Depth Charge (2020) is the fourth in Jack Slater's series starring Jason Trapp. Trapp is a former Army Ranger and current CIA agent who is President Nash's go-to for those difficult geopolitical-military missions that keep America both safe and unaware that a problem even existed.
Slater's books always have lots of moving parts that interact in complex ways before their meaning becomes clear. Almost every page shouts, "Read On!" This is perfect summer reading, especially in the age of Coronavirus when reading is the only risk-free activity—unless you're driving.
Background
The three geopolitical legs of the book's stool are the U. S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia. As we know, Iran's Islamist government hates both the U. S. and the Saudis—the Saudis because they are Sunni and direct contenders for Mid-East power, the U. S. because it is the world's poster child for infidelism, because it meddles in Mid-Eastern affairs, because it has the temerity to have military forces in the middle East, and because Saudi Arabia is protected by U. S. power.
Saudi Arabia and the U. S. are allies with sibling rivalries—they don't trust each other, but they are in the same family and if push comes to shove, they will be allies against Iran. Iran's goal is to trick the U. S. and Saudi-Arabia into destroying each other. That's the line-up as the book starts. And so . . .
. . . a state-of-the-art Chinese missile submarine, the Tianjin has sunk in the North Pacific about 500 miles north of Wake Island. It's location is unknown except to the Iranian who led the operation to sink it. While the Chinese, the Americans, and everyone else is looking for the sub, an Iranian recovery vessel flying a German flag, the MV Challenger, is perched over the sub's resting place ready to extract the twelve one-megaton missiles aboard the Tianjin. In one swoop the Iranians will have nuclear warheads, thus bypassing the restrictions on nuclear fuel imposed by western nations.
The only person who knows Tianjin's location is an Iranian Major named Amir Nazeri: he knows because he is the one who caused the sub's sinking. At the moment Major Nazeri is on the MV Challenger hovering over the Tianjin. Major Nazeri is a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the very capable inner army of Iran's Islamic government. Hoisting lines have been attached to the Tianjin and in a few hours, when the eyes of American satellites are out of the region, the recovery will begin.
Also on board MV Challenger is an Israeli MOSSAD agent named Effrayin Levshin, ostensibly an engineer but whose job is to observe and report the ship's activities to Tehran. When Levshin sees the missile submarine rise to the surface, he knows the devastation it represents. Then a second ship—a freighter named MV North Star joins the MV Challenger. Levshin realizes that it is the ship that will take the missiles, and that the MV Challenger and its crew will be left to sink. Levshin debarks from the ill-fated ship in a life raft with survival gear and a radio beacon.; there is little ship traffic and no civilization within many hundreds of miles.
Levshin's radio beacon will be heard and, near death from exposure, he will be picked up by a U. S. Navy ship and transported to a naval hospital in Hawaii. He will remain in a coma for quite a while and when he wakes up he reports that Iran has twelve nuclear missiles on the MV North Star. A full scale effort to find the ship begins.
Far away, in a desert gully in Iraq about twenty miles from Ramadi, our hero, Jason Trapp, codenamed "Hangman," is in a hide on a dark night. His closest comrades are a company of Rangers fifty miles away. Trapp is there in support of a behind-the-scenes effort by President Nash and the moderate Iranian President, Ashkan Khorosani, to break the hold of Islamist leaders on Iran's politics. This means reducing the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the military arm of the Islamic government, and unseating the Ayatollahs.
Jason's mission in the desert is to observe a meeting of a high-level member of the IRGC with a group of local Iraqi militia leaders; his goal is to identify the IRGC man. Jason is about 200 yards from the meeting site with two weapons, a long-range camera and a sniper rifle: the first is for information, the second for protection. To Trapp's amazement, the high-level IRGC member is the second most powerful figure in Iran—General Quassam Suleiman, head of IRGC. Something very big is afoot! [Suleiman, you'll remember, is the bad guy taken out by American drones at the Tehran airport in early 2020.]
