Threat Level

by William Christie

  Once Troy’s muscles realized how much they’d been traumatized in the car crash, they’d stiffened up like iron. He’d walked off the plane at Diego Garcia hunched over like Quasimodo. The X-rays were negative, though, and a few days of muscle relaxers and loosening up in the pool had him back to walking erect.

  The temperature was over a hundred degrees, and the equatorial sun was ferocious. Only a slight ocean breeze, and the pool, made it tolerable.

  “I want to say something,” said Storey, shifting gears abruptly.

  “Go for it,” said Troy.

  “You were right back in Karachi.”

  Troy waved him off with a dismissive sweep of the hand.

  “No, really,” said Storey. “I was dead wrong. Could’ve gotten us both killed. I’m not supposed to make bad calls like that.”

  Troy didn’t want to get into it with him. Partly because he knew Storey was angry at himself, but it could just as easily turn the other way. Partly because he sensed what the apology had cost. And partly because he agreed—it had been the wrong call.

  “Half-ass your planning, you pay for it—even if your execution is good,” Storey muttered. “Anyway, it won’t ever happen again.”

  Then Troy couldn’t resist. “Aren’t I supposed to be the young impulsive one?”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” said Storey, returning to form. He reread his report, giving thanks yet again for spell checkers. Encoded it, hooked the PDA to his phone, and sent it back to the office in Washington. When he received the confirmation he deleted the message. The software then automatically overwrote the drive so many times that even examination with an electron microscope couldn’t recover it.

  Dark storm clouds began to move in from the south, and they both began gathering up their belongings. They’d seen this the day before. The clouds moving in almost too fast to be believed, followed by a tropical downpour that could unload as much as an inch of rain in fifteen minutes. Then the reappearance of the sun, making you feel as if you’d been thrown wet into a clothes dryer.

  “It’s lunchtime anyway,” said Troy.

  And at the dining facility they were joined by one of the interrogation team, an army lieutenant colonel, military intelligence officer.

  “Mind if I sit with you guys?” he asked heartily. After getting a yes, he went up to the line to get himself some food.

  “I sure hope he’s a better interrogator than he is an operator,” said Troy. “Like he just bumped into us, with the officers’ mess over on the other wing of the building.”

  “Most people get pissed off when officers let you know they think you’re stupid,” said Storey. “I say, use it to your advantage. When he gets back he’ll be all insecure, so he’ll have to mention something about how much he loves us enlisted.”

  The colonel set his tray down. “Thanks, men. It’s good to sit with the real people for a change.”

  He’d caught Troy in the act of drinking a Coke, and some of it started leaking out his nose.

  “Don’t mind him, sir,” Storey said calmly. “Rotten table manners.”

  The colonel smiled uneasily as Troy dealt with the carbonated liquid sloshing painfully about his sinus cavity. He didn’t give any hints that his visit wasn’t social, talking instead of the Monday Night Football game, which was shown live via satellite on Tuesday morning.

  It was only when they were through eating that the colonel suggested a little walk. Storey pondered the irony of the colonel worrying about being overheard when just on the other side of the island was a National Security Agency antenna farm that could pick up someone farting over the phone in Bangalore, India.

  The baseball diamond was deserted. They talked, leaning over the chain-link fence.

  “Your guy broke,” the colonel said.

  Troy wondered what they’d used on him. Sleep deprivation; he knew from SEAL Hell Week just how much that could mess you up. Food deprivation; a bland diet of unfamiliar foods, just enough calories to make you constantly hungry. Temperature; if you were used to the heat, they kept your cell cold, and vice versa. And the devastating psychological knowledge that they had you forever and life wasn’t going to improve one little bit unless you gave up what they wanted. In a way, it was like SEAL Basic Underwater Demolition School. Everyone who volunteered knew what was going to happen and thought they could take it. And it was always a surprise to see how few really could. Rough stuff, but not nearly as rough as what the other side would do if they got their hands on you.

