but I would loved to see that big bad boy roll over and die.” He may have just returned from two hours of scuba diving and six hours of crawling on his belly, but he sounded as hyper is before the day started.
“Leave it to Briggs,” Wohl said. “Ten thousand miles from home, in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and he still manages to find the pretty girls.” Catching no response, he looked at White.
“Everything OK, sir?”
“Yeah, fine,” White replied noncommittally. “Ah … Briggs didn’t really laze that Iranian carrier, did he?”
“No. He’s cocky and a smart-ass, but he’s a good troop,” Wohl said. “He’s not stupid enough to ignore orders, no matter how easy the target of opportunity might be. The carrier’s safe. It launched a few choppers, but none of its fighters and no missiles.
Intel was right—the fighters and weapon systems aren’t operational on that thing yet. Still can’t believe Iran has got an aircraft carrier. We’re gonna hear from that thing one of these days, I know it.”
“The guys don’t exactly seem enthusiastic about Hal,” White observed. “In fact, they’re pretty much ignoring him”
“It’s tough for a team that’s been together for so long to accept a brand-new commanding officer right away,” Wohl said. “This is Briggs’s first mission with the team-“
“Second—you’re forgetting the Luger rescue mission in Lithuania …”
“On which Briggs just happened to be one of the passengers, along with McLanahan and Ormack,” Wohl said. “it turned out that Briggs was better prepared, very close to our standards. But he wasn’t one of us, and he sure as hell wasn’t our leader …”
“But he is now.”
Wohl stopped and glared at White, then shrugged. “Hey, I was never the real commander of the ops group of Madcap Magician,” he said. “You asked me to be reassigned to you because you needed a commanding officer, and I accepted because I was tired of pushing papers at Parris Island. It was only a temporary billet-“
“That lasted three years,” White said. “The men bonded to you right away. You brought them together like no one else could.”
“Because I knew all these guys—I trained them all, even Briggs,” Wohl said. “We’re all Marines first—except Briggs, of course—then ISA operatives …”
“So Briggs being ex-Army and ex-Air Force, he’s not going to fit in…?”
“Depends on him,” Wohl replied. “He’s got a much different style than me—emotional, energetic, touchy- feely. Briggs rewards guys for good performance and ‘counsels’ them when it’s poor—I expect good performance and loudly kick ass if I get anything but. And he’s an officer, too, a young field-grade officer at that—younger than some of the guys on the team—and after all the years I’ve spent bad-mouthing officers in general and field-grade officers in particular, he’s got a tough road ahead.
“He’s a good troop, but a good commanding officer …? Too early to tell. The guys aren’t sure how to respond to him yet, that’s all. Whether he succeeds is totally up to him. They’re the best—whether or not he can lead them is the question only he can answer.”
White nodded absently. Wohl studied him for a moment, then asked, “If everything’s so OK, Colonel, why the hangdog look?”
“Because I’ve had some reservations about this operation from the start,” White said. “We just kicked over a big hornet’s nest out there tonight, Chris—and we did it on Iran’s Revolution Day, their Fourth of July.”
“Shit, I didn’t know that,” Wohl said. “I thought it was in November sometime, when they took over the embassy in ‘79.”
“No, it’s today—and I should’ve known that. I never would’ve recommended executing this mission on that date,” White said.
“Obviously the GCC knew what day it was.”
“Which you know will make this attack sting even more in Tehran,” White said. “And it’ll be the U.S. that takes the brunt of Iran’s anger. We keep on saying this was a GCC action, but you know damn well that Peninsula Shield isn’t going to be leading the fight when the Iranians retaliate for this.”
“How do you know they’re going to retaliate?”
White looked at him grimly. “Because Iran has been preparing for exactly this attack for years, ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. We just justified all the billions of dollars they’ve been spending on modern weapons for the past six years. They aren’t going to rest until someone—until everyone—is punished for what happened today.”
