The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (25 page)

Whitestone reached his chair at the head of the table. “What’s happening in the strait?”

“CentCom tells us the Iranians have sent two battle groups into the strait,” said Admiral Boyd. “Probably subs out there, too, but we don’t know how many—not yet. One of the groups came out of the naval base at Jask, and they’ve been laying down mines—eight ships. The other group came out of Bandar e-Abbas. The missile attack was to cover that group, to take out the
Ingraham
so that group could lay mines north of the Oman Peninsula.”

Whitestone had swung his chair around to look at the map on the wall behind him. “What are we doing?”

It was the silence that quickened his pulse. Not the aggression of the Iranians—that was expected after the “Israeli” sabotage at the Iranian oil refineries and the US freezing of Iranian assets—but the silence of the men who controlled the most powerful military force in the history of the world. Whitestone turned back to the table. The defense secretary was standing at the other end.

“That’s what we were discussing when you came in, Mr. President. To be honest, sir, we’re not sure what we’re doing—or what we should do next.”

Robert Calvin, the defense secretary, was a decorated military veteran of Desert Storm and became a no-nonsense CEO of General Dynamics, the fourth-largest US defense contractor. He had business and military contacts around the world at the highest levels. And he never hesitated on making a decision. Until now.

“Mr. President,” asked Calvin, “where is the secretary of state?”

“He resigned—yesterday. Why?”

“We’re going to need him.”

Whitestone felt a sudden calm. He cast a glance at Cartwright, to his left, then back at the secretary of defense. “Tell me.”

An aide came into the room and handed the secretary one page of paper. As he read the report, Calvin looked over toward Cartwright. “Sorry, Bill,” he said, holding up the sheet. “These are coming in as we speak. Mr. President, an hour ago the emir of Qatar closed the Al-Uedid Air Base. It was reported this morning that a bunch of drunken US airmen broke into two mosques last night in Doha, burned all the Qurans they could find, and defiled the mosques in ways the news sources said they could not repeat. Thousands of Qataris took to the streets in protest. About twenty thousand massed in front of the emir’s residence, demanding prosecution of the offenders and expulsion of American forces from Qatar.” Secretary Calvin looked up. “The emir caved—he’s not like his father. The base and all operations at the base are shut down until further notice. All military personnel are confined to the base. Our stealth fighters are on the ground.

“Just before you walked in, we received a cable from Manama naval base in Bahrain. The French have declined to move their ships out of port with the rest of Combined Task Force 150. This”—he held up the sheet of paper in his hand—“is a report that the Spanish government has also ordered its ships to stand down.”

“What’s happening, Bob?”

“Mr. President, the Iranians are deploying the asymmetric attack strategy we’ve anticipated. I suspect this is the first of a series of ‘swarming attacks’ on our ships. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will launch its fleet of small, fast-attack craft—armed with torpedoes, rocket launchers, and other anti-ship weaponry—at the Nimitz Battle Group as soon as it’s in range. They will position these small craft at the hundreds of launching points that surround the gulf, including small islands and coves, providing cover that would enable surprise attacks.

“At the same time they will use the narrow width of the strait to launch the same kind of attack as they did at the
Ingraham
… Russian-made Sunburn missiles fly at three times the speed of sound. At its narrowest, the strait is only twenty-one miles wide. Those missiles would close on any ship in less than thirty seconds.”

“But we have—what—three hundred ships in and around the Persian Gulf? Superior fire power, superior weapons systems. What’s stopping us from just going in there and wiping out the Iranian navy?”

The secretary of defense sat down as if an incredible weight had been added to his shoulders.

“In 2002, we spent over 250 million dollars to stage a massive war game in the Persian Gulf. It was called Millennium Challenge. The exercise is the exact one we face today in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful ships. According to reports on the war game, the exercise concluded in less than ten minutes, after which forces ‘modeled after a Persian Gulf state’ had succeeded in sinking sixteen US ships, including an aircraft carrier. That was only the first day. The next day, the sheer number and speed of the swarming attacks from rocket-equipped speedboats and land-based cruise missiles overwhelmed the vastly superior US ships. It was a crushing, total defeat.

