The Last Man in Tehran Read online

  He was outside the walls and off the docks, a free man at last. This was how Allah meant for his chosen children to live, and that divine feeling was his sure sign that his mission was the right course, a small taste of what would surely be his for all eternity after his death. From this moment on, he would feel no more pain, even at the end.

  The Haifa dock approached. Workers began moving cranes and forklifts into position. Then he saw the crowd assembled on the portside dock. Israeli police were enforcing a cordon. A forklift was on its side, a wrecked container on the ground nearby. However it happened, several people had been hurt in the accident, judging by the number of emergency vehicles. Fu’ad could hardly believe the blessing. All of them would be within a few feet of the River Thames. More casualties now and fewer police and paramedics to come after them to help the wounded.

  The cargo ship crawled to a stop.

  Fu’ad looked skyward and enjoyed the last feeling of cool air gliding over his cheeks. He said his prayer, a benediction on his whole life, pleading for the divine being he would see in a few seconds to accept him and grant him every promised blessing.

  He finished speaking to God. He walked over to the one container that he’d kept watch over for the weeklong journey. It was forty feet long, eight feet wide and tall, a standard ISO container in every respect except for the addition of an electronic lock mounted on the front. Type in one code and the door would open.

  Fu’ad began typing a different code.

  Inside the container, wires ran out of the electronic lock, down to a black box on the floor. The detonators connecting the dozens of barrels of fuel-air explosives that filled the more than two thousand cubic feet were all tied together in a long braid from the explosive blocks to the box. A dozen Semtex bricks were affixed to the walls and ceiling, equally spaced at carefully chosen points. In the center of the barrels sat a series of warm metal canisters filled with a fine powder.

  Sure of his course, Fu’ad inhaled his last breath of clean sea air, his last taste of the unhappy world as he pressed the last button.

  The Semtex bricks lining the walls of the container detonated first, breaching the container immediately. Fu’ad died as his body was hurled into the air and ripped to pieces by the container walls, which in turn were shredded into metal shards by the expanding pressure wave that was pushing vapor outward in all directions.

  The second set of explosives was far less powerful. They fired a fraction of a second after the first, breaching the pressurized barrels of vaporized explosive. Powdered aluminum and magnesium mixed with an oxidizer rushed outward at a frightening rate, smothering the ship’s deck and the docks on both sides.

  It was the third explosive, the smallest of all, that did the real work. It was a single scatter charge weighing only a few pounds. It fired straight up—

  —and the floating cloud ignited.

  The pressure wave from the thermobaric bomb was fearsome, a fireball of burning metal particulates that expanded outward in all directions. Wherever the floating gas reached, the fire followed, a million burning tendrils snaking out in a million directions, into every crack and crevice within reach, aboard the ship and on the dry ground below . . . and into the lungs of those who had started to inhale the flammable gas in the fraction of a second before the pressure wave had struck them.

  Fu’ad’s body was vaporized a moment after it became a corpse, nothing left to identify. The crew of the River Thames farther aft died a moment later as the explosion reached them, a wall of flames compressed to the density of steel, burning them alive, shattering their bones, and pulverizing their flesh all at once.

  The dockworkers and first responders on the dock died in the same moment. The few bits of their bodies that survived the pounding and immolation were either tossed into the Mediterranean Sea or burned into the side of the vessel next to the River Thames.

  Cargo containers from the vessel’s deck were hurled hundreds of yards in every direction, most in pieces, a few largely intact. Those people in the direct line of sight were dissected by shrapnel flying almost at a bullet’s speed. A few were crushed to death by the larger pieces falling like meteors flung down from the stars above their heads.

  Unlucky men and women farther from the blast were burned alive, hurled into metal walls, their bones shattering and organs crushed. They died quickly, but not immediately, and in great agony. Some died from the shock wave and flying debris, others were shredded to death by the shrapnel, and a few of the unlucky ones who burned to death lasted just long enough to realize through the agony of their burning skin how they were dying.

  The hull of the River Thames cracked open, the vessel splitting wide. Seawater poured inside, and the men who had been protected by layers of steel between them and Fu’ad’s cargo were thrown into the bulkheads. In half a minute the water had reached both ends of the ship, which began tilting at unnatural angles.

  The shock wave also rose straight up, pulling the superheated air along in its wake as it reached for the sky. Mixed in the air was dirt and burning soot, bits of bodies and pulverized metal, and the powder from the warm metal canisters that had sat in the middle of the container—strontium 90, thirty pounds of pulverized dust. The cans, heated from the inside by radiation, disintegrated instantly in the explosion, freeing the strontium to fly into the air. Much of it spread out along the docks. More than half the dust flew skyward, straight up, until the winds overpowered it and began to carry it outward.

  The physicist advising the men who had planned the operation had told them that this particular isotope would be perfect for their purposes. Strontium was a “bone seeker” that acted like calcium inside the human body, where it would deposit itself in the bone and marrow and become impossible to remove. Those few unlucky souls who ingested enough would develop bone and blood cancers, Ewing’s sarcoma, and leukemia. Their deaths would be horrifying.

  The winds were moving eastward at five meters per second. Within two minutes, the strontium traveled over two kilometers and started to descend.

