Twelve Days Page 2

  At four, it wouldn’t.

  The world’s deadliest math problem. Those beautiful deadly streaks would either reach him or not, and the worst part was he’d already played his only card. He couldn’t outmaneuver the missiles, or hide from them. He could only try to outrun them.

  —

  In 45A, Vik had felt the surge of the engines. Then the plane leveled off, more than leveled off, started to drop. They know. They’ll do whatever they do to beat these things and we’ll be fine. But the missiles kept coming, closing the gap shockingly fast, homing in on the jet, arrows from the bow of the devil himself.

  He grabbed Jessica’s hand.

  “Whoever you pray to, pray. Pray.”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—” The words tumbled out of her. Vik just had time to be surprised. He’d expected a yogic chant. One of the streaks flared out, fell away.

  But the other didn’t.

  —

  The Russians referred to the missile as the Igla-S—igla being the Russian word for “needle.” NATO called it the SA-24 Grinch. The Russian military had put it into service in 2004, updating the original Igla. They’d invested heavily in the redesign, knowing that man-portable surface-to-air missiles had a wide export market. Armies all over the world depended on them to neutralize close air support. A single SAM could take out a twenty-million-dollar fighter. The Russians more than doubled the size of the Igla’s warhead. They improved its propellant to allow it to catch even the fastest supersonic fighter. They added a secondary guidance system.

  And they lengthened its range. To six kilometers.

  —

  Twelve seconds after its launch, the Igla crashed into the Boeing’s left engine. The warhead didn’t explode right away. Its delayed fuse gave it time to burrow inside the casing of the turbine. A tenth of a second later, five and a half pounds of high explosive detonated.

  In movies, missile strikes inevitably produced giant midair fireballs. But military jets had Kevlar-lined fuel tanks. In the real world, missiles destroyed fighters by shearing off their engines and wings, sending them crashing to earth.

  This time, though, the Hollywood myth was accurate. The 777’s fuel tanks weren’t designed to survive a missile strike, and the plane carried far more fuel than a fighter jet. It was a flying bomb, fifty times as big as the one that had blown up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  The explosion started in the fuel tanks under the left wing and created a superheated cloud of burning kerosene that tore apart the cabin less than two seconds later. From Nick Cuse, in the cockpit, to Vikosh Jain, in the last row, all two hundred seventy-eight people on board were incinerated. The ones nearest the fuel tanks in the wings didn’t die as much as evaporate, their physical existence denied.

  Despite his immediate action, Cuse couldn’t save his jet. Even so, he was a hero. By getting the Boeing offshore—barely—before the missile struck, he saved the city from the worst of the fireball. If the explosion had happened over the slums, hundreds of people would have burned to death. Instead, Mumbai’s residents lifted their heads and watched as night turned to day. The tallest buildings were the worst damaged, so for once the rich suffered more than the poor.

  The fireball lasted a full thirty seconds before fading, replaced with an unnatural blackness, a cloud of smoke that didn’t dissipate until the morning. By then, the toll of the attack would be clear. Besides the two hundred seventy-eight people on the plane, two people on the ground died. One hundred sixty-five more suffered severe burns. Planes all over the world were grounded.

  And the United States and Iran were much closer to war.

  PART ONE

  1

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The images were horrific. A man’s legs, brown skin sloughed off, exposing the yellow-red meat underneath. A layer of jet fuel burning on top of the ocean, charring a chunk of bone. Worst of all, bits of a stuffed toy, blood smearing its white fur.

  The first reports of an explosion in Mumbai showed up on Twitter ninety seconds after the jet was hit. A half hour later, 12:30 a.m. in India, 2 p.m. in Washington, the Associated Press and Reuters confirmed a plane crash. The Indian navy had sent ships to search the waters west of the city, Reuters said. Two hours later, a bleary-eyed spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation identified the jet as a United Airlines flight bound for Newark. “The situation is difficult. At this point, we cannot expect survivors.”

  Almost immediately, Reuters broke the news that the jet’s captain had reported missiles in the air seconds before the plane exploded. Then an Indian news agency reported that airport authorities had surveillance video that showed a missile striking the jet. By 8 p.m. Eastern, CNN and Fox and everyone else had the video. The anchors murmured somberly, Disturbing, we want to warn you so you can have your children leave the room . . .

  The video was silent, not even a minute long. The camera was fixed and faced west from the airport’s control tower. It didn’t capture the actual launch. The missiles were already airborne when they entered the frame. From left to right, twin red streaks rose toward an invisible target. After five or six seconds, they faded, too far away for the camera to catch. But they hadn’t stopped their chase. The proof came with the explosion, a white flash tearing open the night, resolving into a mushroom cloud. The shock wave hit seconds later, rattling the camera as the cloud in the distance grew.

  HORROR IN THE SKIES, the crawl under the video said, and this time CNN wasn’t exaggerating. India’s navy would call off its search by morning. No one could have survived.

  The inevitable next act would be assigning blame.

