by Oliver North
About a half hour later, Captain Naruch's four-man team arrived and pulled his beat-up old Toyota van into the decrepit building, next to the AIL Desert Raider. Rotem set up security in the building and in the underbrush surrounding it. Then he established his mobile command post to receive messages from Tel-Nof regarding the satellite tracking of the transmitters Newman was carrying.
Rotem watched as the captain typed information into his laptop computer. A map of the nearby terrain came up on the screen. The captain then taped a tiny umbrella-shaped satellite antenna to one of the broken windows and, using his compass and consulting some entries on a PDA, he carefully aimed the antenna at a predetermined point in the sky.
Next, he hooked the antenna cable to a miniature RF receiver and began to download data from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, 32° north of the equator. With another click on the keyboard, a blinking icon showed up on the map.
“There is Colonel Newman's signal. The satellite has not yet activated the two other transponders,” Captain Naruch said. “It is quite clear. He is moving north from the airport, but not on the highway. If he's not in a car or truck and is traveling off-road, perhaps he's in a four-by-four vehicle. Or maybe a horse or camel?”
Rotem and Naruch stared intently at the computer screen.
“He's moving even faster than a car or truck. Maybe he's on another aircraft. A helicopter maybe?” Rotem said.
The captain shook his head. “It's faster than a car, but slower than a plane or helicopter. And look…he's traveling in a straight line across the desert.”
“He's on the train!” they both said at once.
“Of course,” said Rotem. “That's part of the Hezbollah route that the Iranians use. We should have guessed they'd use the train—just like they did with the women.”
Rotem retrieved a l:100,000-scale military map of Syria from his case in the back of the Desert Raider. He spread it out on the hood of the vehicle. After poring over the map for a few moments, he said, “Perhaps we should anticipate they will stop at either Hims, or farther north...up here, by this old bridge across the river south of Hamah at Ar Rastan.”
“If they aren't in Hims, they must have a place near Hamah,” the captain guessed.
“Let's get out of here and head up to intersect with them. If they take him to another safe house, we'll have a head start and can set up in the general area until we find exactly where they take him,” Rotem said.
“We'll need a place to hide out during daylight hours. There's an abandoned mine just a few kilometers from Ar Rastan,” said Captain Naruch. “The train stops at both Hims and Hamah, and this old mine is alongside the train tracks between the two cities. Once we get a fix on where they take Colonel Newman, we'll do a recon and see just how heavily guarded it is, and then we can mount a rescue operation.”
“What about this ravine area that runs from here to the old mine?” Rotem asked. “Can we safely go that way without being discovered?”
“Yes, your Desert Raider can handle that terrain. But we'll have to take our van on the highway. Since we're not as conspicuous as your six-wheeled vehicle, we can take the regular road without any trouble. We'll plan to meet you here,” Captain Naruch said, pointing to a spot on the map. “You can ford the river at this spot, and go about seven or eight kilometers north. The village of Birin is just northwest, and it's the only place in the entire area where you need to be careful. We can stay in radio contact, and I can alert you to anything that you will need to watch out for.”
“What time do you think they'll move Newman from the train to local transportation?” Rotem asked.
“I'm guessing that this is a passenger train and not freight. He'll probably make Hims in another hour or so…then, if the train follows the scheduled stops, it'll be in Hims for awhile, and then it's another hour before it gets to Hamah, where it makes another scheduled stop,” Naruch said.
“And if they have other plans—like having him stay on the train all the way to Aleppo?”
“Then,” the captain said, “I'm afraid Colonel Newman will be on his own.”
Aboard Northbound Train
77 km North of Damascus, Syria
Thursday, 19 March 1998
1330 Hours, Local
Peter Newman sat on a bench seat in the Third Class coach between two young Arab men. He guessed them to be in their late twenties or early thirties. They had stuck to him like glue ever since meeting him in the International First Class lounge at the airport just outside of Damascus.
The rocking of the train, the clicking of the wheels over the rails, reminded him of his last Syrian train ride. Three years ago, aboard the Taurus Express, successor to the old Orient Express, he had taken the train from the Euphrates Valley across northern Syria to Aleppo. From there, he'd taken another train into Turkey. That trip had been a success: he had safely met Bill Goode in Iskenderun, Turkey, and Goode had smuggled him aboard the Pescador—only to have the sloop blown to bits in Cyprus.
Newman's two escorts for this trip were far from pleasant. Both were armed, and neither of them spoke so much as a word as the train traveled north. Newman had no idea where they were taking him: he expected it might be Hims, the initial place where he and Major Rotem had suspected the women were being held; the other possibility was Hamah, a city just forty-eight kilometers further north. If he remembered correctly, those were the only stops until the train arrived at Aleppo.
Newman held two small, dark-blue knapsacks on his lap containing the changes of clothing for each of the two women that Rotem and he had gathered for their respective wives.
In the car on the way from the airport, one of the two gunmen had taken the two knapsacks and meticulously searched the bags and their contents for any contraband, carefully checking each article of clothing. Newman held his breath while the man felt along the seams for anything that might have been sewn into them. He didn't feel the small epoxy pellets that had been sewn into each of the two brassieres, and Newman had released a silent sigh of relief. Now he held the knapsacks protectively on his lap.
