To make absolutely sure he was right, he fed one of the pieces of E-mail intercepted from CompuNet into the sus peeled program. Seconds later, a complete, plain-text message flashed onto his screen.
Paige read through the translated E-mail once in surprise and then a second time in growing horror. Still staring at his monitor, he reached out for the phone on his desk and punched in an internal number. “This is Greg Paige with Group T. I need to speak to the deputy director. Right away!”
The Pentagon Rossini poked his head into Peter Thorn’s office.. “Pete? I think you’d better come see this.” The Maestro sounded strained.
Thorn looked up from the investigative reports Flynn had faxed over from the terrorist safe house, slowly realising that he had been staring at them for minutes without really seeing them. His brain still seemed to be functioning at half-speed. Despite his determination to throw himself into his work, he was finding it difficult to focus on anything beyond Helen Gray. So far his hourly phone calls to Walter Reed had yielded little more than the news that she was still in critical condition and still in intensive care.
He made an effort to gather his scattered thoughts. “See what?”
“The
NSA
found the encryption program they were looking for on that computer Helen captured. They’re downloading the complete set of decoded E-mail from our terrorist friends into our database now.” Rossini looked almost ill. “It contains a damned ugly surprise.”
Thorn was on his feet instantly, following the older man next door into his cramped office.. “Show me.”
Rossini handed him a printout without comment. A time/date stamp at the top showed that it had been transmitted from London on October 12.
Special Operations Order
MAGI
Prime via
MACI
Link to
LION
Prime:
1. Activate Phase 11 of
SCIMITAR
.
2. Your field operations will commence on 5 November. Target selection
BRAVO
TWO
is approved.
3. Go with God.
Message Authentication:
TALEH
,
MAGI
Prime, VXE115
Thorn stared down at the printout in his hands in shock. Taleh? Amir Taleh had organised this terror campaign? The terrorists posing as American extremists were Taleh’s creatures? His friend was the man responsible for these atrocities against innocent civilians? The man ultimately responsible for Helen’s terrible injuries? The man whose actions might cost him the one person who meant more to him than anyone else in the world?
It was insane utterly unbelievable. How could the man who had been like a brother to him all those years ago be capable of such evil? How could Taleh have changed so much?
Thorn’s face darkened. Maybe Taleh had not changed after all. Perhaps the evil had always been inside him a core of malice hidden behind a mask of honor and friendship.
He crushed the sheet in his hands without thinking, caught up in cascading images of the past months. The Iranian had conducted a brilliant and cunning masquerade to conceal his true intentions. Taleh’s attacks on the HizbAllah, his push for renewed U.S.-lranian diplomatic relations, and even his offer to help track down the missing Bosnian terrorists all had been nothing more than a gigantic deception, a blindfold pulled over American eyes while he readied his organised butchery.
Thorn tossed the crumpled printout aside in sudden, blind fury. Clearly, he had been one of the Iranian’s favorite dupes a trusting conduit of disinformation to the highest reaches of America’s counterterrorist forces. His hands curled into fists. The bastard had used him. Taleh had asked him to come to Iran to renew their friendship and to seek new ties with America all the while plotting to use his old friend’s trust as a shield for this murderous campaign.
Brought face-to-face with the magnitude of the Iranian’s treachery, Thorn’s whole view of the world wavered. He was accustomed to making fast, accurate judgments about people and then trusting those judgments with his life. Taleh’s betrayal struck at the heart of his confidence, weakening his own faith in himself.
His breathing slowed as reason returned. The anger remained, but it was now an icy, calculating enmity.
Amir Taleh was obviously a man of hidden malice, but he was not a fool. The Iranian must have realized that the United States would eventually discover his nation’s responsibility for this terrorist offensive. No sane man could hope to keep so large an operation secret forever. He had to know the kind of awful vengeance that would descend on Iran’s head once his duplicity became clear.
