Damascus Countdown (4 page)

TEHRAN, IRAN

The governments of Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco had just announced they were joining the Caliphate, and Indonesia’s parliament was holding emergency meetings to approve joining as well. These were positive developments, to be sure, but the bitter fact remained that the war was not going as he had planned. Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali, known to the world as the Twelfth Imam, entered a conference room off the main war room in the Revolutionary Guard Corps command center. He ordered an aide to summon Ayatollah Hamid Hosseini, President Ahmed Darazi, and Defense Minister Ali Faridzadeh without delay.

“Of course, my Lord,” said the aide. “Anyone else?”

“No, just those three,” said the Mahdi. “And have two armed guards posted outside this door. I do not want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, Your Excellency. It shall be done as you wish.”

When the aide left and shut the door, the Mahdi surveyed the room. In the center was a large, rectangular, highly polished mahogany conference table, around which were eight leather executive chairs. On the table were eight phones connected to a central switchboard in another part of the underground complex that could patch calls through to any Iranian military post or to any civilian phone inside or outside the country. The walls were wood paneled but devoid of any paintings or photographs. Instead there were two large flat-screen TV monitors, one at each end of the room, though neither of them was currently turned on, and several enormous maps on the side walls, including one of the Middle East and Persian Gulf region and another of the entire world.
Over the door were six digital clocks, displaying the current time in Tehran, al-Quds (aka Jerusalem), London, Washington, Beijing. The sixth clock—the one in the center—was set at the local time of wherever the Mahdi was at any given moment. Since he was now in the IRGC’s command center ten stories underneath the largest air base in Iran’s capital city, the first and sixth clocks read the same: 8:52 a.m.

Dressed in a long black robe, turban, and sandals, the Mahdi paced for a few moments. He hated being confined to a bunker. He needed fresh air. He wanted to pray in the sunshine, bowing toward Mecca. He wanted to be in Islamabad to consummate the deal he’d been cooking up with Pakistani president Iskander Farooq for the past few days. It was close. Very close. He could taste it. But he hated negotiating by e-mail, no matter how secure his aides said it was. He wanted to sit with Farooq face-to-face. He wanted to read the man’s body language and make sure he was as compliant and supportive as his messages suggested.

But the Mahdi needed to step carefully. The stakes were too high for another misstep now. His team had deeply disappointed him. They were making serious mistakes. They had lost the initiative, and they didn’t seem to know how to regain it. The time had come for the Mahdi to step in and reassert his authority. He had been patient long enough, and the price had been steep. Never again.

Not wanting those beneath him to see or sense his agitation, he chose to take a seat at the far end of the table, then folded his hands, closed his eyes, leaned back in the leather executive chair, and waited.

His thoughts quickly drifted to his inaugural address to the Islamic world and to the world at large, delivered in Mecca on Thursday, March 3. It was then he had made his intentions clear. “To those who would oppose us, I would simply say this,” he had warned in no uncertain terms. “The Caliphate will control half the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, as well as the Gulf and the shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz. The Caliphate will have the world’s most powerful military, led by the hand of Allah. Furthermore, the Caliphate will be covered by a nuclear umbrella that will protect the people from all evil. . . . We seek only peace. We wish no harm against any nation. But make no mistake: any attack by any state on any
portion of the Caliphate will unleash the fury of Allah and trigger a War of Annihilation.”

But the Israelis had called his bluff.

Darazi—Iran’s moron of a president—had insisted to the Mahdi’s face that the Zionists would never strike first. Indeed, Darazi had claimed that the Americans would never allow it. But he was a fool. There was no other way to describe it. He’d been wrong, disastrously so, and this could not be forgotten.

Hamid Hosseini had been more cautious, hedging his bets regarding the possibility of an Israeli first strike, but it wasn’t because the Ayatollah possessed any scrap of wisdom or sound judgment. The man was a coward, pure and simple. He was a sheep, not a shepherd, and his days were numbered.

