The Omega Theory (38 page)

But he didn’t stop running. He dashed across the flat ground at the foot of the mountain, heading for the shelter of a ravine on the other side of the road. He crossed the strip of asphalt and hurtled down a sandy slope. Then he felt a push from behind, and a pair of tattooed arms encircled his waist. Sergeant Morrison tackled him and they tumbled into the ravine together, jouncing along the ground until they crashed into a clump of dry bushes. David landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him, but Morrison clambered to his knees and raised his fist. His blond head was silhouetted against the sky, and above the sergeant’s shoulder David could see the top of the mountain they’d just escaped. Morrison pulled back his arm, aiming carefully. But before he could throw the punch, a vast rumble shook the roots of the Kopet Dag, and the mountain behind him began to fall.

37

THE PRESIDENT WAS SLEEPING SOUNDLY IN THE WHITE HOUSE MASTER BED
room when the Secret Service agents burst in and turned on the lights. Agent Thompson—the president’s favorite night-shift agent—came to the bed holding a maroon bathrobe. The other agent threw off the bedcovers.

“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Agent Thompson said. “We have to leave right now.” He grasped the president’s elbow and lifted him off the mattress.

“What?” He was groggy and confused. He wondered where his wife was, then remembered she was at Camp David with the girls. Jesus, he thought, what time was it? “Come on, guys, I’m in my boxers. Let me get—”

“We have clothes for you on
Marine One,
sir.” Thompson and his partner helped the president put on the bathrobe, guiding his arms through the sleeves. Then the agents hustled him out of the bedroom and down the hallway.

As they quickstepped toward the stairs, Thompson raised his left hand to his mouth. “Thompson to Blowtorch,” he said into the microphone on his shirt cuff. “We have Renegade. Heading for the South Lawn. Over.”

The president was wide-awake now and starting to worry. There had been false alarms before, when the Secret Service had rushed him out of the White House because some idiot in a private plane had flown into the protected airspace. But never in the middle of the night like this. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Don’t know, sir,” Thompson replied. “But we’re taking you to Andy.”

Shit, he thought. This was no false alarm. Andy was the code name for Andrews Air Force Base, the field where
Air Force One
was stationed. Whatever the nature of this emergency, the Pentagon had deemed it serious enough to warrant moving the commander in chief out of Washington.

The president and his Secret Service agents made their way to the South Lawn, where
Marine One
had just touched down. Bracing themselves against the rotor wash, they jogged across the grass and boarded the helicopter. Within seconds they were in the air, heading southeast toward Andrews. The agents handed the president a gray suit, a white shirt, and a pair of black shoes, and he quickly got dressed in the helicopter’s lavatory. Then he entered the main cabin and took his usual seat.

The cabin was crowded. Sitting across from the president were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security adviser, the national director of intelligence, and the defense secretary. At the other end of the cabin were several generals from Central Command, which controlled military operations in the Middle East, and Special Operations Command, which oversaw all Special Forces units. And sitting all by himself in the cabin’s far corner was a young air-force major whose sole duty was to carry the black briefcase known as the Football. It looked very much like an ordinary briefcase, except that it had an antenna near the handle.

The president waited a moment, composing himself. Then he turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “What’s the situation?”

The chairman’s face, usually ruddy and fierce, was now pale and unshaven. He held a manila folder in his lap. “About an hour ago we detected a seismic event that had all the characteristics of an underground nuclear explosion. We thought at first that the Iranians had conducted another test, but the epicenter was north of Iran’s border. It was in the Kuruzhdey district of Turkmenistan, where our Ranger battalion is positioned.” He paused, his eyes avoiding the president’s. “We tried to contact the unit, but we couldn’t raise them on the radio. So we instructed our reconnaissance satellites to train their cameras on Kuruzhdey during their next pass of the region.” He opened his folder and removed a stack of photographs. “These images were taken thirty minutes ago. They show the area outside the entrance to Camp Cobra.”

The president inspected the photos. He’d seen earlier satellite images of the Camp Cobra site and remembered the topography: a band of flat ground running between two parallel ridges. But in the photographs the president was viewing now, one of the ridges had collapsed. A vast fan of rocky debris had spilled through a gap in the line of cliffs.

