN HIS OFFICE ON THE E-4B, WHICH WAS FLYING
somewhere over the Midwest. It was midmorning in the United States and early evening in Iran. The sun shone through the aircraft’s windows, casting shadows across the president’s desk. His office here was small, about the size of a walk-in closet. Most of the E-4B’s middle deck was occupied by the air-force communications specialists, who kept the plane in touch with the rest of the military. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was also on the plane, along with the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense. But none of the White House staffers who usually advised the president had come on board, and there were no congressmen or reporters or political aides either. He was surrounded by men in uniforms now.
His desk was covered with classified documents. Every ten minutes or so, an air-force colonel knocked on his door and delivered another report on the Camp Cobra explosion. The first search-and-rescue teams had arrived at the site, garbed in Hazmat suits, and started looking for survivors. So far, they hadn’t found any. The State Department had contacted the Iranian government and demanded information on the two aircraft that had flown across the border to the Ashkhaneh facility, but the officials in Teheran denied any knowledge of the flights. The news services were reporting an earthquake in southern Turkmenistan, and the Pentagon had refrained from correcting them. At some point the president would have to address the nation and reveal the awful dimensions of the tragedy. But not yet.
After a while he realized that the air-force colonel was wasting his time. The president couldn’t read the reports. He couldn’t do anything except think about the moment when the bomb exploded. He thought of the soldiers at Camp Cobra preparing for their mission—cleaning their rifles, loading their packs, maybe writing letters to their parents or wives or girlfriends. Then he pictured the explosion, the sudden flash of light, incinerating everything in the cavern. And then he saw the mountain falling, burying their ashes.
If the Iranians did it, they had to be punished. Nine hundred and sixty American soldiers were dead, and one of them was a lieutenant general. More important, it was a nuclear attack, the first ever against the United States. The country was obligated to retaliate in an overwhelming way, with its own nuclear weapons. Still, the president felt uneasy. Talking about deterrence was one thing, but actually dropping the bomb was another. It would change the world, and not for the better.
He heard another knock at his door. He said, “Come in,” but this time it wasn’t the air-force colonel. The director of national intelligence stood in the doorway.
“Sir, we’ve finished analyzing the debris from the Camp Cobra explosion,” the DNI said. “The radioisotope signature is identical to the fallout from the Iranian nuclear test.”
It felt like a kick to the stomach. Wincing, he stared at the reports on his desk. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure?”
“The percentages of U-235 and U-232 in the fallout are the same. We also found identical amounts of beryllium, a rare element that’s used in the structure of uranium bombs.”
The president said nothing. He knew what he had to do, yet he remained silent.
“This is solid proof, Mr. President,” the DNI added. “The radioisotope signatures are as unique as fingerprints. We know that the uranium in the weapon that destroyed Camp Cobra came from the same stockpile that supplied the fuel for the Iranian nuke tested in the Kavir Desert. And the beryllium results indicate that the two bombs also had the same design and structure.”
The president stared at the man for a few more seconds. Then he shook his head. He couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time. “Tell everyone to gather in the conference room. We’ll open the Football there.”
41
SWEATING INSIDE THE WINDOWLESS TRAILER IN SHALHEVET, ARYEH GOLD
-berg continued to decipher encrypted messages using Olam ben Z’man’s quantum computer. He began analyzing the communications intercepted by Israeli listening stations earlier in the year and found additional evidence of Adam Cyrus Bennett’s plot. Since January, Bennett had exchanged dozens of messages with Lieutenant General Samuel McNair, a U.S. Army Special Operations commander, and Nicodemus Aoun, a Lebanese terrorist well known to the IDF. Aryeh didn’t understand the how and why of Bennett’s plan yet, but he felt he had enough proof now to persuade the IDF General Staff to take action. At 5
P.M.
he was about to call the Unit 8200 headquarters in Herzliya and ask to speak to the unit’s commander again. But General Yaron called him first.
“Aryeh? You need to come here at once. I assume you remember where the division headquarters is?”
Aryeh was more surprised by Yaron’s tone than by what he’d just said. The normally emotionless general sounded worried. “What is it? Why do you need me?”
“We’ve heard some very strange things. And we think they might be related to the communications you deciphered.”
“What things?”
Yaron paused, but only for a second. “There are news reports of an earthquake in southern Turkmenistan. Not a very big earthquake. But the epicenter is close to the radio tower that carried one of the messages about Excalibur.”
“What’s strange about that? The area is tectonically active, yes?”
“The strange thing is that the IDF doesn’t think it’s an earthquake. Our seismic monitors indicate that it was an underground nuclear explosion. When our intelligence division contacted the Americans to see if they came to the same conclusion, none of the Pentagon officials would talk about it. But they’ve gone to DEFCON 1, the highest level of alert.”
Aryeh bit his lip. He remembered what Olam had said before he’d gone to Turkmenistan. Excalibur channeled the energy from nuclear explosions. And the more powerful the explosion, the more damage the X-ray laser could do. “You think the Iranians detonated another nuke? And now the Americans are going to retaliate?”
“Listen carefully, Aryeh. When the Iranian crisis started, Unit 8200 deployed several boats in the Arabian Sea to monitor radio communications in the region. About an hour ago one of our boats picked up an encrypted signal that was sent from an American Milstar satellite in a narrow spotlight beam. But there were no American ships within the beam’s range, and our boat’s radar didn’t find any aircraft nearby.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Half an hour later, another of our boats detected a second spotlight beam from the same satellite. This boat was five hundred kilometers north of the first one. So now our analysts had a track to follow, and they came to a reasonable conclusion. The Milstar satellite is communicating with an American B-2 bomber. You see, the plane has stealth technology, which explains why it didn’t show up on our radar. And a B-2 squadron is based about two thousand kilometers south of our boats, on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.”
Aryeh was familiar with stealth bombers, of course. He’d even seen one a few years ago at an air show in America, a sleek, black plane shaped like a bat’s wing. “Those aircraft can carry nuclear weapons, yes?”
“Correct. And the track indicates that the B-2 is heading for Iran.”
Aryeh shook his head. His neck was cold with sweat and his gut was cramping. He scooped up his papers, all the transcripts of the intercepted messages, and stuffed them into his shoulder bag. “I’m coming to Herzliya,” he said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
42
MICHAEL WAS IN THE SHACK AT THE BASE OF THE RADIO TOWER, SITTING
cross-legged on the wooden floor. David Swift had left him a bottle of water and a chocolate bar with a picture of a cow on the wrapper. It was an Israeli candy, David had told him, a gift from one of the soldiers dressed in black. David had said it would taste just like a Milky Way bar, but Michael was reluctant to try it.
Shomron, the Israeli radioman, sat on the floor, too, with his back against the opposite wall and his bandaged leg stretched out in front of him. There were also bandages on the soldier’s face, covering everything except his mouth and one of his eyes. At first the bandages reminded Michael of Cyrus’s head scarf, and he didn’t like this memory. But after several minutes he grew more comfortable with Shomron. The fact that most of the soldier’s face was covered was actually a relief. When Michael looked at the man he didn’t have to follow all the intricate movements of the facial muscles and agonize over what they meant. The soldier’s face was fixed in a single expression, so Michael never had to worry that he was missing something.