SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(16)

“Unclear.”

“Then why is his disappearance such a big deal?”

“It is, Crocker. That’s all you need to know.”

Trying to understand what had been going on with the Contessa, Crocker asked, “Were you able to ascertain the nationality of the men on the launch?”

Donaldson nodded at Anders, who reached for a folder. “You ever hear of the Qods Force, Crocker?”

Of course he had. The Qods Force was the external intelligence apparatus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran—essentially state-sponsored terrorists linked to assassinations and bombings in countries all over the world, including Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Thailand, and France.

Crocker nodded. “They’re only the nastiest motherfuckers on the planet.”

“Among the cleverest, too.” Donaldson grunted and turned to Anders. “Show him the photo.”

The image was of a middle-aged man with intense black eyes, a broken nose, and acne-scarred skin partially covered by a short black beard.

“Recognize him?”

The eyes looked familiar. He thought they belonged to the third man in the launch cabin, the one who had slipped away while he was grappling on the floor with the two others.

“Maybe.”

“His name is Colonel Farhed Alizadeh, also known as Colonel D, member of the Iranian Revolutionary Corps and an engineer linked to Iran’s nuclear program.”

Crocker had never heard of him. “Did the divers find his body?”

“Not yet.”

“I hope they find him.”

“That would be a huge relief.”



Back at the barracks, Crocker tossed and turned throughout the night. He kept waking up and thinking about a museum he had visited in Nagasaki when he was a young navy corpsman stationed with the marines, and about the horrors of nuclear weapons.

On the morning of August 9, 1945, a U.S. B-29 bomber veered away from its intended target—Kokura—because of thick cloud cover and instead dropped a 10,200-pound nuclear bomb, known as Fat Man, on Nagasaki. The resulting 21-kiloton explosion—the equivalent of 75 million sticks of dynamite—destroyed almost all of the city’s buildings and killed roughly 39,000 people. Another 25,000 were horribly burned. Over the following weeks and months another 40,000 residents died from radiation exposure and other injuries.

According to one observer, “A huge fireball formed in the sky.…Together with the flash came the heat rays and the blast, which destroyed everything on earth. When the fire itself burned out, there appeared a completely changed, vast, colorless world that made you think it was the end of life on earth. The whole city became extinct.”

It was the pictures of the burn victims, and the deformed children born to survivors from outside the city who were exposed to radiation, that gave Crocker the chills. He knew that the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki was primitive and limited in firepower compared to some of the bombs built today, ten kilotons compared to as high as ten megatons—approximately a thousand times bigger.

As the WMD officer at ST-6, he also understood the dangers of nuclear proliferation and on more than one occasion had risked his life to stop it. After the fall of the Soviet union  , when approximately two hundred nuclear warheads were either sold or stolen, he had launched spectacular missions into Belarus, Uzbekistan, and caves in North Korea to recover them.

The idea of an aggressive country like Iran, run by a group of religious zealots, getting its hands on nuclear weapons that were even more lethal than the ones dropped on Japan filled him with dread. And the more he thought about Farhed Alizadeh and the incident on the Contessa, the more he was plagued by questions.

They were still screaming for his attention as he ran his team thirty-five miles around the island that morning. Even after they had stretched and he had reminded his men about the importance of hydration, electrolyte replacement, bringing extra shoes, and race tactics, he kept asking himself what the Iranians were up to.

He’d learned not to shy away from things that nagged him. They always came around to bite him in the ass. So despite the fact that he had a number of things to do that afternoon to prepare for the race in Morocco, he arranged to meet Ed Wolfson in a coffee shop near the U.S. embassy.

After they sat down, he said, “I hate being made to feel responsible for an outcome that I don’t really understand.”

“Likewise, I’m sure. What’s on your mind?”

“What do you know about Farhed Alizadeh’s mission on the Contessa?” Crocker asked.

“Enough to tell you that from my perspective the whole thing was planned ahead of time. More precisely, the crew member who disappeared was working for the Iranians. The whole pirating incident was staged.”