The roof was completely open. Esfahani stared into the skies above and praised Allah for giving him the privilege of being part of this glorious rise of the Caliphate.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Director Allen was still on the phone with the president when Tom Murray and Jack Zalinsky realized the Iranians and Syrians were launching a massive missile strike. At first count, the commander of the Global Ops Center counted 169 rockets and missiles lifting off or in the air, each and every one of them headed for Israel.
“… four… three… two… one…”
This was it. The missiles’ engines roared to life. White-hot flames came rushing out of the nozzles below them, instantly incinerating all three men — one Syrian and two Iranians, all of whom Esfahani had once thought to be heroes.
The entire underground facility shuddered and quaked as the launchpads fell away and the Scuds began to lift off. Esfahani was beside himself with joy. The thought crossed his mind that he should turn and look at the faces of the Mahdi, the Ayatollah, and President Mustafa. Each was standing close beside him, and it would be fascinating, he thought, to see their reactions and compare them to his own. But he was mesmerized by the missiles beginning their launch. He simply couldn’t pull his eyes off the sight of the fire and the smoke. It was such a beautiful, glorious sight, one he knew he would cherish forever.
“You see,” said the Mahdi, “Zandi was a liar, and Allah hates liars—”
But then suddenly everything went white. The nuclear warhead in the nose cone of Missile Four detonated at an altitude of just five hundred yards. Temperatures surged into the millions of degrees. Everything and everyone on the Al-Mazzah base was instantly vaporized. The blast wave leveled all buildings and incinerated all life-forms for ten kilometers in every direction in a fraction of a second. Every bit of air and gas in the surrounding area was sucked into the center and erupted into a fireball as hot as the sun. The fireball roared across Damascus, scorching anything and everything that was not already dead, and as it shot into the air and expanded and cooled, the distinctive mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation could be seen for hundreds of kilometers.
Levi Shimon and Zvi Dayan sat in stunned horror. Every screen in the command center displaying satellite, drone, and radar feeds from the Syrian front suddenly went black. For a moment, Shimon feared that Tel Aviv had been hit with a nuclear weapon. But just as quickly the systems rebooted, and Shimon saw the sobering truth. It was Damascus, not Tel Aviv, that had just experienced a nuclear holocaust, but for the life of him Shimon’s mind could not register how.
Without warning, the most intense white light David and his team had ever witnessed burst across the Syrian skyline. Instantly blinded and completely disoriented, David lost control of the car. He tried to slam on the brakes, but at the high speed at which they were racing, the car swerved violently, then ran off the left side of the road, careened down an embankment, and flipped six times before smashing upon the craggy rocks below.
Jack Zalinsky was in shock. He stared at the screens in front of him. Both of the feeds from the Predators ended abruptly and did not come back. But from the Keyhole satellite feed, Zalinsky and his colleagues had watched the detonation in real time. They could see the mushroom cloud rising into the atmosphere. They were watching as the fireball annihilated the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. They just couldn’t believe what they were witnessing.
There was no evidence that any Israeli missiles had reached Syria, much less Damascus. So Zalinsky was certain Naphtali hadn’t yet ordered a nuclear strike against the Syrians. What then had happened? Had the Iranian nuke malfunctioned, and if so, how was that possible?
Behind him, he could hear President Jackson shouting at Director Allen over a speakerphone, “What happened? What just happened?” But Allen could not yet reply. He, too, was in shock.
For several minutes, Zalinsky and everyone else in the Global Operations Center just stared at the screens. They could see what was happening, but it still wasn’t computing. None of it made any sense. And then Zalinsky thought of David and his team. He reached for one of the receivers on the bank of phones in front of him. He knew by now that David had lost his satphone during the gun battle at Dayr az-Zawr. So he speed-dialed Steve Fox’s number. The phone rang once. Then five times. Then ten times and fifteen. But there was no answer.
He hung up and speed-dialed Nick Crenshaw’s phone. He waited through five rings. Then ten, then fifteen and twenty. But no one answered that line either.
Panicked, he tried Fox’s phone again. Then Crenshaw’s. He called Eva and told her to stop everything and just keep redialing those two numbers every two minutes for the next hour. But no one answered.
The phones just rang and rang.
51
“Abort the strike order!” Naphtali ordered over his secure line to the IDF Operations Center. “I repeat, abort the strike order.”
Dozens of Israeli missiles were already in the air, racing for Al-Mazzah and other key Syrian military bases, particularly those housing caches of chemical and biological weapons. Naphtali knew there was nothing he could do to bring those back. But he listened as Shimon immediately relayed the order to the chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force and the wave of fighter jets that were currently lifting off and en route to Syria were called back.
Naphtali couldn’t fully conceive of what had just happened. He had confidence his team would eventually piece together the puzzle and figure it out. But for now his instincts told him to do everything in his power to avoid the charge by the international community that Israel had vaporized Damascus. Had he ordered a massive strike on Syria’s military facilities? Absolutely. But he had not ordered the annihilation of an Arab capital, and he did not want the world to think he had. Israel was isolated enough. Neither he nor his people could afford to be charged with a crime such as this.
The Iranian and Syrian missiles were still inbound, however. Some of them were being shot down, but well over a hundred of them were hitting Israeli cities from Haifa to Beersheva. For some reason Jerusalem was being spared the deadly barrage, but at the moment that was little comfort. More than seven million Israelis were huddled in bomb shelters and wearing gas masks and riding out one of the most devastating attacks in the modern history of the Jewish State. Casualty projections from the latest strikes were expected to be high. Dayan feared more than 1,500 Jews and Arabs could die in these latest missile attacks. But Naphtali felt certain that an Israeli retaliation was out of the question. What more could they do to Syria than had already been done? The great and proud and ancient city of Damascus was no more. It had been wiped off the face of the map, never to rise again. More than two million Arab souls had perished in a matter of milliseconds. It was a tragedy of epic proportions, but it was a tragedy of Iran and Syria’s own making. Naphtali had no reason to feel guilt, but he grieved nonetheless, and he wondered what all this would mean for the future of the Middle East.
To his astonishment, reports began to come in almost immediately from southern Lebanon and even from Gaza that the fighting had stopped. It wasn’t clear whether the forces of Hezbollah and Hamas believed that Israel had just nuked Damascus, but Shimon had begun forwarding reports from IDF commanders in the field that as news of the destruction of Damascus spread, the Arab forces were going into shock. They weren’t exactly laying down their arms, but they weren’t using them either. They were disengaging from the Israelis and beginning to retreat.