Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Calvin Dexter did not need to return to Pennington to collect any messages left on the answering machine attached to his office telephone. He could make the collections from a public phone booth in Brooklyn. He did so on 15 August.

  The cluster of messages was mainly from voices he knew before the speaker identified himself. Neighbours, law clients, local businessmen; mainly wishing him a happy fishing vacation and asking when he would be back at his desk.

  It was the second-to-last message that almost caused him to drop the phone, to stare, unseeing, at the traffic rushing past the glass of the booth. When he had replaced the handset he walked for an hour trying to work out how it had happened, who had leaked his name and business and, most important of all, whether the anonymous voice was that of a friend or a betrayer.

  The voice did not identify the speaker. It was flat, monotone, as if coming through several layers of paper tissue. It said simply: ‘Avenger, be careful. They know you are coming.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Plan

  When Professor Medvers Watson left, the Surinamese consul was feeling slightly breathless; so much so, the official very nearly excluded the academic from the list of visa applicants he was sending to Kevin McBride at a private address in the city.

  ‘Callicore maronensis,’ beamed the professor when asked for the reason he wished to visit Surinam. The consul looked blank. Seeing his perplexity, Dr Watson delved into his attaché case and produced Andrew Neild’s masterwork: The Butterflies of Venezuela.

  ‘It’s been seen, you know. The type “V”. Unbelievable.’

  He whipped open the reference work at a page of coloured photographs of butterflies that, to the consul, looked pretty similar, barring slight variations of marking to the back wings.

  ‘One of the Limenitidinae, you know. Subfamily, of course. Like the Charaxinae. Both derived from the Nymphalidae, as you probably know.’

  The bewildered consul found himself being educated in the descending order of family, subfamily, genus, species and subspecies.

  ‘But what do you want to do about them?’ asked the consul. Professor Medvers Watson closed his almanac with a snap.

  ‘Photograph them, my dear sir. Find them and photograph them. Apparently there has been a sighting. Until now the Agrias narcissus was about as rare as it gets in the jungles of your hinterlands, but the Callicore maronensis? Now that would make history. That is why I must go without delay. The autumn monsoon, you know. Not far off.’

  The consul stared at the US passport. Stamps for Venezuela were frequent. Others for Brazil, Guyana. He unfolded the letter on the headed paper of the Smithsonian Institute. Professor Watson was warmly endorsed by the head of the Department of Entomology, Division Lepidoptera. He nodded slowly. Science, environment, ecology, these were the things not to be gainsaid or denied in the modern world. He stamped the visa and handed back the passport.

  Professor Watson did not ask for the letter, so it stayed on the desk.

  ‘Well, good hunting,’ he said weakly.

  Two days later Kevin McBride walked into the office of Paul Devereaux with a broad smile on his face.

  ‘I think we have him,’ he said. He laid down a completed application form of the type issued by the Surinamese Consulate and filled out by the applicant for a visa. A passport-sized photo stared up from the page.

  Devereaux read through the details.

  ‘So?’

  McBride laid a letter beside the form. Devereaux read that as well.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s a phoney. There is no US passport-holder in the name of Medvers Watson. State Department is adamant on that. He should have picked a more common name. This one sticks out like a sore thumb. The scholars at the Smithsonian have never heard of him. No one in the butterfly world has ever heard of Medvers Watson.’

  Devereaux stared at the picture of the man who had tried to ruin his covert operation and thus had become, albeit unwittingly, his enemy. The eyes looked owlish behind the glasses, and the straggly goatee beard off the point of the chin weakened instead of strengthened the face.

  ‘Well done, Kevin. Brilliant strategy. But then, it worked; and of course all that works becomes brilliant. Every detail immediately to Colonel Moreno in San Martin if you please. He may move quickly.’

  ‘And the Surinam government in Parbo.’

  ‘No, not them. No need to disturb their slumbers.’

