Executive orders - Tom Clancy [355]
SO WHAT DO you think? Another training rotation was completed. Present at the final review of operations were some very senior Israeli officers, at least one of whom was a senior spook. Colonel Sean Magruder was a cavalryman, but in a real sense every senior officer was an intelligence consumer, and willing to shop at any source.
I think the Saudis are very nervous, along with all their neighbors.
And you? Magruder asked. He'd unconsciously adopted the informal and direct mode of address common in the country, especially its military.
Avi ben Jakob, still titularly a military officer-he was wearing a uniform now-was deputy chief of the Mossad. He wondered how far he could go, but with his job title, that was really for him to decide.
We are not pleased at all by the development.
Historically, Colonel Magruder observed, Israel has had a working relationship with Iran, even after the Shah fell. That goes all the way back to the Persian Empire. I believe your festival of Purim results from that period. Israeli air force pilots flew missions for the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war and-
We had a large number of Jews then in Iran, and that was intended to get them out, Jakob said quickly.
And the arms-for-hostages mess that Reagan got into went through here, probably your agency, Magruder added, just to show that he, too, was a player in the game.
You are well informed.
That's my job, part of it anyway. Sir, I am not making value judgments here. Getting your people out of Iran back then was, as we say at home, business, and all countries have to do business. I'm just asking what you think of the UIR.
We think Daryaei is the most dangerous man in the world.
Magruder thought of the eyes-only brief he'd had earlier in the day about the Iranian troop movements into Iraq. I agree.
He'd come to like the Israelis. That hadn't always been true. For years, the United States Army had cordially disliked the Jewish state, along with the other branches of the service, mainly because of the corporate arrogance adopted by the small nation's senior military officers. But the IDF had learned humility in Lebanon, and learned to respect American arms as observers in the Persian Gulf War-after literally months of telling American officers that they needed advice on how to fight first the air war and then the ground war, they'd quickly taken to asking, politely, to look over some of the American plans because there might be some few minor things worthy of a little study.
The descent of the Buffalo Cav into the Negev had changed things some more. America's tragedy in Vietnam had broken another type of arrogance, and from that had grown a new type of professionalism. Under Marion Diggs, first CO of the reborn 10th United States Cavalry, quite a few harsh lessons had been handed out, and while Magruder was continuing that tradition, the Israeli troopers were learning, just as Americans had done at Fort Irwin. After the initial screams and near fistfights, common sense had broken out. Even Benny Eitan, commander of the Israeli 7th Armored Brigade, had rallied from the first set of drubbings to finish his training rotation with a pair of break-evens, and come away thanking his American hosts for the lessons-and promising to kick their asses when he returned the next year. In the central computer in the local Star Wars building, a complex mathematical model said that the performance of the Israeli army had improved by fully forty percent in just a few years, and now that they again had something to be arrogant about, the Israeli officers were showing disarming humility and an almost ruthless desire to learn-ever signs of truly professional soldiers.
And now one of their head spooks wasn't talking about how his forces could handle anything the Islamic world might throw at his country. That was worth a contact report to Washington, Magruder thought.
THE BUSINESS JET once lost in the Mediterranean could no longer leave the country. Even using it to ferry the Iraqi generals to Sudan had been