Faridzadeh was a different story. Iran’s defense minister had operational control not simply of Iran’s military forces but all the forces of the Caliphate. At the moment, that meant primarily the men and arms of Hezbollah and Hamas, both of whom were actively engaged in the war against the Zionists. Ostensibly, Faridzadeh could also direct the militaries of Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Qatar to do his bidding. All of them had joined the Caliphate in recent days. Soon, perhaps within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours, he would oversee the forces of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and possibly Pakistan and Indonesia as well, should everything play out as the Mahdi expected. But was Faridzadeh capable of such enormous power?

There was a knock at the door, and then Hosseini, Darazi, and Faridzadeh entered, one after another, and bowed low to the one whom they called “the Lord of the Age.” The Mahdi commanded them to take seats at the end of the table near the door. For now, he would not permit them to approach too closely. That was an honor they had to earn, and none of them yet had.

The Mahdi stared at each one of them in succession, then spoke bluntly and without emotion. “You are losing this war. This is completely unacceptable. You had eight nuclear warheads. Now you have two. You had dozens of high-speed ballistic missiles. Now you have merely a handful. You had the world trembling at the rise of a new
Persian superpower. Now it is the people of the Caliphate who are trembling and wondering—fearing—if the Zionists are going to defeat us. How do you explain this?”

A long, awkward silence ensued. The three men looked at each other and then down at the notebooks in front of them. None of them made eye contact with the Mahdi. How could they? They knew the situation was untenable.

Finally Faridzadeh cleared his throat. “Your Excellency, may I speak?”

“By all means,” said the Mahdi. “You have an explanation?”

“I have a plan,” the defense minister replied. “Or rather, we have a plan.”

“Go on.”

“We have figured out a way to slip you out of the country to meet with Farooq,” Faridzadeh ventured.

“In Dubai, as we have discussed?”

“No, my Lord. Dubai is full of CIA, Mossad, MI6, the Germans—it’s not worth the risk.”

“But it was before?”

“The situation has changed.”

“It certainly has. Where, then? Islamabad?”

“No, my Lord, we believe that is too risky. We propose a secret meeting in Kabul, preferably tomorrow—fast and quiet—and then get you right back here before anyone notices.”

“Why Kabul?” the Twelfth Imam asked.

“The Americans have pulled out,” Faridzadeh said. “NATO has pulled out. The West has largely given up on the place. So it’s now free from infidel troops. Plus it’s close—just a two-hour flight from here and barely a half hour from Farooq’s palace. What’s more, the ISI has a strong network in the city. And as you know, we’ve been putting more and more intelligence assets into Afghanistan since the Americans withdrew. We’ve discreetly strengthened our presence in the past few days, and we can guarantee your safety. I think we can guarantee your movements won’t be detected, either, which means the trip won’t get into the news unless you want it to.”

“I don’t.”

“My point exactly, my Lord.”

The room went quiet. The Mahdi studied each man closely. Hosseini was tense. Darazi was pale. Faridzadeh seemed . . . what? Confident? Self-assured? Even proud?

“Is this your plan, Ali?” the Mahdi asked.

“We worked on it together, my Lord.”

“But this is your brainchild?”

“Actually, I cannot take any credit, Your Excellency—the original idea came from Mohsen,” Faridzadeh said, referring to General Mohsen Jazini, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We helped refine it, but Mohsen gave us a five-page memo outlining a detailed plan.”

“When?”

“Friday morning.”

“Why am I only hearing of it now?”

“We’ve been refining it.”

“Give it to me,” the Mahdi demanded.

Faridzadeh pulled a copy out of his notebook and then hesitated.

“You may bring it to me,” said the Mahdi.

Faridzadeh pushed his chair back, got up, and walked the memo down to the Mahdi, bowing as he did. The Mahdi held up his hand, directing Faridzadeh to wait, and so he did, his forehead pressed to the ground. The Mahdi, meanwhile, carefully read the five-page, single-spaced document. It was not what he had expected, but he had to admit it intrigued him.

To begin with, Jazini laid out a daring strategy to secret the Twelfth Imam out of Iran and into Afghanistan without being detected, and he proposed a compelling strategy for sealing the deal with Farooq for the Pakistanis to join the Caliphate immediately and turn launch authority of their arsenal of 173 nuclear-tipped missiles—including, but not limited to, provision of all the launch codes—over to the Mahdi’s control. That alone would have been enough, but that was just the first three pages.