  Fearing that Hamas or Hezbollah would someday try to smuggle a nuclear device into their country, Israel’s security services had been installing radiation detectors in their ports for years. Inside the port’s operations center, computer screens began to scream at their users—beta particles detected in unnatural amounts, gamma photons elevated far above normal. The operators, seeing the explosion on their monitors, hoped at first it was a faulty sensor, an instrumentation fault. Then a second sensor was triggered, then a third, the rate increasing. They were still alive to see the report, so they knew that a nuclear weapon had not been used, which left only a single possibility.

  Someone had finally used a radiological dispersion device on Israeli soil, a dirty bomb that would render the Port of Haifa uninhabitable until Israel could find a way to reclaim it from the radioactive dust that would settle on every surface, every roof, and every road along the air current’s path. Every building would have to be scrubbed clean, the streets washed down, and the radioactive wash collected for disposal. Every square inch of topsoil would have to be excavated and hauled away to some northern desert, probably the Golan. Let the Syrians have it, they would say. They were still fighting their civil war and in no position to object.

  There was no way to warn the people before some would ingest the particulates. In a few minutes, the strontium would reach ground level and children and their parents, and certainly hundreds, probably thousands, were breathing in the strontium. Dispersed as it was over so wide an area, most would not absorb enough to significantly increase their chances of dying in a cancer ward, but that hardly mattered. The fear of it would be enough.

  Terrorists had attacked Israel for years, so frequently that most of the population had become numb to it. A bomb went off and within a few hours life returned to normal, the living mourning the dead but taking solace in the fact that they had escaped themselves. But this time would be different. This time, Israel would be frightened like i
t had not been frightened in decades, since the Yom Kippur War, when its leaders had come so very close to deploying nuclear weapons. Now there would finally be panic, and it would never end because the people who had breathed in the strontium would not know, and could not be sure, whether the bomber of the Port of Haifa really had killed them or not.

  Beit Aghion (residence of the prime minister)

  9 Smolenskin Street

  Rehavia, Jerusalem, Israel

  The prime minister’s new residence was not yet finished, delayed again by endless complaints in the Knesset about the cost, so the war would start here, in the old one. The PM was an old man, as Israel’s head of state usually was, almost by tradition, since Golda Meir had held the office. He was white-haired with a soldier’s build, age starting to put a curve in his military posture, but it had done nothing to temper the hard edge of his private manners. His charm in public was practiced enough to convince his people that he could tell a bawdy joke or appreciate one told over a bottle of the Maccabee pilsner that he was known to favor. But when the door closed, he smiled very little, even less when he had to meet with Gavi Ronen, and he drank American Scotch for the same reason. He only called the head of Mossad, the ramsad, when there was a problem to be solved in some way that even former soldiers like the PM didn’t care to know.

  The two men were not friends, but Ronen had no political ambitions, so neither were they enemies. Ronen was merely useful to the old man who lived here, and that was a suitable arrangement for them both. Any ramsad had to be a vicious man to be useful, but it always made him unwelcome company to those who had to keep their distance from Mossad’s work, lest some unsavory mission stain their images either abroad or at home. The public knew about Mossad of course and generally knew about the kinds of operations Mossad occasionally undertook. But knowing the specifics was another matter. As the Americans said, no one wanted to see how that particular sausage was made. They were content just to know it was being done, and so long as no operation went awry, bringing unpleasant details to light, no one asked questions because no one wanted to know answers.

  But tonight the prime minister had called him to the official residence, which was not surprising after the bombing of Haifa. What was surprising was that the old man had waited almost two days to issue the summons. Ronen had decided he would go anyway in the early morning had the old man waited that much longer. More surprising was that the politician did not immediately address the subject for which the ramsad most certainly was here. Instead, he asked Ronen to recount for him the night the Iranians had taken the American embassy in Tehran. Ronen had granted the request.

  The prime minister set a small glass of Scotch, Glenfiddich single malt, twenty years old, on the desk for the Mossad officer. “You prefer brandy, I believe.”

  “I gave it up years ago,” Ronen said. “That very night, in fact.”

  I should like to have been there,” the prime minister said.

  “I should like not to have been there,” Ronen replied.

  “I was in the IDF at the time, standing watch along the Golan,” the old man said. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. “Revolutions do not spring up full-grown overnight, do they? We should have stayed out of Iran when Pahlavi ruled. It was a mistake, I think.”

  “You are not the first to think so. I do not think Iran would like us any more now had we not done our part,” Ronen countered.

  “Surely not,” the prime minister said. “The radioactive material in the bomb almost certainly came from Tehran.”

  “A very strong possibility, but not the only one,” Ronen replied.

  “And you have no sources in Iran to tell you for certain?”

  “I regret not,” Ronen confirmed. “Not anymore.”

  “I had heard that you had an asset there.”

  Ronen allowed a rueful smile to split his face. “No. When the Revolution took hold, one of my assets chose to stay. He told me that he would become a new man, but I do not know whether he managed to build his new life. I’ve not heard of him nor from him for forty years. He may have been killed within days after we last talked. He was a good friend, but I have assumed him to be long dead now.”

