Authors: Noah Beck
Tags: #General Fiction
“Yes, Sir,” the three men under his command responded, in unison.
Daniel arrived with Yisrael’s key in his left hand and his own key ready to be used in his right hand. “Commence nuclear missile launch sequence,” he commanded.
“Yes, Sir,” Bao replied. He inserted his key into the lock securing the nuclear missile arsenal and turned it.
Using his right hand, Daniel put in his key and turned it. He then used his left hand to insert Yisrael’s key. He tried to turn Yisrael’s key but it seemed to be jammed. The captain struggled with it a bit more, applying more force but was unable to turn it. “A simple, jammed key thwarts our entire mission, after overcoming so many challenges to come this far? After struggling with the decision as long and hard as we did?” Daniel said to himself as he tried to turn the key harder. “That would be absurd.”
Determined as ever, Daniel added his right hand to his struggle with Yisrael’s key, and used both of his hands to grasp the jammed key even more firmly. “This can’t be happening,” he thought to himself. He further strained himself to turn the key with both hands, summoning all of his strength. As the metal key stubbornly pressed into his index finger bone rather than budge, he asked himself in disbelief, “Am I in a dream?”
****
Still connected to a variety of life-support tubes and wires, the Prime Minister of Israel turned weakly in his hospital bed. He was feebly twisting the corner of his pillow with both hands while a horrific nightmare gripped him. He suddenly awoke and gradually realized that the thing in his hands was not a key. He released the pillow as he tried to reorient himself. His ears were now attuned to the sounds of the room, and his eyes tried to focus on his surroundings for the first time in 31 days. He looked out the window nearby and saw that it was nighttime. He was in the intensive care unit of a German hospital, surrounded by digital screens monitoring his breathing and brain activity. A variety of instruments connected to his body maintained his respiration and circulation, administered intravenous fluids, and otherwise supported his continued survival.
“Come here! Come here! Look, he’s awake. He’s out of the coma!” It was the sound of his wife’s voice.
The doctor rushed over and inspected the Prime Minister. He checked the readings on the panel of the life support system and then adjusted some of the buttons and switches. The Israeli premier fell back asleep.
As he gradually began to regain consciousness, his medical team slowly weaned him off the ventilator and intravenous sedation drugs. Eventually, about 24 hours after the Prime Minister first emerged from his coma, his attending physician felt comfortable extubating the endotracheal tube, which allowed the leader to breathe on his own. For the next 24 hours, he slipped in and out of a dream state, each time regaining a little more alertness and cognitive function. About 12 hours after the breathing tubes had been removed from his mouth, gasps of horror reverberated through the room, waking him momentarily. People were crowded around the TV in his hospital room. “No, no, don’t disturb his rest. He shouldn’t see this…Don’t say anything to him now.” He slipped back into a deep slumber.
Approximately 72 hours after the Israeli leader first awoke from his coma, he began speaking with those around him and gradually returning to his former self mentally, even though physically he was still quite weak because his muscles had atrophied from a month of disuse. Through several conversations with his wife, physician, and surrounding aides, the Prime Minister gradually realized that he had been in a coma for 31 days. His wife and aides were careful to hide the horrific news that had been on their minds, for fear of distressing him or delaying his recovery.
About four days after the Prime Minister returned from his coma, he could sense that something momentously terrible had happened that he had yet to discover, and his wife and aides saw that he could intuit everyone’s grief. They also figured that he would inevitably hear about the news from the TV or a hospital worker. Acquiescing to the ineluctable, they finally explained to him that, about two and a half days earlier, the State of Israel had been destroyed by a coordinated attack of nuclear and chemical missiles, as well as innumerable conventional warheads from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. For about an hour after that onerous and woeful conversation, the Prime Minister remained speechless and lost in his thoughts.
