Oath of Office

“I don’t like it,” Ysabel said. “We don’t know how many more are inside.”

“True,” Dovzhenko said. “We should watch for a—”

Jack put a hand on his arm to get his attention. “Look,” he said, a whisper.

Ysabel gasped. “Reza Kazem.”

“And Tabrizi,” Ryan said.

They exited the cave at the same time, Tabrizi carrying a clipboard, while Kazem carried a satchel over his shoulder. They walked to the stone building and went inside.

“I can’t be sure,” Ysabel said, “but I think that was Ayatollah Ghorbani in there. And he is bound hand and foot.”

“He must not be part of the conspiracy,” Dovzhenko said.

“Not all of it, anyway,” Ryan said. A plan was already forming in his mind.

Ysabel saw his face. “What?” she asked. “I know that look.”

Ryan took the satellite phone out of his pocket and unfolded the antenna, relieved when he got a signal. “First things first. We need to call in another strike.”

“Oh, no,” Dovzhenko said. “We are much too close. Your bombs will kill us all.”

Ryan shook his head. “I’m not suicidal. As soon as we know for sure the missile is here, we haul ass down the road.”

There was no time for anything but a direct call, so he punched in the number for the prepaid he knew Foley had with her as an added layer of security for these conversations. She answered immediately, then passed the phone to his father. It was good to hear the old man’s voice, but Jack refrained from calling him “Dad” in front of the Russian. He told him his plan, and then read him the GPS coordinates he got from the borrowed cell phone. “We’re moving forward to do a little recon,” he said. “I’ll call back in ten and give you a sitrep. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen, you should go ahead and send it.”

He thought he heard the old man choke up a little, so he added. “You’ll hear from me. I promise.”

Ryan ended the call and folded the antenna down at the same time Kazem and Tabrizi came out of the stone building. They were leading a man with his hands tied in front of him. He had a long white beard and wore the robes and turban of a cleric. Ysabel was right. It was Ayatollah Ghorbani.

Instead of returning to the cave and driving the launch truck outside in the open, Kazem pushed the cleric to a wooden table at the base of the light tree. Ghorbani railed at him, but the generator made it impossible to hear what he was saying. In any case, both Kazem and Tabrizi ignored him. Kazem set the leather case on the table and then opened the flap. All of them recognized it as the launch-control device.

“What is he doing?” Ysabel said. “He can’t launch from inside the cave.”

Tabrizi was staring at a phone in her open palm. She raised her free hand, held it there for a moment, and then, still focused on the phone, suddenly let it fall.

Jack looked at the road that disappeared over the next hill and realized too late what was happening. He raised his rifle and fired, killing Reza Kazem at the same moment he finished entering the code into the launch controller.

A searing light flashed in the adjacent valley. The Russian Gorgon streaked upward through the night sky in a bloom of orange and black. The guards, momentarily startled by the gunfire and the missile blast, regained their senses enough to return fire. Dovzhenko and Ysabel fired while Jack rolled onto his back and yanked the cell phone out of his pocket. He’d started a silent count the moment the missile fired and now justified the time with the passing seconds.

Rolling to his gun, he joined the fight, shooting one of the guards at the mouth of the cave as rounds snapped and cracked overhead. Dovzhenko shot Tabrizi as she picked up one of the fallen rifles. The other guard near the opening of the cave was already dead. The third fell a moment later, brought down by Ysabel. Jack had learned long ago that protracted gunfights were rare. This one ended quickly — and badly for the untrained guards. The sound of the humming generator settled across the valley along with the odor of burned metal from the rocket.

Ghorbani stood alone, blinking under the bright construction lights.

No other shooters ran from the cave, but Dovzhenko moved laterally, ordering the Ayatollah to walk toward him just in case.

Ryan moved the other way, keeping to the trees as he pulled the sat phone from his pocket. Ghorbani didn’t need to know he’d ever been there.

Foley picked up immediately.

“Missile launch at 12:06:32 Iran time,” Jack said. “We couldn’t stop it.”

65

“Dr. Van Orden,” Mary Pat Foley said, letting the cell phone fall to her side. Her face had gone pale. “How long will it take for a Russian 51T6 to reach a satellite passing overhead?”

“A little over three minutes,” Van Orden said.

“Mr. President,” Foley said, “we’re launch plus fifty-four seconds and counting.”

General Paul had Air Force Satellite Control Network near Colorado Springs on an open line in anticipation of this very event.

“Why don’t we move all our satellites if we’re not sure of the target?” Ryan asked.