“What if they’re on alert?” asked Reid.
“Then things become trickier. Their aircraft and surface-to-air missiles will be ready to launch. We’ll have a second package of attack and fighter aircraft ready to go as a backup. But our people have trained for this. We will accomplish the mission, Mrs. President. I’m confident.”
“What happens when we bomb the warhead?” asked the President.
Lovel turned to an Air Force general who was an expert on nuclear accidents. The general began by citing a study that had been done in 1975. To everyone’s relief, Todd cut him short.
“General, the executive summary,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. Predicting with one hundred percent certainty is impossible. But—if the warhead is constructed properly, there will be little harm to it. The rocket fuel and the oxidizer explode, of course. You have a fire, etcetera.” The general waved his hand, dismissing the cataclysm.
“What about the explosive lens around the bomb?” asked the Secretary of State.
The general gave him a condescending smile. “We don’t really know what sort of design they’ve used, Mr. Secretary. Now I agree with you that it’s very likely that they’ve followed the North Korean mode. However—”
“Short answer, please,” said the President impatiently.
“All nuclear weapon designs do contain explosives. However, as a general rule, they can’t just explode. But if that were to happen, almost surely the warhead won’t be ignited.”
Reid noted the disclaimer—almost surely—but said nothing to the others. The CIA had concluded that the explosives would survive a bomb strike without igniting, citing accidents in the 1950s.
“The worst case scenario—short of something we don’t know about with the material,” said the general, referring to the uranium, “would be the explosives in the design getting on fire. But even if that happened—and I have to say it’s highly unlikely—even if that happened, the weapon would not go critical.”
“We have to recover the material once the missile is destroyed,” said Todd. “How do we go about that?”
“I don’t know that that’s feasible,” said Lovel.
“Will the material be scattered?” Todd asked.
“No ma’am,” said the weapons expert. “I mean, again to give you a definitive answer would require quite a lot of study, but the nature of—”
“Thank you. You’ve told me enough,” said Todd. She looked around the table, then back at the screen. “Charles, how do we get the remains of the warhead? What’s our plan for that?”
“We have a Delta Force unit in the region,” said Lovel. “They can recover it.”
“The material is not necessarily dangerous,” added Reid. Contrary to popular belief, an unexploded bomb presented no health hazard. “And as it happens, there is one person in the region who not only has been trained to deal with warheads, but has had considerable experience doing so.”
“Who?” said Todd.
“Danny Freah. The colonel disarmed a live nuclear warhead a few seconds before it exploded in South America during his Dreamland days,” said Reid. “And before that, he was tasked to a team that secured weapons following the fall of the Soviet Union.”
“Before he went on to bigger and better things,” said Lovel admiringly.
“Then the colonel is the person we want handling it,” said President Todd. “Fortune has put him in exactly the right spot.”
“There is one consideration,” said Reid. “He’ll have to be close to the bomb site when it is bombed. The rocket fuel can be quite unpredictable when it explodes. And it does explode with quite a lot of force.”
“Then he’ll have to keep his distance,” said Todd dryly. “I would assume he knows that better than we do.”
The President turned back to the Pentagon feed.
“Charles, work with Mr. Reid and Ms. Stockard to get a plan together. And get those bombers airborne as quickly as possible. I don’t care what it takes. We’re stopping that missile.”
73
Tehran
TARID’S HEAD CLEARED AS THE CAB TOOK HIM BACK TO Tehran. He had to leave Iran; even if Aberhadji wasn’t out to kill him, not even the Guard would be able to protect him from the army’s wrath when the president’s plane blew up. Whatever life remained to him, it was as a permanent exile.
The Sudan was the first place they would look; then they would get to Somalia, Egypt, and Kenya, hunting him down at the other parts of the network he had tended. Turkey wouldn’t be safe, either.
His best bet at the moment was Europe, though the thick Iranian spy networks would make staying for a long term problematic.
The one thing he had was money, squirreled away in Swiss and German bank accounts. The first step would be to rearrange those accounts, in case Aberhadji had been on to the skimming. And then he would decide where to go and what to do.
Leaving by plane was out of the question. He’d have to sneak over a border on foot, or take a boat.
Calm settled over him as they drove to the city. It was only a veneer, a brittle shell that could be broken by even a light shock, but he was functioning again. Even if he was only a shadow of the man he’d been—or thought he’d been—in the Sudan, he was still a capable and formidable opponent, a man who had lived by his wits for many years in the most hostile environments.
He had told the cab driver to take him to the hotel, but that was only to give him a destination to head toward while he figured out where he really should go. He finally decided that his best plan would be to take a bus westward, to the coast. But realizing the stations in the city could easily be watched, he had the driver turn around and head west, to a small suburban station he knew.
By now the cabbie was scared of his passenger and complied without protest. He’d stop talking since the man with the gun had flagged him down. His only thoughts were of his two children. He wanted desperately to remain alive; if he died, there was every chance his wife would take them to live with his in-laws.
“WHERE’S HE GOING?” FLASH ASKED NURI AS THEY LEFT the highway.
“No idea. Maybe he has to report back in. Maybe he’s running away.”
“Why didn’t he just get on a plane at the airport, then?”
“Don’t know.”
Flash checked his pistol, double-checking that no one had messed with it in the brief time it had been out of his possession. They’d swung back to grab their gear; he’d hoped to get something to eat as well, but the shop had closed.
Nuri leaned over and glanced at the fuel gauge. They were starting to run low.
Especially in the dark, the towns around Tehran looked similar to the close-in towns around capitals in the West, with clusters of apartment blocks punctuated by small lots of single-family houses. Except for the spirals of the mosques lit by spotlights in the distance, they could have been practically anywhere in the developed world, at the edge of Brooklyn or Naples or Moscow, Istanbul, Berlin.
“Maybe he’s looking for a McDonald’s,” joked Flash. “I could use one of them myself.”
“You’re not full from dinner?”
“There’s always room for a Big Mac.”
“There’s no McDonald’s in Iran.”
“Shame.”
The Voice told Nuri that Tarid’s cab was stopping three blocks ahead. Flash closed the distance just in time to see Tarid leaning in to pay off the driver. He was in front of a bus station.
“Get out and get the cab,” Nuri told Flash. “Have him stop two blocks down.”
“Tarid’s going to see me.”
“Don’t worry about it. We have to scan the interior. We don’t need him anymore.”
Flash opened the door and got out, walking briskly toward the cab. Tarid turned, saw him, then darted in front of the cab, running across the street to the bus station.