Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (3 page)

 
          
“Ten
divers out, ten divers back, and this rust bucket is still afloat,” Chris Wohl,
the tall man, said in a low, slow voice.
“That’s
a success.”

 
          
“Damn
straight! ” Hal Briggs crowed. “So let’s celebrate! Let’s—” Just then, another
of the commandos walked up to the three Americans. Briggs stopped abrupdy, and
his face went limp and dazed, as if he had just been shot full of painkillers.
The commando was much shorter than Briggs, but was just as wiry and powerful—
and she filled out a Mustang suit much better than he. Her name was Riza
Behrouzi, and she was the commander of the Peninsula Shield security team. A
Peninsula Shield commando had gone along with every Madcap Magician commando to
assist and to secure the area while the targets were lazed. “All Peninsula
Shield operatives present and well,” Behrouzi reported. “On behalf of the
nations of the Gulf Cooperative Council, I wish to thank you all for your
help.” White was about to accept her thanks, but Briggs interjected: “It was
our pleasure, Major Behrouzi...”

 
          
“Riza,
please,” Behrouzi said to Briggs. Wohl and White got the impression they had
instantly been forgotten. “I know it is against your rules to give us your real
names, but I have no such restrictions—about names, or about this.” She stepped
closer to Briggs and gave him a full kiss on the lips. “Thank you.”

 
          
“It
was nothing . . . Riza,” Briggs said, apparently having difficulty catching his
breath.

 
          
“Okay,
Leopard,” Wohl said irritably. “You want to celebrate, go ahead
—after
you clean and stow your gear, conduct the postmission briefing, see to it that
your men are fed, and prepare your reports for the National Security Agency and
the Director of Central Intelligence. And I believe you have the morning watch,
so you better get some sleep. And since you’re within eight hours of your watch,
you’re off the sauce. Other than that, you can celebrate all you want.”

 
          
“Gee,
Mondo, thanks,” Briggs said dejectedly. “You’re a real party animal.”

 
          
“I
would be happy to assist you, Leopard,” Behrouzi said. “We shall conduct the
briefing and see to our men together.”

 
          
“I
like the sound of that,” Briggs said, instantly perking up. “I tell ya, Riza,”
he said as they headed out, “I had that Iranian carrier in my sights for a sec
out there. It might’ve taken the entire UAE air force full of Hellfires, but I
woulda loved to see that big bad boy roll over and die.” He may have just
returned from two hours of scuba diving and six hours of crawling on his belly,
but he sounded as hyper as before the day started.

 
          
“Leave
it to Briggs,” Wohl said. “Ten thousand miles from home, in the middle of the
Persian Gulf
, and he still manages to find the pretty
girls.” Catching no response, he looked at White. “Everything OK, sir?”

 
          
“Yeah,
fine,” White replied noncommittally. “Ah . . . Briggs didn’t really laze that
Iranian carrier, did he?”

 
          
“No.
He’s cocky and a smart-ass, but he’s a good troop,” Wohl said. “He’s not stupid
enough to ignore orders, no matter how easy the target of opportunity might be.
The carrier’s safe. It launched a few choppers, but none of its fighters and no
missiles. Intel was right—the fighters and weapon systems aren’t operational on
that thing yet. Still can’t believe
Iran
has got an aircraft carrier. We’re gonna
hear from that thing one of these days, I know it.”

 
          
“The
guys don’t exaccty seem enthusiastic about Hal,” White observed. “In fact,
they’re pretty much ignoring him....”

 
          
“It’s
tough for a team that’s been together for so long to accept a brand-new
commanding officer right away,” Wohl said. “This is Briggs’s first mission with
the team—”

 
          
“Second—you’re
forgetting the Luger rescue mission in
Lithuania
...”

 
          
“On
which Briggs just happened to be one of the passengers, along with McLanahan
and Ormack,” Wohl said. “It turned out that Briggs was better prepared, very
close to
our
standards. But he wasn’t one of us, and he sure as hell
wasn’t our leader ...”

 
          
“But
he is now.”

 
          
Wohl
stopped and glared at White, then shrugged. “Hey, I was never the real
commander of the ops group of Madcap Magician,” he said. “You asked me to be
reassigned to you because you needed a commanding officer, and I accepted
because I was tired of pushing papers at
Parris Island
. It was only a temporary billet—”

 
          
“That
lasted three years,” White said. “The men bonded to you right away. You brought
them together like no one else could.”

           
“Because I knew all these guys—I
trained them all, even Briggs,” Wohl said. “We’re all Marines first—except
Briggs, of course—then ISA operatives ...”

           
“So Briggs being ex-Army and ex-Air
Force, he’s not going to fit in ... ?”

 
          
“Depends
on him,” Wohl replied. “He’s got a much different style than me—emotional,
energetic, touchy-feely. Briggs rewards guys for good performance and
‘counsels’ them when it’s poor—I
expect
good performance and loudly
kick ass if I get anything but. And he’s an officer, too, a young field-grade
officer at that—younger than some of the guys on the team—and after all the
years I’ve spent bad-mouthing officers in general and field-grade officers in
particular, he’s got a tough road ahead.

 
          
“He’s
a good troop, but a good commanding officer . . . ? Too early to tell. The guys
aren’t sure how to respond to him yet, that’s all. Whether he succeeds is
totally up to him. They’re the best— whether or not he can lead them is the
question only he can answer.” White nodded absently. Wohl studied him for a
moment, then asked, “If everything’s so OK, Colonel, why the hangdog look?”

