That was an understatement. “When was this taken?”
“Early last week, in Düsseldorf,” said Fred.
So that’s where Khaled had disappeared to. And he’d managed to get from Düsseldorf all the way to Sardinia before we’d managed to climb back on his trail.
But why the hell had Khaled put himself in jeopardy to come to Düsseldorf? He already had a commitment for his American-made ADM from Heinz Hochheizer. He wasn’t looking to buy any more—we knew that much from our intelligence. Then, I answered my own question when I looked at the next picture. There was Khaled again. But now he’d been joined by two men.
I recognized one of them: Franz Ulrich’s scarred puss stared out into space, eyes alert, antennas up, as if he’d scented something amiss. Khaled, oblivious, was in deep conversation with another man, whose face was unfamiliar to me.
I pointed at the high-contrast black-and-white photograph. “Who’s he?”
“Him? That is a man named Lothar Beck,” Fred said matter-of-factly. He stared intently at me, gauging my reaction.
I kept ein pokergesicht—a poker face. But inside, I was shouting Bingo! Jackpot! HOO-YAH!! “Was this taken at the Silbermieze?”
“Affirmative,” said Fred. Now it was his turn to pokergesicht. “And how might you have come to know that, Richard?”
“I’m prescient,” I said.
“Richard, die Karten aufdekken, remember?”
I changed the subject. “What do you know about Franz Ulrich these days?”
Fred’s expression told me that he didn’t like Franz Ulrich any more than I did. “Don’t try to change the subject, Richard. I want to know about the Silbermieze.”
Since I was sitting with a six-inch-thick pile of Fred’s top secret documents, I decided to give him a peek at my hand. I gave him a quick sit-rep about Khaled, and Heinz Hochheizer. I told him about the two ADMs we’d recovered, including all the details about the Ivans we’d waxed.
His face grew serious. “Did you say you have their fingerprints?”
“No, but I can get ’em.”
“Gut.” Fred’s fingers drummed on the table. “Zooo,” he said, “you were asking about Franz Ulrich.”
“Ja,” I said. “What’s the word?”
“He has friends in high places,” said Fred. “Like Lothar Beck, for whom he works. And I’m told that he has some bad habits, too.” A wry smile crept across Fred’s face. “But then, you’ve seen him recently, what do you think?”
Now you know that the only time I’d seen Franz in eight years was when he drove past us at the pasture. And Fred knew about that. Now it was my turn to maintain der pokergesicht. But there was only one thing to ask, and I asked it straight out: “What the fuck, Fred?”
“I told you, we’re Germans,” he said. “We work in our own mysterious ways.”
I realized a couple of things at that point. One was that everything that Wink had surmised about KSK was correct. This was a shell game, and Fred was running a small, effective covert unit inside the big, gaudily patched counterterror shell.
“You’ve been tracking me,” I said. You know I’d sensed it, right from the start of this little odyssey. But it hadn’t been clear until now; until Fred had let it slip, and no doubt slip on purpose.
“To be honest, Richard, I don’t mean to be critical, but you tend to leave a big fat wake behind you. You are easy to track.”
I disagreed with him, something I explained to him in RUT.45
Fred held his hand up like a traffic cop. “Richard, Richard, it’s simply a matter of looking closely. You have an American Express card, ja?”
“Ja.”
“Und ven you use it,” he said, fumbling in one of his desk drawers, and coming up with a series of faxes that he handed to me, “I can track your movements.”
Sure enough: there they were. My receipt from the Mainz Hilton. The touristenpark receipt. Gasoline chits. Even the meal we’d had in Bassenheim. I was . . . impressed with Fred, and pissed off at myself. It was such an obvious fucking mistake.
“Zooo . . . now we both know that you are here to deal with the problem that was caused by the Saudi terrorist I have here pictured with Franz Ulrich, and Ulrich’s boss, Lothar Beck. Zooo, you are on a counterterrorism mission—just like my mission at Kommando Spezialkräfte. But it also occurs to me as I track your movements, that perhaps you are dealing with a thorny, potentially embarrassing political problem for your government, as well as trying to neutralize Khaled, which”—he gave me a wry smile—“is alzo not so different from my work here at Kommando Spezialkräfte.”
