24

IN THE WAR ROOM of the Revolutionary Guard, an eerie silence pervades the subterranean space, a silence underscored by the cricket-like keystrokes of ninety intelligence officers bent over their computers before a display wall of coordinated monitors that can show a dozen scenes or be united to display a single image. Right now that image is Jerusalem, burning.

General Niroomad puffs on his second Montecristo. “Knesset,” he says to his technical assistant, a captain trained at Caltech.

The giant image zooms down to show a building destroyed, smoke rising above it in a black column. Earmarked as a prime target, the Israeli parliament has been destroyed not because its legislators might be in the plenum at four in the morning, but because of its symbolic significance, both to the Muslim attackers and the Jews.

“Haifa.”

Built along the sides of Mount Carmel as it flows liquid-like down to the enormous cranes of the container port at its base, the city is aflame. In the harbor, two dozen commercial ships list, some already half-sunk. Farther north, thirty-two IDF Navy missile boats burn in the harbor.

“Tel Aviv.”

Here the picture is different. Because only a few specific sites have been targeted, the city appears as peaceful as it should be this early in the morning, though traffic—running without headlights—has begun to move in the darkened streets

“Airbases.”

The single tiled-together screen devolves into twelve separate images, under which like subtitles in a foreign-language movie are the airbase names in Farsi. Except for these, each screen shows the same scene: IAF aircraft in flames, the tarmac beneath them itself a sea of fire. Here and there explosions erupt as fuel dumps ignite, making the screens go white, momentarily overwhelming the automated lighting adjustments of the satellite cameras.

General Niroomad carefully drops a half inch of ash into a crystal ashtray engraved with the seal of the Revolutionary Guard. So quietly only his adjutant can hear, he says what he has been longing to say for a year.

“Commence ground.”