“There were no B-2s,” said Vahid. “There was a small plane, a light plane. My missiles shot it down.”
“There must have been B-2s,” said the general. “They have blown up Natanz.”
“What?”
“There is no contact with one of the plants. We were asked to try, and failed.”
“There was no B-2. I shot down the only plane.”
The commander shook his head. Stunned, Vahid walked slowly to the nearby transport vehicle. Rather than taking him to his squadron room, where he ordinarily would debrief, he was driven to a bunker at the far end of the military complex. The colonel in charge of intelligence met him outside the entrance and led him downstairs to his office.
“I’d like to change from my gear,” Vahid objected when they arrived.
“You will change when we are done.”
The room smelled of fresh concrete. It was much larger than the squadron offices upstairs. Two long tables, twice the size of normal conference tables, sat at the middle of the room. There were only chairs, but each was a well-padded armchair.
The interview began as soon as he sat down.
“How long after takeoff did you encounter the enemy bombers?” asked the colonel. He was tall and thin, with glasses, a beak nose, and a brush moustache above a thin and close beard. In the harsh light he looked as if he were a cartoon character, a caricature of an officer created as a foil for a popular hero.
“I never encountered enemy bombers, or any bombers,” said Vahid. “I will tell you what happened.”
“First answer my questions,” said the colonel. He lifted his glasses higher on his nose. “How many bombers did you encounter?”
“You keep talking about bombers. There was one aircraft, a light plane. Maybe a Cessna. A small trainer at most.”
“It was more likely an American Predator,” suggested the colonel.
“I—”
“You shot it down.”
“I believe I shot something down,” answered the pilot. He had never encountered the American UAV known as the Predator, but he was naturally familiar with the profile, and the plane he had encountered bore little resemblance to the drone. “But I think it was—”
“I think that is what you encountered,” insisted the colonel. “A Predator.”
“You’ll see when you recover it, then,” said Vahid. He was trying to keep his temper in check, but couldn’t help the note of sarcasm that crept into his voice.
“How many other planes were there?”
“None. I saw none. Check my video record.”
“Sometimes those are not complete.”
“Yes, at times there are things not recorded,” said Vahid, finally surrendering. It was foolish to resist; the man was trying to help him. His goal was probably to spare the commander and the air force in general, but to do that most effectively, he had to help Vahid as well.
There would soon be other interviews, much more difficult.
“Men in the heat of battle do not know everything that is going around them,” said the colonel. “They cannot fly that way. They have to focus on the immediate threat.”
Vahid nodded. “What happened at Natanz?” he asked.
The colonel stared at him.
“The Americans attacked it?” the pilot prompted. “But the facilities are many miles beneath the ground. No one could attack them. Unless they used a nuclear bomb. Did they use a nuclear bomb on us?”
“You are not the one to be asking questions. You know absolutely nothing, beyond the fact that you did your duty. You shot down a plane.”
“Yes.”
The colonel folded his hands in a tight cluster in front of him, pressing them down on the tabletop as if he might try and bend it toward the floor. Finally, he took a small tape recorder from his pocket and put it on the table.
“We will start from the beginning of your flight,” he said. “Recount everything from your takeoff. Leave nothing unmentioned, however trivial. Remember what the end result is.”
4
White House situation room
“THEIR RESPONSE INDICATES THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT happened, not yet, anyway.” National Security Advisor Blitz frowned as he assessed the situation for President Todd. The operation had gone extremely well—a good thing, since the Iranian bomb program appeared to have been much further ahead than anyone had believed. “It’s been three hours now and they’re only just starting to seal off the site. Or what’s left of it.”
“Was it totally destroyed?” Todd asked. She and Blitz were sitting alone in the room. The President had decided she would have no witnesses to the discussion; even her Secret Service bodyguards were in the hall, none too happy at having been summarily ordered to stay outside the door, a rare Todd decree.
“Our satellite won’t be passing overhead for another two hours, and we don’t want to risk a plane,” Blitz told her. “But the images of the explosion and its aftermath from the NASA aircraft show the tunnels and entire underground complex were completely wiped out. It’s history.”
Several hundred workers had died along with it. Regrettable, but necessary.
Blitz’s phone vibrated in his hand. He glanced quickly at the face.
“Ms. Stockard and Mr. Reid are ready for the video conference,” he said.
The President turned to the console as Blitz flipped it on. Breanna and Reid appeared on a split screen, their faces projected from the Whiplash command center at the CIA complex.
“I understand congratulations are in order,” she said. “Job well done.”
“Thank you, Madam President,” said Reid.
“Have we recovered our team yet?”
“We’re working on it,” said Breanna. “But there has been—there is a complication.” She turned to her right, evidently looking toward Reid in the center.
“There’s new information,” added Reid. “We’re still compiling it. But there appears to be another facility that we haven’t known about until now. And it’s possible—very possible, I’m afraid—that there is another nuclear device there, waiting to be tested.”
“How is this possible?” Todd felt her chest catch.
Her lungs acting up? She ignored the pain and continued.
“The facilities were examined in great detail before I approved the mission,” she said. “Well before.”
“I know, Madam President,” said Reid. “I can’t make any excuses. There does seem to be another facility. We have a code name, a radio address, really. We’re trying to match it up to a physical plant. At the moment, we have two different possibilities. Both were closed two years ago. At that time we believed one was completely shut down because of an accidental explosion there; the other housed centrifuges that were no longer needed. Our best theory is that one or both may actually have been kept open and developed—it’s the same pattern they used for the lab we targeted.”
“Which we found.”
“Thanks, actually, to the Israelis.” Reid was very big on giving credit where credit was due, even if it went to a competitor; he’d even been known to laud the Defense Intelligence Agency, something most CIA officers and nearly every Agency bureaucrat would never do. “In any event, we’re working to determine what is going on at those facilities. Whatever it is, the Iranians have gone to great lengths to keep their status secret. Given that, we believe it’s very possible—likely—that one may be another bomb assembly area. Because the amount of fuel in the explosion is about half of what we projected, worst case. And now, well, worst case seems to have been too conservative, given the state of the bomb we destroyed.”
Christine Todd was famous for keeping her temper. She prided herself on being able to control her emotions: all of them, but her temper especially. As a little girl, her mother had said she had the famous “Irish temper” of her ancestors.
You are easygoing in your needs, Mother often declared, but let someone fall short of their job or responsibility, and there’s hell to pay. ’Tis a flaw, Christine Mary, a flaw that will make people dislike you, friends especially.