He retrieved another sheet from his desk and handed it to me. It was a copy of the police report signed by Officer Brendel. My German isn’t as good as it should be, but I know enough to pick up on the important stuff. And the important stuff was that I’d been identified as a Navy SEAL, and Brendel’d had enough doubts about what my men and I were doing in his neighborhood to put ’em down on paper.
“I also know from our time together what SEALs do, and how,” Fred said. “And I know that your government has a problem with missing ADMs—” he pronounced the acronym ah-day-emm—“these days.”
I started to protest, but Fred held up his hand like a traffic cop. “It’s been in the news,” he said. “And I have my own sources of information—good sources, too. So please don’t insult me, Richard.”
“What’s your fuckin’ point?” I asked, a tinge of exasperation creeping into my voice. I hate to be toyed with, and Fred was fast approaching the point of toying.
To his credit, he realized it. “From the start, Berlin wanted me to use you as”—he hunted for the right word—“das Strohmann—the schtraw man, the schalking horse.”
Oh, that was good. “You track me, keep an eye on me, and then cut in front at the last minute, grab the ADMs, and Berlin gets to create a diplomatic incident that’ll give it some leverage with Washington.”
“Ja, that was more or less the idea,” Fred said, his lips pursed. He wagged his head. “Now, I know you, Richard. We have operated together, and loyalty to an old comrade in arms is a very basic loyalty, and so I am opposed to doing that, and I told Berlin my decision three days ago, while you are still in Mainz.”
I was happy to hear so, and I said it.
“But Berlin still needs results,” he said. “Berlin must have something—political Kapital—to hold over the Americans, and right now, nuclear weapons that we were never told about are as good currency as anything. For me, I don’t give a damn about the weapons. The Cold War was the Cold War—and we had to be ready to do what had to be done if the Soviets invaded. You and I both know that. So I will let Berlin and Washington fight the problem of hidden weapons out between the men in the pinstriped suits and the laced-up shoes and the uncomfortable starched shirts. But this other thing: the problem of Lothar Beck and Franz Ulrich and Prince Khaled. The potential for long-term damage is real, both for you and for me.”
“Not from Khaled. He’s dead. I killed him.”
Fred nodded. “And good riddance. But his demise doesn’t stop a whole litany of problems we both have to face these days. I worry about the neo-Nazis. They’re making a resurgence, you know, recruiting.”
“From the skinheads?”
“Some of the time. But also from other areas of the population. There have been neo-Nazis discovered of late in the police—not a good thing, Richard. Even in the Bundeswehr, internal investigations uncovered more than a few rotten apples. Very quietly, hundreds of soldiers have been discharged in the past year alone for neo-Nazi activity. And also in the Bundeswehr, a few members of”—he struggled for the right word—“ultranationalistic paramilitary organizations.”
“Like our crazy militias?”
“Ja.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Und zooo, I did some investigating. Very quiet investigating, you understand, and I discover that some of these organizations are being funded by people close to Lothar Beck. Now, we Germans have always h
ad what you can call fringe groups. On the left we have the Greens, who want to disband NATO and give our military secrets to anyone who asks. On the right, we have people like Beck. But now, some of these crazies, they’re beginning to exert real political power. Moreover, it is hard to deal with them because the ones in charge have much clout with certain segments of the government these days.”
“What do they want? A Fourth Reich, Fred?”
“Not in the old sense,” he said. “But there are those who would like to see a German hegemony over Europe in the twenty-first century. But the domination would be economic at first, not politico-militar. The political garbage would follow.” He took a huge swallow of his beer. “And then, there are those who want to do it the opposite way. People like Lothar Beck, who wants political control first, followed by economic supremacy. I read the papers. And his PR people have been in overdrive lately, Richard. Beck is pushing political domination followed by economic subjugation.”
“Fred, you have the capability to go and ream Beck and his friends new assholes. You know it. So why not just go out and kick some ass?”
