David and his team had cleared through the border crossing more smoothly than expected and were racing across Iraq. Having taken Highway 5 to Muqdadiyah, referred to in classical literature as Sharaban, they had stopped briefly for fuel, topped off their tank, and were now on the road to Baghdad, the war-torn capital of Iraq. All the men were glued to the live press conference from Kabul being broadcast on local Iraqi radio, and they were sickened by what they heard. When it was over, they switched to BBC and heard the news out of Tehran of the five schoolgirls allegedly killed by an Israeli missile, though the BBC didn’t use the word allegedly. Indeed, they reported it like an intentional attack and a war crime at that.
“Should we even keep going?” Crenshaw asked from the backseat. “I mean, if the Mahdi now has 350 or whatever nuclear missiles, what does it matter if he has two more? He’s about to turn Israel into a mushroom cloud. What could we possibly do to stop him?”
The questions hung in the air for a few moments. No one wanted to touch them, not even David. They were logical questions, and the truth was, he didn’t have an answer, just a lot more questions of his own.
“How do we know the Paks have really handed control over to the Mahdi?” David finally asked his team.
“What are you talking about, sir?” Fox asked. “Farooq just told the world he gave the Twelfth Imam all his nukes.”
“But he’s been agonizing about doing so for days, hasn’t he?” David noted.
“Perhaps the Mahdi made Iskander an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Torres said.
“Maybe, but we know Farooq is a Sunni, while the Mahdi is a Shiite. Farooq is not Arab; the Mahdi is. The Pakistanis have always had a proud tradition of separation from the Arab world and of asserting themselves as leaders within the Islamic world. Why would they fold now to the Mahdi — whom they don’t even really believe in?”
“What are you trying to say, sir?” Crenshaw asked. “You think Farooq is playing chicken with the Mahdi on worldwide TV and radio? You think he’s lying to the Mahdi about giving him control of the nukes? How does that end well for him?”
“Maybe it buys him time,” David said. “I don’t know. I just know something seemed fishy about that press conference.”
“Like what?” Torres asked.
“Where was the press? Where were the questions?”
“That’s not unusual, sir,” Fox said. “Jackson gives brief statements to the press all the time without taking questions.”
“True, but why didn’t the Mahdi at least take a question about the death of the schoolchildren in Tehran? Wasn’t that an obvious opportunity for the Mahdi to score major propaganda points? Something doesn’t add up.”
No one said a word, and for the next hundred kilometers or so, they drove in silence, weighing their options and wondering if their mission really had become futile. David feverishly tried to come up with any scenarios in which his team, assuming they got into Syria, could actually penetrate the secure outer perimeter of the Al-Mazzah base and fight their way in to the warheads. But he couldn’t come up with one plan that gave them a realistic shot of even getting to the warheads before they were cut down, much less neutralizing either or both of the weapons in a way in which they couldn’t be repaired after David and his team were either captured or killed.
David was willing to die for his country. He was willing to die for this mission. But he needed a ray of optimism. He needed a strategy, a plausible one that gave them even a sliver of hope of accomplishing their objective. He didn’t believe in suicide. But that’s what this mission increasingly totaled up to. He had no confidence that President Jackson would authorize an attack on the Al-Mazzah base, which was the only certain way to destroy both the warheads and the Mahdi, once he arrived there. As for the president quietly informing the Israelis of the intelligence they had gathered and letting them get the job done, David privately put the chances of that as no better than one in ten thousand. It was unconscionable, to be sure. The Mahdi with nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and her allies, especially Israel. The Mahdi was the head of a genocidal, apocalyptic death cult. He had to be stopped before his actions caused the deaths of millions. Yet it was increasingly clear to David that this president was neither willing nor perhaps able to do what was necessary.
But he had pretty much known this from the start. What bothered him most was that it seemed he and his team were willing but apparently unable to do what was necessary. And when that painful thought flashed across his mind, David began to steel himself for the growing likelihood that he would never get home alive. He was driving himself and his team into a lethal dead end. He was doing so because Zalinsky had ordered him to, and he had willingly agreed. They all had. But it was time to face the cold and sober truth: this was a death trap, and there was no way out.
David wished he knew enough Scripture to calm his troubled heart at that moment. But as the road leading toward Damascus continued to speed by under the vehicle, only the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson came to mind.
Asher Naphtali had barely slept in the past four days. His staff was worried for him and begged him to go to bed and let them manage the war. Even the defense minister and the Mossad director urged him to get some desperately needed shut-eye. But Naphtali said a twenty-minute catnap here and there would suffice. He had a war to win and a nation to save, and he was not going to be caught sleeping on the job.
It was foolish and arrogant, his wife told him. He wasn’t an eighteen-year-old. He was no longer the commander of “The Unit,” the nation’s most elite special operations force. “The people of Israel need you rested and healthy so you can make wise decisions when the time comes,” she insisted. But she was having precious little effect.
Now came the most ominous news of all — the Mahdi in full control of 345 nuclear missiles, and just at a time when Israel’s stockpile of Arrows and Patriots to shoot such missiles down was running dangerously low.
Naphtali asked an aide for another cup of café afouk, essentially an Israeli version of cappuccino, and then called Levi Shimon at the IDF war room in Tel Aviv.
“Levi, tell me we’ve heard from Mordecai,” the prime minister began, referring to the code name of their mole inside the Iranian nuclear command.
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“What about Zvi’s operation to take down Omid Jazini? That was supposed to happen hours ago. What happened?”
“The last I heard, Zvi’s men hadn’t checked in,” Shimon said. “He fears something went wrong, but it’s possible everything’s fine and they just need to keep radio silence for longer than expected.”
Naphtali paced in his private office. He was still in great pain from the wounds he’d sustained during the Iranian terrorist attack at the Waldorf-Astoria just eight days earlier. Indeed, it was a miracle he was alive. But at the moment he wondered if it would have been better if he hadn’t survived the attack after all. Then all of this would be someone else’s responsibility, not his own.