Crusader One (Tier One Thrillers Book 3) Page 24

  The President stood at the window, behind his desk, his back to them.

  “Director Modiri, sir,” the aide announced.

  “Leave us,” Esfahani said, without turning.

  With a wordless bow, the aide—a man who looked more like a cage fighter in a suit than an administrative type—departed and shut the door behind him. The room smelled of tea and cigarettes, but with a subtle floral undertone. Lavender? Lilac? Whatever it was, he liked it, and it seemed familiar—

  “The last time we met,” the President said, “I told you that the party responsible for the bombing in America must be found and revealed to the world. I said, ‘Succeed, and Iran will continue to flourish. Fail, and the Persian caliphate will go up in flames, along with our cities and our bases.’ Do you remember that, Amir?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And now, our cities and our bases are burning, and our nuclear sites are destroyed. Who should I blame for this?” Esfahani said.

  Modiri hesitated. How much did Esfahani know? Without being able to see the man’s face, there was no way to know if this question was meant to be rhetorical or a death sentence. “If you are looking to assign blame,” he said at last, “then blame the party responsible for all this death and destruction—blame the Zionists. If memory serves, you also said that if Persia burns you would raze Israel to the ground.”

  Esfahani turned to face him and looked as though he had aged ten years since their last meeting. “Did you do it? Did you kill the American DNI and Mossad Chief on American soil?”

  “I did not,” Modiri said with conviction, before adding, “but, I’ve recently come to fear that one of my operators may have acted unilaterally and carried out the attack.”

  The corners of Esfahani’s mouth turned up in an angry smile. “Unilaterally?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I assume you’re referring to Behrouz Rostami?”

  “That’s correct,” he said without hesitation or a hint of trepidation in his voice. He’d already played this conversation out in his head a hundred times, rehearsing both his and Esfahani’s lines. So far, the script he’d imagined had unfolded almost verbatim in real life. Unlike Safavid, Amir’s myopic boss, Esfahani was a ruthless tactician hewn from the same stuff as Modiri. To prepare for this encounter, all Amir had had to do was imagine sparring with himself—himself with incomplete information. But incomplete information was not the same thing as zero information. Modiri knew that Esfahani’s lapdogs had been digging and sniffing, sniffing and digging, all around VEVAK and beyond. How did he know this? Because Maheen had told him so. Just as Esfahani had his dogs, Maheen had her little bees, always buzzing and listening, listening and buzzing. Rostami’s absence had gone unnoticed by most, but not all, and word had apparently gotten back to the President. And so Modiri’s only play left was to pin the blame squarely on Rostami and hope that some part of Esfahani secretly both admired and recognized the magnitude of the operation he’d pulled off. VEVAK had successfully managed to wipe out the intelligence Chiefs of their two greatest enemies on American soil. Despite the tremendous cost, it was still an accomplishment worthy of being lauded, one that maybe only another former VEVAK Director could appreciate.

  “Go on,” Esfahani said.

  “As you know, I’ve been pushing my department very hard these past eighteen months. We’ve been recruiting and developing assets all over the globe. We’ve been aggressively taking on the Americans and the Zionists inside clandestine circles—collecting intelligence, rooting out their spies, and hitting them where it hurts. All the while, I’ve worked diligently to conduct my operations in such a manner that I provide you and the Supreme Leader with plausible deniability. This is the model that you pioneered while you were Minister. I’m merely a humble servant of Allah continuing the work you began.”

  “Cut the shit; it doesn’t work with me,” Esfahani said, his expression darkening.

  “Nevertheless, it’s true,” Modiri said. “I have been working my people to the bone. Especially Rostami. I don’t imagine you’ve seen his psychological profile, but if you had, you’d know that Rostami was flagged for having sociopathic predispositions.”

  “That’s not uncommon in that line of work.”