           
“Because I’ve had some reservations
about this operation from the start,” White said. “We just kicked over a big hornet’s
nest out there tonight, Chris—and we did it on
Iran
’s Revolution Day, their Fourth of July.”

           
“Shit, I didn’t know that,” Wohl
said. “I thought it was in November sometime, when they took over the embassy
in 79.”

 
          
“No,
it’s today—and I should’ve known that. I never would’ve recommended executing
this mission on that date,” White said. “Obviously the GCC knew what day it
was.”

           
“Which you know will make this
attack sting even more in
Tehran
,” White said. “And it’ll be the
U.S.
that takes the bruht of
Iran
’s anger. We keep on saying this was a GCC
action, but you know damn well that Peninsula Shield isn’t going to be leading
the fight when the Iranians retaliate for this.”

 
          
“How
do you know they’re going to retaliate?”

           
White looked at him grimly. “Because
Iran
has been preparing for exactly this attack
for years, ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. We just justified all the
billions of dollars they’ve been spending on modern weapons for the past six
years. They aren’t going to rest until someone—until
everyone
—is punished for
what happened today. ...”

 
          
Tehran
,
Iran

Thirty minutes after the
Attack on
Abu
Musa
Island

 
          
General
Hesarak al-Kan Buzhazi was supreme commander of the Islamic Republic’s Armed
Forces and commander of the Revolutionary Guards—and this was the first time in
his career that he had ever been admitted to the residence of the leader of the
Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei. And to tell the truth,
he was scared. But as scared as he was to be in the presence of a man who, like
Ruhollah Khomeini before him, could by a single word muster the lives and souls
of a quarter of a billion Shi’ite Muslims to his side, it was even more
exciting to consider the simultaneous disaster and opportunity that had
befallen him that morning. This was one opportunity that could not be missed.

 
          
Buzhazi
bowed deeply when shown into his presence, and kept his head bowed until the
Faqih spoke. The door was closed behind them. “Your Eminence, thank you for
this audience.”

 
          
“Some
disturbing news has reached me this morning, General,” Khamenei said quiedy.
“Allah has told me of a great threat to the Republic. Tell me what has
happened.”

 
          
Buzhazi
raised his head and stood solemnly, his hands respectfully clasped in front of
him as if standing at an altar or at prayers. Khamenei was in his late sixties.
While his predecessor, the Imam Khomeini, had been tall, gaunt, and ethereal,
Khamenei was short, with a round face, a short, bushy dark beard, and large
horn-rimmed glasses, which gave him a scholarly, professional, quick-witted
appearance. This man before him was the nominal Faqih, the font of
jurisprudence of the Islamic Republic and the ultimate lawmaker, whose word
could overrule the Parliament and any cleric, any lawyer, any scholar in the
Twelver house; he was also the named Marja Ala, the Supreme Leader and
spiritual head of the Shi’ite Muslim sect and the keeper of the will of the
twelfth Imam, who was hidden from the world and would soon return to call the
faithful to Allah’s bosom for all time.

 
          
But
for all that, he was a man, not a saint or a prophet. Buzhazi had known Ali
Hoseini Khamenei when he had been nothing but an ambitious, backstabbing
know-nothing firebrand from a wealthy pro-Shah cargo shipping family from
Bandar-Anzalt on
Iran
’s Caspian coast. Little more than a spoiled rich kid back then,
Khamenei had wanted to impress his friends and rebel against his parents by
joining up with the wild, shrill-voiced fundamentalist Shi’ite cleric named
Ruhollah Khomeini. He had joined the Khomeini revolution because it was cool
and tough to do so, not because he’d had any particular holy vision like
Khomeini, but as time went on, he became deeply committed to Khomeini’s
theocratic ideas. Khamenei held many high positions in government
service—soldier, first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, even president of
the republic. Now he was the Supreme Leader. But he was still just a man.
Buzhazi had seen this holy man angry, and sad, and drunk, and just plain
stupid.

 
          
Buzhazi
knew a lot more about Khamenei’s shadowy past. Khamenei was a well-trained
soldier as well as an accomplished politician, and throughout his rise through
the ranks of power, he’d left a lot of bodies in his wake. Iran was nearly
being overrun by Iraq at the beginning of the nine-year War of Retribution;
when the president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, accused the then-commander of the
Pasdaran, Khamenei, of not doing his job and failing the country, suddenly the
Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed Bani-Sadr. When a rival politician, Muhammad Ali
Rajai, was elected President in 1981, he and his Prime Minister were
mysteriously killed in a bomb blast in the Cabinet room—Khamenei somehow
survived. Time after time, Ali Hoseini Khamenei was able to fight off
challenges to his authority by strange combinations of shrewd political
infighting and unexplained and well-timed disasters.

 
          
So
now, he told himself to overcome his fears and apprehensions and remember
exactly who he was dealing with here, relax. Take command of this situation, he
ordered himself. Take charge
now!

           
“The Republic has been betrayed,
Eminence,” Buzhazi began. He knew that word
betrayed
would arouse Khamenei’s attention. . .. “My orders were countermanded, and
because of this, our main island protectorate in the
Persian Gulf
, Abu Musa, has been attacked by Gulf
Cooperative Council air forces.”