“Oh, I may have been given certain capabilities—on paper. And my best operators are as good as any in the world. But there’s a real concern here about using the German military in any way that might be construed as political. We may be more than fifty years post-Hitler, Richard, but we’re still suffering from the aftershocks of the Nazis.”
He gave me an unhappy look. Fred was stuck between der Fels46 und der hard Platz, and I told him so.
He nodded in melancholy agreement. “And to make things worse, finally, I have been given the responsibility of containing terrorism directed against foreigners—including Americans, because terror against foreigners is most often perpetrated by neo-Nazi or ultranationalists.”
I knew what was coming next: all the problems Fred had just explained to me were about to come to a head.
“Und zoon, I sink. And I am convinced that it is a few people like Lothar Beck—ultranationalists who hate a system that encourages free expression and democracy—who are encouraging much of this mess.”
I thought of the probes against U.S. facilities John Suter had told me about. Things were beginning to make sense. “So, why not take Beck and his pals down?”
“As I said, it is not that easy, Richard. Beck is an influential man. He has a huge public relations machine that wages Blitzkrieg in the news media. He does billions of marks worth of business with the Ministry of Defense. He has friends in Berlin who protect him—some we know about, others are in the shadows. He has informers in the police, the military, and the intelligence apparatus. And so it becomes hard to move against someone like that if you are someone like me.”
I realized now why Fred had put his unit in isolation. He was keeping KSK uncontaminated from what was going on in German society. It was an OPSEC procedure, just as Jim Wink had thought.
Fred looked at me intently. “There is a security problem in Germany. And I have been tasked by those at the highest level of government to fix it. And those who are causing the problem, I believe, are some of the same people who are digging out your ADMs and selling them . . . or trying to.” He cracked his knuckles. “Und zooo,” he continued, “I make a proposal. I say we act konzertierte—together. Like the old days.”
I thought about it. “Our governments have separate agendas, Fred.”
“Ja, that is underschtood.” He tapped a thick index finger on the photograph of Lothar Beck, Khaled, and Franz Ulrich. “But you and I, Richard; we are after many of the same targets. And you are an outsider. I may be restricted, limited, constrained, when I go up against Lothar Beck. You, however—”
He took my empty beer mug, filled it, and handed it back to me. Then he refilled his own. “You are looking for those who stole your devices and want to use them against you. I must hunt down those who would hijack Germany and take it from a democracy to a totalitarian system. I invite you to join with me, Richard.”
As he spoke, something hit me like der Blitz aus heiterem Himmel.47 Everything goes back to the Kuz Emeq.
Khaled was tied in to Franz Ulrich and Lothar Beck. How that knot had come about I had no idea. But when you thought about it, and I most certainly did right now, it made a lot of sense.
I’d always assumed that Khaled’s target would be somewhere in CONUS. But I’d forgotten my own SpecWar Commandment: I’d assumed. But it was just as possible that Khaled planned to strike against America right here in Deutschland. Indeed, if he did that, the terror would serve a dual purpose. It would further Khaled’s anti-American program. And it would help advance Lothar Beck’s objective of German destabilization.
Then it hit me with the squash-power of an old-fashioned ton o’ bricks. What we were being confronted with was a modern-day configuration of an old alliance. What we had here was a new kind of Axis. But instead of an alliance of totalitarian assholes, e.g., Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, this new Axis brought together transnational terrorists, who allied with one another out of convenience, not politics.
Because, now that I’d stopped to ponder the nasty possibilities, I realized that Khaled’s goals weren’t all that different from Lothar’s. Each wanted to spread chaos and disorder. That made each of them a tango. Oh, they had different goals and separate agendas, just like the German government in Berlin and my own back in Washington. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t work together—just like Fred and I could—to pursue a common series of targets and bring destabilization—or worse—to Europe.
And there was something else I realized about the unholy trinity in the surveillance photo, too. There was one simple fucking truth about Khaled, Lothar, and Franz. That truth was that each deserved to die.
Well, I’d already made sure Khaled rode the magic carpet to Allah’s side. Now it was time for me to help Franz Ulrich and Lothar Beck get to Valhalla.