  “True, but couple this with his grandiose aspirations and a god complex, and you get an agent who—if pushed too hard—might crack and go over the edge, which is what I believe happened in this case. I believe Rostami went rogue and decided to execute one of the Red Sabre operations we’ve been developing.”

  “So this was your operation after all?” the President said, narrowing his eyes.

  “The operation was one of mine, yes,” Modiri said. “But I never gave the order to execute it. I never gave the green light.”

  “What are Red Sabre operations?” Esfahani asked.

  Modiri resisted the urge to smile. It was working; he was slowly easing the bull’s-eye off his back and onto his dead scapegoat. “High-risk/high-reward missions involving only my most senior analysts and operators. The missions are all scenario based. Some are crazy, some are impossible, but some have gone on to become our greatest triumphs. The operation to hit the DNI’s private estate was a Red Sabre operation, although in its original incarnation, only the DNI and his wife are in residence at the time of the attack. I suspect that learning the new Mossad Chief would be visiting the mansion with his staff simply was too much for Rostami to resist.”

  “He was already in the US?”

  “Yes, collecting intelligence and meeting with the Suren Circle DC residents, which, despite the beliefs of the Americans, is still very much intact and fully operational.”

  “I don’t know whether to embrace you or hang you,” Esfahani said, suddenly deflating.

  I’ve won, Modiri realized. It’s over . . . Now only to finish without making a mistake.

  “I would prefer the former,” Modiri said with a cautious smile. “Sir.”

  The President took a seat in the chair behind his desk and gestured for Modiri to sit in the chair opposite. Then, scratching his beard, he said, “Maybe there is still a chance this catastrophe can be salvaged. American forces in Iraq are repositioning along our borders. The Fifth Fleet is in the Arabian Sea, and I’m told a second aircraft carrier is steaming to the Mediterranean. If the Americans form an alliance with Israel and declare war on us, it will lead to our destruction. And if they come, they won’t stop until regime change is effected. We can’t let it come to that. Do your job, Amir. Give me something or someone I can trade to the Americans to satisfy their President and stop the escalation. Either find me Rostami or manufacture evidence that someone else is responsible. Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, ISIS—I don’t give a shit—just get me a sacrificial lamb.”

  “I don’t have Rostami. He’s in the wind,” he said. “Or maybe he’s dead.”

  “Do you think the Americans already have him?”

  “No,” Modiri said. “If they had him we would know. They would have publicized his capture to paint us the villain to the world.”

  “Maybe they are just waiting for the right time.”

  “I think that time has passed, but let’s say for argument’s sake they kept it from the media; they certainly would have informed the Zionists,” Modiri said. “But if they’d informed the Zionists, I would know because I have a highly placed source in their intelligence community.”

  “Ah yes, the fabled Broken Mirror . . . but why did we hear nothing from your source two days ago? Hmmm? Where was your loyal Zionist double agent when we needed him most before the Israeli attack?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I assume my asset could not get word to us because of the elevated security. An attempt to do so could have proven disastrous.”

  “The attack was disastrous!” Esfahani shouted, slamming his fist down on the desk.

  “With all due respect, sir, would it have changed anything? We anticipated an attack was coming; it would have been confirming intelligence only
. The outcome would have remained the same. The capabilities of the Artesh are what they are. We are outgunned. It is the simple truth.”

  “You’re right, of course. I know . . .” Esfahani’s words trailed off.

  “On the positive side,” Modiri said, filling the silence, “reports are coming in about our counterattack. The sleeper cells activated, and our brothers in Hezbollah and Hamas continue to hammer Israeli cities. Civilian casualties are climbing.”

  “Yes, but their damn missile defense system is performing better than expected. It’s all over the news.”

  “The media is controlled by the Zionists; these reports are lies and propaganda.”

  “Is that what your spies tell you?”

  “My assets are saying that the damage exceeds what the media is reporting.”

  Esfahani nodded, but his gaze was off into space.

  “When will we attack the Zionists directly?” Modiri asked, fully expecting to be lied to.