  “He didn’t strike me as all that tough, sir,” said Storey. “Even so, that’s pretty fast.”

  “Normally, we have to cover everything,” said the colonel. “Then go back and focus on the areas where they resist interrogation. But the same informer who gave him up also gave us more than enough detailed background information to focus on. That made a big difference.”

  “Good news, sir,” said Storey. His subsequent silence was his way of encouraging the colonel to get to the point of why it concerned them.

  “Either of you ever hear of an Abdallah Karim Nimri?” the colonel asked.

  Storey and Troy both paused for a moment to flip through the card files in their heads. Then both shook their heads no.

  “Egyptian,” said the colonel. “Up and comer. Dark horse candidate for Al Qaeda operations chief. He’s working on an operation to kill the president during the upcoming Asia visit. Probably the Philippines. Your guy was the cutout between Nimri and the leadership.”

  “So this guy knows where Bin Laden and Zawahiri are?” Troy said excitedly, hoping that was why they were being briefed. Hell, the president could always skip his trip to the Philippines.

  “We’re working on that,” said the colonel. “But there’s not much hope there. As soon as the word got around that he got grabbed, all the people he knew about and all the money he knew about moved. That’s their standard procedure.”

  Troy was about to say something else, but Storey nudged him. You didn’t get briefed on information like this unless you had a need to know. And, given time, the colonel would eventually tell them why they needed to know.

  “We haven’t got much on the assassination plot against the president,” the colonel told them. “He threw it at us; then once he realized what he’d done he clammed up. But we’re getting it out of him bit by bit. Evidently this guy Nimri is using networks that are already in place. And evidently a while back you took out one of the Philippine players at Subic Bay.”

  Storey nodded. If you kept working them hard, the links would eventually appear.

  “The rest of the Philippine network is fuzzy,” said the colonel. “We don’t know whether it’s Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah, or strictly Al Qaeda. There’s a firm connection in Thailand, though. Operative named Majed Ismail. Metal dealer. We get him, we could unbutton the whole operation.”

  Now attuned to the rhythm of the process, Storey and Troy waited him out.

  “You’re going to get orders to go to Bangkok,” the colonel said.

  Troy was about to open his mouth when Storey grabbed the bull by the horns. “All respect, sir, we could have gotten a message from Washington, so there’s a reason you’re speaking to us face-to-face. And I assume there’s a reason we’re talking beside a baseball diamond instead of in a SCIF.” Which was a Special Compartmented Information Facility, a specially locked, screened, allegedly bug-proof space where conversations of the highest security classification were supposed to take place. “So might I suggest that the colonel tell us what that reason is?”

  Enlisted men, even senior staff noncommissioned officers, didn’t usually put lieutenant colonels back on their heels, and Troy admired how neatly Storey had done it. His bet was that the colonel was going to do himself a little yelling.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong. The colonel swallowed it meekly. “The CIA is already on this guy Ismail. They’re working with the Thais. But the Pentagon wants to have a presence also.”

  “A presence, sir?” said Sto
rey, without a single trace of emotion.

  “That’s right. The idea is for you two to fly to Bangkok, covertly, and become involved in the capture of the target.”

  Troy was just opening his mouth when he got the “shut up” look from Storey, who said to the colonel, “You realize, sir, that we’re going to have to clear this with our command.”

  “Of course. Those are my orders. I can release any message traffic when you’re ready to send.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Storey. “But we’ll use our own links.” He waited, but the colonel didn’t seem to have anything to add. “Good afternoon, sir.” Being in civilian clothes, he didn’t salute, but he did come to attention.

  “Good afternoon, men,” the colonel replied, in that hearty, low-register voice senior officers reserved for talking to the enlisted swine.

  As soon as the colonel was out of earshot, Storey went through the gate and took a seat on the bleachers. Troy, of course, was forced to follow.

  And he was spilling over with outrage. “Yes, sir? No, sir? What is this shit? This is fucking insane.”

