“And?”

“I love it.”

“What about Massoud?” Massoud Mahabad was MEK’s main guy in Mosul.

“He thinks it’s great.”

“Can we depend on him?”

Stilwell tossed his cigarette to the ground and fished a new one from a crumpled pack. “Massoud is probably the most trustworthy person I’ve met since I’ve been here.”

“Good. Do we need any extra hardware for the drive?” Rapp was referring to guns.

“No. We won’t be stopping.”

“Are you sure?” Rapp asked in a doubtful tone.

“If it’ll make you feel better, go ahead.” Stilwell lifted up the right tail of his dress shirt to reveal a Glock pistol and two extra magazines. “There’s a twelve-gauge mounted on the ceiling and a P-Ninety under the dash.”

“Good enough for me. Let’s roll.”

Ridley and Dumond got in the second car and Rapp got in the first car with Stilwell. The first thing Rapp did when he got in the front seat was reach under the dash and yank the P-90 from its spring-loaded grips. The small bullpup submachine gun was extremely accurate and great for tight fights. Rapp slid the breach back to see if a round was chambered and then put the weapon back.

As they rolled toward the main gate Rapp asked, “You been hit since you’ve been over here?”

“A few times, back when we were driving the Suburbans around.” Stilwell shook his head. “It was really stupid of us. Those things just turned us into a big fat target.” He glanced over at Rapp. “I won’t get in one now.”

“Smart move. This door seemed pretty heavy. You put some armor plating in it?”

“Yep. In fact Massoud did it for me. He’s making a killing on his auto parts business in addition to armoring old cars like this.”

They were waved through the main gate and then zigzagged their way through the big concrete Jersey barriers before they made it to the main road. Stilwell turned north and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. He grabbed a clear plastic mouth guard from the dashboard and held it up for Rapp to see. He put it in his mouth and then punched the accelerator. The big Detroit V8 engine roared to life.

“This is the worst part of the trip, right here. It’s like the Indy five hundred, but with bombs.”

Rapp hurried to put on his seat belt. “What’s with the mouth guard?”

“These people are some of the shittiest drivers in the world. One of our guys got in a collision a few months ago. He got hit so hard he bit off his tongue.”

Rapp looked over at Stilwell to see if the man was pulling his leg. He noticed him white-knuckling the steering wheel and decided it was no act. Rapp gripped the door handle tightly and swore to himself.

Imad Mukhtar was in a foul mood. He looked around the rectangular table with contempt. As a man of action nothing bothered him more than having to listen to soft men spout platitudes. It was the same thing with these pretenders every time. We will push Israel into the sea. We will vaporize their entire country. We will wipe them from the map. We will make the Americans beg for forgiveness. We will, we will, it went on and on and they never lifted a finger to do one hundredth of what it was that they talked so boisterously about.

Mukhtar wanted desperately to move beyond Israel. The stubborn little country bored him. They were showing signs of weakness. The old guard was dying off. The ones who remembered all the broken promises. They were slowly being replaced by younger Jews who were sick of the attacks. Sick of the murders and carnage. So sick, they were willing to grasp at the illusion of peace. Mukhtar had no respect for them. He may have hated their parents and grandparents, but he respected and feared the stubborn old bastards. This young crop in both Beirut and Tel Aviv, with their iPods and cell phones, were losing their identities.

Mukhtar was in a race against time and technology. None of the other men sitting in Amatullah’s conference room understood the change that was occurring beyond their borders. They had so thoroughly bought in to their Islamic revolution that they now believed their own propaganda. They actually thought they were carrying the day in the battle between East and West, but Mukhtar knew different. The number of dead American soldiers was laughably small compared to other conflicts. A million people had died the last time Iran went to war with Iraq. Even so, they needed to get the Americans to pull out as soon as possible. The effects of their occupation were far-reaching.

The Internet, TV, radio, cell phones, and travel were all blurring the lines of race and ethnicity, and every day the American war machine stayed in the region more youths were lost to the seduction of capitalism and commercialism. Economic prosperity was spreading, as were the effects of decades of immigration from Lebanon and Palestine to Europe, America, and Canada. This new prosperity was bleeding them of the angry young men they needed to sustain the fight. A contented youth was not about to offer himself up as a suicide bomber. Fortunately in Iraq the Saudis and Pakistanis had been able to provide a steady supply of youths who had been brainwashed in Saudi-sponsored madrasas. This slow yet persistent trickle of suicide bombers was the only thing that was preventing the Americans from peace and stability. They needed to open a new front. They needed to hit the Americans in their nose and make them withdraw. If they didn’t, they risked the spreading malaise of economic prosperity. Once that happened, the people would no longer have the stomach to fight.

The yammering continued, with each advisor to Amatullah trying to outdo the next in the arena of tough talk. Mukhtar’s patience was threadbare. Allah surely had important plans for him. Why else would He have allowed him to survive the horrible attack at the nuclear facility? He’d spent the first day in the hospital heavily sedated. His lungs ached from all the coughing. When Amatullah sent for him, he was eager for the chance to get away from the poking and prodding of the nurses and doctors. If he had known the meeting was going to be like this, however, he would have stayed in his bed.

Major General Dadress, the chief of the armed forces, was backtracking from his earlier statements that his shore batteries could sink every U.S. ship in the gulf if given the word. He was now saying that while he could inflict heavy casualties on the United States, such an aggressive move would undoubtedly be seen as an act of war and would invite heavy reprisals.

“And what do you call what they did to us?” Amatullah asked with his signature half grin. “Was it not an act of war? Can we sit here and let it go unpunished?”

“I agree,” said General Dadress, trying to sound reasonable, “but we must carefully consider what is proportional.”

Mukhtar tilted his head back and let out a contemptuous groan. Amatullah and all of his advisors turned to see what had upset the uncouth leader of Hezbollah.

“What is wrong?” Amatullah asked, showing only amusement.

“I can’t believe I am hearing this,” Mukhtar said with no attempt whatsoever to conceal his disgust. “Proportional. War is not about equal portions. You have been attacked by Israel and America without provocation. You were doing exactly what Israel did thirty years ago when they developed nuclear weapons in defiance of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. They, more than any country, had no right to do this to us.”

There was a knock on the door, and then it opened to reveal Azad Ashani. The minister of intelligence looked down the length of the table at Amatullah and said, “I am sorry I wasn’t here on time.”

“I was told you were in the hospital.”

Ashani grabbed one of the few remaining chairs. “Doctors like to err on the side of caution.”