At the border, Ben and his team found the crossing as expected — a line of cars proceeded for close to a kilometer ahead of him. By the time his car got close to the border, he could tell that the guards were getting pretty lax in their duties — as he had expected. Ben’s car was the first of the two and passed through the security without any difficulties. Dani, Jackson and Bagheri were a little nervous, wondering if Bagheri’s detail had been discovered and an alert issued but everything was in order. Bagheri was a little surprised that the fake passport Ben had given him had an entry stamp, the same as the rest of the team. He wasn’t sure how Ben had accomplished that feat but he did not pursue it; he was just thankful that he was able to cross the border into Azerbaijan without any difficulty.
The rest of the trip proved rather uneventful for the entire team. They still had a three hour drive from Astara to the Baku airbase. From there, it was a relatively short flight from Baku back to Tel Aviv. However, Bagheri had spent most of the past five hours spelling out the details of Iran’s nuclear program, including the development of a previously unknown fuel reprocessing facility at Arak and long suspected, though unconfirmed, details about testing at Parchin. Both Jackson and Dani were completely surprised to learn that the actual testing of an Iranian nuclear weapon was just over a month out. Once past the border, and with the adrenalin from the tension for the past several hours spent, Bagheri collapsed in the back seat of the car.
The plane on which the team had arrived only a couple days before had remained in the hangar at the Baku airbase. Ben had radioed ahead to let the flight crew know they were on their way and they needed to get back to Tel Aviv just a soon as possible. By the time the team arrived, the flight crew had the engines warmed up with the preflight checklist completed — all that remained was the team and their guest.
Once the team was airborne, Jackson immediately asked Ben about the possibility of notifying his superiors in Washington. The communications gear their plane had rivaled that of Air Force One so gaining a secure link would not be a problem. Both men knew the urgency of getting their information back to Washington so Jackson did not have a hard sell with this; Ben ordered the call made at once.
V
Said Jalili knew he had to act right away to find the source of Netanyahu’s information. He thoroughly detested the Israelis, but he had a great deal of respect for them, and he did not believe for a minute that Netanyahu would be so callous as to discard a source which had to be extremely reliable, and important, without so much as making an attempt to get him out of Iran. The trouble was, he had been out of the country when Netanyahu gave his speech. As a result, he was getting a late start. His first call was to Colonel Ashkan Rafsanjani. Colonel Rafsanjani reminded Jalili of himself twenty years ago: extremely intelligent, relatively good looking and very ambitious and, even though he was the youngest colonel in the Quds, he had recently been appointed as the operations officer for the Supreme National Security Council by Major General Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force. Together, Jalili and Suleimani had already tasked him with Operation Cyrus, one of the most secret and boldest operations in Iranian history. However, now they needed him to plug the Intelligence leak as well.
Operation Cyrus had kept Colonel Rafsanjani extremely busy at his office out at the Bidganeh Republican Guards base. Jalili’s call interrupted a hectic afternoon and he immediately thought the secretary was requesting yet another briefing on Cyrus. However, he knew otherwise after Jalili mentioned he had another urgent task for him — and that he should report to the Ministry just as fast as he could get back into Tehran. One hour later, Rafsanjani walked into Jalili’s office to find him staring out his fifth story window. The secretary motioned for him to take a seat and, as he did, Jalili — still staring out the window — casually asked him if he had heard Netan-yahu’s speech.
“I did, and I noticed that his estimate for us finally getting a bomb is quite accurate,” stated Rafsanjani.
“It is, and that is what I want you to look into. Just how is it that the Israelis know precisely how far along we are in building a nuclear bomb? Netanyahu’s estimate is the same one I received from our own Atomic Agency Commission. We obviously have a leak and I want you to look into this right away.”
“Right away? What about Cyrus?”
“I still want you to pursue that. If I know the Israelis, they won’t be sitting on their laurels. They will attempt to get him out of the country as soon as possible. For all we know, they might already have a team here to pick him up. Obviously, I do not expect this search to last all that long. You have an executive officer; delegate the operation to him while you pursue this traitor. I wouldn’t expect this to be much more than a week long endeavor.”
“Do we have any leads whatsoever?” asked Rafsanjani.
“You know as much as I do,” replied Jalili.
“So we have nothing,” more of a statement than a question.
“We have nothing at all.”
“Well then, I guess I’ll start with the borders. Maybe we can get lucky and catch both the traitor and an Israeli team trying to smuggle him out.”
“Just keep me appraised of what you find out,” and with that, Rafsanjani took his leave.
Back at Bidganeh, Rafsanjani called in his executive officer, Major Farrok Zarin, to discuss Jalili’s new assignment.
“So, you need to find a grain of salt on the beach, huh?” asked Zarin.
“So it would seem. I’ll be starting with the borders in the north. The Astara crossing is already the only crossing from Azerbaijan so we’ll double the guards there. We’ll also beef up the Bazargan crossing at the Turkish border. This is really going to hurt things in the north but I don’t expect it to last all that long. We won’t be closing the border but it is definitely going to take a lot longer to cross it. The Iraqi border is pretty well covered; we’ve had that managed pretty well since the Americans invaded back in ‘03.”
“What about the coast? Israel has a number of submarines and it wouldn’t take much for a submarine to surface in the middle of the night and have a few Israeli commandos come ashore to smuggle someone out.”
“That is the hardest part. We only have 1,700 kilometers of coast line to guard,” Rafsanjani added rather sarcastically. “However, the Bushehr reactor is right on the coast. I’ll have the navy saturate the surrounding area with patrol boats so no one could get through. We also need to check and see if any ‘surprise’ inspections show up here in the next few days or if anyone is making an unscheduled trip to Bushehr.”
“What do you think about Afghanistan and the eastern borders? I can’t see the Israelis going this far out: we don’t have any nuclear facilities in that direction and it’s a long way to travel if they want to pursue this route.”