The Last Jihad (26 page)

“Almost there, sir. They’ve been flying from the U.S. all night.”

“Good. Get SEAL Team Six and the guys from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team on a chopper headed towards Baghdad. I want them in the theater as fast as possible. The minute we get any whiff of another possible nuclear launch, we’ll send them in like the Israelis’ GhostCom force to disable the missile and recover the warhead. But look—we don’t have much time and we’ve got to keep the Israelis and the Saudis out of this war. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“OK. Then launch B-2s out of Whiteman and get them to Incirlik, Turkey, as fast as you can. Have them each locked and loaded with those tactical nuclear missiles. And get their targeting packages ready for Baghdad and Tikrit, just in case. This goes without saying, but I want it said to those pilots anyway, by you personally, Mr. Secretary: those pilots may not release those nuclear missiles except on my direct command and with the appropriate nuclear launch authorization codes. I have not made my final decision. But I want them to be in place if necessary. Let’s just pray to God it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Defense Secretary picked up a secure line back to the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and set things in motion.

“Sanchez?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Get Football in here and at my side ASAP—and have him call back to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and get briefed.”

“I’ll do it right now, sir.”

“Good. Bill, get on the horn with all the Congressional leadership. I know they’re scattered all over the country but I need them on a conference call as fast as you possibly can get it arranged.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bob, get me Prime Minister Doron on the phone immediately. Then get me Chairman Arafat on a separate line. And go get Chuck Murray. Have him line up the networks for tonight and begin to coordinate some leaks. Make them work, Bill. We can’t afford to screw up now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, call Shakespeare back at the White House. Get him working on a draft speech for tonight. And check with Public Liaison. I want the details of the memorial service and make sure the First Lady has them, too. I’d like to see if Franklin Graham could come and speak. Call him yourself, Bob. Let him know I’ll call him the moment I can.”

“You got it, sir.”

Corsetti moved to the other end of the conference room, grabbed a secure phone and got a White House operator on the line to begin making things happen.

“Marsha, get all the allies on the phone. Start with London. Then President Vadim in Moscow.”

“Mr. President?”

It was Secretary Paine. He was clearly being left out of the loop, but he no longer seemed enraged. Nevertheless, the President continued to be very formal with him.

“Yes, Mr. Secretary?”

“One question.”

“What?”

“Mr. President, you are unleashing the power of the gods, and with it the law of unintended consequences. Who’s to say what will happen next? What if Moscow decides it needs to use nuclear weapons someday? Or Beijing or Pyongyang or India or Pakistan? My God, Mr. President, what if Tehran ever decides to go nuclear against Israel? What then? What would we do? What could we possibly say when they look us in the eye and say, ‘Hey, you did it first?’”

The silence was almost eerie.

“Mr. Secretary, I’ve got less than fifteen minutes. We don’t live in a perfect world, and I guess I’ll just have to cross those bridges when I come to them. For now, I’ve got a job to do. And I’m going to do it.”

The president nodded to Corsetti and the transmission was cut. The videoconference call was over. The debate was finished. Now it was time for the hard part—shutting down Saddam before Iraq could actually launch a nuclear missile. And time was running out.

David Doron stared at his colleagues, took a deep breath, and picked up the call.

“Mr. President, I trust you have an answer.”

“Mr. Prime Minister, I am calling to inform you that the United States has just launched full-scale war on the Republic of Iraq.”

The exhausted Israeli Prime Minister exhaled with relief.

“Our cruise missiles are in the air,” MacPherson continued. “Our bombers are taking off as we speak. We’re deploying ground forces as quickly as we can. You have my word: We are going to take down Saddam Hussein and neutralize his military machine no matter what it takes.”

“That is welcome news, my friend.”

“At nine
P.M.
Eastern I will make a televised address from the Oval Office, explaining the events that led up to this moment. I will explain why our national security, our vital interests, and our friends and allies are in grave danger. And I will describe our course of action. But David, as a friend, I need to know one thing.”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“If I find it necessary to order the use of a weapon of mass destruction against Iraq, finding no other course of action effective in neutralizing Saddam’s forces quickly enough, would your government back us publicly and at the U.N.?”