Once back from his desert gully, Trapp joins Hamza Hussein, an old friend from previous books. Hussein is a Saudi intelligence agent working for the good guys, and Trapp trusts him; he is also a member of Saudi intelligence and a prince in a land with more princes than grains of sand. Together they fly to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to interrogate another prince, Prince Waleed. Waleed is the head of the Saudi oil franchise and a man very interested in raising the price of oil. He is suspected of complicity in the destruction of the Port Arthur refinery.
Back in the U S of A
Back in the U. S., a Saudi-American Air Force Lieutenant is a copiloting a large refueling tanker carrying 200,000 tons of jet fuel to the Houston area. On the way he kills the pilot, takes full command of the plane, and guides it into the major oil refinery at Port Arthur. Mission accomplished!
The destruction of the Port Arthur refinery is followed by several coordinated attacks on U. S. oil supplies: three smaller refineries are damaged, mortars are used to destroy a pipeline from Canada through North Dakota, and nine trans-U. S. pipelines are broken. This is traced by U. S. intelligence to Saudi nationals so U. S. intelligence puts this down to a Saudi program to raise oil prices (hence the interest in Prince Waleed).
But who within the vast and internally contentious Saudi royal family is really responsible? President Nash meets with the Saudi Ambassador and tells him that the "who" question is irrelevant: we know that the Saudis were involved and unless the Saudis give the U. S. certain information, Nash will order the destruction of Saudi Arabia's water desalinization plants. Tit for Tat!
Meanwhile seven Iranian intelligence operatives are meeting at a warehouse in New York City. among them is Major Amnir Nazeri, the man who lead the operation on MV Challenger. The meeting is called by IRGC General Hasan Zargari, dubbed The Ghost. Zargari, then a Colonel, was once Nazeri's commander; Nazeri was slavishly loyal to him but saw him killed in a previous action. Nazeri vividly remembers seeing Zargari killed in an operation. Nazeri is upset that Zargari hadn't trusted him enough to tell him that his death was a ruse, but his loyalty snaps back into place and he signs on to a mission that, the Ghost says, will be a "final" blow against the Great Satan.
Once Zargari's got the rapt attention of the other six, he executes them—the meeting was just to "wrap up loose ends." Though Zargari is badly injured in the melee, he leaves the warehouse under his own steam and heads for Canada. On the way he kills a pharmacist to get medical supplies.
The FBI has been watching a number of Saudis in the U. S. One, Youssef Attar, is a twenty-one year old NYU engineering student who lives in a $6,000 per month condo—he's either a scion of the Saudi elite or a bad guy. Trapp joins with FBI agent Nicholas Price in watching Attar's condo. They wait for him to leave and when he does—carrying a big backpack—he is followed by FBI agents while Trapp and Price search his condo. There they find bomb-making equipment for high-grade plastic explosives, detonators and so on. But there are no explosives. Their suspicion is that when Attar left his condo his backpack contained a ready-to-use suicide vest. They go to his destination—a New York mosque holding Friday services—and arrest him; a fully-armed suicide vest is in the backpack.
President Nash meets with Ashkan Khorosani, the Iranian President, at the White House. He wants to bring Khorosani into a briefing of the state of affairs between the U. S. and Iran by including him in a situation room meeting viewing a U. S. attack by Navy SEALS on the MV Triumph, the Iranian freighter that is now carrying Iran's newly-acquired nuclear warheads. The attack is a messy success with one alarming surprise: there are only eleven warheads aboard MV Triumph was heading after leaving one missile MV North Star for more immediate use.
But there's a bonus: on board MV Triumph is an Iranian nuclear physicist who had been kidnapped by the IRGC for this mission. He's happy to talk and reports that he thinks the IRGC plans to use the North Star as a launch platform. He also reports seeing a large cache of winter weather gear when he was aboard the North Star. So it looks like a nuclear attack of a major city will be launched from a cold region of the planet; the 700km range of the missile suggests the launch site is the North Atlantic and the target is likely to be New York City.
President's Nash and Khorosani are both horrified by the potential for mass destruction of a major U. S. city and by Iran's plan to put the blame on Saudi Arabia. We wonder where that attack will occur. Read on to find out! But if you're still alive when you read this, you know it's not your city. tull, turn on CNN.