Revenger (2 page)

They passed along a river valley where the local farmers’ lush green fields clustered together in the flatlands between two ranges of dusty brown hills. At Gazran they stopped for cups of sweet mint tea. Then they drove a little out of town till they found a turn-off where they could spend a few minutes undisturbed.

Bakhtiar’s companion helped him screw a metal plate across the inside of the windscreen, precisely shaped to the dimensions of the glass. It had a narrow slit, allowing him to see out. But unless a lucky shot happened to pass precisely through this gap, the front of the truck was effectively bullet-proof. As an additional precaution Bakhtiar put on a motorcycle helmet. It would not fully protect him against a direct shot, but it would keep out any ricochets or flying fragments of metal or glass.

‘I will leave you now,’ his companion said. ‘Would you like me to pray with you before I go?’

‘Yes, I would like that very much,’ Bakhtiar replied.

Together, they turned to Mecca, got down upon their knees, prostrated themselves and said the words of Al-Fatiha, the prayer that is to Muslims what the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians: the most basic, fundamental profession of faith.

When the prayer had been said and his companion had departed, Bakhtiar got back in the truck, in the driver’s seat this time, and turned right on to the road towards the nuclear reactor. He did not have far to go, three kilometres at most, and he was surprised to discover how calm and at peace he felt. It was as though Mehdi was in the passenger seat where he himself had been just a few minutes ago. He was smiling at Bakhtiar, and the thought of his face, his bright eyes and his gentle good humour was like a soothing balm to Bakhtiar’s soul.

He drove the truck to the turn-off that led to the IR-40 complex, and when he saw the first barricade he picked up the small, handheld controller that would activate the bomb, depressed the switch and held it down. From now on, there was no going back. The moment Bakhtiar relaxed his grip on the switch the bomb would detonate.

The switch was in his left hand. The wheel of the truck was in his right. Bakhtiar floored the accelerator and the truck leaped forward.

It took the guards a couple of seconds to realize what was happening, and a couple more to bring their weapons to bear. But by the time the first bullets were hammering into the truck, Bakhtiar had smashed through the barrier and was racing down the dead-straight road that led to the heart of the complex. By now he was under heavy fire from the guards at each checkpoint, in front of him and behind.

Bakhtiar had gone two . . . three . . . four hundred metres down the road.

The glass in the front and rear windows had all been blown out. The metal plate in front of him was clanging like a steel drum to the constant beat of the bullets hitting its surface. His own head was ringing with the deafening noise all around him and the constant patter of debris against his helmet. The engine was smoking like a steam train and screaming in protest at the wounds it was enduring.

Another three hundred metres raced by beneath his wheels, and then the truck slewed wildly as one of the rear tyres blew apart under the relentless fire. Bakhtiar found himself skidding off the road. There were high security fences on either side, and he was heading straight for one of them.

The truck smashed into the fence, which gave way under the impact, collapsing all around the truck and wrapping it in chain-linked wire and concrete posts. Bakhtiar heard more shots clattering around him, then the sound of men shouting as they ran down the road towards him.

He looked to his right.

Mehdi was there. He was telling him not to be afraid. They would be together soon. Their love would last forever.

Bakhtiar let go of the switch.

There was one important detail that Firouz had neglected to tell Bakhtiar.

The device in the oil barrel was an updated version of a fifty-year-old US Army weapon with the designation W54 SADM. It was cylindrical in shape: about 60cm tall, with a diameter of 40cm. It weighed around 70 kilos. The designation SADM stood for ‘Special Atomic Demolition Munition’, for this was a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, and it was the culmination of many years of strategic thinking, war-games and military exercises.

For more than three decades, the Israeli government had made it plain that it would not allow any of the hostile states in the region to possess atomic weapons, nor even the capacity to build them. Nuclear installations in Iraq and Syria were bombed, and Iran was given unequivocal notice that it was next in line. An Iran Command was formed within the Israeli Air Force. Its jets flew up and down the full length of the Mediterranean, sometimes even as far as Gibraltar, practising long-range missions.

Everyone knew what the Israelis were doing, not least the Iranians themselves. That’s why they buried their uranium-enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow deep underground; impregnably so, they claimed. To most Western analysts, it was a question of when, not if, Israel would mount airstrikes at the dozen or more key installations on which Iran’s nuclear weapons programme depended. But from Israel’s point of view, that was the problem: everyone knew.

Surprise would be impossible. Deniability non-existent.

So Israel boxed clever. It used the MEK as its proxies for this strike, as it had for others before. Because of Iran’s refusal to halt its nuclear weapons programme, it was under a punitive regime of international sanctions. But where there are sanctions, there will
also
be smugglers. Mossad agents used those smuggling routes to infiltrate four SADM bombs into Iran.

The 10-kiloton bomb Abou-Ali Bakhtiar detonated beside the IR-40 reactor blew a crater seventy-five metres wide by seventeen metres deep. It created a dazzling fireball from which blew a scorching hurricane. At least half the people within a five-hundred-metre radius were killed instantly, and those that survived received fatal doses of radiation. Human bodies and inanimate objects were transformed into lethal missiles. The blast reduced the heavy-water plant to rubble, and caused sufficient damage to the reactor to render it entirely useless.

Above all, the IR-40 complex was so heavily soused in nuclear fallout as to be unapproachable by anyone unless they were wearing full protective gear. Even then, a stay of more than a few minutes could result in a dangerously high dose of radiation. And that, from the strategists’ point of view, was the other great benefit of this form of attack. It was not necessary to destroy Iran’s impregnable underground sites. The ground above or around them just had to be turned into toxic wastelands through which no human could pass, and they were effectively useless. The IR-40 nuclear reactor, the two uranium enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow, and the Nuclear Technology Centre at Isfahan were all rendered inoperable. The Iranian weapons programme was cut off at the knees.