His morose mulling was interrupted when, at around 5 a.m. local German time, about 35 days after he had first entered into a coma, a mobile phone rang. The call came through the Prime Minister’s emergency-backup phone that operated on a European network. His wife answered for him. It was her husband’s chief of staff calling from overseas. When she updated him with the good news about the Prime Minister’s recovery, he excitedly asked to speak with him.
“It’s Lior, your chief of staff,” she explained to her husband. She passed the cell phone to him so that he could, for the first time in over a month, conduct a conversation as the Prime Minister of Israel.
“Sir, it’s great to be speaking to you again,” Lior said. “I’m relieved that you’re back.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Washington D.C., Sir.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’ve been talking to the American administration about what to do.”
“What to do?”
“They’re discussing military options.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“Shall I tell them that?”
“Didn’t the president get my diplomatic cable?”
“Which cable, Sir?”
“I sent him a cable before I was about to convene the meeting of my security cabinet. You helped me to arrange that meeting, remember? We were preparing for it over the working breakfast.”
“Yes, Sir, I remember all of that.”
“The cable put him on notice that our military would attack in the next three to seven days if he didn’t send me a written reassurance within the next 24 hours. I gave him 24 hours to present Iran with a firm ultimatum requiring the complete and verified dismantling of their nuclear program starting within 48 hours.”
“Yes, I remember. You copied me on that cable. And the President received that cable, Sir. He tried to call you to discuss it a few hours later but you were already hospitalized. And because you couldn’t attend the security cabinet meeting that we had set up, the ministers at the meeting couldn’t reach a decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. You know how divided people were at the time. And your deputy couldn’t achieve the necessary consensus in support of a decision to attack.”
“But what did the Americans do all this time?”
“They continued pressing for tougher economic sanctions and more diplomatic isolation. I think the Americans assumed that if the Israeli security cabinet couldn’t reach a decision to attack Iran, then they certainly weren’t going to. Remember, Sir, their timetable for an attack was different than ours.”
“Well, tell them that I’m out of my coma now, and that I no longer need them to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat. I’ll do it myself.”
“Sir, how do you expect to do that? We have no more military.”
“What about the Dolphin?”
“Sir, the closest reliable link to the Dolphin – or anything else concerning Israel – at this point is through Gabriel Cohen.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s in charge of the emergency backup communication center located in Karpathos, Greece. I last spoke to him about an hour ago.”
“What did he say?”
“He confirmed that the country has been completely destroyed – and that he had forgotten there were even any Israelis left, until he heard from the captain of the Dolphin, and then from me.”
“When did he hear from the captain of the Dolphin?”
“About two hours before he talked to me. He said that the captain was near Bandar Abbas and had called him seeking a Prime Minister’s approval for a second-strike on Iran.”
“Put me in touch with Gabriel so that I can give him the authorization.”
“Sir, we can try that, but I don’t know when or if the Dolphin’s crew will ever again try to communicate with him after they learned that Israel has been destroyed and that they were effectively the last Israelis.”
The Prime Minister lay there in frustration, feeling – for the first time ever – truly powerless. He was still feebly recovering from a near-death health emergency. His country had just been destroyed while the world had apparently looked on, and it was highly unlikely that he could reach the last instrument of retaliation at his disposal. After all, what if the crew, upon hearing the inconceivably depressing news from Gabriel Cohen – and without any valid attack order to guide them – couldn’t reach an attack decision on their own and simply decided to commit collective suicide?
The Prime Minister certainly would have understood such a decision. In any case, it was now indubitably clear to him that the Dolphin really had no reason ever again to contact Gabriel Cohen. Thus, trying to reach Gabriel from his hospital bed through his chief of staff, in order to deliver an attack order to the submarine’s captain, which order would never actually reach the captain, just seemed like an exercise in humiliating futility. “Why underscore our pathetic state?” he thought to himself.
“Sir? Are you still there?”
“Yes. Just thinking. Never mind. I need to rest.” He hung up the phone.
