Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  From there he received his primary submarine officer’s training, graduating first in his class, and was sent out into the fleet.

  A century ago, he reflected. A completely different lifetime, because in those days he’d had legitimacy, a pride in what he was doing. There had been more schooling, more promotions, new ships, new mates, new adventures.

  And throughout it all, almost from the beginning had been Jillian; dear, sweet, pixie-faced Jillian whom he had loved with every fiber of his being.

  He closed his eyes, a frown crossing his features. There had been two incidents during Perisher before he’d been given command of his own sub, in which the old man had taken him aside for a word in private.

  Jillian had been admitted to the base hospital twice in three months; the first with cracked ribs and a lot of bruising on her arms and chest, and the second with a fractured left arm and three teeth knocked out. In both incidents she’d told the emergency room doctors that she was clumsy and had fallen down the cellar stairs.

  But it wasn’t true, and although no one had believed her stories, nothing could be done. The old man had counseled Graham on anger management during times of extreme stress.

  “You’ll need your wits about you if you should suddenly find yourself in a dicey situation a dozen miles off some Russian peninsula in the Barents Sea. Can’t be losing your head. Your men will be watching your every move.”

  The thing was, he could no longer remember the incidents in any great detail, nor could he bring up an image of Jillian’s face in his mind. It frightened him.

  But what was permanently etched in his brain was the fact that the same man who had counseled him on anger management had not sent the recall message so that Graham could get back from sea in time to be at Jillian’s side when she died.

  Afterwards he’d demanded that the staff judge advocate’s office investigate. But his request had been denied. Admiral Woodrow S. B. Holmes had acted well within the responsibilities of his office by not recalling a nuclear submarine on patrol for the sake of a personal problem, no matter how high-ranking the officer was, nor how serious the problem was. The needs of the Royal Navy had to come first.

  In the heart of the city’s business and banking district the Mercedes turned onto M. R. Kayani Road and two blocks later entered a secured underground parking garage that served the forty-eight-story M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre.

  Graham had only been here twice before, and he thought that it was a great irony that bin Laden had been hiding out in Pakistan’s largest city all along, when the entire world, especially the American CIA, believed he was somewhere in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan.

  Five levels down the driver pulled up at an elevator, but he didn’t get out to open the car door for Graham. “You may go directly up. He is expecting you.”

  “Will you wait for me?” Graham asked. The driver was looking at him in the rearview mirror.

  “That will be up to him.”

  “Very well,” Graham said. He let himself out of the car, got his bag, and walked across to the elevator, which automatically started up. A closed-circuit camera mounted near the ceiling was trained on him. Security in this building was very tight because of all the wealthy business tenants. No one who didn’t belong here got in or out. Ever.

  But an even more delicious irony was that a small international investments company on the tenth floor that handled money transactions for the Afghanistan heroin trade was, in fact, a front for a CIA special mission station. Only a very few people in Pakistan’s secret intelligence service knew about it, or its purpose, which was to find and eliminate Afghanistan’s drug overlords as well as the handlers along the pipeline to the United States.

  The elevator came to a halt on the twenty-fifth floor and Graham stepped out into a plushly carpeted entry hall, across which was a single door. An old man in Western dress was there.

  “Good evening, Captain Graham,” the old man said. He was one of bin Laden’s inner circle, though Graham had never been told his name.

  “Will I be staying here tonight, or have hotel arrangements been made for me?”

  “You will remain here, with us, for the time being,” the old man said. He was frail and his voice was pleasantly soft, but there was no warmth in his eyes or his manner. “Come with me.”

  Graham followed the old man into the suite of offices and living spaces, down a long corridor to a small room in approximately the center of the building. Furnished only with an Oriental rug and a small television set on a tiny round table, the space was lit by a single small-wattage bulb that hung from the ceiling. There were no woven hangings, pictures, or any other adornments on the walls, nor were there windows. This was the inner sanctum, where bin Laden prayed five times per day, where he watched CNN, once in the morning and once each evening, and where he held the most secret of his meetings.

  “Wait here,” the old man said, and he withdrew.

  Graham dropped his garment bag in the corner, slipped off his shoes, and sat cross-legged on the edge of the rug.

  Both times he’d been called to this place he’d met with bin Laden in this room, but never before had he stayed in the building for more than an hour. All of his other planning sessions with the man had been conducted via encrypted e-mail or encrypted satellite phone or, once in person, at the training camp in the Syrian Desert.

  And at each meeting bin Laden had greeted him like an old friend, a long-lost brother. Graham suspected that this time it would be different. The mission had failed and he knew that he would be blamed, though he strongly suspected that the leak had come from someone here in Pakistan, or more likely someone from the Syrian training camp.

  There was a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head, but no one who knew the man’s real location would ever reveal it. He would not live to collect the money, let alone spend it. But feeding the American authorities information about al-Quaida missions was becoming a high-stakes cottage industry. In practical terms it meant that only a very select few men were allowed to know the whole picture of any mission.

  Graham decided that if nothing else happened he would find the traitor and personally slit his throat.