“Mr. President, without air power, our ships are sitting ducks. We not only don’t have air power with Al-Uedid shuttered, we also don’t have allies. Italy just told its captains to stand down.”

9:57 a.m., Jerusalem

Orhlon was prepared for the vote. He was prepared for that morning’s vote and its anticipated result. He didn’t expect Eliazar Baruk to survive the firestorm engulfing both his government and the man himself. But this? He had failed to see this coming.

Meir Kandel was so far to the right in his political philosophy, he made Orhlon feel like a liberal. “Ultra” was to downplay his radical positions. How Meir Kandel, head of the conservative Jewish Home Party, had wrangled his appointment as interim prime minister of Israel until elections could be held in four months, was a mystery to Orhlon. A mystery, but—with Hezbollah rocket attacks increasing in volume and accuracy—it was also a reality that General Moishe Orhlon, defense minister for the State of Israel, needed to deal with immediately.

Orhlon preferred driving himself, but in these times, he relented to having an armed driver and escort. If Baruk could be attacked in his own home …

The nondescript military vehicle raced up behind the nondescript government office building on Kaplan Street in Qiryat Ben-Gurion, between the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of the Interior. Orhlon’s bodyguards were flanking the back door of the car before the general could get it fully open. Well known to the guards, all three nonetheless presented their biometric ID cards and submitted to the iris scanner before gaining access to the building.

Kandel was waiting in Baruk’s office …
no, the prime minister’s office
, thought Orhlon. Unlike Baruk’s fashionable and regal bearing, Kandel looked like he had just emerged from the banana fields in a kibbutz—his khaki work shirt sweat-stained at the armpits, his khaki pants in need of a good cleaning. A head shorter than Orhlon, Kandel was round in shape, but hard in body and disposition. He wore the same grizzled, gray stubble on his chin as he did on his head. Welcome and warmth were as foreign to Kandel as Palestinian rights.

There was no preamble, no pleasantries.

“When can the IDF move?”

“Move where, Mr. Prime Minister?”

“Lebanon … and down from the Golan.”

Calculations flooded Orhlon’s mind, stalling his response. Readiness reports and threat assessments were fresh, digested less than an hour ago. He traversed the terrain in his mind, reconnoitered the disaster of Israel’s last incursion into Lebanon when Hezbollah shredded the IDF.

“We can bring reserves to the front today. The Golani Brigade armor and artillery will be at strength and can move tomorrow.”

Kandel looked at the watch on his muscled, tanned arm. “Tell Brigadier Bertz that I want the Thirty-Sixth Armor Division moving in twenty minutes. The Seventh Brigade is to leave Mas’ada, cross the border at Quazzani, and swing west, to the coast, just north of Tyre.”

“That’s thirty kilometers!”

“Yes,” said Kandel, stepping to a map pinned to the office wall. “I want to cut Lebanon in half and then squeeze the Hezbollah rocket encampments from both sides. Where is the 188th?”

“Rihaniya.”

“Close enough. Send them across the border to destroy the rocket launchers at Yaroun and Rmaich.”

Orhlon knew where this was going … another war with Lebanon. So be it. But, for the moment, he must protect his soldiers. “Mr. Prime Minister, without support the tanks will be blind, they will be vulnerable—they will be decimated. We should—”

“You need your armor, your ground troops, yes?”

“Yes, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Then I suggest you get your armor started and your ground troops moving, General. Let the air force loose once more and pound Hezbollah’s strong points. But the tanks move in twenty minutes. Is that clear?”

Orhlon needed to be on the phone—now. “Yes, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Good. Then ready the heavy bombers. We strike Iran tonight … Natanz. The Iranians are focused on the American warships in the Strait of Hormuz and the radiation poisoning in its air. And Syria is in no condition to oppose us or offer retaliation. This is the time to strike. The world will have its eyes on Lebanon. So we go after Natanz tonight, with everything we have. Understood?”

Orhlon was already at the door. “Yes, sir.” He hesitated, turned, and faced Kandel. “You are taking quite a risk.”

Kandel turned away from the map to look at Orhlon as if he were an alien. “No risk,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “Destiny. And opportunity. An opportunity which may not come our way again. This time, you are to crush Hezbollah. See to it.”

