The Gamma Option (17 page)

He imagined he could feel the heat of bullets singeing the air around him; it was impossible to tell how close the last few came before he brought the spear gun to his shoulder. The plane roared at him and he imagined he could see the pilot’s eyes, not squinting but bulging, and suddenly in surprise. The weapon was just fifty feet away when Blaine pulled the trigger.

The spear jetted out and seemed to wobble briefly under the extra weight of the attached steel shard before straightening out on line with the windshield. McCracken saw the spear ram home when the plane was just twenty feet over him. He did not see the windshield disintegrate on impact or the splinters of glass spray into the pilot’s face, which drove his hands upward from the stick. What he did see was the Cessna list and drop suddenly, falling as if knocked off the edge of a table. It struck the hard surface of the water and broke apart on impact without flames or smoke, its fuselage continuing to skim the surface as if on water skis, shredding pieces of itself along the way.

Blaine had that moment to enjoy his triumph and no more, for the
Runaway
was relinquishing its last grasp on life. By the time he got back to Patty the water was up to his stomach and was lapping at her chest in what remained of the cabin. Her pulse was still strong and he pulled her to him with an arm cupped lifesaving-style beneath her throat. Then he eased the two of them out the doorway and away from the sinking ship.

He swam only slightly, reluctant even then to abandon the vehicle that was their only hope to survive the fury of the sea. The life jackets were under ten feet of water in the cabin, and to make a try for them would mean leaving Patty alone. He knew that if Patty’s Mayday message had gotten through, even under the best of conditions it would be many hours before the rescue party dispatched from Guam could find and save them. Much too long in any event for him to maintain his hold on Patty and save himself. But it would be much, much longer if her broadcast of their coordinates didn’t get through at all. A widescale search would be required and that could take days. The sight of something white bobbing in the sea before him caught Blaine’s eye. His first thought was
Shark!
but his next was something else entirely. Holding tight to Patty, he paddled for the object.

At last he was close enough to reach out and grasp RUSS’s transistorized control panel. Bracing it against Patty, he fiddled with the joystick, then eased it toward him. He clung to hope, with nothing else to hold on to.

A slight churning in the water made him swing to the right. RUSS’s miniature conning tower crested through the surface and its automatic bilge pumps sent water through its vents. RUSS had the look of a small but majestic whale rising proudly from the sea. Still using the joystick, McCracken brought RUSS up close enough to pet it affectionately and then lay the unconscious Patty over its cylindrical bulk before he flung himself upon it. He ended up straddling the submersible as if it were a horse. Feeling it bob slightly beneath him, he made sure Patty was safe, maneuvered the joystick to head RUSS forward, and slammed the submersible’s sides with make-believe spurs.

“Hiyo, Silver! Away!”

Chapter 14

AMIR HASSANI STOOD
in the center of the plush library deep within the fortified confines of the former Shah’s royal palace in the Niavarin district of northeast Tehran. A huge section of the room was dominated by bookshelves housing the royal library of first editions in all languages. There were four long shelves holding books of every conceivable color binding, in addition to the neatly layered stacks from floor to ceiling on the three walls enclosing the shelves.

But as his feet padded across the luscious deep red floral carpet, Hassani was aware of the books only from the scent of leather that filled his nostrils as he addressed his audience. The representatives of the various groups that had united behind him sat in seven high-back chairs upholstered in a red velvet that matched perfectly the red of the rug. At present they sat collectively aghast and dumbfounded by his report pertaining to the first stage of the plan that would ultimately see them seize power throughout the Mideast.

“The key to the success we are about to achieve,” he said, nearing the end of his presentation, “has been and will continue to be the level of secrecy I have employed in the operation that will set us on our way. There have been no leaks in security. We are poised on the brink of something awesome. It is within our grasp, and if we maintain the resolve to reach out for it, soon the state of Israel will cease to exist.”

