by Brad Taylor
He looked up again and saw there was only one more person ahead of him. Too late to run now. He felt queasy, like he’d eaten something rotten. He should have done more research on Dubai immigration. He had thought using the Jordanian passport was the perfect break from all that Hezbollah knew, especially now that they were hunting him out of misplaced vengeance, but he wished he had stuck with the original forged passport.
The traveler behind him gently tapped his shoulder, causing him to flinch. The man pointed, and he realized he was being waved forward. He walked woodenly to the counter and presented his passport.
The official saw the visa for Dubai, then the missing national identification number.
“You are from Jordan?”
“Yes. Well, the West Bank, but the passport and visa are from Jordan.”
“What is the purpose of your stay?”
“I’m visiting a friend. I hope to find employment in Dubai.”
“Who is your friend?”
He read off the name and address of a man living in the old section of Deira, near the banks of the Dubai Creek. At least this much was backstopped. The man was real, a friend, and knew he was coming. After Yemen, the Ghost would rely only on those he knew he could trust. Knew the purpose of his cause.
“What does your friend do?”
The Ghost felt a trickle of sweat track down his cheek. He wanted to wipe it away, to hide the traitorous reaction of his body, but realized the motion would only draw attention to his nervousness.
“He’s a maintenance worker at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel. He said I might join him there. They have openings.”
This part was not true. The friend did work at the Rotana Hotel, but the Ghost had no idea about their employment status. All he cared about was the fact that the man’s job would allow him to penetrate hotel security for his mission.
The official pointed to a lens on a stalk behind his chair and said, “Look here until I tell you to stop.”
The Ghost did so, giving a silent prayer.
The man glanced at the screen, apparently satisfied. He stamped the passport and handed it back, already waving the next man forward.
The Ghost snatched up his passport and willed himself to walk casually to the baggage claim area, and his next challenge—getting through customs.
He found his first suitcase already circling on the baggage carousel. Two bags behind it was the large computer box, swathed in cellophane for the journey. It looked no different than a half dozen other boxes on the carousel, but contained the explosives and detonators he’d acquired in Yemen.
He placed both on a luggage cart and passed through the door marked “Nothing to Declare.” He was directed to an X-ray machine, along with four other men, all competing to get out of customs.
He waited for his luggage to be spit out on the far side, surreptitiously watching the official tasked with reviewing the screen. The man barely looked at anything coming through, and in short order, the Ghost was free, feeling the bracing heat of the Dubai afternoon.
He took three deep breaths, glancing left and right to see if anyone had followed, still not believing he had made it into the country. He heard someone shout, “Ash’abah!” and turned to see his friend pull up in a rusty, belching sedan.
“Hamid. It’s good to see you.”
Hamid exited and helped with his bags, then said, “Where to first?”
He gave out the address to his hawaladar, then said, “I need a place to stay. A hotel that won’t be visited by anyone in authority.”
“Nonsense. You will stay with me. I have a flat in the old town. It’s secure, trust me.”
The Ghost smiled and said, “I have one other favor.”
“What? Anything to repay my debt.”
“I need you to get me in to the Al Bustan Rotana as an employee. I have some work to do there before they lock it down for a visit from an American.”
Hamid’s face fell, and the Ghost said, “What? You told me you were being promoted to a leader in the maintenance department. I won’t tie you to the work. You’ll be safe.”
“It’s not that. I would do anything for you, but I no longer work there.”
At first, the Ghost didn’t grasp what Hamid had said, the words too destructive to contemplate. The very idea of using the Rotana Hotel had come from his friendship with Hamid. His entire plan relied on Hamid’s employment. The symmetry of attacking the United States envoy in the same hotel that Mossad had killed the Hamas operative held a poetic justice in his eyes, but it was predicated on gaining access. He’d never thought to ask if Hamid still worked there.
He considered attacking at the hotel anyway, but knew it was futile. He wanted a surgical killing. A statement that vied for publicity precisely because it duplicated the Mossad hit. Now, it would have to be a large, messy attack. And he didn’t have the explosives for a car bomb.
Hamid continued. “Right after they opened the Burj Khalifa, they had a problem with the elevators. Some tourists were trapped for hours. They fired the maintenance crew, and I applied to replace them. I’ve worked there for over a year.”
The comment tickled something in the Ghost’s memory. He reached into his carry-on bag, pulling out the American’s itinerary and saw what had triggered the recollection. The Burj Khalifa was the tallest building in the world, an engineering marvel that rose like a spear out of the desert, towering over every other building in the Dubai skyline. The envoy had left his ambassadorship six months before the building opened in January 2010. He was now scheduled for a royal tour to the observation deck one hundred and twenty-four stories above the earth.
“You work at this building now?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get me in there?”
39
Let me get this straight,” said the director of the CIA. “You want to move a team to Dubai without any cover backstopping whatsoever? A team that’s supposed to be in Tunisia and we clandestinely infiltrated into Beirut for no good reason?”