  The video ended. CNN cut to a serious-looking man in a gray suit with a white shirt. Fred Yount, Terrorism Analyst at RAND Institute—

  John Wells flicked off the screen before he had to hear Yount. A man squeezed a trigger in the dark. A few seconds later, almost three hundred people were dead. Whatever Yount had to say wouldn’t change those bare facts.

  Wells had quit the Central Intelligence Agency years before. But he’d never escaped the secret world. He knew now he never would. He felt like a swimmer fighting a whirlpool. He was strong enough to avoid being sucked down, but not to reach land. He could only tread water, knowing that one day his body would fail.

  He was in his early forties, but his chin was still sturdy, his shoulders thick with muscle. Only the patches of gray hair at his temples and the permanent wariness in his brown eyes betrayed his age and his too-close acquaintance with the world’s sins.

  Now he lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. He was in room 319 in the Courtyard by Marriott at the Washington Navy Yard, a hotel favored by randy congressmen for its nearness to their offices. More than anything, Wells wanted to close his eyes. Sleep. But he had a plane to catch in less than four hours. He had arrived in the United States only the night before. Now he was going back the way he’d come, over the Atlantic, bound for London and Zurich. To meet with a man who didn’t much want to see him. Then, maybe, to Mumbai.

  Wells understood. He didn’t want to see himself either. Not at the moment. He was carrying himself around like a rain-soaked cardboard box about to burst. Too many miles. And too much death. Wells blamed himself for the downing of the jet. A few days before, he’d discovered the truth about a plot to maneuver the United States into war with Iran. He’d nearly found a way to stop it. But his enemies had outplayed him.

  He’d failed.

  Wells turned out the bedside light. He closed his eyes, and for sixty seconds thought of the jet’s passengers. Then he made himself forget them. Nothing else to do.

  —

  A light knock stirred him. The room door swung open. “Nice opsec.” Ellis Shafer’s gravelly, mumbly voice. The lights flicked on.

  “If it came to that, I could kill you in my sleep, Ellis.”

  “Hitti
ng you hard?”

  “I’m all right.” Wells pushed himself up.

  “Of course you are.” Shafer sat on the bed next to Wells. “They probably didn’t even know what hit them. Except the captain. Obviously.”

  “You should be a grief counselor.”

  “Should I tell you they’re in heaven with seventy-two million virgins each?”

  “Ellis—”

  “Too soon?”

  Wells had been raised Christian but converted to Islam more than a decade before, in the mountains of Pakistan. Shafer was a Jew who had declared his atheism at his bar mitzvah more than fifty years earlier. Unlike Wells, he still worked for the CIA. Barely. Until one of the new director’s new men got around to dropping off a letter of resignation for him.

  Over the years, Wells and Shafer had worked together on a half-dozen operations.

  But they had never faced a mission as tricky as this one.

  —

  A few weeks before, Iran had begun a secret campaign against the United States. Assassins working for the Quds Force, the foreign intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, killed a CIA station chief. Then the Guard smuggled radioactive material onto a Pakistani ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Fortunately, a rogue Guard colonel tipped the CIA to Iran’s efforts, enabling the Navy to intercept the ship in the Atlantic.

  Then the colonel gave the agency an even more disturbing piece of intel. He said Iran had moved three pounds of weapons-grade uranium to Istanbul. The uranium was ultimately destined for the United States, according to the colonel, who called himself Reza.

  Wells and Shafer knew that the truth was very different. Iran had nothing to do with the killing of the station chief, or the smuggling. Reza wasn’t a Revolutionary Guard colonel at all. He worked for a private group trying to trick the United States into attacking Iran. A billionaire casino mogul named Aaron Duberman had paid for the operation. Duberman hoped to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon that it might use against Israel. Iran regularly threatened to annihilate the Jewish state, and a nuclear weapon would make the threat real. Even if Iran never used the bomb, its mere existence would give the country new freedom to launch terrorist attacks against Israel.

  Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, the United States had stood firmly with Israel against Iran. Now the relationship between Washington and Tehran was warming. The White House had recently agreed to loosen economic sanctions against Iran. In turn, Tehran promised to stop work on its nuclear weapons program. But those promises in no way satisfied Duberman and the mysterious woman who was his chief lieutenant. They had decided to force the United States to act by fooling the White House into believing that Iran was trying to smuggle the pieces of a nuclear weapon onto American soil.

  Wells and Shafer had unraveled the scheme in the last couple of weeks, after Wells tracked down Glenn Mason, an ex–CIA case officer who had betrayed the agency to work for Duberman. Senior CIA officials refused to consider that Mason might be involved, for a reason that at first seemed airtight. Mason had been reported dead in Thailand four years before, and the death report appeared genuine. Mason hadn’t used his passport or bank accounts since. In reality, Wells discovered, Mason had undergone extensive plastic surgery, so he could travel without setting off facial-recognition software.

  After chasing Mason across three continents, Wells finally found him in Istanbul. But Mason turned the tables, capturing Wells and imprisoning him in an abandoned factory. Wells spent a week in captivity before killing Mason and escaping. Wells assumed that the Turkish police would find Mason’s body at the factory, setting off an investigation that would unravel the plot.