The library hall was enormous, and the result was a background echo that would have unnerved his audience had they possessed the inclination to notice. Of the seven, three had come in military uniforms, three in traditional Arab robes, and one in an expensive western-style suit. They came from Syria, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. For himself, as always, Hassani had chosen a general’s uniform from the Revolutionary Guard he was still proud to be a part of. He wore it boldly, defiantly, as if refusing to acknowledge a war had ever been lost or, more likely, to illustrate the point that a more important war was about to be won.

“You speak of the destruction of Israel,” the Iraqi delegate said, “yet you continue to avoid the specifics. My concern is that we are being attentive here to the same kind of mindless rhetoric that preceded your unsuccessful campaign against my nation.”

Hassani did his very best to smile at the man he had been at war with just a few years before. His cap was tilted so low over his forehead that it shadowed his face all the way down to his beard. His eyes were narrow and seldom met those of the person he was addressing. He never allowed anyone a close look at him, as if any glimpse might strip away part of his aura. He was a specter who had never been interviewed by the Western press, which condemned him for being elusive and enigmatic, and for making a travesty of Iran’s post-war economic recovery.

But his smile was that of a man who saw what others failed even to look at. He had been one of the nation’s military leaders, a great favorite, during the war with Iraq. His militance had forced him to flee when the final, humbling terms of peace were agreed upon. He returned, however, during the military coup that followed Khomeini’s death and the failure of any of his successors to be installed as president of Iran with a promise to restore pride and hope.

“And is it not a great blessing,” he continued, only half looking at the delegate from Iraq, “that the strife between our nations is at last over so we can contend with our true enemy? No one supported the end of our war more than I, not because I wished to accept defeat, but because a greater victory, a victory with the word of Allah behind it, was on the horizon. Your final roles in this victory need not be made known until the last day is upon us.”

“But I have people to organize,” the Syrian delegate protested. “You promised us Israel would be ours to take in a vast sweep across lands that are rightfully ours.”

“Rightfully the Palestinians, you mean,” exclaimed the representative from the PLO. “Who, may I remind you, are supplying the largest complement of manpower to this invasion.”

“Now just wait a—”

“Gentlemen,” Hassani interrupted, raising his voice only slightly and turning his face rapidly from one man to the other, “listen to yourselves. You make the lot of the Jew easy by bickering with each other. Israel is not our greatest enemy; we are our own greatest enemy, and that in the past has prevented the miracle we have now accomplished by uniting our forces together. It also accounts for my reasons in continuing to hold back the final elements of our plan.”

“Are you saying you don’t trust us?” asked the delegate from Saudi Arabia, the single one dressed in a western suit.

“Of course I’m not. But for this operation to be successful I said from the beginning that I required
your
trust, your single-minded devotion to a cause that will only just be beginning when we overrun Israel. If one of you disagreed with the substance of my plan, you could leave here and destroy it. My holding it back is simply insurance against the exercise of such poor judgment. I would be foolish not to heed the lessons of the past. You will know what you need when you need to know it.”

“Hah!” the Libyan delegate laughed, rising to his feet and looking cramped in the medal-layered khaki uniform that was too tight on him. “We sit here and listen to a man who has already lost one war. I say to you, General, that you have accomplished your task by bringing us together and uniting us behind the common goal of Israel’s destruction. Now let us do it our way. Am I right?” he asked of the Iraqi delegate, searching for support.

“No,” the darker man said, “you are not.” The Iraqi’s eyes turned to Hassani who had stood rigid and silent through the Libyan’s tirade. “General Hassani did not lose the war. No man could have done more when faced against the might of Iraq.”

“Listen,” the Libyan responded, “I am not arguing intentions, only procedure. Comrades, together we have at our disposal millions of troops who can enter Israel from all sides and avoid the mistakes of ’67 and ’73. We can have them prepared within two weeks and leave words behind.”

“You would have them die for their cause?” Hassani asked.

“Of course I would! Any Arab would!”

“To die in pursuit of a dream instead of seeing that dream come to fruition? I think not. Our peoples need no more martyrs. I am not advocating denying Arabs the chance to fight for what they so richly deserve. But let them fight for certain victory instead of almost certain death at the hands of the cursed Jewish state.”