Peter Thorn stood motionless in Rossini’s office, staring at nothing while his mind grappled with questions that seemed to have no rational answer. Why would Taleh involve himself and his country in this slaughter? What could he possibly gain that would make the inevitable price worth paying?
DECEMBER
6
It was well past midnight.
Thorn and Rossini sat on opposite sides of a desk piled high with maps, satellite photos, transcripts of intercepted Iranian military communications, and reports published by a dozen different U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies. Some of the data came from the files pulled together earlier that year by the Maestro’s tiny team trying to track down those first rumors of Bosnian Muslim terrorists. More had been scraped up by
JSOC-ILU
researchers held long after normal hours and sent out to scour the Pentagon’s voluminous databases. After reading through Taleh’s E-mail to his terrorist teams, Thorn had put the entire unit on a de facto war footing.
Both men were exhausted, but neither of them was willing to break for sleep. Their growing certainty that Taleh had something else up his sleeve something even worse than the terrorist campaign drove them onward.
Thorn put down the fragmentary telecommunications intercept he’d been studying, pulled a map of Iran closer to him, and scrawled a hasty note on the map next to one of the Iranian Army’s garrison cities.
Rossini looked up from his own pile of papers. “Another one?”
“Yeah.” Thorn slid the intercept across to the older man. “One of our
VORTEX
satellites picked up part of a conversation between the commander of the 25th Parachute Brigade and one of his battalion COs. They’re going to full readiness all leaves canceled, extra practice jumps, full equipment draw. The works.”
“Jesus.” Rossini scanned the sheet quickly and then eyeballed the map Thorn had been working on. “There’s a hell of a lot of movement going on over there, Pete.”
Thorn nodded. Although the picture of recent Iranian military activity they’d been putting together was by no means complete, it was increasingly ominous. Significant portions of more than six elite Iranian divisions were either in motion or preparing to move somewhere. Air and naval units scattered across the Islamic Republic were also being brought to higher states of alert.
So far, no one else in the U.S. defense and intelligence communities had spotted the full scope of the Iranian maneuvers. That was understandable. Viewed in isolation, the various clues and bits of evidence meant very little. Few analysts were in a position to see all of the information gathered by America’s satellites, signals intercept stations, and spies. Lulled by Taleh’s phony U.S.-lran detente and immobilised by the terrorist attacks at home, nobody in authority had paid much attention to the tiny warning bells going off.
“Colonel? Maestro? You got a minute?” Mike McFadden came bustling in, clearly excited.
“What’ve you got, Mike?” Thorn asked.
“This just came down the wire from Langley. It’s a summary of the latest Satcom transmission from that Afghan truck driver, ‘Stone.’ ” The young, red-haired analyst held out a two-page color fax with blue stripes running down one side of the cover sheet. The stripes indicated the fax contained information from a
CIA
agent. “He just reported the final destination for the Iranian 12th Infantry Division and most of the other convoys.”
“And?”
McFadden stabbed a finger down on the map in front of Thorn. “They’re moving to Bushehr!”
Bushehr? Thorn stared at the map. Why Bushehr?
Suddenly, the data they’d been accumulating bit by bit began falling into place with dizzying speed.
“My God,” he said softly. He turned to Rossini. “I’m going to see Sam Farrell.”
The older man looked confused. “Why?”
“To make sure he demands an immediate emergency meeting of the National Security Council.”
“To do what, exactly?”
Thorn showed his teeth in a grim, bitter smile. “To persuade the President and the
NSC
that we have to kill General Amir Taleh before he kills us.”
The White House
The White House Situation Room was packed to the rafters. The President and his Secretaries of State and Defense sat around a long rectangular table flanked by the Directors of the
CIA
and the
FBI
, the Attorney General, the National Security Advisor, and the uniformed Joint Chiefs of Staff. Notepads, pens, and glasses of ice water were precisely squared away in front of each man and woman at the table, along with briefing books hastily prepared for this meeting. Chairs lining the walls were filled by civilian and military aides.
