Free Damascus Countdown by Joel C. Rosenberg Page B

steps when the phone rang. He stopped, pulled out the phone, and was surprised to see Mina’s name on the caller ID.
    “Hello? Mina? Is that you?”
    “Yes, it’s me,” Mina said. “Is this Reza? Reza Tabrizi? Are you okay?”
    “Yes, it’s Reza, and I’m safe, thank you, Mina,” he said. “And you? How are you and your mother?”
    “Praise Allah, we are okay,” she replied, though her voice was trembling. “We’ve been living in the basement of our apartment. I just came upstairs to get some more food and water, and the satphone rang. But when I picked up, you’d already hung up.”
    “Abdol gave you a satphone?”
    “In case he needed me to help him.”
    “Are you helping him?”
    “A little, here and there,” Mina said. “But no, not much.”
    “Where is he now?” David asked. “I’m trying to find him and Mr. Rashidi.”
    “I don’t know where Mr. Rashidi is. Mr. Esfahani has been trying to find him too.”
    “Okay, but where is Abdol? It’s urgent, Mina. I must talk to him.”
    “I just spoke to him about twenty minutes ago,” she replied. “He’s heading to Qom.”
    “Qom?” David asked. “Why Qom? The Israelis are bombing the daylights out of the nuclear sites and military bases there.”
    “That’s why he went.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “His parents live in Qom,” Mina said. “Near one of the bases. His mother is terrified of all the bombing. She wants to leave, but his father, as you know, is a big mullah there. He won’t leave the seminary. He says leaving would show a lack of faith in Allah.”
    “So why’s Abdol going?”
    “To get them out of there before they are killed.”
    David suddenly realized his best chance—maybe his only chance—to reconnect with Esfahani, or anyone inside the Mahdi’s Group of 313, was in Qom.
    “Mina, I need an address,” he said, his mind already made up.
    “For what?”
    “For Abdol’s parents.”
    “No, Mr. Tabrizi, please, you cannot go,” Mina said.
    “I have to.”
    “But why? It’s a suicide mission.”
    “No, it’s not. It’s to help a friend.”
    There was a long silence.
    “Mina? Are you still there?”
    “Yes,” she said softly.
    “Please, I cannot let Abdol go alone,” David insisted, trying to come up with a plausible-sounding rationale for what clearly seemed to Mina an act of insanity. “Abdol’s life is too valuable to the Mahdi to let him die in Qom. I must help him get his parents to safety and then get him to safety as well. The fate of this war may very well depend upon it.”
    It was silent again for a few moments, and then Mina relented and gave him the address.

    TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
    “Haifa is a confirmed target,” the IDF watch commander said urgently. “I repeat, Haifa is a confirmed target.”
    “And the second target?” Shimon pressed. “You’re sure it’s Jerusalem?”
    “No,” the watch commander said.
    “Then where’s it headed?” Shimon demanded, moving quickly to the watch commander’s side to get a closer view of the images on the laptop.
    “The computer says the second target is Dimona, sir—and now three more Shahabs have been fired and are heading toward Dimona as well.”
    “No—you can’t be . . . Are you positive?”
    “Computer puts it at a 97 percent confidence level, sir.”
    Shimon felt physically ill. This couldn’t be happening. Dimona was a desert town, not even a city. Thirty-some kilometers south of Beersheva, it certainly wasn’t a major population center. Only about 33,000 Israelis lived there—nothing like the three and a half million who lived in and around metropolitan Tel Aviv. But Dimona had something Tel Aviv didn’t—Israel’s only nuclear power plant. The Iranians were gunning for Dimona, and if they hit it with ballistic missiles as powerful as the Shahab . . .
    Shimon grabbed the orange phone on the console in front of him, chose a secure line, and hit number one on the speed dial.
    “Get me the prime