The Prime Minister reflected with dark irony on how the “last Israelis” were, at the time of the attack on Israel, all located in and saved by German-made structures: he, his family, and his aides in the German hospital, and the crew of the Dolphin in the German-made submarine. This thought then caused bits of his dream to return suddenly. He turned to his wife to share his confused recollection.
“I…I was dreaming that…I was holding a key…” He said, trying to manage his mixed-up thoughts and reconstruct the details of his nightmare.
“Wait, honey. Look at this,” his wife said, pointing to the TV. As he moved his eyes to the television screen by his hospital bed, the Israeli Prime Minister realized that the real nightmare was that he was no longer dreaming.
A breaking news alert interrupted the BBC program that had been running: “This just in. We have reports that Iran has sustained attacks by nuclear missiles in about ten different locations throughout the country. Judging from its intensity, each blast appears to have been caused by a 200-kiloton nuclear explosion, which is about 13 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Initial reports indicate that the targets hit were all key sites comprising Iran’s nuclear program. We can also confirm that Iran’s capital city of Tehran has also been hit with a nuclear detonation. We will bring you more information about this dramatic development as it comes in.”
The Prime Minister was still bewildered by everything, but gradually began to piece together all of the information.
He finally turned back toward his wife. Her eyes were still glued to the TV, totally transfixed by the dramatic news report. She eventually looked at her husband and saw that he wanted to say something.
“Yes, honey? What is it?”
“The last Israelis did not go quietly.”
THE END
Epilogue: The Diplomatic Cable
Dear Mr. President:
I just awoke from a nightmare about the day after Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Waking up didn’t help much: the Mossad chief just informed me that Israel has only a week left to decide whether it will act alone to stop the Iranian nuclear threat. As you know, a military strike by my country will be far messier and less effective than a strike carried out by the most powerful military on earth.
Only a truly credible threat of overwhelming force against Iran will prevent a potential doomsday scenario from becoming reality, and only the United States can deliver such a threat. Paradoxically, if Iran truly believes that the U.S. is about to launch a massive attack, it will back down and no force will be needed at all. If, on the other hand, Iran has doubts about American resolve, it will not only continue to develop an independent nuclear capability, but it may also take a “short-cut” route to immunity by purchasing nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Such an acquisition would make it impossible even for the U.S. to stop Iran from becoming yet another nuclear proliferator. The Iranian regime must understand that it will face devastating consequences if it attempts – by any means – to acquire nuclear weapons.
The threat of force should be used to achieve something far more effective than the illusory arrangement settled on with North Korea in 1994. The goal with Iran must be a Libya-style total disarmament, removing equipment and material from Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with independent verification by the IAEA.
A verified and total disarmament is the only way to eliminate the many perils of a nuclear Iran. These dangers include: (i) nuclear proliferation because other countries in this volatile and commerce-critical area will feel the need to develop their own nuclear programs in response to the Iranian nuclear threat, (ii) the risk of nuclear materials being passed from Iran – the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism – to terrorist organizations and/or states, (iii) bolder attacks by terrorist groups protected by an Iranian nuclear umbrella, and (iv) an even more aggressive Iran that flexes its nuclear arsenal to: export its radical Islamic ideology, acquire disputed territories and resources from neighboring countries, and/or undertake actions like blocking the Strait of Hormuz to increase the price of oil.
As you know, Iran violently quelled the democratic movement in its own country in 2009 and has actively supported the Syrian regime in its brutal crackdown on protesters and in the subsequent civil war. The Islamic Republic directly and through its proxies threatens stability in Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Iraq, and the Gulf area. Iran is also responsible for countless deaths of American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In short, as clear as it is today that a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Third Reich would have spelled catastrophe, so should it be clear with the Iranian theocracy. Allowing Iran to acquire or develop nuclear weapons could lead to horrific destruction on an unthinkable scale. Even reformers with the best of intentions and most reassuring words will need time to change the governing system and political culture in Iran, and the world must be patient and skeptical before concluding that Iran has changed so dramatically for the better that it can be trusted with the world’s most dangerous weapons.