The Disciple

I had no answer to that. It looked to me as if the God Squad had a pretty firm grip on things around here. They were arresting people for political protests and convicting them of treason, executing women by hanging and stoning… All in all, the place looked like I imagined Nazi Germany looked in the 1930s, complete with goon squads and Gestapo. They even had a dictator with a direct telephone line to God. All they needed to do to make Iran perfect was to declare war on the rest of the human race, and it looked to me as if Ahmadinejad just might do it.

I didn’t say any of this to Davar, of course. I didn’t have the heart.

In the Pentagon the plans for conventional strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were coming together slowly. There were a lot of problems, as Jake Grafton expected. The reactors were easy to hit, but the uranium processing facilities, the bomb factory and the missile factories were all underground. Many of the key facilities were under Tehran. The distances involved meant that all the strike planes, including navy planes launched from aircraft carriers, would have to be refueled, some of them twice, a few three times. Tanker assets would have to come from all over the world.

And since it was assumed that Iran would be launching cruise missiles, some of them armed with nuclear warheads, a lot of fighters would need to be in the air to shoot them down and protect the strike birds from Iranian fighters.

Ballistic missiles that flew up and out of the atmosphere, then reentered on a steep dive to their targets, were an entirely different problem. Fighter aircraft lacked the weapons to knock them down.

The officer in charge of the pla

Today Jake Grafton found General Heth huddled with two army Special Forces officers, one a general and the other a colonel. Heth looked up at Jake when he saw him and motioned him to join them.

“We have problems,” Heth said after he had introduced Jake to the army officers. “There is no way we can crack some of these bunkers. We’re going to have to put boots on the ground and blow the bunkers from the inside. All the centrifuges, the laser separation facility, the heavy water plant, all of that stuff is at least a hundred and sixty-five feet under bedrock.”

“Opposition?” Jake murmured as he looked at the chart on the table in front of them, a chart with the locations a

“Lots of it, and if they are going to launch nukes, the guard troops will be on full alert. The only way we have a chance is to target the troops on guard, blow them to holy hell and put the Spec Forces guys right into the smoking craters before they have time to regroup. And they will regroup. Here around Tehran are several armored divisions and a couple of infantry divisions. These guys aren’t the Wermacht, but there are so many they’ll be tough to handle.”

“If their leadership is even halfway competent,” the Special Forces general agreed. “To be brutally honest, I don’t know if we can do it with paratroops or Special Forces. We may need armored columns punching in from Iraq. Battles are won with firepower.”

“Casualties?”

“I would expect to lose at least half my troops,” said the Spec Forces general. “Maybe more. The real problem is that our guys will have limited firepower, and once they go through what they have, it’s going to get really exciting. Air support will have to come from a thousand miles away, and I don’t care what anybody says, that’s too far.”

“Extraction?”

“We were discussing that. After the teams do their mission, they would have to egress to an airport where we can actually pick them up. And flying transports in will be a whole other problem.”

Jake spent a few more minutes with them, then left to go look at the large map of Iran posted on the wall. Iran was a damn big place, about three times the size of France. Over a hundred million people lived there. A lot of it was inhospitable deserts and mountains, much like Arizona, so most of the people were crammed into urban centers where they tried to earn a living.

In 1980 the military had tried to rescue American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They had flown helicopters north through the desert; the mission failed when one of the helos crashed trying to land in a cloud of dust and dirt. Iran was huge and inhospitable, yet the American military had learned a lot about desert operations since 1980.

Jake was standing there scrutinizing the map when he felt someone at his elbow. He turned. Sal Molina.

“I saw that list you sent over this morning. ‘Jihad missiles,’ no less. You didn’t make that crap up, did you?”

“Food for thought, eh?”

“Come clean. Where’d you get that list?”

“It happened just as I set it out in the cover memo.”

Molina stood looking around at the charts and maps. “Israel,” he murmured, “Baghdad, Doha, Kuwait, and-this is the part that I find unbelievable-Tehran.” He was silent for a moment. “So what do you think?” he asked finally.

Grafton took a deep breath. “We really have two problems here. One is the ballistic and cruise missiles that get launched. The other is the people who ordered them launched.”

Sal thought a little bit about that. “Okay,” he finally said.

“Some of the missiles are going to get into the air unless we do a first strike, which your boss ruled out. We need a layered defense, a defense in depth, to try to knock down as many of those missiles as possible before they reach their targets.”

“I’m with you.”

“We won’t get them all.”

Sal Molina didn’t respond.

Grafton continued. “Uranium enrichment, bomb and missile factories aren’t a threat in and of themselves. It’s the people who build bombs that are the problem. Taking out those facilities will require an invasion of Iran. I doubt that the president will approve it, even if the Iranians wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”

“Go on.”

“What we need to do,” the admiral said, “is cut off the head of the dragon.”

“A coup d’état?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“America has tried those before, once in Iran, I believe. They don’t work very well.”

“You’ll like the idea a lot better after you talk to General Heth.”

“Can it be done?”

“I think so,” Jake Grafton said and tapped his finger on the map, way up near the top, on Tehran. “Iran has a vibrant young population and a political opposition that the regime has tried to sit on. All they need is a chance.”

I spotted Ghasem in front of the metro station. He seemed to be alone, a twenty-something guy, obviously middle class, with a short beard and trimmed hair.

We rode past him once, looking for the tails. There were plenty of people around at that time of night, yet all seemed to be going somewhere. No one was standing around, watching other people or pretending to read a newspaper or book.

I assumed that if Ghasem thought he was being watched, he wouldn’t stand there like a store dummy waiting for us.

I stopped in front of him on our next circuit of the block, and Davar got off the back of the bike. “I can get home from here,” she said as she pulled off her helmet. Ghasem stared at his cousin; apparently he had never seen her on a motorcycle or wearing a helmet. Davar helped Ghasem don the helmet and fasten the strap under his chin. As he climbed on the bike, she smiled at me.