Kurt grimaced at the reaction. He’d purposely whitewashed the infiltration of Knuckles’ men, blurring the line between when they’d reached the point of no return on their deployment and when Pike had been rescued.
“Yes. I know it sounds risky, but we can mitigate that as far as the Taskforce goes. The team from Tunis has clean passports that we can burn after this op.”
The D/CIA pointed to the presentation Kurt had just given. “And that’s the smoking gun? That’s all you have?”
“Yes, it is, but the PowerPoint doesn’t do justice to the man. Lucas Kane is a proven killer, and he’s headed to Dubai. We’ve tried to capture him several times, and failed. The risk is worth it.”
The secretary of defense spoke up. “I get that Kane’s a threat, but you’ve got nothing to go on. You couldn’t even find him in Dubai if you wanted. You said yourself that there was more to this that you didn’t understand. That there were others involved. I think you should take some time to flesh this out, get some concrete operational information, then come back. I can’t see sending a team willy-nilly to Dubai.”
“Sir, you know me. Know I don’t cry wolf. Yes, we don’t have a handle on Lucas, and yes, there’s a bunch of threads we don’t understand, but we need to go with what we know. Lucas discussed finding assassins on tape, and Pike found the envoy’s itinerary on a laptop computer held by Islamic extremists. An itinerary that hasn’t been changed, I might add.”
He saw the secretary of state bristle and hastily continued, knowing he would need the man’s vote. “I’m not making a judgment on that decision, but the fact remains that Lucas is in Dubai, and the envoy’s headed that way. We need to assume that Lucas has the itinerary and is going to target the envoy. We can stop it now or mop the blood up later.”
By the secretary of state’s expression, Kurt knew he’d hit a nerve, and was surprised at what he said next. “The itinerary was constructed with policy implications in mind. We couldn’t change it at this late date wit
hout offending a great number of people and setting back the very agenda for the trip. Given that, I’m inclined to let the Taskforce continue, if they can do it without compromise. An attack on the envoy’s party would be devastating to the peace process, setting us back to square one. We can’t be sure we would be able to get the people back to the table again.”
The secretary of defense said, “Billings, you should sit back and watch a few of these go down before you jump so quickly to approve. Your key comment is ‘without compromise,’ and I don’t see how that can be done.” He turned back to Kurt. “How are you going to infiltrate them?”
“We’ll get them in as tourists.” He saw the SECDEF and D/CIA roll their eyes, and worked to mitigate the weakness in his plan. “I know that’s not optimal, but tourism is one of Dubai’s greatest selling points, and they don’t look too hard at Westerners. We can get in and out without trouble. This is what we do.”
“Seriously?” said the D/CIA. “That’s what Mossad used to say. After their hit, Dubai is the last country in the Middle East I would send an operative to work without complete cover backstopping, and you’re talking about sending in a shooting team with nothing.”
Kurt held up his hands. “Hold on. Don’t confuse what we’re trying to do with that operation. The target of the Mossad hit is exactly why Dubai worked so hard to solve the crime. It humiliated them to have a bunch of Israelis come in and flagrantly kill a Hamas military commander. We’re doing nothing of the sort. We’re preventing an attack in their country, against another Westerner. As long as we don’t do anything that blatantly embarrasses them, they won’t look too hard, particularly given the target. They love McMasters from when he was an ambassador. They don’t want harm to come to him, or to their reputation. Especially after the Hamas hit.”
Alexander Palmer, the president’s national security advisor, said, “Whoa, whoa. Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? Missing something? Lucas Kane is a United States citizen. Does that matter? I mean, should we discuss the implications?”
Kurt, fearing he was losing ground, said, “Lucas Kane was designated a DOA target a couple of years ago, and it’s still valid. We just quit chasing him because he no longer posed a threat to national security. No longer fell into the Taskforce mandate. We don’t need to plow over that ground again. We discussed the implications when he was designated.”
Palmer said, “I appreciate your input, Colonel Hale, but I was speaking to the Council, not to you.”
President Warren spoke for the first time. “Lucas Kane gave up any constitutional protection when he decided to attack national interests. No different than al-Awlaki. As far as I’m concerned, his citizenship has no bearing.”
He waited for a rebuttal. When none came, he said, “Gentlemen, we have an unprecedented opportunity with this peace process, beyond whatever solutions we can gain at the bargaining table. The Palestinian Authority has requested certain things that, if we provide them, may very well give us great leverage in the future. I understand this deployment is risky, but damaging McMasters’s mission would be catastrophic to future peace in the region.”
Kurt knew the president was talking about the taste of American greenbacks he was providing to the Palestinian Authority. A carrot of money that would invariably be asked to grow, with a commensurate increase in the size of the stick behind it. He had been ambivalent before, but now was grateful for the president’s decision, as it would be the deciding vote.
The secretary of defense leaned back with a resigned expression, coming to the same conclusion. “You can give assurances that they can get in and out without compromise?”
