Damascus Countdown (37 page)

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

Eva Fischer picked up the phone on her desk and speed-dialed Zalinsky.

“You’re calling me directly,” he said when he answered. “This must be bad.”

“It is, Jack.”

“How bad?”

“This one needs to go to the president.”

She explained the flurry of satphone calls the NSA had intercepted over the past few hours and that she and her colleagues were feverishly trying to translate. There was very little news about the location of the Mahdi or any of his current war plans, but there was growing evidence that an Israeli missile attack had accidentally killed five Iranian children in downtown Tehran. One report said they were all girls, but Eva said several other calls indicated the gender of all the deceased was not yet clear. Police reports that were being called up the chain of command
to the staff of Ayatollah Hosseini and President Darazi said the dead children ranged in age from nine to fifteen years old.

“The calls indicate the state-run satellite networks have some very grisly video,” she told him. “The Ayatollah has authorized the stations to begin airing the footage within the hour. This one’s about to hit the fan, Jack. If what the people on these calls are saying is true, international opinion is going to turn against Israel any moment.”

“E-mail me the call transcripts right away, Eva,” Zalinsky said. “You’re right. I need to get this upstairs right away.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

It was just after 10 p.m. on Sunday when Roger Allen and Tom Murray arrived at the West Wing and were immediately ushered into the Oval Office, where President Jackson and his chief of staff were waiting for them.

“I was told to brace myself for the worst,” the president sighed, motioning them to take a seat on the couches while he got up from behind the
Resolute
desk and came over to sit with them.

“I’m afraid that’s right, sir,” Allen began. “We have a serious situation, Mr. President.”

“Go ahead; lay it out for me.”

“Well, sir, we have evidence that an Israeli air strike accidentally hit a school bus or some similar vehicle in downtown Tehran.”

“Accidentally? What does that mean? And are there casualties?”

“I’m afraid there are, sir. Five children are dead.”

Tom Murray picked up the story from there. He briefed the president on the details they had so far. He said they couldn’t be 100 percent certain whether this was a strike from a fighter jet or a drone, but from looking at satellite images, the initial damage assessment suggested it was a drone attack. That’s what was leading him and his colleagues to surmise that this was an accident.

Murray then pulled out a portable DVD player he’d brought with him and showed the president and chief of staff a two-minute clip of gruesome news footage from the scene, complete with the charred bodies of several little girls, their chadors nearly completely burned
away, one of them holding the remains of what appeared to be a small stuffed animal.

Jackson winced and could look no further.

“How could this have happened?” the president fumed. “Don’t the Israelis know better than to do something so stupid, so foolish? How could they put us in such an awkward situation? It’s unconscionable!”

“The Israelis have very strict protocols, Mr. President,” Director Allen explained calmly. “They’ve learned the hard way over the years, mostly through mistaken drone attacks in Gaza that killed innocents and created bad headlines. The only way the IDF would have authorized that drone to fire a missile at a vehicle—especially in the middle of Tehran during such an internationally condemned war—is if they thought they had ironclad evidence that the people in that vehicle were high-value targets.”

“But these weren’t high-value targets, for heaven’s sake. Those charred bodies on the screen are innocent, defenseless children.”

“That’s why it’s clearly a mistake,” Allen repeated. “It’s obviously not Israeli policy to kill civilians. Indeed, they take every precaution to prevent such tragedies from happening. But mistakes do happen, sir. We make them too. Our enemies try to hang us with our mistakes, and they’re going to try to hang the Israelis. With your permission, I’d like to call Zvi Dayan, the director of the Mossad. I want to talk to him off the record and get the real story. I’m sure they’re mortified by all of this, and I’m sure they’ll be honest with us about what happened and why. And while I’m on a secure line with Zvi, I think we’d better tell him we’ve got two of his men in custody inside Iran.”

“No,” the president said firmly. “Not yet. Don’t talk to the Israelis. They should be calling us to give us a heads-up on this. But they haven’t, and it’s going to cost them. I’m sick and tired of Asher Naphtali driving the agenda in the Middle East. I warned him not to strike Iran first, but he wouldn’t listen. Now the whole world is against him, and he’s going to start losing public opinion here in the U.S., too.”

Surprised by how vehement the president was, Allen tried a different angle to get permission to call Dayan and open a back-channel dialogue. But Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. His relationship with Naphtali
had always been strained, but this, Allen feared, could prove a very troubling turning point. “Sir, at the very least I need to let them know we’ve got two of their Mossad agents in custody,” Allen pressed.

“Why?” the president shot back. “They were interfering in one of our operations. They’re lucky they’re not dead. I’ll tell the Israelis when I’m good and ready, but I’m certainly not going to tell them now.”

“Mr. President, it’s not just about these two agents,” Allen noted as tactfully as he could. “It’s about the information we’ve recovered from Omid Jazini’s apartment. We now know the warheads are being moved to the Al-Mazzah air base in Damascus. We know, or at least we strongly believe, that the Mahdi is headed to the same base. We can surmise, therefore, that the Iranians and the Syrians are getting ready to attach those two warheads to missiles, probably to some Scud-Cs. The probability that they will be fired at Israel in the next twenty-four hours is very, very high.”

“What are you saying?” the president asked.

“I’m asking what you want us to do to stop it, sir,” Allen replied. “I can brief the defense secretary and the joint chiefs. I’m certain we can provide all the intel they’d need to launch a decisive air strike against the Al-Mazzah base in the next few hours. But it seems only fair that we at least let the Israelis in on what we know so they can be on full alert.”

“Roger, you’re out of line,” said the president. “Your job is to give me information and analysis. But the CIA doesn’t make policy. I make policy.”