  ‘Paul, they could arrest him the moment he flies into Parbo airport. Our embassy boys could confirm the passport is a forgery. The Surinamese charge him with passport fraud and put him on the next plane back. Two of our marines as escort. We arrest him on touchdown and he’s in the slammer, out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Kevin, listen to me. I know it’s rough and I know the reputation of Moreno. But if our man has a big stack of dollars he could elude arrest in Surinam. Back here he could get bail within a day, then skip.’

  ‘But, Paul, Moreno is an animal. You wouldn’t send your worst enemy into his grip . . .’

  ‘And you don’t know how important the Serb is to all of us. Nor his paranoia. Nor how tight his schedule may be. He has to know the danger to himself is over, totally eliminated, or he will butt out of what I need him for.’

  ‘And you still can’t tell me?’

  ‘Sorry, Kevin. No, not yet.’

  His deputy shrugged, unhappy but obedient.

  ‘OK, on your conscience, not mine.’

  And that was the problem, thought Paul Devereaux when he was once again alone in his office, staring out at the thick green foliage between him and the Potomac. Could he square his conscience with what he was doing? He had to. The lesser evil, the greater good.

  The unknown man with the false passport would not die easily, upon the midnight with no pain. But he had chosen to swim in hideously dangerous waters, and it had been his decision to do so.

  That day, 18 August, America sweltered in the summer heat, and half the country sought relief in the seas, rivers, lakes and mountains. Down on the north coast of South America, 100 per cent humidity, sweeping in from the steaming jungles behind the coast, added ten more degrees to the hundred caused by the sun.

  In Parbo docks, ten miles up the teak-brown Surinam River from the sea, the heat was like a tangible blanket, lying over the warehouses and quays. The pye-dogs tried to find the deepest shade to pant away the hours until sundown. Humans sat under slow-moving fans which merely moved the discomfort around a bit.

  The foolish tossed down sugary drinks, sodas and colas, which merely made the thirst and dehydration worse. The experienced stayed with piping hot, sweet tea, which may sound crazy but was discovered by the British empire-builders two centuries earlier to be the best rehydrator of them all.

  The fifteen-hundred-ton freighter, Tobago Star, crept up the river, docked at her assigned pier and waited for dark. In the cooler dusk she discharged her cargo, which included a bonded crate in the name of US diplomat Ronald Proctor. This went into a chain-link-fenced section of the warehouse to await collection.

  Paul Devereaux had spent years studying terrorism in general, and the types that emanated from the Arab and Muslim world, not necessarily the same type, in particular.

  He had long come to the conclusion that the conventional whine in the West, that terrorism stemmed from the poverty and destitution of those whom Fanon had called ‘the wretched of the earth’, was convenient and politically correct psychobabble.

  From the Anarchists of Tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to EOKA in Cyprus, from the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, CCC in Belgium, Action Directe in France, Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany again, the Renko Sekkigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru, to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of comfortably raised, well-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-i
ndulgence.

  Having studied them all, Devereaux was finally convinced the same applied to all their leaders, the self-arrogated champions of the working classes. The same applied in the Middle East as in Western Europe, South America or Far East Asia. Imad Mugniyah, George Habash, Abu Awas, Abu Nidal and all the other Abus had never missed a meal in their lives. Most had college degrees.

  In the Devereaux theory those who could order another to plant a bomb in a food hall and gloat over the resultant images all had one thing in common. They possessed a fearsome capacity for hatred. This was the genetic ‘given’. The hatred came first; the target could come later and usually did.

  The motive also came second to the capacity to hate. It might be Bolshevik revolution, national liberation or a thousand variants thereof, from amalgamation to secession; it might be anti-capitalist fervour; it might be religious exaltation.

  But the hatred came first, then the cause, then the target, then the methods and finally the self-justification. And Lenin’s ‘useful dupes’ always swallowed it.

  Devereaux was utterly convinced that the leadership of Al Qaeda ran precisely true to form. Its co-founders were a construction millionaire from Saudi Arabia and a qualified doctor from Cairo. It mattered not whether their hatred of Americans and Jews was secular-based or religiously fuelled. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that America or Israel could do, short of complete self-annihilation, that would even begin to appease or satisfy them.

