Van Horn smiled serenely. “It must be the bad company I’m keeping.” She banked the BushCat back to the east — starting the long, arduous night flight through Iran’s mountains and across its vast deserts that would take them back to Afghanistan.
Sourly, Pavel Voronin prodded a twisted and blackened piece of debris protruding from the sand with the toe of one of his handmade boots. He turned to the gray-bearded Iranian brigadier general standing next to him. Mohsen Shirazi commanded the Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Force. That put him in charge of all of Iran’s military missile and space efforts — most important of all now, those committed to MIDNIGHT. “So now we know for sure that an enemy has uncovered some of our most prized secrets,” he commented coldly.
Shirazi frowned. “Some, perhaps,” he admitted. “But not all of them.”
“Thanks to your traitor Khavari, they know about the Gulf Venture,” Voronin retorted. “And now their agents have seen your Zuljanah rocket in transit. Which means they were tipped off to the convoy from Shahrud by someone.” He scowled. “All things considered, Jerusalem has already learned far more about our business together than I find comfortable.”
Shirazi looked narrowly at the dapper, well-dressed Russian. “You’re still convinced this was an Israeli operation?”
“It’s the logical assumption,” Voronin pointed out. The ambush carried out against Viktor Skoblin in Vienna had been straight out of the Mossad playbook. And so was this. Who else but the Israelis would have the courage, skill, and, indeed, the sheer ruthlessness to carry out such a daring covert operation so far inside Iran? Certainly not the Americans or even the British, he concluded dismissively. Judging by what he read, their intelligence agencies were much too focused on playing domestic political games right now to willingly risk trained agents and equipment in a high-stakes gamble like the one they’d just witnessed.
Moodily, he kicked at the burnt-out remains of the helicopter again. “If we can be grateful for anything,” he said harshly, “it ought to be that the Israelis had only a small reconnaissance unit deployed near the highway, and not a more well-equipped commando force. Judging by the results here, a full-fledged attack on your convoy might well have reduced all our hopes for MIDNIGHT to smoldering wreckage.”
Slowly, Shirazi nodded in bleak acknowledgement. “If the Israelis have been alerted by what they’ve learned here — and elsewhere — we can expect them to react even more violently going forward,” he warned.
“I am aware of that,” Voronin snapped. He fought to regain his composure. He had too much riding on this enterprise to see it end in failure. Zhdanov had given him a blank check so far. But Russia’s president would never forgive him if MIDNIGHT resulted in yet another humiliating defeat. If his nation’s autocratic ruler had one defining characteristic, it was his readiness to sacrifice anyone he believed had failed him.
“Perhaps we should provide an armed naval escort for Gulf Venture when it sails,” Shirazi suggested. “To protect the tanker against air attack or a commando raid.”
“You think so?” Voronin said acidly. He snorted in derision. “Why not just publish all our detailed plans for this secret operation in the New York Times or the Washington Post? It would certainly be simpler and cheaper than surrounding what is supposed to be an innocent civilian merchant ship with a flotilla of your fast-attack speedboats and other warships.”
The Iranian’s mouth thinned in anger. He folded his arms. “Then what do you propose we do?”
Voronin told him.
Shirazi frowned. “Your concept has merit,” he conceded at last. “But implementing your ideas will add several days and significant costs to the tanker’s fitting out process. My superiors in Tehran will not be pleased.”
“Better a minor delay now, than complete disaster later,” Voronin reminded the other man bluntly. “Especially since neither of us is likely to survive for long if this operation fails.”
“A persuasive argument,” Shirazi agreed at length. He nodded. “Very well, it shall be done.”
Twenty-One
Miranda Reynolds, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, wondered if she ought to mark this down as a red-letter day in the imaginary diary she’d didn’t actually keep. High-ranking officials in the Agency had learned the hard way that even the most personal of records might be subject to subpoena by busybody Congressional investigators determined to cause trouble. In the circumstances, it was safer to rely entirely on your own memory, she thought cynically — unless, of course, you needed to jot down a pro forma protest of some questionable, or even outright illegal, order from a superior… at least as a measure of limited protection against possible future prosecution.
Nevertheless, she probably should find some permanent way to memorialize this meeting. Since his appointment, Charles Horne, the new director of Central Intelligence, had made it clear that he preferred working with his senior subordinates through a web of toadies and underlings. And yet here she was, summoned to his private office for an emergency intel briefing from Philip Demopoulos, who ran the Agency’s Directorate of Analysis. Whatever else was going on, she guessed that was a sign the DCI didn’t want any other potential leakers — or witnesses, maybe — to hear what they were going to discuss.
For now, she sat quietly in one of the two chairs placed in front of Horne’s desk. Demopoulos, wavy-haired with a trim, graying goatee, occupied the other. She thought he seemed on edge, which probably meant he suspected his news would not be welcomed.
Slowly and methodically, Horne sorted through the sheaf of photographs he’d been handed by Demopoulos shortly after they all sat down. Although he said nothing at first, his thick lips compressed in obvious annoyance as he fanned them out across his desk. They showed what appeared to be a convoy of military trucks and other vehicles on a road somewhere. Canvas-shrouded shapes of some sort were tied down on some of the flatbed trailers shown. His fleshy face reddened slightly while he studied them.
At last, he looked up at Demopoulos. “What’s all this supposed to be, Phil?” he demanded, indicating the photos.
“We believe those are the separate stages of a large missile or space rocket,” the other man said carefully. “One the Iranians shipped by road to the Bandar Abbas area several days ago.”
Horne frowned. “How do you know that?” He tapped one of the pictures. Beyond the line of trucks, it showed a barren, rocky wasteland with sharp-edged mountains rising in the background. “For God’s sake, these images could have been taken almost anywhere in Iran. The whole damned country’s almost nothing but desert or arid, mountainous wilderness.”
“The digital file containing those pictures was sent to us by a well-informed source we’ve always found reliable,” Demopoulos explained. “And we’ve confirmed the geolocation data provided with every photo. There’s absolutely no question that these images were, in fact, taken along a stretch of highway not far north of Bandar Abbas.”
Horne’s frown deepened. “Ah, yes, your mysterious ‘reliable’ source,” he said heavily. “The same one, I recall, who tried to sell us the bullshit story about that oil tanker Tehran was supposedly retrofitting for some nefarious purpose a while back.”
Demopoulos let that pass.
Reynolds grimaced. She’d assigned a small team to discreetly uncover where Demopoulos really obtained his gems of raw intelligence from inside Iran. So far, to her intense irritation, they’d come up mostly empty-handed. All anyone in the Analysis Directorate could tell them was that their chief’s eyes-only source was code-named GLASS ISLE. One of her more literary-minded subordinates had rather hesitantly suggested this could be a veiled reference to the Isle of Avalon in Arthurian legend, the place where King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, was forged and where the gravely wounded king was said to have vanished into legend — but where the hell was that type of mythological gobbledygook supposed to lead her?