  Storey was deep in thought. After a while he looked up and said, “Sorry, were you waiting for me to argue with you?”

  “No, I was waiting for you to fucking argue with him.”

  “It wasn’t his idea. If a lieutenant colonel comes up with a harebrained scheme on his own, you can get rid of him pretty easy. Unless he’s your boss. But he was just a messenger boy.”

  Troy was still talking fast. “If we go to Bangkok, we’ve got two options. We tell the CIA we’re there to help, and they’ll tell us to fuck off and go home. Or we don’t tell them we’re in town, go nosing around an operation they’re running with Thai security, and bump into them by accident. Someone could accidentally get killed. Or thrown in jail. And I’m pretty sure it would be us.”

  “In case you’re wondering,” said Storey, “I’m still not prepared to argue with you.”

  “Well then, why didn’t you fucking say anything to him? Only about a hundred questions popped right into my head.”

  “Oh, that’s the one thing you don’t want to do,” said Storey, still unperturbed. “If this is coming from as high up as I think it is, we might actually have to do it. When you get ordered to do something stupid, and you can’t get out of it, your first instinct is to ask a million questions and demand detailed orders. To demonstrate to them how stupid they’re being. But that’s a big old mistake. Because then you’re saddled with all these detailed stupid orders that they expect you to carry out. Never ask any questions about a stupid order you have to carry out. Just salute, say ‘yes, sir,’ and get your ass out of the area. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll leave yourself some flexibility to inject a little common sense into the operation.”

  Troy just sat there with his jaw swinging open. The fuck if Storey wasn’t playing chess while the rest of them were playing checkers. “You’re right. This is so stupid it had to come from high up in the Pentagon. But what’s the reason? Why do they want us bumble-fucking around Bangkok, tripping over an operation the CIA’s already got up and running?”

  Storey’s expression was one of pity. “Because, you poor fool, this is a big score, an assassination plot against the president, and they don’t want the CIA to get all the credit for foiling it. And that’s exactly what the CIA wants, which is why they’re moving so fast.”

  “Fuck,” said Troy.

  “Back in D.C. it’s all about budgets, and all about politics. That’s why it’s more important we beat the CIA than Al Qaeda.”

  “Now I know why we’ve done so well so far.”

  “This goes back a long way,” said Storey. “When the Iranians took over our embassy in seventy-nine, the CIA couldn’t put any spies on the ground to support Delta’s hostage rescue, so the army put together Intelligence Support Activity. And they actually put agents on the ground in Teheran. The CIA didn’t want anyone but them running agents, so all of a sudden investigations of special operators padding their expenses gets leaked all over Washington. It was a bloodbath. ISA eventually gets back on its feet, and in Colombia they do a better job of pinpointing Pablo Escobar’s cell phone calls than the CIA. Once Pablo’s dead it’s expense account fraud and sexual fraternization all over again. People in the Pentagon have long memories, and they carry grudges. A couple of the guys who got Pablo are in our support section.”

  “I guess we all can’t get along. And we’re the two dicks who have to run around Bangkok.”

  “I’ve been doing this for a while,” said Storey. “And there’s always a way around everything. Even if we have to go to Bangkok, we’re the ones on the ground. Not them.”

  The reason Storey turned down the colonel’s offer to release a message was that military communications, even highly classified communications, were read by an enormous number of people in addition to the sender and recipient. So he sat down again with his keyboard and PDA, composing his own inquiry.

  The word back from Washington was what he expected. They were going to Bangkok.

  Unlike the trip to Pakistan, which had been done under red diplomatic passports and cases of weapons with diplomatic seals, this would be totally covert. What was known in the trade as a low-visibility operation.

  Blue civilian United States passports, though Canada and New Zealand were used occasionally. Impersonating any other nationality pushed the risk level too high. Legitimate passports, but names that were not Storey and Troy. However, the first names were variations on Ed and Lee. No doubt any good psychiatrist could explain why even highly trained operators always remembered a false last name, even under great stress, but frequently drew a total blank on the first name, even under the most mellow conditions.