  None of them, for him, cared a damn for the Palestinians save as vehicles and justifications. They hated his country not for what it did but for what it was.

  He recalled the old British spy chief in the window table at White’s as the left-wing demonstrators went by. Apart from the usual snowy-haired British socialists who could never quite get over the death of Lenin, there were the British boys and girls who would one day get a mortgage and vote Conservative, and there were the torrents of students from the Third World.

  ‘They’ll never forgive you, dear boy,’ said the old man. ‘Never expect it and you’ll never be disappointed. Your country is a constant reproach. It is rich to their poor, strong to their weak, vigorous to their idle, enterprising to their reactionary, ingenious to their bewildered, can-do to their sit-and-wait, thrusting to their stunted.

  ‘It only needs one demagogue to arise to shout: “Everything the Americans have they stole from you”, and they’ll believe it. Like Shakespeare’s Caliban, their zealots stare in the mirror and roar in rage at what they see. That rage becomes hatred, the hatred needs a target. The working class of the Third World does not hate you; it is the pseudo-intellectuals. If they ever forgive you, they must indict themselves. So far their hatred lacks the weaponry. One day they will acquire that weaponry. Then you will have to fight or die. Not in tens but in tens of thousands.’

  Thirty years down the line, Devereaux was sure the old Brit had got it right. After Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Aden, his country was in a new war and did not know it. The tragedy was made worse by the fact the establishment was steeped in ostriches as well.

  The Jesuit had asked for the front line and got it. Now he had to do something with his command. His response was Project Peregrine. He did not intend to seek to negotiate with UBL, nor even to respond after the next strike. He intended to try to destroy his country’s enemy before that strike. In Father Xavier’s analogy, he intended to use his spear to lunge, before the knife-tip came in range. This problem was: where? Not more or less, not ‘somewhere in Afghanistan’, but ‘where’ to ten yards by ten yards, and ‘when’ to thirty minutes.

  He knew a strike was coming. They all did; Dick Clarke at the White House, Tom Pickard at the Bureau headquarters in the Hoover Building, George Tenet one floor above his head at Langley. All the whispers out on the street said a ‘big one’ was in preparation. It was the where, when, what, how, they did not know, and thanks to the crazy rules forbidding them to ask nasty people, they were not likely to find out. That, plus the refusal to collate what they did have.

  Paul Devereaux was so disenchanted with the whole lot of them that he had prepared his Peregrine plan and would tell no one what it was.

  In his reading of tens of thousands of pages about terror in general and Al Qaeda in particular, one theme had come endlessly through the fog. The Islamist terrorists would not be satisfied with a few dead Americans from Mogadishu to Dar es Salaam. UBL would want hundreds of thousands. The prediction of the long-gone Britisher was coming true.

  For those kind of figures the Al Qaeda leadership would need a technology they did not yet have but endlessly sought to acquire. Devereaux knew that in the cave complexes of Afghanistan, which were not simply holes in rocks but subterranean labyrinths including laboratories, experiments had been started with germs and gases. But they were still miles from the methods of mass-dissemination.

  For Al Qaeda, as for all the terror groups in the world, there was one prize beyond rubies: fissionable material. Any one of at least a dozen killer groups would give their eye-teeth, take crazy risks, to acquire the basic element of a nuclear device.

  It would never have to be an ultra-modern ‘clean’ warhead; indeed the more basic, the ‘dirtier’ in radiation terms, the better. Even at the level of their in-house scientists, the terrorists knew that enough fissionable element, jacketed within enough plastic explosive, would create enough lethal radiation over enough square miles to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable for a generation. And that would be apart from the half a million people irradiated into an early, cancerous grave.

  It had been a decade and the underground war had been costly and intense. So far, the West, assisted by Moscow more recently, had won it and survived. Huge sums had been spent buying up any fragment of Uranium 235 or plutonium that came near to private sale. Entire countries, former Soviet Republics, had handed over every gram left behind by Moscow, and the local dictators, under the provisions of the Nunn-Lugar Act, had become very wealthy. But there was too much, far too much, quite simply missing.