“We would,” Doron replied instantly. “How else can we help?”

“You can stand down your nuclear forces, David,” MacPherson said softly but firmly.

There was a long pause.

“Please don’t ask that of me,” Doron replied.

“I must. It will be bad enough for the U.S. to use such weapons. But make no mistake—there will be terrible international repercussions if your country were to use them. That I can assure you.”

“Mr. President, I am well aware of the risks we face in terms of international opinion. Even international trade. But we are on the brink, sir. We are talking about the very survival of the Jewish race as we know it. My government wishes you well in this military campaign. But let me be clear—if we see the slightest indication that Iraq is again prepared to use such catastrophic force, we will act. We will act decisively. We will act with cataclysmic force. And we will act without warning.”

“I urge you to reconsider,” MacPherson responded, his mind scrambling to find a coherent argument—any argument—to dissuade the Israeli leader.

“That I cannot do.”

“Then I guess my country better get the job done, so you won’t have to take matters into your own hands.”

It was a killer storm—in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was daytime in the Middle East. But it looked and felt like the dead of night. The winds were gusting over the Mediterranean—as well as over Lebanon, northern Syria, and northern Iraq—at upwards of forty to fifty knots.

Massive sheets of rain were moving horizontally. Bolts of lightning lit up the dark and ominous sky, allowing anyone brave enough or stupid enough to be on the pitching, heaving decks of the two American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to see monstrous waves cresting at thirty to forty feet.

It was no time to go to war. But then soldiers, sailors, and airmen never get to choose when they go into battle.

The flash traffic email arrived from CENTCOM, and it was red hot. The message was quickly decoded, printed, shoved in a black folder marked “TOP SECRET” and rushed to the captains of each ship. Minutes later—despite the raging storm—dozens of fighter jets began catapulting off the decks of the
U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt
and the
U.S.S. Ronald Reagan
, the newest 97,000-ton state-of-the-art
Nimitz
-class American aircraft carrier patrolling the Med.

The Commander-in-Chief had spoken. America was going to war—now. And the man in the gun sights was Saddam Hussein.

“Downey, don’t mess with me.”

Sam Maxwell—the counterterrorism watch commander sitting behind a bank of sixteen computers and five giant TV screens in the FBI’s fifth-floor OPS2 center—couldn’t believe what he was hearing over the phone. “I’m in no mood for a joke.”

“No joke, sir. I’m telling you, I just got it. I triple-checked it. It’s real.”

“You’re telling me Treasury Secretary Iverson just got an email from Yuri Gogolov?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he opened it?”

“Yes. It was forwarded from his personal AOL account to his BlackBerry—
and he opened it right on Air Force One.
Then deleted it. And it’s a weird note, too. I don’t get it. And I don’t know what to do. I thought you and the director should see it right away.”

“Got that right, Downey. OK. Sit tight. Don’t tell anyone. I’m coming to you.”

The president finished his call with Doron and turned back to Bennett.

“Jon, the minute we get to Andrews, I want you and Erin and Deek to get on a plane and head back to Israel immediately. I’ll brief you guys in the air. But when you land, you’ll need to huddle with Galishnikov and Sa’id and let them know what I want to do with this peace plan. Then you all need to meet personally—but separately—with Doron and Arafat. Walk them through this peace plan scenario. Step by step. Piece by piece. Doron is trigger-happy right now. I don’t blame him. But we need to get him and his team thinking about life
after
we take out Saddam—about the endgame. Arafat is another story. He may only be an honorary figurehead leader now, not the actual duly elected leader of the Palestinian Authority anymore, but don’t kid yourself. He and his loyalists still effectively run the place. He’s the man you need to persuade. And the key with Arafat, Jon, is to make one thing crystal clear. He either signs on to this deal—a deal that will make him and the Palestinian people richer than they’ve ever hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined—or he and his cronies are finished.”