But there were some things I needed to know before I was going to commit my men to a joint operation. I drank deeply and looked probingly into my old comrade’s eyes. “Look, like you said, Fred, Berlin has its own political objectives in all of this. So does Washington.”
Fred’s face grew somber. “I understand, Richard, and, as you know—”
I broke in. “Oh, yes, I know. Berlin wanted you to use me as a fucking sacrificial lamb in this little exercise. But frankly, Fred, you’ve known me long enough to realize I don’t give a rusty fuck about politics or politicians, and I certainly don’t give a shit whether I ever get a star on my collar. All I care about is making sure the scumbags who tried to sell these things go down, and I mean go down permanently. But you gotta understand that we’re talking about killing assholes who could make trouble for you, even after they’ve been wasted.”
I watched as Fred drank in what I was saying and pondered the unhappy consequences. You see, he was a general now. He wears stars. If things went well for him at KSK, he essentially had a limitless future in the Bundeswehr.
Like I just said, I’m a hairy-assed SEAL captain, and I know I won’t ever be promoted again. I exist only to break things, kill people, and make sure the merry marauders under my command remain WARRIORS in body and in soul. I don’t give a shit about wearing stars. What I wear is scars.
But I wear those scars with more pride than any fucking admiral with four stars on his collar, scrambled eggs on his hat—and shit for his brains.
There was what you could call a LFP—a Long, Fucking Pause. Then Fred toasted me with his mug. “I understand,” he said. “And, so be it, Richard.”
His face was a mask of determination, boldness, and steely resolve. “To hell with politics. To hell with bureaucracies. To hell with apparatchiks. Let’s drink to making WAR—to making WAR together.”
ABSCHNITT
ZWEI
10
ACCORDING TO THE MAPS, IT LOOKED LIKE JUST ABOUT an hour’s run from Bonn to Düsseldorf on the autobahn. I drove up with Boomerang in forty-two minutes, in a clandestine-ops BMW Fr
ed had loaned to us for the duration. It was another in the big, sleek 7000 series: black, with smoked windows and a hufucking-mongous engine. (I flattened Boomerang against the passenger seat when I hit 209.5 kilometers an hour in the passing lane—only to have to pull over into the “traveling” lane and slow down to a mere 170 because some asshole in a Porsche Carrera wanted to pass moi.)
I was TBW, which you can probably guess stands for Tired But Wired. I’d spent sixty straight hours at KSK researching our targets. I’d had the opportunity to peruse Fred’s intel files and news clips. I’d used his secure phone to get hold of my old friend Wink back in the States, and my new one, John Suter, down in Stuttgart.
Wink, who lives up in the Blue Ridge in an anonymous little town called Pine Grove, drove down to his office at Langley, quietly perused the counterterrorism files, and called me back from his secure telephone with the information I needed within eight hours.
John Suter scanned the Ivans’ fingerprints into his desktop and E-mailed ’em to me within minutes. Fred took the printouts and galumphed down the hallway like a kid with a birthday present.
While I waited for Wink to get back to me, Boomerang, sly child that he is, had used one terminal of the big Dell server belonging to KSK’s intel squirrels to tap into the DOD computer at Nuremberg, giving us access to DIA’s files and a smattering of NSA intercepts. Just for good measure, Boomerang siphoned off all the commo between Patch Barracks and CINCUSNAVEUR, so I’d be able to see how bad they actually wanted our hides tacked on the wall. Let me put it to you this way: hunting licenses had been issued by Eamon the Demon, and I was designated as trophy buck.
Sixteen hours after we’d arrived at KSK, I’d assembled all the pieces of the puzzle. Twenty-eight hours of strong coffee later, I had crafted a scenario for action, based on what I’d discovered from the begged, borrowed, and stolen intel factoids and info-bits.
Now, you may ask what makes me so fucking special that I can do in just over a day and a half what none of the vaunted G-2 staff in Stuttgart, or Nuremberg (or anywhere else for that matter), has been able to do in months.
Option Delta Page 17