“Sir, you know I can’t give absolutes, but they’ve done pretty good so far.”
“Yeah, right. I’ve seen a few operations run by Pike go down. What’s he doing right now? Shooting out streetlights for fun?”
Kurt smiled, knowing he had won. “No, sir. He completely understands the importance of this meeting. He’s been given direct orders to stand down from anything until the Council has decided. He’s just soaking up the Beirut sun right now.”
40
Peeking through the small gap in the curtain behind the front seats of the van, I could see Samir inside his car three rows over, nervously fidgeting and glancing at his watch. Probably wondering if he’d made the right choice. I knew how he felt, because our plan had about a hundred different opportunities for going sideways.
Immediately after talking to Samir in the house, I’d held a war council of our own, and the team had decided that getting his niece back was the right thing to do. At first, the idea seemed suicidal, because not only did the six of us have to find the niece, but also assault what was sure to be a stronghold. The only way we could see doing it successfully was to force them to come to us, then attack them while on the move. Something that was much easier said than done.
Hollywood notwithstanding, a vehicle interdiction is one of the hardest operations to successfully accomplish. By its very nature, the purpose was to stop the vehicle without harming those inside. If that wasn’t the case, a simple anti-tank rocket could be used, destroying the vehicle and killing everyone aboard. The problem with a surgical interdiction was that while the team was focused on stopping the vehicle, the occupants would be focused on the team, and they usually had a very strong desire to evade capture, along with weapons they had no compunction about using. About fifty percent of the time, the operation ended in an assault anyway, with the targets getting injured in some way or another.
The difficulty was compounded here by the fact that we could in no way allow this to end in a gunfight. I couldn’t be responsible for starting a shooting war between Hezbollah and the Druze. We needed to stop the vehicle and close on the men before they had a chance to react, which posed significant challenges. It was Decoy who’d come up with the idea of popping a tire with a suppressed sniper shot.
At a distance of two or three hundred meters away we could potentially disable the vehicle without the occupants knowing what had happened. The suppressor would muffle the sound of the gunshot, and while the bullet would still break the sound barrier with an audible crack, the noise was omnidirectional and would be camouflaged by the exploding tire. From there, a van driven by a Druze friend of Samir’s, with Jennifer in the passenger seat dressed in her stylish black sack, would pull over to help. Once they were engaged in conversation, we’d come boiling out of the van.
That was the plan, anyway.
I saw a sedan with two men approach and said, “Get ready.” The vehicle continued on, then exited the parking lot.
Brett said, “Jesus. Where are those guys?”
The time for the meeting with Hezbollah had come and gone, and we were all getting a little antsy. You always had in your mind’s eye exactly how a plan would go down, but we were attempting to take out thinking human beings with a penchant for survival, and make no mistake, they had their own ideas of what would happen.
Decoy said, “You think they’ve got eyes on Samir right now?”
Meaning, have they already scoped us out and were we now about to be on the receiving end of their own brilliant plan.
“I don’t know. Let’s give it a few more minutes, then break out. If they don’t show, we’ll have Samir call them from his house.”
I keyed my radio. “Knuckles, you still good?”
“Yeah. It’s getting hot as hell, but it won’t affect my shot.”
While I was most assuredly the better sniper, I’d given the task to Knuckles, wanting to be on the assault to contain whatever curveballs came our way. Of course, he’d say my assessment was most assuredly incorrect, and truthfully, he might be right. Although I would never tell him that.
Samir had come up with a beat-up Dragunov SVD, and Knuckles had test-fired it in the mountains behind Samir’s house. He’d come back and said that it held a little under two minutes of angle in accuracy, meaning he could put a round just inside a two-inch circle at a hundred meters, and it would
work for the operation.
The only thing that had remained was finding a place for the exchange of Samir and his niece, then the follow-on ambush. After some searching, we’d decided on the Beirut airport parking lot. The area had enough security to prevent the Hezbollah thugs from trying anything right off the bat, allowing the niece to get in Samir’s car and get away, and was close enough to Hezbollah-land that they’d feel secure. It was only a half mile from the airport to the heart of their territory.
A half mile was all we had to play with. Not a whole lot of time for me to relay the description of the vehicle to Knuckles, then have him take it down from the roof of the warehouse he was lying on.
Brett said, “You still want to parlay with them?”
“Yeah. We might get something more than just rescuing Samir and his niece. Something we can use to track Lucas.”
The end-state of the operation had been the biggest bone of contention, with most of the team wanting to chalk up a win once we had Samir and his niece freed. I thought that was just postponing the problem for Samir. In order to truly get him free, we needed to convince Hezbollah that he had nothing to do with the murder of their leadership, and I was fairly sure the tape we had of Lucas killing the Hezbollah courier would accomplish the goal—if I could get them to watch it. Best case, they lay off Samir, a civil war would be averted, and they’d give us some thread we could use to find Lucas.
Jennifer said, “White four-door sedan approaching with three men and a woman. Moving way too slow.”