The last two pages counterintuitively recommended
against
the Mahdi’s order to attach the last two remaining nuclear warheads to
medium-range ballistic missiles on Iranian soil and launch both at Israel at the same time amid a simultaneous barrage of some two hundred Hezbollah and Hamas rockets and missiles, thereby drastically reducing if not eliminating Israel’s ability to identify which missiles carried the atomic payloads and thus Israel’s ability to successfully shoot them down. Instead, Jazini suggested getting the warheads
off
Iranian soil—forward deploying them to Syria, transported in milk trucks or fuel trucks or something innocuous like that rather than in military convoys.

Once the warheads were on Syrian soil, Jazini wrote that they should be moved to military bases in or around Damascus to be attached to shorter-range Syrian missiles. When all was ready, ideally within the next few days, Jazini recommended the same simultaneous missile barrage from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas but combined with a full-fledged Syrian barrage of some twenty to thirty missiles, all aimed at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.

Jazini’s theory was that if the Israeli air defense systems could discriminate between Iranian missiles and Lebanese rockets, then the Patriot and Arrow systems would focus exclusively on the missiles inbound from Iran every time. The risk of having the last two nuclear warheads shot down, therefore, increased dramatically. But, he argued, in such a massive incoming missile and rocket attack from all directions, the Israelis would never suspect the atomic warheads were coming from Syria. Thus the likelihood of those warheads getting shot down would decrease dramatically under this scenario, and the chances of annihilating the Israeli Jewish population would increase.

Jazini concluded his memo by noting the critical element of the Twelfth Imam’s securing full and unhindered control of the Pakistani nuclear missiles before launching the final two Iranian warheads. If this could be successfully negotiated and announced publicly, it should forestall the Americans from even considering a retaliation against Iran or any part of the Caliphate after the Mahdi wiped the Zionists off the map. Indeed, full control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal would make the Caliphate a fast-rising superpower and the Mahdi one of the most powerful leaders on the planet, if not
the
most powerful.

“Just as Allah would have it,” Jazini concluded.

The Mahdi was surprised. The memo was good—better than he had expected—and he found himself impressed with Jazini’s foresight and initiative. Actually, Jazini was proving himself a far more effective tactician than Faridzadeh. It was Jazini who, several years before, had successfully overseen the program to enrich Iran’s uranium to weapons-grade purity. It was Jazini who had overseen the program to make sure the warheads were successfully built and tested and attached to the Shahab-3 missiles. What’s more, it was Jazini who had overseen the training and deployment of the IRGC cell that had successfully assassinated Egyptian president Abdel Ramzy in New York City. He couldn’t be personally blamed for the failure to kill the American and Israeli leaders as well. At least both had been wounded. Besides, killing Ramzy had been the top priority in order to prepare the way for Egypt’s joining the Caliphate, and that’s exactly what had happened. Plus, the Americans had suffered another black eye, another major terrorist attack inside their homeland—and in Manhattan of all places. Oil prices had soared. Gas prices were skyrocketing. The Dow was plummeting. The American people were rattled. President Jackson looked feckless and indecisive, and Jazini deserved a great deal of credit.

Put simply, Jazini’s job had been to build Iran’s nuclear weapons program and make it viable while also giving Iran a terrorist network capable of striking deep inside enemy territory, and he had succeeded beyond anyone’s most fervent prayers. Faridzadeh’s job, on the other hand, had been to protect Iran’s nuclear weapons program from sabotage and external attack, and Faridzadeh had failed disastrously.

It was Faridzadeh who had failed to stop the Israelis—or perhaps the Americans, or possibly a coordinated effort by both—from assassinating Dr. Mohammed Saddaji, ostensibly the deputy director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization but clandestinely Iran’s chief nuclear physicist running the weapons-development program. It was Faridzadeh who had failed to stop the defection to the United States of Dr. Najjar Malik, Saddaji’s son-in-law and chief deputy on the weapons program. Not only was Malik now apparently cooperating with the CIA, but he was claiming on satellite television and through his wildly popular Twitter account that he had renounced Islam and converted
to Christianity. And now Faridzadeh was systematically losing this war against the Zionists. Any one of these crimes would have been abominable enough, but combined they were unforgivable sins.