“Major General Farrell, is your officer ready to brief us?” The President’s familiar voice sliced through the buzz of uneasy speculation and concern. Word of Tehran’s complicity in the wave of terrorism had already swept through the administration’s upper circles like wildfire. So far, the threat of prosecution for leaking classified information had kept it away from the media. That and the realisation that revealing the information prematurely would shatter an administration that had rested so much of its reputation on the mistaken assumption the terrorists they were fighting were homegrown radicals.
“Yes, sir,” Farrell nodded. He glanced at Thorn. “You’re on, Pete.”
Thorn appreciated the symmetry of Farrell’s decision to let him conduct the brief. He had played an unwitting role in Amir Taleh’s diabolically clever deception plan. Now he was being given an opportunity to make amends by punching a hole through the tissue of lies surrounding Iran’s true objective.
He rose from his chair and moved to the plain wood lectern at the front of the room. Its raised front concealed an array of buttons, knobs, and switches that gave the briefer control over the room’s computer-driven displays.
By rights the concentrated gaze of the most powerful political and military leaders in the United States should have made him nervous. Instead, he felt nothing beyond the same cold anger that had filled him since he first learned of Taleh’s treachery.
“Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Colonel Peter Thorn, and I command the JSOC’s Intelligence Liaison Unit. This briefing is based on satellite photography, signals intercepts, and on human intelligence from
CIA
assets inside Iran much of it received over the past seventy-two hours,” he began in a quiet, confident voice. “By now you all know that General Amir Taleh, the Chief of Staff of Iran’s armed forces, is the prime mover of this terrorist campaign directed against us.”
Heads nodded around the table, some of them impatiently. This was old news by Washington standards. Most of them had read the intercepted dispatches proving that the terror groups operating in the United States were receiving their orders from the military high command in Tehran.
“What you do not know,” Thorn continued firmly, “is the reason we believe General Taleh has committed his country to such a risky course of action.”
He tapped a button on the lectern. The large video monitor behind him came on, showing a map of the Persian Gulf region. Blinking symbols on the display showed Iran’s armed forces in motion.
“As you can see,” Thorn said flatly, “a sizable fraction of Iran’s conventional military forces are on the move. These forces include Tehran’s most elite divisions and its most sophisticated ships and aircraft. Although the Iranians are making significant efforts to conceal the full scope of this sudden mobilisation, we now know that the majority of these units are heading here to Bandar-e Bushehr.” He touched another bunon, highlighting the port city.
Thorn paused briefly to let the President and his advisors take in the vast size of the Iranian buildup and then went on. “Put bluntly, Mr. President, Taleh’s open diplomatic lures toward us and his covert terrorist campaign here have all been nothing but a smoke screen a calculated and successful effort to conceal Iran’s true objective for as long as possible. He has been buying the time he needs to complete these massive military preparations.”
“And what exactly is this man’s real aim, Colonel Thorn?” the President asked. His eyes were still fixed on the outlined port of Bushehr.
Thorn answered him quietly but with absolute conviction. “General Taleh is preparing to conduct a major amphibious operation across the Persian Gulf within the next seven to ten days. He intends to invade Saudi Arabia.”
There were gasps around the crowded table and throughout the room.
“Surely that’s not possible!” the President exclaimed, clearly stunned. His eyes roamed around the Situation Room, seeking someone, anyone, who would contradict such a dire prediction.
“On the contrary, Mr. President. Such an operation is not only feasible it is likely to succeed,” Thorn cut in decisively. He was determined not to offer any excuse for inaction or delay. “Taleh has systematically strengthened Iran’s armed forces. Their weapons are better. Their maintenance and supply units are better. Most important of all, the Iranian officer corps is more professional and more capable than at any time since the fall of the Shah. Iran is once again a major military power in the Gulf region.”
“Hold on, Colonel,” the Secretary of Defense, a quiet, scholarly man, protested. “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions prematurely? Isn’t it possible that these Iranian troop movements indicate a possible offensive against Ira~and not against Saudi Arabia?”