Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  The call had come thirty-six hours ago, and al-Turabi had spent that time trying to devise a foolproof plan. The best would have been to kill McGarvey while he slept in his own bed. He no longer had a security detail assigned to him, so it would have been a relatively straightforward hit.

  “It looks like they’re moving away,” Odeah said, breaking al-Turabi out of his thoughts. “In a big hurry.”

  “Yes, but there was no security detail as we feared might be down there,” al-Turabi replied. “McGarvey is on his own.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, only his wife.”

  “We can come back tonight,” Odeah suggested. “But we’re going to have to get someone down here before the truck leaves so we can follow it.”

  “It won’t be necessary.”

  “We don’t want to lose them—”

  “It’s not necessary, Imad, because I know precisely where McGarvey will be two days from now, and precisely what time he will be there. We’ll just have to wait until then to kill him.”

  They were passing over the busy Beltway where I-270 split off to Rockville, and Odeah adjusted his course to skirt the city to the south. “You’re talking about the funeral?”

  “Four o’clock in the afternoon at Arlington. We’ll get there a half hour early, and spread out. As soon as McGarvey arrives we’ll hit him and everyone else with everything we’ve got.” Al-Turabi had come across the funeral arrangements for the dead spy, Robert Talarico, on the CIA’s low-security Web site. He had considered it only as an alternative, because although killing McGarvey would be fairly easy, getting away afterwards would present some problems.

  Insh’allah. Paradise awaited the fighter for the jihad.

  “Killing a grieving widow and her children is not a good thing.” Al-Turabi’s anger, which had been fueled by fear ever since he had joined the struggle, suddenly spiked. “They are infidels!” he shrieked. He was seeing red spots and flashes in front of his face. He wasn’t aboard an airplane over the Maryland countryside, he was in a fierce battle north of Kabul, and the incoming tracer rounds from the Russian position were flying all over the place.

  “Yes, Kamal, but are they worth dying for?”

  “We have to kill them all.”

  “McGarvey I understand, but not the others,” Odeah argued. “Listen to reason. I am no suicide bomber. Neither are the others. We’re willing to give our lives for the struggle, but not like some crazy kids from the West Bank.”

  “Or like Mohamad Atta?”

  Odeah was suddenly uncomfortable. He glanced nervously at al-Turabi. “He was a great hero. When he died he took more than two thousand infidels with him. Not a handful attending a funeral.”

  “Pray that you die so usefully,” al-Turabi replied, no longer angry.

  “Do you mean to kill us then?”

  “If our deaths serve the jihad, yes.”

  THIRTY

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  Adkins sat behind his desk, looking out the bulletproof windows across the woods behind the Building, enjoying the rare moment when he was alone, no telephones, no one seated across from him, no secretary, no pressing commitments to a National Intelligence Estimate or Watch Report. It was a few minutes after seven in the evening and all that was done for today.

  But his desk was piled high with reports that would need his attention first thing in the morning, and with letters yet to be written, others to be signed, and a brutally grinding schedule of appointments that wouldn’t end until well after seven.

  He’d decided that when this business was done, he was going to resign—retire, actually—like McGarvey, only his retirement was going to be permanent. He’d never been a spy, in the classical, Cold War sense, he’d been more of an administrator. He could keep the gears well oiled, the machinery moving, but he’d never had those sudden flashes of inspiration or intuition that came so naturally to men such as McGarvey. They thrived on the game, as so many of them thought of the business. For them it was a black-and-white issue, us versus the bad guys. Administration meant nothing. Neither did realpolitik.

  Von Clausewitz had written something to the effect that war was a political instrument. Adkins’s poli-sci professor at the University of Indiana had vehemently disagreed. Of course he was a raging knee-jerk liberal, as Adkins had been at the time. But now everything was different. Maybe the old German had been right all along, but it was a philosophy that Adkins could not bring himself to embrace.

  His secretary, Dhalia Swanson, had left for the evening, as had Dave Whittaker and most of the other senior staff. The Watch down in DO was manned 24/7 as was the NRO’s photo interp shop, but most of the Building was quiet.

  The inner door to his office was open, and he saw Otto Rencke’s reflection in the window glass. Adkins turned around as the Special Projects director came in, his long frizzy red hair flying out from beneath a baseball cap with the sword and shield logo of the old KGB. His short-sleeved sweatshirt was from Moscow State University. He figured that his outfit was a good joke here at CIA headquarters.

  “I thought you’d be gone by now,” Adkins said, girding himself for bad news. Rencke had the look.

  “The lavender is getting really deep, Mr. Director, I had to let you know right away. Mac doesn’t want me to bother him at Gitmo, and you probably gotta do some stuff before he gets back.”

  “Why aren’t you supposed to call him?”

  Rencke shrugged. “He and Gloria are probably in the middle of some serious shit, ya know.”

  Adkins supposed that one of the core reasons he hated this job was that lives were on the line. He’d lost some good people in Afghanistan, several in Iraq, and then Talarico last week. Gloria had been wrong; Bob’s death wasn’t her fault, that burden was the DCI’s, who had given the orders to send people into harm’s way.