The ominous words just hung in the air. Ultimatums weren’t MacPherson’s style, thought Bennett. But then again, neither was nuclear war.

“I
will
cut off all U.S. aid to him,” the president continued. “I
will
send in the Rangers and Delta Force to hunt down his terrorists. And then we’ll go after him. Personally, I’ve had it with Arafat and his whole corrupt bunch. It’s time for them to lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. If I have to wipe out Iraq, then believe me, we’re going to knock heads together and get peace throughout the region or there are going to be serious consequences for the Palestinian leadership. Got it?”

Bennett just stared at his friend the president in disbelief.

“You got a problem with that, Jon?”

“No, Mr. President, I just…”

“You just what?”

“I’m sorry, I mean—an hour ago I worked on Wall Street. Now you want me to go to Israel to negotiate a peace plan with Yasser Arafat while Saddam Hussein rains nuclear missiles down on our heads?”

“First of all, Iraq isn’t going to get a second chance to fire any missiles, nuclear or otherwise. Second of all, who am I going to send, Tucker Paine? You know the situation. You know this oil deal. And you know me. You’re it, Jon. You do your part and I guarantee you I’ll do mine. I’m not going to let Iraq nuke Israel. Period.”

The president’s case wasn’t all that convincing, much less comforting, thought Bennett. The prospect of dying in a nuclear holocaust in a country he knew so little about—and cared about even less—nearly paralyzed the normally unflappable Bennett. But what choice did he have? Those were the cards he’d been dealt. And one thing was for sure: He couldn’t afford to lose.

Daylight is no time to fly into the heart of darkness.

But they had no choice.

In Saudi Arabia, the issue at the moment wasn’t a raging electrical storm. It was a blinding sandstorm that dangerously reduced visibility. But America was at DefCon One, sandstorm or no sandstorm.

So, without warning, twenty-two F-15E Strike Eagles—part of the 48th Fighter Wing (dubbed the “Liberty Wing” during the Eisenhower Administration)—roared out of Prince Sultan Air Base near Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia, about an hour southeast of Riyadh, and shot hard, fast, and low over the desert, heading north into Iraq.

Their orders were straight from CENTCOM in Tampa: Take out Iraq’s air defense installations, establish one hundred percent American air superiority and then hunt down and destroy Iraq’s mobile missile launchers.

Scud hunting was like a finding a needle in a haystack at five thousand feet going Mach two. But first they needed to dominate the skies. That’s what each pilot and his weapon systems officer were trained to do. But it took time. And time was one thing of which they had very little.

It was going to be a supersonic game of cat and mouse, with one little twist.

The mice might be nuclear.

He’d lost the element of surprise.

But he still had cards to play.

General Azziz, sitting alone in his private command center—staring at a bank of computer screens providing him the latest updates on the mobilization of his elite Republican Guard forces and his agents overseas—knew he could still deliver a knockout punch. The only question was when.

He quickly tapped out three cryptic email messages. The first was to the “four horsemen,” now racing out of Russia to get into position as quickly as possible. Their mission: assassinate Dmitri Galishnikov (the “dirty Jew,” barked Saddam) and Ibrahim Sa’id (“that filthy traitor to his people,” the Iraqi leader had added); then launch a bloody suicide bombing campaign in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat. The second email was to his “assets” outside of Moscow—Gogolov and Jibril—activating another phase of the terror campaign. The third was to his failsafe, “Mr. C.,” deep inside the U.S.

Next, Azziz picked up a phone and barked commands in Arabic to his senior deputy in the larger command and control center down the hall.

“Send out the general alarm. We should be expecting American planes within the hour. All forces prepare for battle. And seal up the bunker. The battle is about to begin.”

Air Force One finally landed at Andrews at four-thirty Friday morning.

Only three days had elapsed since the initial
kamikaze
attack on the president and his motorcade in Denver. Yet everything had changed.