Orhlon was out the door, already on the phone to his commanders. It was time for war.

10:04 a.m., Ghajar, Israel

It was a line on a map, the border between Ghajar, Israel, and Quazzani, Lebanon. This invisible but very real border sliced through the midst of four buildings in the middle of the community, cutting as cleanly as the loyalties in each home. On one side, Israel. One step away, Lebanon. And no fence to separate the two.

Colonel Isadore Stanfill struck the obligatory image of a tank commander. The colonel stood in the open hatch at the top of the turret in his Israeli-designed Merkava Mark 2 battle tank. The field glasses held to his eyes scanned the buildings on the Lebanese side. He was waiting for half his brigade to form up behind him on the road from Ma’sada. The other fifty were split on his flanks.

Stanfill was grateful his tanks didn’t need to run the gauntlet between the buildings of Ghajar and Quazzani. This mission was insane enough without having to maneuver through tight streets looking for Arabs with rocket launchers. Cross the border, turn left, and run for the coast. Whose idea was this, anyway? Thirty kilometers on a straight line. Stanfill’s Mark 2s could cover that thirty kilometers in an hour at full speed. But there was no straight line between Quazzani and Tyre, just a series of deteriorating, twisting roads in a maze of dead ends. Either his tanks would risk a run down the Latani River valley, an undulating series of meanders and switchbacks that would take forever and leave him vulnerable. Or, as General Orhlon had ordered, he would lead his column along the road to Qantara, smash the Hezbollah rocket batteries that were raining death into Kiryat Shmona, and join up with the flanking column to the east that had attacked Osair, and the one to the west, turning south at Ghandourive and pushing hard to join up with the 188th Brigade on its way north from Rmaich.

With two hundred Israeli tanks massed to the north of the border, Israeli ground troops, armor, and artillery could push up from the south and catch Hezbollah in a vise. At least, that was the plan. In 2006 that plan hadn’t worked very well. Hezbollah was ready then, and countered every Israeli move, driving the IDF from Lebanon. Stanfill thought this new plan a fool’s errand. He was old-school. He believed in the tactic of overwhelming force massed into one decisive blow.

But that wasn’t the strategy for today.

“Start up the engines,” he said into the radio mike on his lapel. “It’s time to move.”

10:08 a.m., Jerusalem

Annie was getting frustrated. It seemed like every step forward was a fight. All she wanted was some real end to this nightmare. Why was Tom so resistant? Sure, Tom was emotionally and physically exhausted from the desperate and ill-fated race to save her and Kallie. His damaged shoulder was in a sling, and his body one, huge bruise. But this was no time to wait, to rest.

“These thugs and murderers are a threat to us and to our children. They’ve torn our lives apart.”

Tom and Annie sat on a wood-slat bench in the shade of a large cypress tree near the memorial at the top of Ammunition Hill—the site of a bloody battle during the Six-Day War, not far from the apartment. Annie wanted a place where she could speak to Tom privately. The apartment was getting too crowded.

“Don’t you think I know that?”

She could feel his Irish getting up.

“But we don’t know anything. At best,” said Tom, shaking his head and gesturing with his left hand, “we have half the story.”

She spoke as softly as her mangled nerves would allow. “Tom, what’s wrong with you? Some days you’re positive, some days you’re negative—let’s keep going … no, let’s stop. I don’t know what’s going on. And I don’t know what to expect, but we’ve clearly been given a mission from God. Remember Gabriel?”

Twice he opened his mouth to speak, the second time turning to face Annie. But the words were having a hard time finding their way to his lips. He shook his head.

“I’m tired. I’m tired of making all the decisions. I make a decision, and we take a six-hundred-mile excursion into the desert of Iraq because we think these directions on the sprockets will lead us to the garden of Eden? Well, how do we get into that country, eh? More important, how do we get out? And what do we do when we get there? Just wander around in the streets of Saddam’s Babylon until the spirit strikes?”

“Why not? It worked for you before,” said Annie, the snap of her words carrying more of an edge than she intended.

She took Tom’s hand. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. But we keep thinking this nightmare is over, and it continues to pull us back in—because the Prophet’s Guard hasn’t stopped and we are in their way. But it hasn’t stopped for me, either.”