  “Okay, Otto, what have you come up with and what stuff do I have to do?”

  “We may have caught a break, ’cause José Martinez, one of our guys in Mexico City, thought he spotted Graham, or someone close enough he could’ve been a clone, at the airport’s international terminal two days ago.”

  “Why’d he wait so long to get that up to us?” Adkins demanded. His stomach was sour.

  “He wasn’t sure until just now,” Rencke said.

  “Is he one of McCann’s people?”

  “He’s a Mexican national we burned eighteen months ago,” Rencke said, sidestepping the question. “Works airport security. He was the one who spotted Graham heading down to Venezuela.”

  Mexico City had always been a big center for intelligence-gathering. The Soviets, and these days the Russians, fielded more intelligence officers from their embassy than from any other embassy in the world, including here in Washington. Some of the networks such as Banco del Sur and CESTA had been in continuous operation, spying not only on the United States, but on Mexico and all of Central America as well, since the early fifties.

  McGarvey had come back from a delicate operation down there more than ten years ago, in which a lot of people had lost their lives, including Donald Suthland Powers, possibly the most effective DCI in the Company’s history. Adkins remembered it well, because he had been a senior Watch officer under Jon Lyman Trotter, who’d turned out to be the mole that Jim Angleton had been searching for all along.

  “Continue,” Adkins prompted.

  “Graham was moving fast and he was in disguise each time, but Martinez managed to get reasonably clear headshots. The first time he sent them up to us for the match with Graham. This time he wasn’t so sure of himself, so he did the work himself.”

  “Graham?” Adkins asked.

  “I sent his stuff over to Louise and she has a ninety-three percent confidence that both guys are Graham.” Louise Horn was chief of the National Reconnaissance Office’s Photographic Interpretation Center. She was almost as brilliant and as odd as Otto, and she was his wife.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Adkins said. “He wasn’t heading
back to Maracaibo to try again, was he?”

  “Pakistan,” Rencke said.

  “He’s on his way to bin Laden,” Adkins said, molten lead in his stomach. “Allah’s Scorpion. It’s really going to happen, and it wasn’t the canal after all.”

  Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other. “Bingo,” he said and he clapped his hands together.

  “What about at that end?”

  “I sent the package to Dave Coddington, but we were way too late,” Rencke said. Coddington was chief of Karachi Station, one of the CIA’s toughest postings anywhere in the world.

  “He could be anywhere by now,” Adkins said. If they could have picked up the man’s trail he might have led them to bin Laden—the big prize. But this job had almost never been that easy.

  “Yes, he could,” Rencke agreed.

  “Like a needle in a haystack,” Adkins mumbled.

  “Mac would let the president know about this,” Rencke suggested. “We need to shift our assets into finding a Kilo sub, because that’s what they’ll probably use. The Pentagon has the resources to help us out, if they can be convinced to cooperate.”

  Adkins was mildly surprised. “I would’ve expected that you would just hack their system.”

  Rencke smiled. “Unfortunately not everything is loaded into a database. We might need Humint this time. Pete Gregory is a naval historian. If we could get to him, he might be able to tell us where a stray Kilo for sale might be located. I’ve got my own list, but I don’t think Graham will go to the most obvious places.”

  “A submarine alone won’t do them much good,” Adkins pointed out. “They’ll need a weapon.”

  “I’m working on that too.” Rencke nodded. And that’s probably going to be the worst of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the deep lavender, Mr. Director,” Rencke said. “A lot of Kilos are capable of launching cruise missiles while submerged. Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  The president and his national security adviser, Dennis Berndt, agreed to see Adkins immediately. It was eight by the time the DCI arrived at the White House. His limousine was passed through the West Gate, he signed in with the Secret Service detail, and was brought back to the Oval Office.

  Haynes was dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, which meant he’d already had dinner with his wife and daughter. Berndt was still dressed in a suit and tie. He’d been getting ready to leave for the night when Adkins called. He and the president seemed concerned.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, Dick?” the president asked. He was having a Bud Light. “Or a beer?”

  “No, sir. I’m not going to take up much of your time tonight, but there have been some interesting developments that you need to know about,” Adkins said.

  “Concerning Graham and the Panama Canal incident?” Berndt asked.

  “Graham was spotted in Mexico City two days ago, heading to Pakistan.”

  The president grinned. “That’s good news—” he said, but then stopped, realizing what Adkins had just told him. “He’s on his way to bin Laden?”

  “Yes, sir. But we got the news too late to be waiting for him when he got to Karachi. By now he could be just about anywhere.”

  “I see,” the president said. He exchanged a look with Berndt. “You didn’t come here this evening merely to tell me that the CIA lost track of this man.”

  “No, sir. But we believe that the attack on the Panama Canal was a separate operation from one al-Quaida has been gearing up for possibly more than a year.”

  “Allah’s Scorpion?” Berndt asked.

  Adkins nodded. “We’ve since learned that Graham was trained by the British navy to be a submarine commander. Top of his class in their Perisher school.”

  “Good Lord,” the president said softly.

  “He’s more dangerous than we first believed.”