Newman also carried Rachel's diplomatic passport that would enable her to cross any border checkpoint, board a commercial flight, or depart any port without being subject to too much scrutiny from immigrations or customs officials. For the same reason, Newman also carried the black diplomatic passport General Grisham had given him. Though the Marine had no idea what his status was with the United States government and its various agencies, this was no time to take chances. For all he knew, he might still be a wanted fugitive, and he hoped this new passport was his guaranteed ticket out of Syria or any other countries whose borders they crossed.
Sitting between the two thugs, Newman feigned sleep while he tried to focus on the matters at hand. What concerned him at the moment was Major Rotem's Sayeret Duvdevan team. They would be primed for action and, Newman assumed, close by. Despite his fears that the Israelis might act prematurely, Newman had to trust that Rotem would be the professional he claimed to be. After all, his own wife's life was at stake as well.
As he thought about the meeting with the kidnappers, Newman decided his best course of action was to go along, to not aggravate any situation. His only real objective was to get the women rescued without injury. Once they were free, then he could think about saving his own skin.
MI6 New HQ Construction Site
85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall Cross
London, England
Thursday, 19 March 1998
1030 Hours, Local
Sir David Spelling, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as “C” inside “The Firm,” was at the construction site of the new SIS office complex under construction on the south bank of the Thames River. He was standing outside, on the first-level rooftop of the nearly completed, multistoried building, making notes for his meeting with the construction superintendent when MI6 Officer Ian Downs approached him.
C liked Downs. Like himself, Downs was an authority on the M
iddle East and had served with him since the 1980s. Downs had ridden here with C in the armored Land Rover sedan from the aging SIS HQ at Century House in Lambeth. It was only during such rides that Downs could get his boss alone for a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation. But as the pair arrived at the construction site, Downs had received an urgent call on his mobile telephone and had stayed inside the unfinished building to take it.
As C waited for Downs to catch up, he watched as a crane manipulated a heavy steel beam through a tight opening. Though C seemed engrossed in the construction going on around him, his mind was really on his budget meeting with the Prime Minister two hours from now. Since the fall of the Soviet empire, the SIS budget had been cut to the bone. Along with the budget cuts had come drastic personnel reductions; and today, even though he was down to fewer than three thousand intelligence officers and support employees, C knew his budget was about to be trimmed again.
Downs reappeared while C was contemplating how the SIS could possibly do the job that had to be done with the measly one hundred and fifty million pounds Parliament had appropriated.
“Sir David,” Downs said, “do you have time to discuss another matter before we head back to Century House? Blackman and Thomas are downstairs in one of the conference rooms. Even though the wing isn't finished, they tell me this particular room has been Tempest-certified. We can speak securely there.”
“What do Thomas and Blackman want?” the Chief asked.
“They'd like your opinion regarding a Middle East anomaly they uncovered yesterday. Do you have time before your meeting with the PM?”
C glanced at his watch, then nodded and strode toward the construction elevator. “You know,” he said to Downs as they walked, “this is a magnificent view of the Thames and the city, and all of MI6 will be delighted to move here from that drafty old loft in Lambeth. But I have some concerns about this location. Take a look—down there, on the river. Some terrorist group could take a boat and cruise right by, aim one of those Matra Eryx anti-armor missiles that the French are selling all over the place, fire it through any of these windows, and we'd have one bloody, messy massacre. Has the architect thought about that? What's being done about the glass in the windows? What kind of resistance will it have?”
“I'll inquire of the architect as soon as we arrive back at Century House, Sir David. One would hope all of that has already been taken into consideration.”
C grunted. “What floor do we want?”
“Six.”
Moments later, C and Officer Downs walked into the unfinished conference room where two other men were waiting for them. One of the men had spread out some computer printouts of aerial photos and the other had opened his laptop computer atop a makeshift table—a four-foot-square sheet of pressed wood supported on two sawhorses.
“Blackman, Thomas, good day. What have you there?”
“Well, sir...we found something a bit queer when one of our analysts took a closer look at last week's NRO overhead imagery from the Americans,” Thomas said. “These nine shots are from routine day and night passes over Iraq. As you know, Saddam Hussein is giving the UN weapons inspectors a hard time. Well, even though the Americans don't make much of it, Watts down in the Imagery Unit has noticed Saddam has started a regular building boom in the construction of mosques. The Americans say 'so what?' but Watts doesn't think they're really mosques. Here, let me show you the pictures.”
C bent over the makeshift table and perused the printed photos. They consisted of shots of several construction sites, apparently taken from various angles during several different satellite passes over the course of twenty-one days. “Is this one of them?” C asked, pointing to one of the images.
“Yes, sir. That's one that Watts has labeled suspicious. So we went back and interviewed that Republican Guard officer who defected to us in Jordan last month...the one you were briefed on?”
“Yes, yes…what about him?”
“Well sir, he says this particular structure is not used for religious purposes at all, but instead it's a laboratory for weapons of mass destruction…and a prison.”