“I understand, sir,” Allen replied, “but I’m just trying to—”

The president cut him off. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I’m telling you it’s not your place. You want me to launch an attack against Damascus and the Mahdi? You want us to start a whole new war? That’s not what the American people want from me. I was elected to prevent wars in the Middle East, not start new ones or pour fuel on fires already burning.”

Then the president turned to Murray and asked, “Where did you get this footage? Has it been broadcast to the world yet?”

“No, sir,” Murray said. “We intercepted it from a state-run news crew on the scene. They were uploading it to the main studio. We have
intercepted phone calls from the Ayatollah’s office authorizing this footage to be shown at 7 a.m. to lead the morning news.”

“How long from now is that?”

“About twenty minutes, sir.”

The president suddenly stood, catching the others off guard and forcing them to stand as well.

“We need to drive this story,” said the president. “We need to leak it, and then we need to manage it.”

He turned to his chief of staff and told him to provide everything they knew—including the video footage—to the Associated Press,
New York Times
, and CNN.

“Actually, start with CNN, but make certain there are no White House or CIA fingerprints on this,” the president insisted. “Give it to these reporters on deep background, but make sure the story begins to break quickly, before the Iranians break it. That’s why I’d recommend you go with CNN first. Then, once the news does break, we’ll be asked to comment. At that point, call the White House press corps in immediately. I want to make a statement and take questions. This war has to stop. The Israelis have to stand down. And right now I’m the only one who can make that happen. You gentlemen are dismissed. Good night.”

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

While it was still late Sunday evening in Washington, it was dawn in Damascus. The warmth of the rising sun was beginning to creep through the windows of the guest room to which Birjandi had been assigned, but he hadn’t slept. He remained now where he had been all night, on his knees at the foot of the bed, earnestly pleading for the Lord to end this war and protect the people of Israel and protect all the people of this region from the genocidal plans of the Twelfth Imam. Birjandi had long warned the men he discipled that “the most dangerous corridor on the planet is the corridor between Tehran and Tel Aviv,” and tragically his instincts were being proved correct.

The more he prayed for God’s grace, the more the Twenty-Third
Psalm burned in his heart. Throughout the night, he had found himself repeating it from memory every few hours, meditating on its meaning, chewing on it again and again, savoring every word and every nuance, and now he did so again.

“‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,’”
Birjandi said to himself, not wanting even to whisper lest he be overheard by agents of the Mukhabarat.
“‘He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’”

What weighed most heavily on his heart and soul was the fact that in just a matter of hours, the Mahdi would arrive and summon him for their first face-to-face meeting. The Mahdi would be expecting to meet a true disciple, a faithful servant and supplicant, not just a Twelver but Shia’s leading authority on the Twelfth Imam and Islamic eschatology. Birjandi desperately needed Christ’s wisdom. He didn’t want to go to such a meeting with a demon-possessed tyrant at all, but he was beginning to resign himself to the fact that the Lord might be in this, that the Lord might actually be preparing a table before him in the presence of his enemies. If that was really the case, then he certainly didn’t want to enter such a meeting in his own strength. He wanted to truly be able to say, “I will fear no evil; for you are with me.”

As he repeated his favorite psalm for the umpteenth time, another passage came to mind, a piece of Scripture he had not thought of even once in recent months. The verse was John 12:49, where Jesus said, “The Father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to say it.” At first, it struck Birjandi as odd. Why had that passage occurred to him, and why now? He knew that Jesus loved the Father and did only what the Father wanted him to do. There was nothing new in that truth. But then it struck him that he had never really applied the verse to himself. He was not, after all, a public speaker, or at least he
had not been for many years since retiring from the seminary and since the passing of Souri and his decision to live a more reclusive life. But as he reconsidered the verse and its meaning for the moment, Birjandi realized that he had literally no idea what to say to the Mahdi, nor how to say it. He certainly didn’t want to guess. He wanted—or more precisely, he desperately needed—the Father to command him what words to speak, to fill him with the Holy Spirit and give him the power and authority to say what needed to be said.

The forty-ninth verse in the twelfth chapter of John suddenly became very precious to Birjandi in a way that it never had before. For Birjandi had no illusions. The simple truth was that he could not reasonably expect to come out of that meeting alive if he were to maintain his testimony for Jesus. To profess his love for and allegiance to Christ in the presence of the Mahdi meant his head would surely be separated from his shoulders. He thought he was ready. He wanted to be ready. But he prayed more earnestly than ever before that the Lord would make him readier still by giving him supernatural grace and courage to remain faithful to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the very end.

And then, after hours on his knees in prayer, Birjandi felt the fog beginning to lift from his thoughts. As the rays of fresh, sparkling sunlight began to warm his face, he could feel the Spirit of God speaking directly to his heart, explaining what was happening and why and some of what was about to happen next.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“This is CNN breaking news. Live from London, here’s senior international correspondent Karan Singh.”

President Jackson and several senior aides huddled in the Situation Room, watching a bank of television monitors and working on a statement the president would make to the White House press corps in a few minutes. But the report on CNN was not playing out anything like they had anticipated.

“Good evening to our CNN viewers in North America, and good
day to the rest of our viewers around the world,” Singh began. “We have breaking news this hour out of Kabul, Afghanistan. CNN has learned that the Twelfth Imam and the president of Pakistan have been engaged in high-level talks there throughout the night, and . . . Hold on. . . . My producer tells me the two leaders are about to make a joint statement. There is an unconfirmed report moving on the wires right now that Pakistan has decided to join the Caliphate, but again, this is an unconfirmed report. Let’s go now to a live feed of a press event now under way in the Afghan capital of Kabul.”