  “Do the crazy bastards actually have a submarine?” Berndt asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Adkins admitted. “But they have a top-flight submarine captain, and they’ve been trying to recruit a crew, so we think it’s a safe bet that they’ve already got a sub, or they’ll try to get one. Otto Rencke thinks they’ll try for a Russian-built Kilo Class boat. It’s diesel-electric, so on batteries alone it’s ultra-quiet. I’m told that it’s extremely reliable, easy to operate with a minimum crew, and almost as common as the Russian Kalashnikov rifle. Half the navies in the world own one or more. Iran has three.”

  “Okay, assuming bin Laden recruited Graham to come at us with a submarine, why’d he take the risk trying to destroy the Panama Canal?” the president asked.

  “I’ll tell you why, Mr. President,” Berndt broke in. “If he’d been successful we would have had our hands full, just like after 9/11. We would have been looking the other way. Which means that whatever they’re planning next will have the potential of hurting us even worse than the canal.”

  Haynes had been standing, leaning against his desk. He put his beer down, a set expression in his eyes. “What next?”

  “McGarvey went down to Guantanamo Bay to question a number of prisoners who might have navy backgrounds, on the chance they may know something,” Adkins said. “His primary mission is still to find Graham and bin Laden and take them out.”

  “Does he know that Graham went to Pakistan?”

  “Not yet, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “He’ll be informed when he gets back. In the meantime we’d like to ask the navy for some help tracking down the Kilo boats our satellites will probably miss.”

  The president nodded. “I’ll call Charlie Taggart tonight.” Taggart was the secretary of defense and a longtime friend of the president’s.

  “Thank you, sir, but there’s more,” Adkins said.

  “There always is,” Haynes said, and he nodded impatiently for Adkins to get on with it.

  “A lot of the Kilo boats out there have been modified so that they can fire cruise missiles from their torpedo tubes while submerged.”

  “Yes?”

  “Before the British navy taught Graham to command submarines, they sent him to Dounreay, where he got his degree in nuclear engineering.”

  Both the president and his national security adviser were struck dumb for a moment. Berndt was the first to recover.

  “I would think that buying or stealing a cruise missile might be even harder than getting a submarine,” Berndt said.

  “Yes, it would,” Adkins agreed. “We think they’ll probably try for a nuclear-tipped cruise missile. Graham would certainly know how to handle such a weapon.”

  “He could park his boat within a few miles anywhere along our coast and fire the damn thing,” Berndt said. “We would have virtually no warning whatsoever.”

  “If we knew where, we could intercept him and destroy his boat,” the president said. “Have you told any of this to Hamel?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t,” Haynes said. “There’re too many politicians over there. We can’t let one word of this get out. It’d create a panic worse than last year’s suicide bombing scare.”

  “No matter what happens this will be the end of them,” Berndt said. “We didn’t collapse after 9/11, and we toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They’ve got nowhere to go.”

  “That’s what we figure, Dennis,” Adkins said. “From their perspective they’ve got to hit us. We’ve left them no other choice.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  CAMP DELTA

  A few minutes before two in the morning Gloria drove McGarvey across the quiet base up the hill to the prison’s main gate.

  They’d tossed their overnight bags in the Humvee and roused the Gulfstream’s crew to get the aircraft ready for an immediate departure for Washington, because after this morning McGarvey figured they’d have to get out of Dodge as soon as possible, or they might be held until Adkins could pull some strings either at the Pentagon or the White House.


  “They’re going to want to know what we’re doing here at this hour of the morning,” Gloria said as they approached the gate. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I’ll handle it,” McGarvey told her. Last night they had spread the word that they were heading home first thing in the morning, and then had turned in early to get a few hours’ sleep at the BOQ. He had no doubt that Weiss had been informed, and would have let his guard down, thinking he had won.

  Gloria glanced at him. “This isn’t going to work if you’re wrong about bin Ramdi understanding English. There’s no way in hell Deyhim will cooperate.”

  “I know,” McGarvey said. “But we’re going to call him anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone is going to notify Weiss that we’ve showed up, and I want him to think that he’s got plenty of time because without a translator it won’t matter what we do.”

  Gloria grinned. “Sneaky. I like it. I just hope you’re right, otherwise our trip was a waste of time.”

  She pulled up at the main gate. The MP who came out remembered her from last week. His M8 was slung over his shoulder, muzzle down.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” he said. His name tag read ROBERTS. He looked past her at McGarvey. “Sir, may I help you?”

  McGarvey held up his CIA identification card. “We need to ask one of the guys we interviewed just before dinner a couple of questions.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll call Commander Weiss for authorization.”

  “He’s on his way,” McGarvey said. “But you can get our translator out of bed. He didn’t answer when we tried to call just twenty minutes ago.”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll just stand by—”

  “Look, everybody’s tired, and nobody wants to be here at this hour of the morning, not us, and especially not Weiss. So go ahead and call Deyhim, but in the meantime we want to get to the interrogation center and have the prisoner brought over. It’ll save us some time, and’ll probably make Weiss a little less pissed off than he already is.”