“A prison? Why would he have a prison together with biological weapons?”
“Our guess is the prisoners might be guinea pigs.”
“I see…Have we notified the UN inspectors about this?”
“Not yet,” Blackman said. “You see, we discovered something else when we were making the high resolution pictures of the prisoners as they were exercising in the courtyard. We thought we ought to get your thoughts on this before we involve the UN—or anyone else for that matter.”
“Go on.”
“These are photos of a group of six prisoners taken at highest magnification, where they were leaning against the interior prison wall,” Thomas said, pointing to the photo. “We compared it to this group of prisoners about fifteen feet away from them.”
“Hmm...I see,” said C. “These men are clearly Arabs, probably Iraqis, maybe even some of the Kuwaiti POWs that were never repatriated...while these men here, these six, certainly seem to be Westerners.”
“Yes, sir, precisely. When we saw this, Blackman remembered a new computer program that came into MI6 from the Canadians. Seems they've developed a new facial recognition software program in collaboration with the Americans. Blackman decided to try it out on this group of faces—the ones that look like Westerners—and see if it turned up anything.”
“And…?”
Blackman went to the computer. “Look at this, Sir David. We started with this man…isolated his head, fed his photo into the computer, and mucked about with it some; then the computer looked for a match in our database of thirty-seven million faces. It came up with this.” Blackman clicked enter and the screen filled with a UK Armed Forces file photo of a man in a British Army uniform. The caption read, “Macklin, Bruno. Captain, SAS” and listed a brief resumé of his military service. Below were the words, in a larger font, “MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD. SEE FILE ACTOR 95322/9945 UK EYES BRAVO.”
“And you checked the ACTOR file?”
“He was assigned by the PM as part of a special SAS contingent that went out on a rogue UN mission in '95...perhaps you remember it, the one that was set up as a joint UK, U.S.A., and UN assassination mission to Iraq,” Blackman said. “Everyone thought Macklin was killed in action.”
“And the others in the photo?”
“We can only ID three more of the six Westerners in the picture. This one is one of ours. He's a pilot shot down while patrolling the ‘no fly' zone three years ago. The other two are Americans, one a U.S. Navy pilot shot down in the Gulf War and the other a U.S. Air Force pilot—same situation. They've all three been in Iraqi prisons since 1991.”
“I see.” C pushed his glasses up on his nose as he stood upright. “Did you try to ID any of the Middle Eastern prisoners?”
“Uh...no, we didn't, sir. Should we?” Thomas asked.
“Yes…let's see if that turns up anything. Let's see if they're political prisoners or common crooks.”
“And then...?” asked Blackman.
“And then we'll discuss it some more. Meanwhile, see if you can find anything else on this Macklin fellow. Now that we know he's alive, I'm sure the PM will want to get him back—as well as any other Brits being held. We may have to plan some kind of operation,” Sir David said. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “What did the Americans say about all this? I should think they'd like to get their pilot back.”
Thomas and Blackman looked at each other and then to Downs for guidance.
“When Thomas took the matter to Liaison, as we're supposed to do, their station chief in London was initially very interested indeed,” Downs said carefully. “But two days later, he came back and said the CIA disagreed with our analysis, and they were not going to pursue the matter.”
C said nothing for a moment.
“You've done a good job on this, Thomas...Blackman. Put together a brief for the PM, and I shall take it to him person
ally.”
Then he looked at his watch and straightened his tie. “Well, if that's all, I have to run.”
Blackman shuffled the photos and documents into his attaché case and shut down the computer. “Thank you for your time, sir,” he said.
“Oh, there's one other thing, Sir David,” Thomas said. “Our people at the GCHQ site in Cyprus reported that the brass at the Sovereign Air Base gave some sort of assistance to the American CENTCOM Commander in Chief. He's now in Incirlik, by the way.” Thomas consulted a three-by-five-inch card that he had withdrawn from his shirt pocket. “Our post in Turkey also picked up some intel about something going on in Syria, by way of the Israelis. Two nights ago, the Cyprus GCHQ site picked up encrypted Israeli aircraft chatter that coincided with overhead imagery showing two blacked-out helicopters—perhaps CH-53s—transiting the Beirut FIR, then making a ‘rough field' landing inside Syria. The birds were on the ground for only two and a half minutes, and then they went back to Israel. Curiously, the same thing happened last night...or actually early this morning, before daybreak. We assumed it was some kind of agent drop or an IDF special ops insertion and extraction because five hours ago, two helicopters landed in Syria again. Do you want us to query the Israelis on this?”
C put his hand to his chin. “I think not. Probably just intelligence gathering on some suicide bomber.”
“That's what we thought yesterday. But when it happened again today, well...we're not so sure. As you know, the Israelis make it a matter of policy not to repeat an insertion/extraction using the same coordinates twice in a row. But for whatever reason, they felt it was important enough to break SOP and make an almost identical run a second day. That makes me think they may be up to something more serious.”
“Could be, Jerry. But instead of asking the Israelis, just keep an eye on it. Call me if you find that it's anything out of the ordinary. And now, please excuse me. Can't keep the Prime Minister waiting.”