  Instead, Duberman’s mercenaries disposed of Mason’s body and cleaned up the factory, leaving police with nothing to find. Wells and Shafer had no other evidence to prove that Duberman was involved.

  —

  Meanwhile, the plot was close to success.

  Tests conducted by the Department of Energy had shown that the weapons-grade uranium the CIA found in Istanbul didn’t come from any known stockpile. The DOE and CIA agreed that Iran was the only logical candidate to have produced it. Kilogram-size chunks of highly enriched uranium didn’t exist in private hands. And Iran had worked on nuclear weapons for decades, doing everything possible to hide its efforts from international inspectors. The United States and Israel had repeatedly unearthed hidden enrichment plants over the years. But Iran was twice as big as Texas. No one could say for sure that every plant had been found. In fact, Iranian exiles had told the CIA of rumors that the government had opened a new plant deep under central Tehran.

  Despite his fears of starting another war in the Middle East, the President decided he had to accept the reality of the Iranian threat. In an Oval Office speech, he gave Iran two weeks to end its nuclear program or face an invasion. To support his threat, he ordered drones and stealth fighters to bomb Tehran’s airport. Congressional leaders in both parties backed the President. Ironically, the earlier deal with Iran increased his credibility. A man who wanted an excuse to invade Iran wouldn’t have spent years trying to end sanctions.

  China and Russia protested the American attack on Tehran, but neither country offered any military aid to Iran. Afghanistan and Turkey, which had long-standing rivalries with Iran, agreed to allow the United States to use their territories as bases for American forces who might eventually invade. The rest of the world stayed on the sidelines. Most countries seemed to think the United States and Iran deserved each other. One was a fading empire that used its military too often, the other a dangerous theocracy that couldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.

  Iran responded furiously to the American threat. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a two-hour speech accusing the United States of lying to justify an invasion: “Iran shall never open its legs to the filthy Zionist-controlled inspectors. Our people will gladly accept martyrdom. The Crusaders and the Jews will suffer the fury that they have unleashed . . .”

  Now someone had shot down an American plane. Iran was the obvious suspect. And the Islamic Republic had a history of terrorism against the United States.

  —

  Shafer turned on the television. CNN was replaying the explosion yet again.

  “Think it was Duberman?”

  “A couple hundred civilians wouldn’t stop him, if he thought it would fuel the fire.”

  “On the other hand . . .” Shafer didn’t have to finish the thought. The Iranian government might also have downed the jet. The fact that it was innocent of the nuclear plot made it more rather than less likely to lash out. From Iran’s point of view, the United States had created fake evidence as an excuse for an invasion. Iran was not likely to wait for American troops to cross its borders before it took revenge.

  “We have any idea where Duberman is?” Wells said.

  “Probably Hong Kong,” Shafer said. “When not starting a war, he’s got casinos to run. Those rich Chinese want to see the man who’s taking their money.”

  Wells wondered if Duberman was cold-blooded enough to glad-hand wealthy gamblers while goading the United States into war. He’d never met the man. But the sheer boldness of Duberman’s scheme suggested that the answer was yes. And Duberman was not just an ordinary billionaire, if such a creature existed. He was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune of almost thirty billion dollars. He had mansions all over the world, a small fleet of private jets, his own island. He had spent $196 million on ads in the previous presidential election, making him the largest political donor ever. Some analysts believed that the President wouldn’t have won without his help.

  “You talk to Evan and Heather?” Shafer said. Wells’s son and ex-wife.

  “Yeah. They agreed to hang out a few more days. Though they aren’t happy about it.” “Hang out” translated into stay in FBI protective custody. Before Wells killed him, Mason had thr
eatened Evan and Heather. Wells didn’t know if Mason had been serious, but he couldn’t take the risk.

  “Where are they?”

  “Provo. Heather told me the biggest risk was death by boredom. And Evan says I’m going to get him kicked off the team. He just cracked the rotation and now this.” Evan was a shooting guard on San Diego State’s nationally ranked basketball team.

  “We all have problems. You mention you killed five guys three days ago?”

  “We had a nice conversation about it.”

  The room door banged open. Vinny Duto walked in. Strode in.

  The former Director of Central Intelligence, Duto was now a Pennsylvania senator. He’d crash-landed in the Senate after the President pushed him out of the CIA. He was an old-school politician, unpolished and raw with power. No one would call him handsome. He had stubby fingers, a heavy Nixonian face. But his intensity had resonated with Pennsylvania’s flinty voters. He had dominated the debates.

  As DCI, Duto had saved Wells’s life more than once. Now they were working together to stop Duberman. But Wells could barely stand Duto at the best of times. He saw Duto as the worst kind of Washington opportunist. And he knew that Duto pegged him as an adrenaline junkie who took unnecessary risks.

  They were both right.

  Duto offered Wells a thin-lipped smile. “Gentlemen. Hope I haven’t interrupted anything.” Duto liked to irritate Shafer by accusing him of having an old man’s crush on Wells.

  Wells felt the itching in the tips of his fingers that meant he was ready to fight. Three hundred people dead and Duto was cracking jokes. Wells knew exactly what Duto thought of the downed plane. Not a tragedy. A moment. One that might help his career if he played it right.