The Disciple

Hazra al-Rashid picked up the telephone and asked for the number two man in the MOIS.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Four MOIS agents came for Mostafa Abtahi at two in the morning. They found his passport, examined the American tourist visa, then handcuffed him and settled in to search the apartment. They trashed it as Ghasem Murad dressed, then watched. He knew better than to try to leave or to object. He merely stood and watched, expressionless, as he tried not to think about what was in store for his friend Abtahi.

Arresting people for political reasons was an old story, as old as kings and dictators and tyrants, yet that made it no easier to endure. Ghasem watched as Abtahi bit his lip to keep tears from leaking out.

Ghasem also bit his lip. He well knew that this might be the last time he saw Abtahi alive, a man whose only crime was that he wanted to go to America and had actually scored a tourist visa.

As they were leaving, Abtahi tried to say something to Ghasem, but the MOIS men slapped him into silence and pushed him out the door.

Ghasem looked at his watch. They had been there an hour.

Jihad Day was precisely one week away. Seven days. On that morning the missiles would rise from their launchers and Israel would cease to exist. Israel or America would probably retaliate with nuclear weapons. Ghasem could envision Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanding that the Muslims of the world unite against the Great Satan to avenge the martyrs of Tehran, may they rest in peace.

Ghasem locked up his apartment-he paused at the door for a last look at the stuff strewn everywhere-and went downstairs. His car was where he had left it.

He drove to the ministry and went in. The guards didn’t ask to see his pass; he merely walked by them.

The light was on in the minister’s office. He saw his uncle on his prayer rug, bent over. His uncle didn’t seem to notice that he was in the room.

Minister of Defense Habib Sultani was doing a lot of praying these days. As he had all his adult life, he started by reciting passages from the Koran, which didn’t take much thought. He merely put his mind in neutral and the words flowed out.

Tonight, though, the words slowed to a trickle and finally stopped as images formed in his mind of missiles roaring into space and flying a huge parabola, finally turning slowly to fall straight down toward the earth, like a spear hurled at the earth’s heart. Then the missile became a fireball that grew and grew until it consumed everything. Everything… cities, people, buildings, the sky, the earth…

Afterward… there was nothing. It was as if the world and humans had never been.

In his mind’s eye were only images. Horrible images.

When he could stand the images no longer, Habib Sultani opened his eyes and levered himself to a sitting position on his prayer rug.

He was drained, yet the images in his mind refused to fade.

“Are you all right, Uncle?”

The voice was Ghasem’s.

Sultani looked around slowly. His familiar world appeared intact, undamaged.

He reached for a table and touched it. Its solidity reassured him.

Ghasem was standing there with a worried look on his face.

“Yes,” Sultani said, slightly surprised by the sound of his own voice. It seemed to be coming from a great distance away.

When he was a young boy, Habib had loved birds, had tried to imagine what it would be like if he could fly with the birds. He could feel himself flying along now, looking down, the birds accompanying him, looking down at the buildings and people, who were staring up at him and pointing, as the missiles fell toward them.

“Uncle, what is the combination to your safe?” Ghasem again.

He heard the words and understood them, but he was still aloft, still flying along as the missiles fell, missiles with warheads that he had helped create. He could turn his head and look up and see them coming down, closer and closer and closer…

“Uncle, you must concentrate,” he heard Ghasem saying. “You must tell me the combination to your safe. I need to know that combination so that I can open it.”

By great force of will Habib Sultani formed the words for the first number and uttered them aloud. Then he saw the missiles falling again.

“Now the second number,” Ghasem said.

The second number… oh, what was it? Something with a three… oh yes, thirty-two. He made his lips move, forced the words out.

“And the third number?” Ghasem said softly. He was right there, near him, even though he was suspended in midair, but his words were coming from so far away. Soon Ghasem would be dead, and his cousin Davar, and Khurram and the daughters of Israr Murad, dead, as if they had never been, because he, Habib Sultani, had created the missiles and warheads to murder everyone on earth.

Now he felt a hand on his arm. And another on his back. Ghasem again, whispering about a third number. Even though he was far away, Habib heard the whisper, heard the urgency, the pleading, the desire to know.

“Fifty-six,” he said, forcing his lips to form the words and his diaphragm to push air out around them.

“Thank you, Uncle.”

Ghasem Murad left his uncle sitting on his prayer rug and turned to the safe. He spun the dial and carefully stopped it on the first number. Back the other way…

When he had put in the third number and turned the dial back until it stopped, the heavy latch lever clicked. He seized it and applied steady pressure. He felt the locks move. Then he pulled on the door of the safe. It opened.

Working quickly, he began hunting through the contents of the safe. He found a file labeled jihad missiles. Opened it. The third document in the file was a list of twelve locations defined by latitude and longitude, numbers a GPS guidance system understood. The list was headed targets for jihad missiles. Someone had written in pencil the names of the cities or military bases that the coordinates defined. Two of them were Tel Aviv. One was Tehran, and the rest were American military bases in Iraq, Qatar and Kuwait.

Staring at it, Ghasem realized he was holding a copy of an original document. The names of the cities appeared to be in his uncle Habib’s handwriting. He scrutinized the paper. Yes. It was a copy, with no number; apparently someone ran a classified document through the copy machine and handed out copies, probably to people who were not cleared to see the original.

Perhaps that someone had given a sheet to Habib Sultani. The Minister of defense might wish to know where the missiles were going to go, but arguably, he didn’t need to know.

Ghasem was stu

One of the warheads would detonate over the city. Two hundred kilotons of nuclear energy would form a fireball above the city hotter than the sun, a fireball that would expand until it almost touched the ground. The thermal pulse would cremate the people under it, set mud and wood, brick and concrete and steel afire, and the concussion would push over everything as it rushed away. Then, as the fireball rose and cooled, air would rush back into the vacuum in a tidal wave that would destroy any buildings or bridges or other structures still standing and carry thousands of tons of combustibles into the center of the fire, which would rage uncontrolled, destroying everything that would burn, even dirt.

Ghasem Murad hunted through the file. Where are these damned missiles? Where will they be launched from? And when?

He found no piece of paper to answer those questions. None. Not a scrap.