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Secretary of Defense England was sitting near the president with a phone clutched tightly to his ear. His deep baritone voice had a tendency to carry, so
most of the other Cabinet officials had either left the room or moved farther away like Wicka. From time to time England would raise his head and relay to the president what the Joint Chiefs were telling him. Everyone from the secretary of the navy down to the theater commander had denied the report of a U.S. submarine’s being involved in the sinking of an Iranian frigate. Now, England was attempting to speak firsthand to the Task Force Commander for the subs in the region.
The door to the conference room opened, and Ted Byrne, the president’s chief of staff, entered with a deeply concerned look on his face. He moved quickly around the far side of the table and intercepted the president.
“I just got off the phone with Mark.”
“Mark?” the president asked.
“Stevens.”
Mark Stevens was the president’s treasury secretary. Alexander nodded for Byrne to continue.
“The European markets are in a free fall.”
“Shit…I should have seen that coming. Oil futures?”
“Through the roof. They jumped to ninety dollars a barrel, and there’s rumors that Iran is calling for an OPEC embargo of the United States.”
Before the president could decide what assets to put on this new front, Secretary of Defense England’s voice drowned out the entire room.
“You’re sure?” England half yelled. “Have you seen the footage?” England looked at the president and smiled. “Great work, Captain. Send it.” The secretary of defense slammed the handset back into the cradle and said to the president, “You’re not going to believe this. We had a sub in the strait when the Iranian frigate was torpedoed.”
“Why would we find that hard to believe?” the chief of staff asked in a sour tone. “That’s what the Iranians are claiming.”
“They’re claiming we sunk their ship, and they’re full of it. We had the U.S.S. Virginia tasked to follow the Yusef, one of Iran’s three Kilo-class subs. The Virginia followed the Yusef into the strait and has the sonar tapes of the Yusef firing on its own ship.”
“Why on God’s green earth would they fire on their own ship?” Byrne asked.
“Because they want to make it look like we did it,” the president answered.
“Exactly,” England agreed. “The task force commander is sending the contact tapes as well as footage of the Iranian ship being hit.”
CIA Deputy Director O’Brien entered the room looking harried. “Mr. President, I just spoke to Rapp. He has confirmation that Kennedy’s kidnapping was an Iranian operation.”
The room went silent. The president asked, “What kind of confirmation?”
“One of the prisoners has confessed that he’s a member of the Quds Force. For lack of a perfect analogy, that means he’s Iranian special forces. He identified one of the other prisoners as his commanding officer, and the third he says is a member of Hezbollah.”
The president looked around the room at the other members of his National Security Team. “So this was no random attack by local insurgents?”
“No, sir, in fact we have an even more damning piece of evidence.” O’Brien looked over his shoulder and nodded to a tech who had followed him into the conference room. A series of photos appeared on one of the large plasmas. O’Brien pointed to the photo in the upper left corner and said, “These were surveillance shots taken of Iranian Intelligence Minister Ashani as he landed in Mosul this morning.” The deputy director pointed to a second photo. “Here he is shaking hands with our deputy director of operations, Near East Division. On the far left of the frame you can see a man walking in the opposite direction.” O’Brien’s finger moved to the second row. “This man walking right here toward the police vehicles.”
“Rapp took this photo,” O’Brien said, pointing to the last one, “and showed it to one of the prisoners, who did not know the man’s name but said he arrived in Mosul this morning and took over the operation to kidnap Director Kennedy. The man Rapp has been interrogating”—O’Brien looked down to consult a piece of paper—“a Corporal Tahmineh, says he was not told who they were kidnapping. Only that this man was adamant that it was a woman and she be taken alive.”
The president looked angrily at the screen. “Who is he?”
“It’s Imad Mukhtar, sir, the head of Hezbollah’s paramilitary wing.”
The president stared at the screen in absolute disbelief at the Iranians’ audacity. “You’re sure?”
O’Brien looked at the president with a partially dazed expression. “Well, sir, this information is coming in pretty fast, so we haven’t had the chance to source it properly. In fact the only photo we have of Mukhtar is nearly thirty years old.”
“So you’re not sure,” the president said with no attempt to hide his irritation.
“Let me explain further. Mitch called Minister Ashani and asked him who…”
The president interrupted, “Mitch called Minister Ashani directly?”
