Damascus Countdown (38 page)

No one in the Situation Room was paying any attention to the draft of the president’s statement. Every eye was riveted on President Farooq as he appeared on all the American cable and broadcast TV news networks and many overseas networks as well. Farooq proceeded to announce Pakistan’s decision to turn over full control of its immense nuclear arsenal to the Twelfth Imam. It took a moment for the horrifying truth to register, but as it did, the president demanded to be connected to Roger Allen at the CIA immediately.

“Are you watching this?” Jackson asked.

“Tom and I just pulled into Langley,” Allen said. “We’re not near a TV yet, but Tom’s got Jack Zalinsky on the other line. He’s translating Farooq for us right now.”

“It’s a doomsday scenario.”

“I’d have to agree, sir.”

“What are our options?” the president asked.

“For that you need the SecDef and the joint chiefs, sir.”

“Roger, I’m asking you. Privately. Man to man. What would you recommend right now?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. Give it to me straight.”

“Mr. President, if it were me, I’d direct the SecDef to contact Carrier Strike Group Nine. They’re currently operating in the Indian Ocean. I’d order the launch of two F/A-18 fighter jets off the USS
Abraham Lincoln
to race for Kabul. In the meantime, I’d direct my guys to find out exactly where that live press conference is happening and take out the Mahdi and Farooq right now before they can do any harm. I’d
guess we have about thirty minutes. Otherwise, we’re about to go from a madman in the Middle East with two nuclear warheads to a madman running a nuclear superpower with more than 300 nuclear missiles, some of them long-range.”

Jackson said nothing. He had no idea what to say or do. Part of him knew Allen was right. They had a very narrow window to take action, if they were going to take action at all. But how could he justify killing two leaders in one strike when neither had directly attacked the United States of America? Some in Washington believed in the doctrine of preemption, but Jackson had risen to political power opposing such a doctrine with every fiber of his being. His critics berated him for being “in over his head.” If he didn’t move decisively now, they would have a field day at his expense. The political price to him and his administration could be catastrophic. But if he ordered a military strike, wouldn’t he be ceding the very principle over which he had taken Naphtali to the woodshed?

Even as he considered his rapidly shrinking set of options and weighed the costs of each, a news flash was scrolling across the bottom of the screen on CNN.
“EXCLUSIVE: CNN has learned that five Iranian children in Tehran have been killed in an Israeli missile strike. . . . Ayatollah Hosseini has denounced Israel for ‘stepping over a line’ and has vowed to ‘accelerate the collapse of the Zionist entity’ by turning Israel into a ‘crematorium.’ . . . Israeli leaders have not yet commented on the record, but one unnamed senior military official told CNN that it was possible there had been a ‘mistake’ and the IDF was ‘taking a careful look at the accusation.’”

Jackson’s knuckles were white as they gripped the armrests of his chair. Events were rapidly spiraling out of control. It was not difficult to imagine the Mahdi launching nuclear missiles at Israel—possibly dozens of them—from Pakistan at any moment. His own press conference, therefore, was obviously off. Jackson couldn’t possibly go out there now and denounce the Israelis and call for a cease-fire. He couldn’t threaten to side with the Russians and the Chinese at the United Nations and support a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its “targeting of civilians.” That had been his plan. But in an instant the dynamic had changed, and Jackson felt paralyzed, entirely unsure what to do next and bitterly aware that time was not on his side.

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

Dr. Birjandi stopped praying, got off his knees, rose to his feet, and began pacing the guest room, trying to get his mind around the enormity of what the Lord had just revealed to him. The end of Damascus had come. Indeed, its utter destruction was imminent.

The Lord had spoken to him from two Old Testament passages—Isaiah 17 and Jeremiah 49. As Birjandi padded back and forth from one end of his little guest suite to the other, the old man chastised himself for being so focused on teaching his disciples about the prophetic future of Iran that he had failed to ponder the prophetic future of Syria. In his defense, of course, it was only in the last few hours that he had even considered the possibility that Syria was going to be a critical element in this war. So far President Mustafa had not launched an all-out offensive against the Israelis, and Birjandi’s thoughts had thus far not been drawn to the Syrian leader or the Syrian capital. But now that he was here, and now that the Lord had opened his eyes and allowed him to see a glimpse of what was coming, it was all beginning to make sense, and Birjandi’s fragile heart was racing.

