One man in a tattered blue shirt half ran and half staggered back to a small oasis he knew. With still a quarter of a mile to go, he saw a tiny figure running toward him, her ragged dress flying, her long dark hair waving behind her like a shining banner.

Leyla leaped into his arms, hugging him and sobbing into his neck. After a moment she pulled back.

“Papa.” She smiled, blinking away wet eyes. “I prayed, and you were right; they came. The angels. Did you seem them – was it them that saved you?”

He nodded. “They saved us all, and sent the bad men all to hell.”

“Good.” She nodded, satisfied, and then closed her eyes. “Please God, now bring down your hammer on Hell itself.”

CHAPTER 8

Hammerson read the intercepted Israeli information brief, and collated it with Alex’s data from the desert. The debris from the Golan Heights indicated enough raw high energy material to construct a bomb of about thirty-five kilotons – bigger than both Soran and the Baghdad blasts. They were getting more audacious and deadly.

Alex had said they uncovered plans to transport one to Italy. That was a horrifying thought in anyone’s book. But more worrying was the fact that they believed it was the Iranian IRG that might be behind it. Hammerson exhaled, sitting back, his mind working on plans and permutations.

If it was true, that the Iranians were behind the nuclear blasts responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocents – including many Americans – it was grounds for a full-scale war.

Hammerson stared into the distance as he thought through the implications. The blasts also meant the Iranians had nuclear capability, no matter what they professed to the UN inspectors. Hammerson knew they didn’t have perfect ICBM technology, so missile delivery was still years away. But someone walking, driving, or flying a big tactical nuke anywhere in the world, meant nothing other than an aggressive plan of gross annihilation.

Why? he wondered. Why this huge risk? We could turn their entire country into slag.

His fingers tapped on his desk. There were the final negotiations between the Iranian government and the White House going on. Washington was seeking to enlist their help in fighting the Hezar-Jihadi in return for allowing them to keep their uranium enrichment program.

By having the terrorists seem to be using weapons of mass destruction, then it would add to a sense of urgency on the West’s part. Time was the enemy of good negotiation, and creating this pressure on the adversary was the key to pushing them into a bad deal.