“Certain death to the Israelis as well,” the PLO delegate added.

“And they will use their bombs to obliterate all of us in a last desperate attack. What have we gained? Nothing, gentlemen, nothing at all. Overrunning Israel isn’t an end, it’s a means for all of you to come to power in your individual countries and unite the Mideast as it has never been united before. We have been mistaken in the past to be so narrow and shortsighted in our goals.”

“You continue to ignore the obvious,” the Saudi protested. “Israel may never have faced as strong an enemy as we are, but neither have we faced as strong an Israel. Nuclear weapons aside, her conventional arsenal, including jet fighters, is terrifying.”

“Granted, Mr. Ambassador. And to combat that force we now have in our possession a weapon that will render Israel helpless.”

“Why have we not been told of this weapon before?”

“There was no reason. Just as there is no reason to be any more specific today.”

“When then?” the Syrian asked.

“At our next meeting; Sunday, May fourteenth,” the general returned. “Israeli Independence Day. Three days before our invasion begins.”

On a street set back from the square in front of the royal palace, a van with traditional Islamic markings was parked. Such vans were a fixture in the streets of Tehran, though most couldn’t have said what they were, other than some version of public works.

In the back of this particular van sat a pair of men working amidst the most sophisticated recording equipment available in the world. Months before, the Mossad had managed to plant bugs throughout the royal palace, a new kind of bug with a built-in jamming device that made finding it by any kind of electronic sweep impossible.

In spite of all this, extraordinarily few dividends had been paid, as General Hassani spent little time speaking of anything they could truly make use of. The men in the van had not seen the delegates enter, so the meeting itself came as a complete shock. The man wearing headphones had started scribbling notes as was his routine, but quickly his hand began shaking too much to keep it up.

The bastards were going to destroy Israel!

The man wearing the headphones knew all the procedures and precautions. He knew he should have continued to listen patiently, even with the meeting winding down. But time had become the crucial factor in his mind, hours the issue now instead of days.

“Get us out of here!” he ordered the agent working the recording meters and levels.

“What?”

“Get behind the wheel and drive!”

“But we’re supposed to—”

“I don’t care! Do you hear me? I don’t care! Get me to the relay point. Get me there fast.”

Evira was regaining her strength. Monday had marked her third morning in the small room, and each had seen her awaken able to do more. She was exercising regularly on the dusty floor now, working flexibility back into her wounded side and neck.

Kourosh had been there with her breakfast each morning when she awoke, some bakery goods stolen from the first batch placed out in a store window six blocks away. Two mornings back he had also managed to find coffee, but it had cooled by the time he brought it up to her. She found herself following his flight through the cracks in the boards over the window, amazed at how he took to the streets as if he owned them. He bounded gracefully about with each gutter and sidewalk crack stored in his memory, long hair flapping about to the whims of the wind.

Kourosh had made a world for himself in the streets, but all the same he had become as dependent on her as she had on him. She knew he had failed to answer all her questions at once out of fear he might return from one of his jaunts to find her gone, no longer in need of him. Evira would have told him not to worry, except she knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. Trust was something that did not exist in the boy’s life. So their strange relationship was based on needs that were different for each but for the present were strong enough to keep them together.

She watched from the window now in expectation of his bouncy return down the street. Thus far he had provided her with several hastily drawn maps of the royal palace. Different sections were sketched on individual sheets of gray cardboard, drawn elaborately and exaggerated the way drawings in his comic books were. To see the whole of the palace and the sprawling grounds enclosing it, Evira needed only to arrange the cardboard sheets together like a puzzle. It was a huge white stone and marble structure built by the Shah less than twenty years before, surrounded by an outer retaining wall stretching fifteen feet high. Within the grounds, besides the palace there was a school, a guards’ barracks, and an older palace that had been transformed into office space with the construction of the newer one. The main entrance was inside the front wall, accessible only by a drive that circled round a hilly garden to prevent the gates from being rammed. There was a servants’ entrance located near the school on the northern side and a guards’ entrance near the barracks on the south.