The sounds of the battle were picking up in the exchanges among his men.
“Patyish 23, engaged, bandit ten o’clock, six, Fox Two.”
“Patyish 24, supporting.”
“Dyan 12 is in, engaged, tally on bandit at two o clock, six miles.”
“Dyan 11, break left, break left, flare. Bandit on your six with lockup!”
Digit by digit he kept his jet steady as he punched the numbers in, forcing himself not to react to the intense tactical exchanges of his pilots or the new chirping of a ground anti-aircraft missile battery that had acquired them as they continued to deal with the oncoming Iranians. Somewhere just behind him was the border, and they were now streaking into heavily defended enemy airspace.
The White House
The call from St. Paul’s Hospital in Denver and Steve Reagan had come right on the heels of passing Jenny Reynold’s code to the prime minister.
“Paul, we’ve got it! We’ve got the code! Ready to copy?”
“Go ahead,” he said, not wanting to reward what had to have been Herculean effort with the news that it was undoubtedly too late.
He wrote the numbers down as Steve intoned them.
“Stand by,” Paul Wriggle said, feeling a rush of adrenaline as he pulled the other note containing the Reynold’s code across the table and placed it side-by-side with the numbers he’d just inscribed, reading them with the care of a potential lottery winner making certain his wishful thinking was not overriding reality.
My God! Paul thought to himself, confirming one more time. They’re the same!
He forced himself to take a deep breath, the urgency suddenly gone.
“How is Gail?” he asked.
“She’ll be okay.”
“Thank her deeply for me.”
“She’s still pretty balmy. She thinks we’re married, sir,” Steve Reagan said with what sounded like a nervous chuckle. “I’ll have to let her down easily.”
“Or, you could just marry the girl! I always thought you two made a great team.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have to go.”
Jenny Reynolds and Will Bronson were both watching him carefully from halfway down the conference table as the general turned to them, the shadow of a smile playing around the edges of his mouth.
“Well, Miss Reynolds.”
“Sir?”
“It seems you cracked the code. Your numbers were correct. That was the unlock sequence.”
She came forward slightly, eyes wide. “Really? How do you know? Did it work?”
“We don’t know if they got it in time, and I can’t tell you how I know, but…” he said, aware that he was stumbling linguistically, his mind’s eye a half world away with a civilian airliner flying into combat unarmed with anything more than a string of digits in the night.
He yanked himself back to the Cabinet Room. “I’m impressed that you figured it out, and, I assume, Mr. Bronson, that your efforts led to getting it here. Thank you. In fact… if it worked… I am deeply in your debt.”
“When will we know, General?” Will asked.
“Soon. Very soon.”
The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel (7:40 a.m. / 0540 Zulu)
Clearly, Gershorn Zamir thought, this is the moment.
An aerial battle just over the Iraq/Iran border was raging, and both he and whoever was in charge in Iran had their fingers poised over respective nuclear buttons.
“Four splashed for certain, perhaps a fifth kill,” the air force chief was intoning as he monitored several radio channels with a phone to each ear. A widescreen depiction of the battle zone was before them on the latest technology screen, along with each of the potential Iranian ballistic launch sites deeper into Iran. The airliner had lumbered through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace with the respective countries either unaware of the Israeli fighter escort, or unwilling to get involved. Despite their public rhetoric to the contrary, every responsible government in the Middle East was secretly hoping the Israelis would disregard American advice and go for Iran’s throat.
Gershorn glanced around the room, recounting the advice of his fellow civilian leaders who were nervously standing by to sign off on any doomsday launch decision.
Surprising, he thought, that no one was pounding on him for a preemptive strike. With all the logic of that terrible move and Moishe Lavi’s suspected orchestration of this opportunity, he had expected a full court press. Yet only one of the generals and one of the Knesset members had taken him aside for the hard sell, and even they seemed tepid in their support for the nuclear option.
In truth, he was on the fence, teetering on a knife edge of indecision with his country’s fate in the balance. Everything he’d ever read or studied about great men making great decisions made him feel small and terrified in the face of such awesome responsibility. He was no John Kennedy facing down Nikita Khrushchev, yet… hadn’t even Kennedy waffled back and forth with agonizing indecision as his generals begged him to have it out?
“Gershorn,” the air force chief was addressing him.
“Yes?”
“This is the last chance to consider shooting Flight 10 down ourselves.”
“Are you recommending that we do so?” he asked, as evenly as possible.
“No, but… we must decide. That… would eliminate the provocation to Iran without question.”
“I understand that.”
“We’ve ordered our lead pilot to make one last attempt at transmitting that disconnect code, then they are to fall back into firing position awaiting your orders if the pilots don’t regain control and turn back.”
“Only if I give the order, understood?”
“Understood.”
So the challenge was joined, he thought. Pangia 10 was over the border, an air battle was already underway, and he could either eliminate the provocation of the Iranians by shooting down the Airbus and killing hundreds of innocent people, or let the flight continue, permitting the Iranians to do the hideous deed of murdering everyone aboard.
And, he thought, there would never be a better moment, a more justified moment, than this. Iranian fighters were essentially attacking a civilian airliner, and hundreds of miles ahead Iranian ballistic missiles had been erected, fueled, armed, and clearly targeted at Israel, at least one of them carrying a nuclear weapon. He had every reason and every right to push the metaphorical button as fast and as hard as he could and launch the very preemptive strike Lavi had proposed so passionately. Yes, the world would be outraged, and Israel would be hamstrung with sanctions pushed mainly by the Russians and Chinese. And yes, oil prices would go through the roof, and the planet could end up in an unprecedented economic depression.
But, Iran’s nuclear program would be back to the stone age, especially since the Iranians had no idea how much Israel knew—how vulnerable they had been to human intelligence, and how successful Mossad’s efforts had been. At a great cost, of course, measured in the lives of seven Mossad agents—some barbarically tortured before being killed—Israel knew where the fissionable material was and how to destroy it. Information not even fully shared with Washington.
Now, indeed, was the moment, and why not launch? Didn’t the mullahs want to slaughter every man, woman, and child in Israel? Wasn’t radical Islam’s hatred and lethal intent just another version of Hitler’s final solution? Wasn’t he dealing with mad dogs who did not deserve the consideration afforded fellow humans?
Gershorn took a deep breath, registering in the back of his mind the fact that an Israeli jet had been hit, the pilot trying to limp back to the west with considerable damage. He looked into a sea of faces all belonging to serious and experienced men and women, and all of them looking to him for a decision.