The president, Corsetti, Football, and a team of Secret Service agents—led by Jackie Sanchez—flew Marine One and a backup helicopter back to the White House to get an update on the first air strikes. Iverson directed his security detail to take him home. He needed to shower, shave, change his clothes, and take care of some urgent business before he headed back to Treasury to work the phones and help manage the crisis.

Bennett, Black, and McCoy, meanwhile, grabbed their luggage and crashed in an officers’ lounge until their G4—trailing Air Force One all night—was refueled, restocked, and ready to whisk them back to Israel.

A long day’s journey into night was about to get much longer.

By five
A.M.
, Iverson was back at his newly purchased sprawling Georgetown mansion.

His Secret Service detail took up their standard positions around the house and inside the front and back doors. Iverson immediately headed upstairs to his bedroom, flipped on CNN’s breaking news coverage of the mushrooming military crisis in the Middle East, and booted up his personal laptop on the desk beside his antique canopy bed. By the time he finished taking a quick hot shower and donning a freshly dry-cleaned Brooks Brothers suit, his computer was already logged onto AOL and downloading his emails. It had been awhile since he’d even had time to check this account.

“You’ve got mail,” said the pleasant voice, heard more than forty million times a day, more than twenty-seven thousand times a minute, by AOL subscribers worldwide.

Most of his emails were junk. Except one. The last one. It had arrived just a few minutes before, as though the sender knew he’d be coming home, though he couldn’t possibly have. Iverson was afraid to open it. It was marked inconspicuously, “Special offer/rush order.” But he knew immediately what it was, who it was from, who it had been forwarded from, and what it would say.

“Mr. I—you must RESPOND NOW to our SPECIAL OFFER. Send us your entry and CLAIM YOUR PRIZE. Reminder: if we don’t hear from you within twenty-four hours, the offer will be null and void. And Mr. C—next on the list—will win. Don’t let that happen. ACT TODAY.”

Iverson knew what it was, all right. He’d even fully expected it. Nevertheless, now that it had arrived, he just stared in disbelief. Evidence of the horror yet to come. Unless he sent back his own brilliantly conceived plan by Saturday morning—someone (he didn’t know who) was going to set into motion their plan to assassinate the President of the United States. And soon. Especially if the U.S. started bombing Baghdad back into the Stone Ages.

He had no idea who this sleeper agent—this “Mr. C.”—was. Nor had he any way to contact him. Especially not as the new Secretary of the Treasury. Not now that he oversaw the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for the protection of the president. No one had expected that to happen. Least of all him. But here he was. If he wanted to go through with the plan, it should be even easier, given the new role fate had given him to play.

But what if he wanted to call it off? That would be tougher. How could he actually inform Secret Service Director Bud Norris about a sleeper agent he knew nothing about? And how would he explain exactly how he knew a hit on the president was imminent without implicating himself?

Everything was happening too fast. When he’d met Gogolov years before, he’d had no idea what he was getting into, or where that relationship would lead. How could he have? Iverson stopped and thought about that for a moment. Was that really true? Was this really such a surprise? Maybe not.

Born January 23, 1940 in a tiny hamlet in the Swiss Alps, Iverson was the only child of a powerful banking family. Iverson’s mother, also an only child, forced a bitter, painful divorce in the spring of 1948, after finding her husband in a vault with his secretary. The ensuing custody battle was a particularly nasty affair, a shrill, demeaning bid by both parents to force their son to take sides.

Eventually securing sole custody, she rapidly set about using her contacts and her own considerable personal fortune—nearly $69 million, left to her after the death of her parents—to emigrate to the U.S. and set up a new life in New York. Refusing him the chance to ever see his father again, she immediately sent Stuart off to a series of boarding schools in Delaware and Massachusetts, preparing him to eventually attend and graduate from Harvard with both a BS and an MBA, and hopefully go back into banking, where her parents and their parents and their parents had made their fortunes.