TEHRAN, IRAN
THIRTY MINUTES AFTER THE ATTACK ON ABU MUSA ISLAND General Hesarak all-Kan Buzhazi was supreme commander of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces and commander of the Revolutionary Guards—and this was the first time in his career that he had ever been admitted to the residence of the leader of the Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei. And to tell the truth, he was scared. But as scared as he was to be in the presence of a man who, like Ruhollah Khomeini before him, could by a single word muster the lives and souls of a quarter of a billion Shiite Muslims to his side, it was even more exciting to consider the simultaneous disaster and opportunity that had befallen him that morning. This was one opportunity that could not be missed.
Buzhazi bowed deeply when shown into his presence, and kept his head bowed until the Faqih spoke. The door was closed behind them. “Your Eminence, thank you for this audience.”
“Some disturbing news has reached me this morning, General,” Khamenei said quietly. “Allah has told me of a great threat to the Republic. Tell me what has happened.”
Buzhazi raised his head and stood solemnly, his hands respectfully clasped in front of him as if standing at an altar or at prayers.
Khamenei was in his late sixties. While his predecessor, the Imam Khomeini, had been tall, gaunt, and ethereal, Khamenei was short, with a round face, a short, bushy dark beard, and large horn-rimmed glasses, which gave him a scholarly, professional, quick-witted appearance. This man before him was the nominal Faqih, the font of jurisprudence of the Islamic Republic and the ultimate lawmaker, whose word could overrule the Parliament and any cleric, any lawyer, any scholar in the Twelver House; he was also the named Marja Ala, the Supreme Leader and spiritual head of the Shiite Muslim sect and the keeper of the will of the twelfth Imam, who was hidden from the world and would soon return to call the faithful to Allah’s bosom for all time.
But for all that, he was a man, not a saint or a prophet. Buzhazi had known Ali Hoseini Khamenei when he had been nothing but an ambitious, back-stabbing know-nothing firebrand from a wealthy pro-Shah cargo shipping family from Bandar-Anzalt on Iran’s Caspian coast. Little more than a spoiled rich kid back then, Khamenei had wanted to impress his friends and rebel against his parents by joining up with the wild, shrill-voiced fundamentalist Shiite cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. He had joined the Khomeini revolution because it was cool and tough to do so, not because he’d had any particular holy vision like Khomeini, but as time went on, he became deeply committed to Khomeini’s theocratic ideas. Khamenei held many high positions in government service—soldier, first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, even president of the republic. Now he was the Supreme Leader.
But he was still just a man. Buzhazi had seen this holy man angry, and sad, and drunk, and just plain stupid.
Buzhazi knew a lot more about Khamenei’s shadowy past. Khamenei was a well-trained soldier as well as an accomplished politician, and throughout his rise through the ranks of power, he’d left a lot of bodies in his wake. Iran was nearly being overrun by Iraq at the beginning of the nine-year War of Retribution; when the president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, accused the then-commander of the Pasdaran, Khamenei, of not doing his job and failing the country, suddenly the Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed Bani-Sadr. When a rival politician, Muhammad Ali Rajai, was elected President in 1981, he and his Prime Minister were mysteriously killed in a bomb blast in the Cabinet room- Khamenei somehow survived. Time after time, Ali Hoseini Khamenei was able to fight off challenges to his authority by strange combinations of shrewd political infighting and unexplained and well-timed disasters.
So now, he told himself to overcome his fears and apprehensions and remember exactly who he was dealing with here, relax. Take command of this situation, he ordered himself. Take charge now!
“The Republic has been betrayed, Eminence,” Buzhazi began. He knew that word betrayed would arouse Khamenei’s attention “My orders were countermanded, and because of this, our main island protectorate in the Persian Gulf, Abu Musa, has been attacked by Gulf Cooperative Council air forces.”
Khamenei seemed surprisingly relaxed as he heard the news—well, probably not surprising. It wasn’t from divine inspiration that he’d first heard about it, Buzhazi knew, but from his contacts in the VEVAK, the Iranian