  There were no commercial flights to or from Diego Garcia. Storey and Troy caught the round-the-world C-141 that flew in from the Philippines. They both got off in Nairobi, Kenya, and went their separate ways. Businessmen traveling in pairs attracted attention.

  The arrangements were easy. There was an international toll-free number back to the office, and staff that did nothing but book flights, hotels, and cars, under whatever business cover the operators were traveling under. Storey flew to Cairo, then to Abu Dhabi. From there it was a direct flight to Bangkok.

  Troy flew from Nairobi to New Delhi. Then another direct to Bangkok a day later.

  In his business suit. In business class. With a briefcase and a laptop, because every businessman has a briefcase and a laptop. Troy’s contained nothing but reams of material on the injection-molded plastics trade.

  A profession that he couldn’t help but think Storey had picked out just for him, knowing he’d have to memorize everything about it to maintain his cover, and knowing it was just the most boring shit imaginable. But it was good cover for both the Middle East and Asia.

  Troy hated flying commercial when he wasn’t armed. And a Middle Eastern airline, yet. There were only a few passengers on the plane who weren’t Arabs.

  It was after dark when his plane touched down at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport. The traffic was always unbelievable. The cab from the airport took so long he could have caught a decent nap.

  Troy was jet-lagged, and being jet-lagged always made him feel jacked-up, not tired. The hotel was a typical four-star businessman’s choice, and the room was quite comfortable, but in his condition it felt like a cell. When the bellboy set down the bags, Troy could have sworn he heard an echo.

  He was supposed to meet Storey in the morning, and he’d better be fresh to make sure he didn’t bring any surveillance to the meet. Troy did sets of push-ups until he reached a thousand, then a thousand crunches. Exercise only made him feel more wired. It was almost midnight. Hell, it wouldn’t hurt to go down to the bar for a while. Sleep was out of the question, and he had to get out of that room.

  When most people walk into a bar they check out the action first, then look for a place to sit. When members of the special operations community enter a bar they scan for thre
ats, first immediate, then potential. Then they make sure there are at least three viable ways out, rehearsing in their mind exactly how they’d accomplish a speedy exit. Then, and only then, do they position themselves in a place where no one can get near them without being seen. After all, the two most dangerous and proficient gunfighters of the old West, Wild Bill Hickok and John Wesley Hardin, were both shot in the back of the head by individuals they never even saw.

  Americans who hated their current popular music might reevaluate that position after checking out what the rest of the world listened to. Troy normally hated pianos in bars. Now he longed for one.

  There was a light ball over the dance floor, of course. Japanese businessmen dancing with Thai girls. Not wearing bikinis and numbers, but pros nonetheless. No matter how badly you danced, watching a Japanese businessman get down made you feel like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

  Troy pushed his way to the end of the bar, where it blended into a wall. Before his vodka and tonic—the beer drinker’s mixed drink—was delivered, the chairs on both sides of him magically opened up. One thing about Asians, they made no bones about their racism. Troy didn’t give a shit—now that he had a place to sit down. He twirled his seat around so his back was to the bar and the wall, with good sight lines in all directions.

  What Lee Troy did see was a Thai girl making her way down the bar. In a tight black strapless dress that was enough to bring tears to the eyes of any heterosexual male. Not cheap, though. And she sure knew how to move in it. Straight black hair that just touched the small of her back. A small sting of simple pearls around her neck that, for whatever reason, Troy found incredibly hot. No silicone tits, just lithe and beautiful.

  She stopped at the open chair beside Troy, looking first down at it, then up at him. Troy made a welcoming gesture. She slid into the seat, tugging at her dress to prevent unsightly creases and delicately crossing her legs.

  She took a cigarette from her purse. Troy didn’t smoke, but he always carried a lighter—for just this sort of contingency, among others. He lit her up.