The Enemy Within

Christ, what a fuckup, Thorn thought in despair. At first, he’d thought their attack had gone off without a hitch at the cost of only two Delta Force soldiers lightly wounded. They’d even secured the headquarters complex without alerting anyone outside the area. Now, though, it was dear that their intelligence had been wildly off the mark. Neither Taleh nor his top-level invasion command staff had been inside the Khorasan Square building. He and his troops had hit the wrong damned target!

His eye fell on the two troopers setting up a SATCOM radio near an open window. Once they had a clear signal, he was going to have to report the failure of their mission to Washington.

Diaz stuck his head into the office. “I have something I think you should see, Pete.” “Where?” Thorn asked tightly.

“The HQ comm center. I think we may be able to draw a bead on our Iranian friend.”

“Show me.” Thorn grabbed his weapon and followed the sergeant major down three flights of stairs into the basement.

On the way they passed Delta Force troopers checking bodies for identity cards. Major Witt believed in being thorough.

The communications center was a large room just off the staircase. Banks of high-frequency radios, telephone switchboards, and teletype machines lined three of the walls. The fourth held a large street map of Tehran with various locations marked. Most of the equipment was old 1970s and 1980s vintage but there were a few newer computers and fax machines on a group of desks cluttered in the center of the room. There were more corpses huddled on the floor or sprawled across the desks. The comm center at least had been fully manned.

Diaz led him straight across the room to where a Delta Force trooper, Master Sergeant Vaughn, stood tracing circuits and switches on one of the telephone switchboards. “Show the colonel what you found, Tony.”

Thinner than most of the men who made it through the Delta selection course, Tony Vaughn was one of the outfit’s top technical specialists and linguists. He pointed to a set of panels. “See these?”

Thorn nodded.

“They’re patch panels to several remote sites. Phone calls come in here to the main center and this gear reroutes them elsewhere automatically,” Vaughn explained. “Now, what’s interesting in all of this spaghetti wire is that I’ve found a series of switches that show that several primary circuits are being routed to one site but not to any of the others.”

“They’re tied into an auxiliary command post,” Thorn realized suddenly.

Vaughn nodded. “Exactly.” He led the way back to the desks in the middle of the room and hefted a pile of loose-leaf binders. “So that’s when I started looking through their latest comm logs.”

The noncom flipped the top log open to a page near the end. “And this is where I hit pay dirt.” He tapped an entry. “Here’s what the chief watch officer noted for 1210 hours, 13 December: ‘MAGI Prime transferred to Aux Site Three. Command circuit, staff phones, emergency circuit routed to Aux Site Three.’ ”

Thorn swung toward the wall map of Tehran. A walled compound near the intersection of two major avenues was clearly marked as Auxiliary Site Three. A soccer stadium lay to the east just across the street. The location was painfully familiar to any Delta Force officer with a knowledge of his own unit’s history. His jaw tightened. “I’ll be damned! The son of a bitch has set up his new command post smack-dab in the middle of our old embassy!”

He shook his head, angry at himself for underestimating Amir Taleh’s cunning yet again. With the clock counting down toward a major military move, transferring his headquarters was a reasonable precaution for the Iranian general to take. He suspected it would also give the man a twisted sense of pleasure to issue the orders that would emasculate America’s economy from inside the embassy buildings Iranian militants had used in 1979 and 1980 as a prison for their hostages.

Thorn and Diaz took the stairs back up at a dead run.

Witt and the others were still waiting for them inside the second-floor office. “We’re in contact with the CAC,” the major said.

Thorn went straight to the SATCOM, slipped on the headset offered to him by one of his soldiers, and picked up the microphone. “Nemesis Lead.”

“This is Centurion,” Farrell’s voice answered. To oversee the mission, the general had flown down to the Special Operations Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. SOCOM’s Crisis Action Center had secure computer, phone, fax, and satellite links to the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House, and every major U.S. military headquarters around the world.

“What is your status, Nemesis?” Farrell asked.

“Not good. We’ve missed the primary target, Centurion,” Thorn reported quietly. He quickly filled the other man in on what they had learned and then said, “I recommend we delay our evac, move the force, and immediately attack Taleh’s alternate HQ.”