  Just after he founded his own tiny section in Counter-Terrorism at Langley, Paul Devereaux noticed two things. One was that a hundred pounds of pure, weapons-grade Uranium 235 was lodged at the secret Vinca Institute in the heart of Belgrade. As soon as Milosevic fell, the USA began to negotiate its purchase. Just a third of it, thirty-three pounds or fifteen kilograms, would be enough for one bomb.

  The other thing was that a vicious Serbian gangster and intimate at the court of Milosevic wanted out, before the roof fell in. He needed ‘cover’, new papers, protection and a place to disappear to. Devereaux knew that place could never be the USA. But a banana republic . . . Devereaux cut him a deal and he cut him a price. The price was collaboration.

  Before he quit Belgrade, a thumbnail-sized sample of Uranium 235 was stolen from the Vinca Institute, and the records were changed to show that a full fifteen kilograms had really gone missing.

  Six months earlier, introduced by the arms dealer, Vladimir Bout, the runaway Serb had handed over his sample and documentary proof that he possessed the remaining fifteen kilos.

  The sample had gone to Al Qaeda’s chemist and physicist, Abu Khabab, another highly educated and fanatical Egyptian. It had necessitated his leaving Afghanistan and quietly travelling to Iraq to secure the equipment he needed to test the sample properly.

  In Iraq another nuclear programme was underway. It also sought weapons-grade Uranium 235, but was making it the slow, old-fashioned way, with calutrons like the ones used in 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The sample caused great excitement.

  Just four weeks before the circulation of that damnable report compiled by a Canadian magnate concerning his long-dead grandson, word had come through that Al Qaeda would deal. Devereaux had to force himself to stay very calm.

  For his killing machine, he had wanted to use an unmanned high-altitude drone called the Predator, but it had crashed just outside Afghanistan. Its wreckage was now back in the USA but the hitherto unar
med UAV was being ‘weaponized’ by the fitting of a Hellfire missile so that it could in future not only see a target from the stratosphere but blow it to bits as well.

  But the conversion would take too long. Paul Devereaux revamped his plan, but he had to delay it while different weaponry was put in place. Only when they were ready could the Serb accept the invitation to journey to Peshawar, Pakistan, there to meet with Kawaheri, Atef, Zubaydah and the physicist Abu Khabab. He would carry with him fifteen kilos of uranium; but not weapons-grade. Yellowcake would do, normal reactor fuel, isotope 238, 3 per cent refined, not the needed 88 per cent.

  At the crucial meeting Zoran Zilic was going to pay for all the favours he had been accorded. If he did not, he would be destroyed by a single phone call to Pakistan’s lethal and pro-Qaeda secret service, the ISI.

  He would suddenly double the price and threaten to leave if his new price was not met. Devereaux was gambling there was only one man who could make that decision and he would have to be consulted.

  Far away in Afghanistan, UBL would have to take that phone call. High above, rolling in space, a listener satellite linked to the National Security Agency would hear the call and pinpoint its destination to a place ten feet by ten feet.

  Would the man at the Afghan end wait around? Could he contain his curiosity to learn whether he had just become the owner of enough uranium to fulfil his most deadly dreams?

  Off the Baluchi coast the nuclear sub USS Columbia would open her hatches to emit a single Tomahawk cruise missile. Even as it flew it would be programmed by global positioning system (GPS) plus Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DISMAC).

  Three navigational systems would guide it to that hundred-square-foot and blow the entire area containing the mobile phone to pieces, including the man waiting for his call-back from Peshawar. For Devereaux the problem was time. The moment when Zilic would have to leave for Peshawar, pausing at Ras al-Khaimah to pick up the Russian, was moving ever closer. He could not afford to let Zilic panic and withdraw on the ground that he was a hunted man and thus their deal was null and void. Avenger had to be stopped and probably destroyed. Lesser evil, greater good.