Meanwhile, not a single Israeli Air Force plane had been involved in any hostile action whatsoever. Deniability was ensured. It was a strategic triumph for Israel . . . and an unmitigated disaster for the rest of the world.

As its nuclear sites lay blanketed in radioactive dust and debris the Iranian government looked for a way to strike back, not just against the Israelis, but also their allies in the West. Iranian naval forces immediately launched a series of missile attacks on the Strait of Hormuz – the shipping lane through which one-fifth of the entire global oil trade passed – hitting several vessels and sinking a
massive
supertanker. Maritime insurance premiums immediately rose to a level that made any passage through the Strait prohibitively costly, even assuming a ship owner or crew was willing to risk the voyage. With that crucial supply-line cut, the resulting spike in the price of oil had a devastating effect on an already battered global economy, ending any slim hopes of recovery. Meanwhile, conflict spread to the streets of Europe as the Continent’s Muslim populations rose up in outrage at the Jewish assault on their Iranian brothers and sisters.

It was difficult, however, to distinguish these Muslim riots from all the other forms of civil disturbance tearing the EU to pieces. Repeated bailouts of the Mediterranean states had drained the Continent’s treasuries while failing to address any of the fundamental causes of economic failure. Indeed, they had simply made that failure even more acute. The grinding austerity demanded by Berlin as the price for supporting the failed economies of southern Europe had created economic damage that would take decades to repair. As the second Great Depression took hold, once-flourishing businesses collapsed, governments were unable to meet even their people’s most basic needs, and yet more millions of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese were thrown out of work to add to those already on the breadline.

Greeks had long been familiar with the sight of government buildings going up in flames. Now Rome, Madrid and Lisbon were burning too. The French alliance with Germany fractured as the new government in Paris refused to accept the current self-flagellating orthodoxy, and embarked on a policy of spending more government money, not less, risking credit-agency downgrades, rising borrowing costs and even national bankruptcy rather than cutting spending to the bone. And slowly it dawned on the German electorate that by beggaring their neighbours they had destroyed their own most important export markets, harming themselves economically as well as reigniting old anti-German hatreds that the EU had been created to bury for ever.

Little by little the fabric of Europe unravelled. Some of the crises were
of
minimal significance in any financial or geopolitical sense, but their symbolic weight was crushing. The Champions League, for example, was suspended as the explosive tensions on the streets of Europe’s major cities made it impossible for tens of thousands of supporters from different nations to gather together for a competitive event without the near-certainty of violence. Without that revenue source many of the major clubs collapsed under the crushing debts they had amassed in the pursuit of glory.

Meanwhile Britain’s relative immunity from the crises of the euro counted for less and less. The EU’s implosion acted like an economic black hole, whose gravitational field dragged more and more of its neighbours into the same plunging death-spiral. The first generation of nine-thousand-pounds-a-year students graduated to find that their fees had been wasted: there weren’t any jobs for them to take. Their parents were no better off. As their property values plummeted and their painfully accumulated pensions were rendered worthless, so the respectable middle-classes of suburbia became as angry as the underclasses in the sink estates.

The riots that had seemed like a single, exceptional outburst in the summer of 2011 were now a chronic condition, like a bad cold you just can’t shake off, or a cut that refuses to heal. No one knew where the next bricks and bottle-bombs would be thrown, or which once-peaceful shopping street or housing estate would find itself under siege. But almost every night, something seemed to kick off somewhere, until the festering anarchy became so commonplace that it took an event of exceptional violence – a policeman killed, or a well-known building razed to the ground – for the media even to acknowledge that anything had happened.

National governments were helpless in the face of such unrelenting disorder, and as conventional politics failed to provide any answer to the chaos, siren voices started making themselves heard. They belonged to populists and demagogues promising simple, understandable explanations for the incomprehensible collapse of the old world order. They offered bogeymen to blame
and
hate; pat solutions to put things right. In their desperation, voters listened to these voices. They longed for strong, decisive leaders who could bring order to the anarchy and make everything work again.

Yet even in the worst of times, whether beset by war, natural disaster or economic collapse, people have to get on with their lives. They strive to find work. They do their best to look after their families. They seek whatever comfort they can in their friends and lovers. And they can always console themselves with the knowledge that the sun still shines, the wind still blows and the world keeps turning, whatever mankind might do . . .

1

AS THE FIRST
rays of the morning sun sparkled on the water, the
Lady Rosalie
made her graceful way between the massive concrete pillars of the Hubert C. Bonner Bridge, left the peace of Currituck Sound and poked her nose out into the dancing whitecaps of the North Atlantic. There was a fresh south-easterly breeze blowing, and as the forty-two-foot sloop left the last shelter of land and felt the full force of the wind, her sails filled, her hull heeled over and she raced away across the water like a racehorse bursting from the starting gate. The four high-powered rigid inflatable boats, crewed by armed men who were keeping watch ahead, behind and on either side of the
Lady Rosalie
, had to accelerate hard to keep up, as did the US Coastguard cutter keeping station a few hundred yards away and the Marines helicopter overhead.

It was a perfect fall morning, with a cloudless sky and the promise of highs in the mid-seventies, but at eight in the morning there was still a sharp, invigorating chill in the wind that hinted at the colder days of winter to come. The man at the helm was grinning with the sheer joy of being alive on such a day, in such a
boat
. His name was Lincoln Roberts. He was African–American, well over six feet tall, strongly built, with a hint of silver in the hair beneath his dark-blue baseball cap. He had recently celebrated his sixty-first birthday, yet his vigour was undiminished and his presence and charisma still dominated any room he ever entered.