  A clean-shaven bin Laden, dressed in khaki slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt, entered the room. Graham started to get to his feet, but bin Laden waved him back. “It is good that you have returned unharmed. You may consider yourself lucky.”

  “Who was he?”

  Bin Laden sat down on the rug and faced Graham. “His name is Kirk McGarvey.”

  Graham allowed a look of wonder to cross his face. “He was the director of the CIA.”

  “Yes, but more than that he is an assassin.”

  “The Americans no longer do that sort of thing … .”

  “You’re a submarine commander, not an intelligence officer, so your error is understandable,” bin Laden said mildly. “And now you are the second man to come to me a failure against McGarvey.”

  “Where is the other?”

  “He tried again and died,” bin Laden said.

  “I’m not so easy to kill,” Graham said, irritated.

  “I sincerely hope not. But McGarvey is not your problem. You will remain here until he is eliminated.”

  Graham’s anger spiked. He sat forward. “I want him,” he said sharply.

  Bin Laden was unmoved. “If he sees you again he will kill you,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen. I have another use for you.”

  “What?”

  “In due time, my friend. Do not let your anger and impatience get the better of you. Not if you wish to continue your jihad against the godless men who abused your trust so harshly.”

  “You said it was a mission more suited to my training,” Graham said. “Can you at least tell me if it involves a submarine?”

  Bin Laden looked at him for a long time, before he finally nodded, the gesture so slight it was almost unnoticeable.

  A thrill coursed through Graham like
a hit of cocaine to a desperate man. All of his training had been for one purpose, and one purpose alone; to command an underwater warship. To train a crew and lead his men into battle. All other considerations were secondary: pain, fear, conscience, ego. Even love.

  “Until the mission preparation fully develops you will remain here at my side.”

  “I should be involved in the planning,” Graham said. “For God’s sake, I’m a trained sub driver. I have the knowledge.”

  “Yes, which is exactly why you will not be allowed to leave this place until the time is correct,” bin Laden said. “You are too valuable an asset to risk.”

  “Then why was I sent on the canal strike?” Graham demanded.

  “Because I wasn’t sure that we could get a boat,” bin Laden said.

  “My God, you’ve done it? You’ve got a sub?”

  “In due time,” bin Laden said. “Now leave me, I wish to be alone. Salaam will show you to your quarters.”

  Graham got up, retrieved his bag and shoes, and left the room without another word. His mind was alive with the possibilities that another command would give him. The entire world would be his, and he meant to take it.

  By the time he was finished, the damage would be incalculable.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GUANTANAMO BAY

  Across the bay from Leeward Point Field, which served as Gitmo’s airport, the U.S. Navy Station senior personnel were housed in base headquarters, which was also home to the U.S. Army’s senior Detainee Ops personnel.

  The navy ran the station, but the army was in charge of the prisoners—mostly al-Quaida and Taliban, and the mujahideen who fought for them.

  The navy’s ONI handled most of the prisoner interrogations after the backlash against the army’s methods at Abu Ghraib, but Army MPs were still in charge of security at all six camps.

  It was an odd melding of the services, but it seemed to work, despite pressures from Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the international media to close the place.

  This morning McGarvey and Gloria Ibenez had flown down aboard a Navy C-20D, which was a Gulfstream III used to transport VIPs. They were seated at a conference table at base headquarters across from Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, who was the CO of detainee operations, his chief of intelligence operations, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Higgins, and Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss, the one Gloria had warned McGarvey about. He was the senior ONI officer at Delta.

  “I was asked by the secretary of defense to cooperate with you,” General Maddox said. “And that’s what we’ll do. But I don’t like it.” He was a tall, rangy man in his early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short in the Depression-era style with no sideburns. He was dressed in camouflage BDUs.

  “We appreciate it, General,” McGarvey said pleasantly, and he glanced over at Weiss, who had an angry scowl on his face. “We’ll try to cause as little disruption as possible, and get out of here as soon as we can.”

  “There will not be a repeat of last week’s incident in which three of my people were KIA, do I make myself clear?”

  Gloria stepped in before McGarvey could speak. “Excuse me, General, but my partner and I did not start it.” She was hot, but on the way down she’d promised to control herself. “Your three people were already dead by the time we stumbled onto the prison break.”

  McGarvey sat back. They had not made a decision to play bad-cop, good-cop, and it wouldn’t work with Maddox anyway. He’d seen the general’s jacket. As a young captain during the first Gulf War he had been awarded every decoration except the Medal of Honor. His nickname was “Icewater.” But with Weiss it could be different. The man was in love with himself.

  “If you had stayed out of it, your partner wouldn’t have been shot to death,” Weiss jumped in angrily. He was in crisp summer undress whites. “And most likely the Coast Guard would have recovered all five prisoners, and the strike force that hit us, before they got five miles offshore.”

  “They could have been halfway back to Iran before anybody knew they were gone,” Gloria shot back. “Bob was just doing his job, something you apparently don’t understand.”

  McGarvey held up a hand. “Can we get back on track here?”

