“We’re as sure as we can be under the circumstances, Mr. President,” David Leiter answered carefully. At forty, the trim, telegenic FBI Director was young for his post, but he’d spent years as a prosecutor and he knew how to build a case.
Physical evidence from the site of the bridge massacre and the dead terrorists definitely linked the HizbAllah to the attack. And where the HizbAllah went, Iran was always close behind. Tehran’s radical Islamic regime had helped create the shadowy terror group in the early 1980s. Tehran provided it with safe havens, training camps, and supplies. Tehran held the organization’s purse strings and kept its ideological fervor burning at a fever pitch. For all practical purposes, Iran owned the HizbAllah. Given all of that, the consensus opinion among America’s senior counter terror experts was clear: The HizbAllah’s leaders would never launch an operation of such magnitude without direct authorization by Iran’s Supreme Defense Council.
After all, Iran had plenty of its own reasons to strike hard at the United States. Since the fall of the Shah, the two countries had been more or less in a state of undeclared war. Iranian-sponsored hostage-takings had been met with American economic sanctions. During the 1980s Iranian attacks on neutral shipping during its war with Iraq had led to a series of fierce naval clashes in the Persian Gulf. In recent years Tehran’s ambitious efforts to acquire missile and nuclear technologies had encountered stiff American resistance at all levels. With the collapse of the old Soviet Union, Iran’s radical mullahs viewed the United States the Great Satan as the last remaining obstacle and threat to their revolution. And Tehran’s state-controlled press had been quick to openly celebrate the “heroic martyrs who have plunged this dagger into America’s heart.”
Leiter paused, letting that sink in, and then pressed on. “Finally, Mr. President, we have hard evidence of official Iranian involvement.” He nodded toward the CIA chief. “Several years ago, our intelligence services started making contacts in Eastern Europe’s arms industries. We knew their desperate need for hard currency would make it difficult to completely block explosives sales to terrorist front groups. So we did the next best thing. We persuaded them to blend distinctive mixtures of inert chemicals into every batch of plastic explosive they manufacture. Essentially, every separate production run carries its own unique molecular signature.”
The FBI Director paused again. “Our labs ran a trace on the explosives used in the Golden Gate Bridge attack. They came straight out of Iranian military stockpiles, Mr. President. Stockpiles the government of Iran purchased less than six months ago.”
“I see.” The President bit his lower lip, apparently still reluctant to make a final decision.
Farrell understood his hesitation. By their very nature, military operations involved killing. They were also inherently hazardous both physically for the men tasked to carry them out and politically for the national leaders who approved them.
Still frowning, the President shut the briefing book in front of him and glanced toward the small man seated to his left. “Any thoughts, Jeff?”
Balding, scrawny, and often dressed in worn suits that were ten years out-of-date, Jefferson T. Corbell blended oddly with the rest of the button-down crowd inhabiting the White House. Despite that eccentric appearance, Farrell knew, the man wielded enormous power.
Corbell was the President’s top political tactician, the keeper of his prospects for reelection.
“We have to hit the Iranians back, Mr. President. Hard.” Corbell at least had no doubts. He leaned forward, stabbing the air with a finger to emphasise his points speaking forcefully through a soft southern drawl. “When the American people find out who was behind this attack, they’ll want action on this not finger-wagging or U.N. resolutions.”
The diminutive Georgian glared at the Secretary of State as if daring him to disagree before he turned back to the President. “Our focus groups all say the same thing: You can’t afford to appear weak or indecisive. God knows, we can’t afford to let this thing linger on much longer. This foreign policy shit is dragging all your poll numbers down.”
Farrell hid his distaste for Corbell’s reasoning. It shouldn’t take bad polling news to push and pull this White House into retaliating for one of the worst acts of terrorism ever conducted on U.S. soil, but he’d been around Washington long enough to know that domestic politics played a role in every administration’s foreign policy decisions. Civics textbooks aside, that was the way the world worked, and you couldn’t ignore it.
The President seemed to read his mind. He smiled wryly. “Well, I guess I don’t often get the chance to win votes by doing the right thing. Admiral Dillon?”
“Yes, sir?” The white-haired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs straightened in his chair, expectation plain on a face weathered by years spent at sea in all seasons.
“Put your forces in motion.”
The still, calm waters of the Persian Gulf exploded, blasted apart by a missile surging skyward from below the surface. Boosted at first by a solid rocket, it climbed rapidly, deploying tail fins, stub wings, and an intake for its jet engine. As soon as the airfoils bit into the air, the Tomahawk cruise missile arced over, diving for the concealment offered by low altitude.
The sea erupted again, eighty yards further north. Another missile roared aloft. Tomahawk after Tomahawk followed, taking flight at precise, thirty-second intervals.
Several miles away, a four-engine, propeller-driven plane orbited slowly above the water.
Lieutenant (jg) Pat Royce sat in the right seat of the Navy P-3C Orion, watching the launch through binoculars, counting the missiles. They fanned out slightly over the deep blue water of the Gulf, speeding away to the north at just under the speed of sound. Not terribly fast for a jet, Royce thought, but compared to this bus, that’s pretty zippy.
He keyed his mike, using the intercom to be heard above the thrumming roar of the Orion’s engines. “I’ve got six good birds so far, all heading in the right direction, Dave.”
The pilot and mission commander, Lieutenant Commander Dave McWhorter, nodded. He spoke into his own mike. “Sparks, pass the word, ‘Launch made on time, proceeding smoothly.’ ”
Except for quick scans of his instruments, the P-3 pilot kept his own eyes on the skyline, ready to throw the Orion into evasive maneuvers at the first sign of trouble. So far the launch area was clear of air and surface traffic, and the Tomahawk missiles were working as advertised. But they were still attacking a hostile foreign power, close to its shores.
McWhorter could feel the sweat beading up on his forehead. There were Iranian jet interceptors based at Bandar-e Abbas, scarcely two hundred miles east. Loitering like this to observe and report on the missile launch wasn’t terribly covert, and trouble could arrive a lot quicker than his old, lumbering turboprop could get out of it.
Six minutes began to seem an eternity.
As exposed as McWhorter and Roycc felt two thousand feet above the surface, Commander Mark Marino felt even more so a hundred feet under it. USS Helena, a Los Angeles class attack submarine, lived by stealth, and the explosions of water and spray above him sounded like a combination brass band and steam calliope. And in order to fire its salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his boat had to steer a straight course at periscope depth at creep speed, ghosting north at no more than four or five knots. The noise also blinded many of his own sonar arrays. Not that they were much good anyway in the warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.
If any of the ultra-quiet diesel subs the Iranians had bought from the Russians were lurking close by, Marino and his whole crew could be dead before they even knew they were under attack.
Duckling that unprofitable and unnerving thought, he scanned Helena’s control room.
Chief Walsh, the boat’s senior fire control technician, hovered over his board, making sure that if the automated sequence went wrong, it didn’t get any worse. Not far away, Master Chief Richards, chief of the boat, manned the diving panel, working hard to keep the boat level. Each Tomahawk weighed almost two tons. With that much weight leaving the submarine’s bow every thirty seconds, Richards was kept busy trying to compensate for the rapid changes in Helena’s trim. The other officers and ratings packed into the control room were equally attentive to their duties.
Marino allowed himself to relax minutely. Except for a slightly greater air of concentration and a tendency to speak even more softly than usual, his crew might almost have been conducting a routine peacetime drill.
In a way, that wasn’t surprising. Once started, the launch process was virtually automatic. The sub’s navigation system gave the Tomahawks their starting point. Preloaded data packs fed in their destinations. Launch