For about ten seconds he couldn’t breathe. When he finally did, he felt an ache in his chest. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Are there any survivors?”

The Joint chairman grimaced. “We’re preparing to send a search-and-rescue team from Afghanistan, but first we need to measure the radiation levels in the area. We’ve already dispatched a pair of reconnaissance drones to collect samples of the radioactive debris from the explosion.”

The president nodded, trying to stay calm. That was his job, to analyze the situation in a rational way and consider the appropriate response. But he was feeling anything but rational at the moment. It took all of his willpower to remain in his seat and nod at the general. He wanted to rush into the helicopter’s cockpit and grab the controls of
Marine One
and fly it directly to Turkmenistan. He wanted to land on the pile of debris he’d seen in the photograph and start digging through the rocks with his bare hands. “How could this happen? Was it an accident? The Rangers didn’t have any tactical warheads, did they?”

“No, sir, they didn’t. And this wasn’t an accident. About twenty minutes before the explosion, our radar systems detected two aircraft traveling south from Kuruzhdey to the Iranian border. And we intercepted a brief message that was sent from one of the aircraft to the Ashkhaneh nuclear facility.”

“They were communicating with the Iranians? With the Revolutionary Guards?”

“Yes, sir. The message was in Farsi. The English translation is, ‘Detonation in nineteen minutes.’”

The president nodded again. Now he understood why the Pentagon was rushing him out of the capital. Nearly a thousand American soldiers had just been killed in a nuclear attack. And more attacks could be coming. This possibility scared the hell out of him, but it also focused his mind. Get your shit together, he told himself. Step up and take control. He pointed at the Joint chairman. “Did the radar systems track the two aircraft?”

“They landed near the Ashkhaneh facility. By the time our satellites passed over the area, the Revolutionary Guards had hidden the aircraft, most likely inside the bunker. But the images show a company of armed men, which is probably the Iranian strike team. They must’ve discovered the location of the Ranger camp and launched a preemptive attack against it.”

“Mr. President.” A gray-haired, jug-eared army general raised his hand to get his attention. It was General Philip Estey of Special Operations Command. “Our analysts have come up with a possible scenario to explain what happened. The Camp Cobra site was a cavern with many passageways and entrances. The Iranian commandos must’ve discovered a tunnel that the Rangers weren’t guarding. And then all they had to do was place one of their nuclear devices inside the mountain.”

Again, the president wanted to jump out of his seat. He was enraged—no one in the Pentagon had mentioned this vulnerability before! How could all their strategists and experts have overlooked such an obvious thing? “Christ!” he yelled. “I don’t believe this! You didn’t—” But he stopped when he saw General Estey’s stricken face. He’d just remembered that Estey had been a close friend of McNair. “Hold on, I’m sorry. Was General McNair at Camp Cobra at the time of the explosion?”

Estey nodded. His face was as pained and sober as a preacher’s. “Yes, sir, he was there. McNair was strongly committed to the mission’s success and took a hands-on role.” He bowed his head and stared at the cabin’s floor. “I’m not giving up hope until we hear from the search-and-rescue team. But in all likelihood, Samuel is gone.”

Several other generals bowed their heads, too. For a few seconds the cabin was silent except for the thumping of the helicopter’s rotors. But the president had no time to mourn. He was still enraged, and now all his fury was directed at the Iranians. “All right, our first priority is defending against further attacks. Our forces in the Middle East should go on highest alert. All units return to their bases and hunker down.” He turned to the national director of intelligence. “Is there any evidence that the Iranians are preparing another nuclear strike? Either in the Middle East or here in the U.S.?”

The NDI shook his head. “No, sir. We still believe that their nuclear devices are inside the Revolutionary Guard’s Ashkhaneh facility.”

“Well, we’re not going to give them a chance to use another one. We’re going to destroy that facility. We’re going to make it disappear.” He turned back to the Joint chairman. “Get the stealth bombers in the air. Loaded with the B83, the bunker-busting nuke. As soon as we confirm that the Iranians were behind the attack on Camp Cobra, I’ll give you the authorization to deploy the warhead.” He jerked his head toward the air-force major who held the Football, the black briefcase containing the nuclear attack plans.