  “As of this moment, we will not launch an overt attack. To do so would all but ensure American intervention. I intend to maintain our innocence as long as possible. We paint the Zionists as the aggressors while maintaining plausible deniability. We cannot win a war with the Americans in our current state.”

  “What about Russian intervention?”

  “Petrov will not commit.”

  “So what, then . . . We do nothing?”

  Esfahani had no reply.

  “What happened to ‘razing Israel to the ground’?”

  A pained look washed over Esfahani’s face. He sighed, rubbed his temples, and was quiet for a long beat. When he finally spoke, he said, “If we attempted this—and the odds are staggeringly low that our military would prevail—the Americans would intervene, and the outcome would be devastating. Our cities would be left in ruins. The regime would be toppled. Sunni factions would unite inside our borders and incite civil war . . . I cannot . . . I will not let Persia become the next Syria.”

  From his first day on the job as Director of Foreign Operations, Modiri had understood his charter to be to antagonize, foil, and injure the giant on the other side of the world in ways that did not breach the threshold of triggering a full-scale retaliation. Until now, he had been incredibly successful at fulfilling that charter, perpetrating real harm to American assets, interests, and security. The victories in Yemen and Djibouti that decimated the Navy Tier One units had been a tremendous blow that US Special Forces was still trying to recover from. The terror attacks he facilitated at the New York United Nations and later in Atlanta, Omaha, and Seattle—while not full-blown successes—had achieved the psychological objective of demonstrating to the world that America was not invincible. In none of these operations had the Americans gathered sufficient evidence to hold Iran accountable. He did not believe his bold assassination of the DNI to be any different, whether they recovered Rostami’s body or not. What made this case different from the others were the Zionists. They did not have the same threshold as the Americans, and their brazen strike on Persia was proof of this.

  By attacking Iran, Israel had changed the game. It was never Modiri’s intention that Iran be put in this position, but now that it was, Iran had no choice but to act with strength. The President had it backward. By yielding to the Zionists, Persian credibility would be lost. Their Sunni adversaries in the region would become emboldened and challenge Persian sovereignty. It was his duty to convince Esfahani of as much.

  “By doing nothing, the world will know us as cowards. Our adversaries will unite and take our homeland from us. We cannot roll over before the Zionists. We must show our adversaries that any attack on Persia will be revisited with tenfold the destructive power,” Modiri said, meeting the President’s gaze. “We have parity in our pocket. It is only a matter of having the courage to use it.”

  “Are you talking about a nuclear strike?” Esfahani said, his eyes widening behind his silver-rimmed glasses.

  Modiri nodded. “We have the capability. I can covertly shuttle one of our twenty-kiloton warheads to Hezbollah. They have nine operational SCUD missiles. We load the warhead on one and fire all of them at Tel Aviv in the middle of a second-wave rocket attack. The Iron Dome is vulnerable. We proved that in the first attack.”

  “No, Amir,” Esfahani said, shaking his head. “I will not do this. I will not be the architect of Persia’s demise. I will not be the man who starts World War Three.”

  Modiri met the President’s gaze.

  “Then what will you have me do?” Modiri asked.

  “Find me a scapegoat’s head to offer the Americans and the Zionists on a platter so we can get on to the business of rebuilding, before we don’t have anything left to rebuild!”

  Modiri swallowed down his vitriol and pride and bowed his head in deference. “I will see it done,” he said and then turned to leave.

  Spineless fool, he seethed. If you don’t have the courage to act, then once again you leave me no choice.

  PART III

  We share enemies, my friend. Enemies everywhere.

  —Levi Harel

  CHAPTER 26

  JSOTF—Iraq Compound

  Irbil, Iraq

  May 31

  1630 Local Time

  Dempsey had no time for nostalgia.

  No time for déjà vu.

