A visibly relieved and smiling American ambassador tore himself away from staring at all the video screens and scanned the digital clocks on the wall. It was now 7:32 a.m. in Jerusalem, 9:02 a.m. in Tehran, and 12:32 a.m. at the White House. Then he turned to Naphtali and stretched out his hand.
“Congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister. I think it’s fair to say on behalf of my government that while we regret and oppose this war and want you to bring it to an immediate end, we are certainly glad to see you and your team successfully defending your people, especially using technology we helped sponsor and develop. Hopefully we can ratchet this thing down very quickly and get back to talking peace.”
Naphtali took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. Then he took the ambassador’s hand and shook it firmly. “Dan, nothing would please me more than to bring this war to an immediate end. I’m not going to surrender in the face of genocide, but please tell the president if he can find a way to shut the Iranians down, I would be very grateful.”
“I will certainly convey that to the president, along with the rest of our conversation.”
“Thank you. It is always a pleasure to spend time with the American ambassador,” Naphtali said.
But just as the prime minister was about to show the ambassador out, his military aide cut him off. “It’s the defense minister again.”
Naphtali took the phone. “Levi, what’s wrong?”
“Sir, we have a problem.”
“Why? What is it?”
“One of the Arrows missed.”
“What are you talking about? I just saw—”
“No, sir. We still have an Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missile inbound for Dimona.”
“But we just watched on the monitors. I thought we got them all.”
“I did too, but apparently we missed one.”
“What about the Patriots?”
“They’ve missed as well. We’re about to launch another Arrow, but it’s the last one on the launcher.”
“How is that possible?”
“We’ve had too many incoming missiles. My men are scrambling to load more missiles, but they’re not miracle workers. It takes time.”
“How much time?” the prime minister demanded.
“More than we have.”
Shahab means “meteor” in Farsi.
True to its name, the final, unscathed Shahab-3 blazed across the morning sky like a shooting star at seven times the speed of sound, leaving a trail of flame and smoke in its wake. Having reached its apogee over the northern deserts of Saudi Arabia, the last of the Iranian death machines now began its sizzling descent toward Dimona, hell-bent on genocide. Three Israeli interceptors had already missed it, and all that stood in its way now was one last Arrow, locked and loaded but still awaiting an order from Tel Aviv.
“Fire, fire, fire!” shouted the commander, sweat pouring off his brow as he was told there was a technical glitch preventing the launch. Cursing violently, the commander picked up a phone and opened a direct line to the engineers on site, but no sooner had the call gone through than the glitch was finally resolved.
Finally the Arrow exploded into a vertical hot launch and tore into the eastern sunrise. Moments later, the missile jettisoned its solid propellant booster, began a secondary burn, and accelerated toward max speed. But precious time had been wasted on the ground. The Arrow soon hit Mach 9, or nearly two miles a second, as its onboard computers received continual updates on the Iranian missile’s velocity and trajectory from the command center near Tel Aviv. Combining this data with its own infrared sensors and active radars, the Arrow’s computers calculated and recalculated the optimum point of intercept, adjusting its thrusters and control fins to get it to that precise point. But would it be enough?
“Ten seconds to impact!” came the voice of the war room commander over the speakerphone in the communications center.
Naphtali, flanked by the American ambassador, who couldn’t leave now, turned back to the video screen, which included a live shot on CNN International from the roof of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and another live shot on Al Jazeera from the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman. Neither were clear or sharp images. Indeed, all that could really be seen was the flaming tail of the Shahab on its downward trajectory and the upward trajectory of the Arrow. But however poor the quality, rarely had live television captured such compelling images of a potential catastrophe of this magnitude.
“Eight seconds to impact.”
Shimon held his breath. His eyes kept darting from the monitors providing him classified tracking of the two missiles’ telemetry and the live TV images being watched by all of Israel and all of the Muslim world, if not the rest of the world as well.
“Seven seconds… six…”
The Arrow was certainly gaining, but how could it be fast enough?
“Five… four…”
Suddenly Shimon realized that for some reason the watch commander was no longer counting down the time until the Arrow’s impact with the Shahab. Rather, he was counting down the time until the Shahab’s potential impact with the nuclear reactor at Dimona. And just then, the red and blue lines crossed.
The Arrow had missed.
11
David was running back to the safe house when a silver sedan raced up beside him and screeched to a halt. Startled, he instinctively reached for his pistol before he saw Marco Torres behind the wheel.
“Get in,” Torres shouted.
Not quite thirty years old, Torres was a former Marine sniper who had dazzled his superiors during two tours of duty in Afghanistan and was now the commander of the CIA paramilitary team assigned to assist David deep inside Iran.
“What’s going on?” David asked, catching his breath while walking over to the open driver’s-side window.
“The Iranians just hit Dimona.”
David could hardly believe what he was hearing, but the look on Torres’s face said it all — this was as real as it was serious. He got in the car, and Torres hit the accelerator.
Two minutes later, they were back at the safe house, where the rest of the team was watching the latest coverage on satellite television.
“What do we know so far?” David asked, setting his phone and pistol on a coffee table as he pulled off his sweatshirt and used it to dry his face and neck.
“Not much,” said Nick Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL on Torres’s team. “Details are sketchy. The Israelis aren’t saying anything, and their military censor has clamped down on any reports or even pictures leaving the country. Sky News out of London is saying a Shahab missile hit the sixty-foot dome over the reactor, but that’s all we’ve got.”
“The Israelis couldn’t shoot it down?”
“It sounds like they tried but failed,” said Crenshaw, hunched over a laptop and scanning for the latest headlines. “Agence France-Presse is quoting eyewitnesses in Amman saying the Israelis intercepted several Iranian missiles but missed another, and the AP has a high-ranking American source saying that’s the one that hit the Dimona facility dead on.”
“Who’s the source?”
“Unnamed.”
“Radiation?”
“No word yet, but it’s got to be horrific.”
“Casualties?”
“Again, nothing yet.”
David was pacing the living room.
“What are you thinking?” Torres asked.
David didn’t answer right away. He was trying to consider all the angles.
“Everything depends on how bad it is,” he said finally. “I mean, Dimona is out in the desert — way out in the Negev — far away from most population centers. There’s a decent-size city that’s grown up around the facility, but I read a few weeks ago that they evacuated all nonessential personnel for just such an eventuality. Now, if it was really a direct hit, that could set off secondary explosions that could rip apart the reactor and possibly the cooling towers. That, in turn, could release radioactive clouds in any direction — toward Beersheva for certain, but also toward Eilat to the south, Cairo to the southwest, or to Tel Aviv and Ashdod to the northwest. Or Jerusalem and even Amman or Damascus to the north. A lot depends on the winds, of course, but whole cities could be in danger. And then the question is, what does Israel do to retaliate?”