“How are we going to get confirmation?” the chairman asked. “If you ask the Iranians, they’ll just deny any involvement.”

General Estey raised his hand again. “Mr. President, in a few hours we should be able to analyze the radioactive debris collected by our reconnaissance drones. If the radioisotope signatures from the Camp Cobra explosion are similar to those from the Iranian test in the Kavir Desert, we can conclude that the same nuclear fuel was used in both cases.”

The president took a deep breath. It was a grave decision, with terrible consequences either way. But as commander in chief, his primary responsibility was to his troops. And he had to stop the Iranians immediately, before they could attack again. “That’s good enough for me. If we get confirmation from the debris analysis, we’ll launch the nuclear strike on Ashkhaneh. And then we’ll destroy the rest of the Iranian military with our conventional forces. I assume those plans are already in place?”

The Joint chairman saluted. “Yes, sir!”

By this point,
Marine One
was descending. The president gazed out the helicopter’s porthole window and saw the runways of Andrews Air Force Base. About a hundred yards away was a 747 with the words
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
written in gray letters along the fuselage. The plane looked similar to the other 747s in the
Air Force One
fleet, but the president knew it was very different on the inside. It was an E-4B, specially modified for use as a mobile command post, with hardened electronics that could withstand the electromagnetic pulses caused by high-altitude nuclear explosions. The Pentagon had given this aircraft the code name of Nightwatch. But it was better known as the Doomsday Plane.

38

AS BROTHER CYRUS HAD EXPECTED, THE IRANIANS AT THE ASHKHANEH
nuclear facility weren’t happy. They didn’t like the fact that Cyrus had broken radio silence with his cryptic message in Farsi. And they were even more displeased when Cyrus and his men arrived in two Osprey tilt-rotor craft that looked like they’d just been stolen from the Marine Corps. The Iranian soldiers were scared enough already of an American attack, and they knew that the U.S. Air Force’s reconnaissance satellites were passing over the area every thirty minutes. So they rushed out of their bunker and quickly towed the suspicious aircraft into a hangar that the Revolutionary Guards had carved into the mountainside. The hangar was essentially a large cave with a wide mouth and an arched ceiling. The bunker was a separate network of caverns that had a concrete pillbox at its entrance and a spiderweb of sloping tunnels that ran twelve hundred feet below the mountain.

Inside the hangar, Cyrus’s soldiers unloaded the promised shipment of enriched uranium, hauling the heavy, lead-lined cases out of the Ospreys. The Iranians carried the U-235 back to their bunker, eager to return to the depths of the cavern where they’d stored the previous shipments of nuclear fuel. Then General Jannati, the commander of the Ashkhaneh facility, entered the hangar with two of his lieutenants. Cyrus had met Jannati before. Because the general spoke English well, he’d become Cyrus’s main contact in the Revolutionary Guards. He was a short, skinny man in a ridiculous-looking uniform. He frowned as he approached Cyrus. “Good afternoon, Mr. Black,” he said.

Cyrus hadn’t revealed his true identity to the Iranians. They knew him as Cyrus Black, the masked leader of an international smuggling ring. “A pleasure to see you again, General. Please excuse us for violating your security rules, but we had to leave Turkmenistan on short notice.”

Jannati kept frowning. “You were supposed to arrive at night. And travel by car, not aircraft. Our agreement was very clear on that point.”

“A thousand apologies. But now you have the last shipment of U-235. And I brought a little something extra for you.”

The general glanced nervously at his lieutenants. Then he leaned closer to Cyrus. “Is it in the aircraft?” he whispered. “The Courvoisier?”

Cyrus nodded. Jannati had a taste for cognac, which was illegal in the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the general had found ways to privately indulge.

Jannati turned to his lieutenants and barked an order in Farsi. The two men saluted and marched out of the hangar. Once they were gone, the general grasped Cyrus’s arm and headed for the Ospreys. “You were lucky to get out of Turkmenistan,” Jannati said. “I just heard a report of an earthquake there.”