  On his last visit to this American Special Forces compound, the young SEAL officer whom everybody called Chunk had accompanied him on a capture/kill mission into the Wild West of Iraq. Last time, everything had gone to hell, and they’d had to fight their way to freedom, taking turns saving each other’s lives in the process. This time, all that mattered was getting in; everything else was just noise. This was the reason the universe had spared him, and him alone, from the attack in Djibouti. This was the mission Jarvis had recruited and trained him to fulfill.

  This was his purpose.

  This was his destiny.

  “You good?” said Munn, his face drawn with anxiety.

  “Yeah, just thinking about Lizzie,” he lied and returned to the task of cleaning and oiling his assault rifle. He’d been thinking about vengeance, not his friend, and suddenly a wave of guilt washed over him.

  “Yeah, me, too.” Munn sighed, snapping the lower receiver of his own rifle back in place and pushing the pin back in. He cycled the charging handle and locked the bolt back, inspecting his rifle closely. “Thank God we had the Seventh Order medical assets so close.” Munn inserted a magazine into his rifle. He tapped the bottom of the magazine and released the bolt. Then, he leaned the weapon against the bench beside him.

  “I can’t stop thinking about our last conversation,” Dempsey said, shaking his head. “It wasn’t a conversation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we were quarreling. She was really upset with me, and as usual, I didn’t understand why.”

  “You guys seemed okay during the workup.”

  “No, that was just us trying to stay out of each other’s way. We were going through the motions, but ever since that night at the bar in Annapolis, things have been off. If something happens and she doesn’t make it . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “She’s gonna make it, bro.”

  “You sure?”

  “It was touch and go there for a while, but she’s a fighter. The last status report they sent me was solid. She’s turned the corner. I’m not worried, JD, which means you don’t have to, either.”

  Dempsey searched his friend’s eyes for any modicum of insincerity and found none. If Munn hadn’t been there—if he hadn’t recruited the doc onto the team—then Grimes would be dead. She would have died before they got anywhere near the hospital. He felt like he should say something, somehow give Munn the credit he deserved, but the right words didn’t come to him, so they sat in silence. With anyone but another blooded operator and former teammate, this might have been awkward, but not with Munn.

  Dempsey boxed up his worry and anxiety over Grimes and locked them in a va
ult in his mind. Now wasn’t the time. He needed to be thinking about his target. If this were a standard SEAL Team capture/kill mission, he’d be completely relaxed. But a two-person team infiltrating the Islamic Republic of Iran during wartime was a whole new beast. This was real-life cloak-and-dagger spy shit—a mission that fell outside his wheelhouse. Of course, that was why he was going in with Elinor . . .

  On cue, a shapely pair of hips stepped into his field of vision.

  “When do we meet these superhero friends of yours?” Elinor asked.

  He looked up and she smiled at him. She was dressed in BDU pants and a snug coyote-brown T-shirt; she wore a pistol in a drop holster on her right thigh and had a rifle slung combat style across her chest. In her left hand, she casually carried a combat vest, which the red-blooded part of him was grateful she had yet to put on. He grinned at her and wondered if she knew that he found her even sexier now than he had outside that lingerie shop in Tel Aviv. The whole scene reminded him of the time these OGA guys were selling T-shirts in Iraq printed with “Chicks Dig Guys in Body Armor” on the front and “Guys Dig Chicks with Guns” on the back. He’d bought two—in his and her sizes—but he’d never been able to convince Kate to wear hers out in public. Elinor, he surmised, would have no such hang-ups.

  “They should be along in a few minutes,” he said, taking a mental snapshot of her. If the mission went to shit, this memory would be a good one to hold on to in an Iranian torture cell.

  “Why are we meeting here?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we be briefing in their TOC?”

  Instead of setting up shop in the JSOTF TOC, they’d been instructed to camp out in a private section of the “diplomatic” building on the ever-growing compound. This facility, originally built to function as an actual diplomatic mission, had since evolved into a counterinsurgency operations base focused on ISIS. Along with the SEALs, the compound housed a whole host of OGA folks, as well as friends from other three-letter agencies.