“‘The oracle concerning Damascus,’” Birjandi muttered to himself, reciting Isaiah 17:1. “Behold, Damascus is about to be removed from being a city and will become a fallen ruin,” the Lord God Almighty had declared through his prophet. The next few verses then revealed that the “fortified city” and the “sovereignty” of Damascus would “disappear” and “fade.”

Souri had once read to him another translation of the first few verses of Isaiah 17, and these were even more clear.

A Message concerning Damascus: “Watch this: Damascus undone as a city, a pile of dust and rubble! Her towns emptied of people. The sheep and goats will move in and take over the towns as if they owned them—which they will! . . . Not a trace of government left in Damascus.”

As Birjandi then recalled the prophecies of Jeremiah 49:23-27 from memory, he found them just as chilling.

Concerning Damascus. “Hamath and Arpad are put to shame, for they have heard bad news; they are disheartened. There is anxiety by the sea, it cannot be calmed. Damascus has become helpless; she has turned away to flee, and panic has gripped her; distress and pangs have taken hold of her like a woman in childbirth. How the city of praise has not been deserted, the town of My joy! Therefore, her young men will fall in her streets, and all the men of war will be silenced in that day,” declares the Lord of hosts. “I will set fire to the wall of Damascus, and it will devour the fortified towers of Ben-hadad.”

Not once but twice in the Holy Scriptures, the Lord had foretold the utter and complete future destruction of Damascus. The second of the prophecies clearly indicated the destruction would come by fire. Yet neither prophecy had ever been fulfilled. Yes, Damascus had been attacked and conquered numerous times throughout history, but it had never been utterly destroyed and made uninhabitable. To the contrary, Birjandi knew that Damascus was one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet, if not the oldest.

As Birjandi considered both texts, he found it odd that neither passage gave a direct indication of when the prophecies would come to pass. The prophecies of Ezekiel 38 and 39, by contrast, said Iran’s
military (among others) would be judged by the God of Israel in “the last days” of history. Indeed, the prophecies of Jeremiah 49:34-39—also about the future judgment of Iran’s leaders—were specifically described as happening in “the last days.” Yet as Birjandi reviewed the prophecies regarding Damascus again and again, he found no specific time reference in either passage.

Still, what was important, Birjandi reminded himself, was the context of both prophecies. The thirteenth chapter of Isaiah through at least the nineteenth chapter were all End Times prophecies, as far as Birjandi could tell. Isaiah 13 was about the future destruction of Babylon, and at least twice in that chapter the Hebrew prophet made reference to “the day of the Lord,” saying it was “near” and “coming,” indicating that these events would occur near but prior to the literal, physical, actual second coming of Jesus Christ back to earth. Isaiah 19, meanwhile, was about the coming judgment of Egypt followed by a tremendous spiritual awakening in Egypt in the End Times. Indeed, one of Birjandi’s favorite passages of Scripture, one that gave him hope for the future of the Middle East, was the last few verses of Isaiah 19, in which the Lord declared that after a time of tyranny in Egypt and subsequent judgment, “the Lord will strike Egypt, striking but healing; so they will return to the Lord, and He will respond to them and will heal them.” What a blessed future that foretold.

The same was true about Jeremiah’s prophecies. The forty-ninth chapter through the fifty-first chapter of Jeremiah all described events the Hebrew prophet indicated would occur in the “last days,” from the judgment of the leaders of Damascus and Iran to the judgment of Babylon in the final days of history before the return of Jesus Christ.

Birjandi was well aware that not every prophecy scholar agreed about such things. Indeed, while his wife was still alive, Birjandi and Souri had read more commentaries about such prophecies than he could count and had found disagreements among many of the scholars. But Birjandi knew there was no mistaking the message the Lord had spoken to him; Isaiah and Jeremiah had both written about the same future event . . . and that future was now.

HIGHWAY 5, EASTERN IRAQ

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.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

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.