“That’s what I keep asking you.”
“And until now I haven’t had an answer.”
“But now you do?”
“Yes.”
“You think Syria’s about to unleash everything they have at us, but you have no proof.”
“Sir, it’s the only move that makes sense,” Shimon insisted. “Tehran and Damascus have a mutual defense pact. The moment we attacked the Iranians, the Syrians began to retaliate. Then they stopped abruptly. Why? Because Gamal Mustafa got cold feet?”
“Mustafa doesn’t get cold feet.”
“Of course not,” Shimon agreed. “The man is a ruthless killer. The only reason he stopped shooting was because Tehran told him to stop shooting. And who is the only man in Tehran with the authority to give such an order at the moment?”
“The Twelfth Imam.”
“Precisely.”
“You think the Mahdi is reining Mustafa in?”
“I do.”
“For how long?” Naphtali asked.
“Not much longer, sir,” Shimon replied. “I think we need to consider a massive preemptive strike against Syria’s chemical weapons facilities and missile bases.”
“Do you have a plan ready to go?”
“I do, sir.”
“Then let me see it.”
34
It had taken a little more than two hours, but just before 9 p.m. local time, the school bus carrying the Twelfth Imam along with Daryush Rashidi and their security team finally rolled into the Iranian city of Sari. Nestled between the Alborz Mountains and the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, Sari was the capital of the Mazandaran province. With a population of only about 250,000 people, it was a small, economically insignificant, and militarily unimportant city, which was exactly what they needed. It meant the place wasn’t likely to be closely monitored by either the Israelis or the Americans. But it did have a decent general aviation airfield, and that was why General Jazini had chosen it.
As the bus pulled onto the airport grounds, Rashidi was struck by just how quiet and sleepy the place seemed. Night had fallen, and the runway lights were on, but not a single plane was taking off or landing, and few cars were in the parking lot. The guard station wasn’t even manned, and Rashidi guessed they didn’t have the budget for any serious security measures. The bus pulled onto the tarmac and drove over to a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet parked outside a hangar on the far end of the field. The plane had been freshly painted to look like a Red Crescent medical transport craft. Rashidi and the lead security officer jumped off the bus first and shook hands with the pilot, who was waiting for them, then waved the Mahdi and the rest of the security team aboard.
“How far are we from Kabul?” the Mahdi asked Rashidi once they were seated and buckled in on the plush, French-built plane.
“It’s about 1,500 kilometers from here,” Rashidi said. “If everything goes as we hope, we should be on the ground by midnight.”
“Very well,” the Mahdi said. “Wake me up when we’re there.”
“Yes, Your Excellency. Can I get you anything before we lift off?”
“Just dim the cabin lights and keep everyone quiet,” the Mahdi said. “I don’t want to be disturbed.”
The waves of the Atlantic lapped rhythmically upon the shore as bitter March winds continued to rattle the house. These were the only constants while everything else in Najjar Malik’s life seemed to change minute by minute.
The country of his birth was at war, taken over by a madman, a false messiah who was preaching lies and hatred and cruelly leading the people Najjar loved into death and destruction. Syria, meanwhile, seemed about to plunge into the war as well. A madman was running that country too, slaughtering tens of thousands and sending many of them into a Christless eternity. And then there was Israel, whose civilian nuclear reactor in Dimona had just been hit by Iranian missiles and whose prime minister was surely preparing to unleash the nation’s fury back upon Iran. There was no good news anywhere he looked. He knew he personally was in the care of the Good Shepherd, who would not leave him or forsake him, and he continued to urge all who would listen to give their lives to Jesus Christ before it was too late. But the intensity of the battle was taking its toll, and Najjar desperately needed to rest.
He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and checked his watch. It was 12:30 in the afternoon. He’d been scanning the web for the latest news from Iran, Israel, and Syria for the last four and a half hours. He’d also been tweeting and retweeting the stories he found most important to the 923,178 people who were following him on Twitter. From time to time, he’d send out a Bible verse that he felt was relevant for the moment, and occasionally he answered questions people were sending to him. There wasn’t much he could really communicate in 140 characters, and he continued to be stunned that anyone was listening to anything he had to say, but mostly he was grateful that the Lord had given him the chance to speak the truth to those in the Islamic world who were living in utter darkness.
At this point Najjar was completely exhausted, not to mention freezing cold. He already had two T-shirts on and a sweater and a hoodie over those, but he still couldn’t get warm, and he couldn’t seem to figure out how to work the house’s central heating system. What he really wanted to do was go upstairs and curl up in bed under lots of blankets and comforters for the next few hours and get some serious sleep, but his stomach was growling, and he decided his first priority was to eat something.
Stepping into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and stared into the empty void. The milk was gone. The orange juice was gone. The fruit was gone, and so was the bread. He went to the pantry but didn’t find much else. He’d finished all the tea in the house, all the pasta, and all the rice, and as he looked at the dishes piling up in the sink and the empty jars of peanut butter and jelly and empty boxes and containers of myriad other kinds of food heaped up in the trash, he realized how obsessive he had been for the past few days. He’d been spending most of his time reading the Bible or praying for Sheyda and the rest of his family and for the people of Iran and the Middle East or tracking the war on TV and on the computer, and he hadn’t made much time for anything else.
Najjar was embarrassed how messy he’d allowed this gorgeous beach house to become, and he wondered what the owners would say if they popped in unexpectedly to see how he was doing. He had never met the couple, friends of the producer at the Persian Christian Satellite Network. Their goal in having him stay here was to keep Najjar out of the hands of the FBI and CIA and to keep him communicating the gospel and the latest war news to the Iranian people via Twitter for as long as possible. Meanwhile, the folks back at PCSN were going to keep replaying his riveting television interview explaining how he, a Shia Twelver and the highest-ranking nuclear scientist in Iran, had come to renounce Islam, become a follower of Jesus Christ, and seek political asylum in the United States.
When he’d first been told by the producer that they had a place for him to hide away, Najjar had expected a couch in someone’s basement or a little apartment or maybe a condo someplace on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., not far from the TV studio. He certainly hadn’t expected to be put up in a multimillion-dollar beach house all by himself on the Jersey Shore. Yes, it was off-season, and yes, it was bitterly cold in a town largely depopulated, but it was, Najjar knew, a very gracious gift from his Father in heaven, and though flabbergasted, he was deeply grateful.
He scanned the disaster in the kitchen and made a quick plan. For now, he’d take out the trash and go get some groceries. Then he’d come back, check the headlines, and load the dishwasher. A few loads of laundry couldn’t hurt either, he told himself, and suddenly he missed his precious Sheyda all the more. What was she doing right now? How were the baby and his wife, Farah? Was the CIA taking good care of them? Or were they punishing them for Najjar’s escape? He felt fairly certain that the American government was nothing like his own. Indeed, the mullahs would have hanged or shot his family by now had he left them in their hands. No, he knew the Americans would never do such a thing. Yet he had to admit to himself that he didn’t really know how the Agency handled such situations, and a wave of guilt began to wash over him. How could he have been so selfish? They needed him now more than ever, and in a sense he had just abandoned them. Not literally, of course. It was his CIA handlers who had separated him from his family and locked him up in a safe house. But maybe if he had cooperated more, they would have been reunited by now. Najjar began to wonder again if he should turn himself in.