  The prime minister nodded. “Regrettable. He would be very useful to us now,” he said. “I have ordered the IDF to deploy artillery on the border with Lebanon. If the Iranians did order this, Hezbollah was surely the agent that carried it out. They could have some other operations in motion.”

  “I agree, but we have seen no movement along the border as yet. Hezbollah has moved neither men nor missiles, before the bombing or after.”

  The prime minister frowned into his glass. “Have you identified the dust?”

  “The preliminary tests suggest strontium 90, a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear fission, but we can’t say yet if it’s reprocessed nuclear fuel. If so, it could be carrying Pu-240 in the mix, and probably some minor actinides like americium and curium.”

  “Iran has reactors.”

  “Yes, but strontium has some industrial applications, so it is possible that our attackers acquired it on the black market from some other country, even one of our allies,” Ronen said. He saw the disapproving look on the old man’s face and decided that this was not an argument worth having. “Still, in the absence of any other evidence, we must always consider Tehran to be the primary suspect for any such crime,” he conceded.

  “Indeed.” The old man leaned back in his chair. He offered the ramsad more Scotch, which Ronen declined. He wanted his mind clear for what would come next. “I regret having to call you here at this hour, Gavi,” the prime minister said.

  Ronen knew there were several reasons why this was true. “We all knew this night would come eventually.”

  “Yes,” the old man agreed. “Tell me of the investigation.”

  “Shin Bet reports that the port database was hacked. The ship’s manifest was erased, so tracing the container carrying the explosives will be troublesome, assuming there’s enough left of the container to identify it. The blast yield and the eyewitnesses’ descriptions suggest that it was a thermobaric weapon, and such bombs generate blast waves and destruction second only to nuclear weapons. If you have seen footage of the Americans’ Mother-of-All-Bombs or their daisy cutters, you have seen one.”

  “An airburst weapon.”

  “Yes, but in this case, recovered footage shows it exploded at the level of the ship’s deck . . . a cargo ship registered as the River Thames. So we know the ship that delivered it but not the specific container. If anything useful did survive intact, it will take weeks to recover, perhaps months, and much of the evidence will have suffered contamination from the seawater, if not corrosion.”

  “Gavi . . . how long can we keep this quiet? That it was a dirty bomb and not just a conventional explosive.”

  “Another day at best, I think. Shin Bet and the local police have already sealed off the docks, but the media are already asking why we are evacuating so many so far from the immediate blast area. Someone will leak the truth to some reporter and then the story will be on the Internet and broadcast news. If our people do not find out the truth from us, the backlash will be tremendous. It would be the end of your government.” It was a bold statement, but it had the virtue of being the truth.

  “I know.” The prime minister sighed. “We truly cannot control information anymore, can we?” he asked, the question entirely rhetorical. “I will share the truth in a statement tonight and give an order to evacuate the affected areas of Haifa. At least fifty thousand people will have to leave, likely more.”

  “You may wish to note that the wind is blowing to the northeast, so the cloud isn’t moving over Tel Aviv. Some of it will end up in Lebanon, and may even reach Syria, but the particulates will be dispersed enough by then that they shouldn’t present a danger to anyone there.”

  The leader of the Jewish state nodded. “A shift in the winds and we would be evacuating parts of our capital.”
/>   “I know. Where will you send the residents of Haifa?”

  “We have contingency plans for this,” the old man said. “We worked them out years ago, but operation never matches the plan, does it? Those who have families elsewhere have been asked to stay with them. I am told we can shelter the rest in schools and military facilities around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The economic disruption will be severe. Haifa’s airport is closed indefinitely, and no one can tell me when the port will reopen. Even then, getting the dockworkers to return will be difficult. They will want safety assurances, which we cannot possibly give. We cannot inspect every container on every ship before allowing it to dock. We would have ships backed up to Cyprus.” The prime minister sipped his Scotch.

  “How is the public mood?” Ronen asked.

  “Shaken, but more calm than it will be once I admit the truth,” the prime minister said. “We cannot abide a sustained campaign using these bombs. We do not have the resources to relocate whole neighborhoods. Haifa alone will stretch us. If the winds had been stronger and blowing toward the lower city . . . ?” He shook his head. “If our enemies have more of these ready to use, they could overwhelm us, forcing us to clear out entire cities faster than we could clean them up. Our people would become refugees in their own country. Many would have to leave for America or Europe, perhaps Russia for those with close ties there.”

  “I know,” Ronen agreed. “Mossad is ready to serve.”

  The elder statesman put the stopper in the glass bottle and set it back on the bar. “President Rostow will take advantage of the moment. He will call for immediate talks with Tehran.”

  “You are sure?”

  The PM nodded. “He is in danger of losing his election, so he will seize on this. He will suspect Tehran as we do, but he will not want to appear too close to us. So he will offer us a few words of sympathy while calling for a summit with the obvious suspects. And the Iranians will attend because they cannot refuse. If they sent the bomb, they will agree so the Americans will press us to delay any military response while they prepare for war. If they did not send it, they will agree to delay a military response and buy time to convince the world of their innocence. Either way, they will send a delegation.”