  Weiss started to say something, but Maddox held him off. “Amnesty International will be here in two days to make sure we’re no longer using Biscuit teams.” Psychiatrist M.D.s had been used in units called Behavioral Sciences Consultation Teams, Biscuit teams for short, to help interrogators increase the stress levels of prisoners. It made questioning of them a lot easier. But there had been ethical issues and the White House had ordered the practice be stopped. “You will be gone from this base before they arrive. Is that also clear?”

  “I expect we’ll be done by then,” McGarvey said.

  Maddox turned to Weiss and then Gloria. “And the fireworks between you two will cease and desist right now.”

  Weiss wanted to protest, but he nodded darkly.

  Gloria smiled. “Sorry, General, just trying to do my job.”

  “Very well,” Maddox said. “What brings a former CIA director here, or is your mission so secret we can’t be told?”

  “Not at all,” McGarvey replied pleasantly. He watched Weiss’s eyes. “Al-Quaida has hired an ex–British Royal Navy submarine captain, and we think the organization is trying to raise a crew for him. The five men who were broken out last week were all ex–Iranian navy.”

  Weiss didn’t blink.

  “We didn’t know that,” Lieutenant Colonel Higgins said. He was a West Point graduate who had never seen battle. He’d gotten his law degree and had spent a large portion of his career at the Pentagon. He was a mild-mannered–looking man, with thin brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Like Maddox, he was dressed in BDUs.

  “Not ex-navy,” Weiss put in. “We think they were on active duty when they were rounded up on the Iranian border. We were working on confirming it, in which case they would have been released.”

  “Why wasn’t I told?” Higgins demanded.

  “Dan, we just weren’t sure,” Weiss said. “And we still aren’t.” He glanced at Gloria. “If we could have recaptured them alive we might have found out.”

  “There’ve been no IDs on the bodies of the strike force they sent against us,” Higgins told McGarvey. “We think they were al-Quaida, but in light of this they could just as likely have been Iranian special forces here to rescue their people.”

  “With the cooperation of the Cubans—” Gloria said, but McGarvey held her off with a gesture.

  “That’s purely speculation,” Higgins replied calmly. Unlike Weiss, who was posturing, he was in control; a lawyer discussing the dry facts of a civil case. “They probe our perimeter at least once a week, and that’s been going on for months now.”

  Gloria wanted to protest, but McGarvey held her off again. “Our people are working on that aspect.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Maddox said. “Which brings us back to the question at hand. What are you doing here?”

  “We have the names of four additional prisoners we believe might have navy backgrounds. We’d like to interview them. If al-Quaida is trying to raise a crew the word will have gotten out. They may have heard something.”

  “There’ve been no unauthorized communications to or from this camp,” Weiss said, and he looked to Higgins for confirmation, but the colonel merely cocked his head as he looked at McGarvey.

  “Right,” McGarvey replied dryly. “They’ve got themselves a sub captain, now if they can come up with a crew they could hit us harder than 9/11.”

  “Isn’t the CIA forgetting something?” Weiss wanted to know. “Captains and crews don’t mean much if they don’t have a boat. Or are you saying they managed to snatch someone’s submarine.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “I’ll bet you are. In the meantime, the prisoners belong to me.”

  McGarvey held his silence. If Weiss was on someone’s payroll, he was either very dull, or bright
enough to hide behind what was almost too obvious a show of stupidity.

  Weiss again looked to Higgins for support, but again the colonel said nothing. “Give me your names, and I’ll check them against our database,” he told McGarvey. “If I come up with something, I’ll arrange for the interviews. Supervised interviews.”

  McGarvey nodded. “We’ll need a translator who speaks Farsi as well as Arabic.”

  “We have them,” Weiss said. “And I’ll be looking over your shoulder.”

  Otto had come up with the four names, out of the three-hundred-plus prisoners being held here. But he had no solid evidence linking any of them with the Iranian navy, only speculation derived from the transcripts of the interviews of more than two thousand detainees since the start of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The only real information he’d come up with was on the five prisoners who had been broken out last week. McGarvey didn’t think they would learn much from these four, but he wanted to see what Weiss’s reaction would be. If the navy spook was the conduit, breaking him could give them a path that might stretch all the way back to Pakistan.

  “I have no objections to that, provided you promise not to interfere, and that you’ll give us a decent translator,” McGarvey said.

  “We can have one of ours flown down by this afternoon,” Gloria suggested on cue.

  “I have some good people on staff,” Weiss said, not asking the obvious: Why hadn’t they brought their own translator in the first place?

  But Higgins got it, and he managed to hide a slight smile behind his hand.

  “Very well,” McGarvey said.

  Gloria took four thin files from her attaché case and handed them across the conference table to Weiss. “Assa al-Haq, Yohanan Qurayza, Zia Warrag, and Ali bin Ramdi,” she said. “We know that they’re here, but not much else.”

  Weiss briefly glanced at the material, then nodded smugly. He’d managed to push his weight around. “Go over to the BOQ, get settled, and grab a late lunch over at the O Club. As soon as I come up with something, I’ll send a runner for you.”