Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

I felt as if I had gone through a portal into the twilight zone. This is Iran ? Beam me up, Scotty.

Davar appeared at my elbow. The manteau and scarf were gone, her skirt ended a couple of inches above her knees, and she had put on a pair of high heels, which lifted her eyes closer to mine and did something subtly wonderful to her figure. Seeing the look on my face, she laughed.

She led me around and introduced me to some of the attendees. She whispered what they did. Several were university professors, one was a lawyer, one of the women was a doctor, several people were engineers, and three or four were employed by the government doing this and that.

One couple was smoking hash in a corner-I could smell it, and I’m sure Davar could. She pretended she didn’t. “Who are they?” I asked.

“The man is a judge,” she said and pressed herself against me. “Let’s dance.”

We did, for almost an hour. Fast, slow, whatever, we gyrated, swayed and tangoed. As I said, the majority of the tunes were American, with a smattering of English and French and a few singers that Davar whispered were Iranian. I wondered if Ahmadinejad had ever heard one of those Iranian chanteuses; maybe he listened every night. When someone put on a hip-hop tune, I led Davar off the floor.

She made a tiny motion with her head, so I followed her up the stairs. The same guy was still in the hallway. The whole scene reminded me of a Prohibition speakeasy. What the party-hearty crowd downstairs was going to do if the Islamic Gestapo arrived with sirens blaring and guns out, if they ever did, was a bit beyond my powers of prediction.

We took another set of stairs upward. She opened a door, inspected a room, then pulled me in. She closed the door, then wrapped her arms around my neck, glued her body to mine and planted her lips on my mouth.

“Whoa,” I managed when she came up for air. “Just whoa.”

“Come on, big guy,” she whispered. “Give me what I want.”

“And what is that?”

“Guess.”

“Affection, sex, love, respect? This ain’t the way to any of those things.”

She pulled back far enough to look into my eyes. “How much time do you think we have, Tommy? How much time do you think I have?”

Well, she had me there.

I was still supporting her weight, so I carried her over to the bed and deposited her gently. Then I kissed her the way I thought she should be kissed.

When the technicians got the first warhead installed in a missile, a Ghadar-110 ballistic missile with an 1,850-mile range, Habib Sultani informed the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who of course wanted to go look. The official party went that evening in four vehicles. They were accompanied by armed troops in four more vehicles, just in case. Ghasem rode with his uncle Habib Sultani in the third vehicle. The general in charge of the weapons of mass destruction program, Brigadier General Dr. Seyyed Ali Hosseini-Tash, and his senior aide rode with them.

Hosseini-Tash was feeling mighty good. He had accomplished his goal; under his direction thousands of technicians and scientists had designed and built a facility to enrich uranium to weapons grade, designed and constructed a trigger and designed and constructed a warhead. It was, he told Sultani and Ghasem, the biggest engineering project in the history of Iran, and he had pulled it off.

Sultani asked about testing a weapon underground, and that sobered Hosseini-Tash. Having the damned things go bang with the oomph they were supposed to have was, after all, the real final hurdle. Until the weapons passed the test, Hosseini-Tash’s head was still on the block.

Hosseini-Tash’s aide, a bearded, turbaned math freak, began a long, technical explanation about why a test wasn’t necessary. He even discussed some of the key calculations as they rode through the darkness of the evening to the missile factory in the Parchin complex under the mountains east of Tehran.

After the troops in the lead vehicle had paused for a brief discussion with the guard officer on duty, all the vehicles were waved on through.

Ghasem watched Ahmadinejad stride away, accompanied by the officer in charge of the missile plant, who had been waiting. Soon they were in the tunnel, which drifted straight back into the mountain. The bombproof doors were closed, and access was by a smaller door, which stood open, in one corner of the larger one. Ghasem knew that the larger door was only opened when large objects needed to be moved into or out of the tunnel, such as a missile on its transporter.

Indeed, there they were, ballistic missiles riding transporters, dozens of them. They were arranged two abreast in the large tunnel, and others were parked in galleries that ran off at right angles. Seeing them here under the lights, within the security of the tunnel, painted and polished and gleaming, with the national flag on their tails, was heady stuff.

The sight seemed to straighten Habib Sultani, Ghasem noticed, and added an inch or two to Ahmadinejad’s erect stance. All these advanced weapons, waiting, ready…

The second gallery on the left was the one the officer led the party to. Soon they were standing in front of a Ghadar-110 missile with the panels that normally covered the warhead removed, exposing it. With the missile on the transporter, the warhead area was at least twelve feet off the ground, so the official party clambered up on a scaffold. There wasn’t room for Ghasem, who stayed on the ground. Consequently he didn’t hear much of what was said by the missile expert to Ahmadinejad and Sultani and Hosseini-Tash and the other officials, who had packed the scaffold platform.

Troops were arranged along the walls of the gallery, and they stood loosely with their AK-47s across their chests, watching the official party and looking bored. No doubt they had been trotted into position to impress Ahmadinejad, if he noticed.

Ghasem wondered what Tommy Carmellini would say if he were here, looking at the military might of Iran.

Of course, Ghasem wondered what Ahmadinejad and the other officials of the government intended to do with these nuclear weapons. He had assumed that film crews would be here, filming Ahmadinejad’s inspection, but there were none. If Ahmadinejad was going to make a major announcement to the press, there should be film crews, Ghasem thought.

Why have the weapons if the leaders weren’t going to announce the reality and demand the respect of the nation’s enemies?

Nuclear weapons were worthless unless your enemies knew you had them. Even Israel, which pretended it lacked such weapons, made sure the Arab states were well aware that they lived in a nuclear shadow.

Now Israel lived there, too, as did the American armed forces scattered around the Persian Gulf. And at sea.

The officials on the platform were huddled around Ahmadinejad, who was telling them something. He spoke so low that Ghasem could not hear his words, nor any of the other observers and soldiers near him.

“This afternoon before we began this inspection trip, I spoke to the Supreme Leader,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. “The decision has been made. Iran will become a martyr nation. We will strike a blow for Allah that will resound throughout the world, a blow that will win glory for the Iranian nation and a place in Paradise for every Iranian.

“We have it in our power! Here are the missiles that we will use to destroy Israel and the concentrations of American forces that surround us. When the believers see our power, they will rally around us, unite and destroy the infidel dogs wherever they can be found.”

His listeners stood with mouths agape. They had been expecting some serious saber rattling, but not this ! Not a nuclear strike against the Great Satan or its ally, Israel. To shake one’s fist at a lion is a political statement, but to stick one’s head in its mouth goes beyond politics.