The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “Does Feldman know about your plan?”

  “Hell no!” Wheatley said. “I only formulated it in the last couple of days. He’ll find out soon enough, when you are in Islamabad. But in the meantime, get over to the Hoover Building and let them know that you are going to be working with them. For the time being, this is just between you and me and the folks downtown at HIG. This time we’re not going to lose control of events.”

  ***

  Though the thought of going to Pakistan excited him, Phil Drayton sorely wished he could have discussed his assignment with Kate Langley and Mort Feldman. Before leaving for FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, Drayton put the finishing touches on a report on the Nippon Yoku-Maru that Kate had requested from Karachi the day before.

  A Yokohama-based shipping company registered in Panama had purchased the vessel, built in 1990, for $2 million in 2004. Its cruising speed was 15 knots, with a crew of 12. She was tiny by the standards of the industry. A large container ship, 1,300 feet in length, could carry up to 8,000 standard 40-foot containers. By these criteria, the Nippon Yoku-Maru was a shrimp: 275 feet long with a beam of 50 feet rated only for 160 TEU, or ‘twenty foot equivalent units.’ In the lingo of container shipping, that meant this ship had a maximum capacity of 160 20-foot containers, or 80 of the more conventional 40-foot intermodal containers. This was one per cent of the container capacity of the behemoths of the industry.

  The specs of the Nippon Yoku-Maru just did not seem right to Drayton. He knew that so-called ‘small feeder ships,’ among the smallest in the fleet, had up to 1,000 TEUs, which meant they could carry 500 40-foot containers. What then did that make this vessel? Was it credible that such a small ship would sail halfway across the world—or even from Karachi to Jakarta? More likely, it moved like a freight taxi from smaller ports to larger ports in a constrained area, hugging the coast and carrying freight containers for transfer to larger vessels for transoceanic voyages. That would make sense.

  Another detail caught his eye before he sent the report off to Pakistan. The Nippon Yoku-Maru was a ‘geared’ ship, which meant that she had her own cargo cranes on board for moving containers onto and off of the vessel. Most container ships did not have this luxury, relying on the specialized ports they used to provide the equipment to load and offload the intermodal boxes. In contrast, the Nippon Yoku-Maru, though it was a pipsqueak among cargo vessels, could drop off a container on any wharf in the world, whether that port had crane facilities or not. It could also transfer containers to and from another vessel alongside of it.

  Drayton made a note to call Kate Langley to discuss his research. It was now approaching noon in Washington, which meant eleven hours later in Karachi, or 11 PM. The call could wait until Kate awoke the next morning.

  ***

  Like most CIA employees, Phil Drayton had never visited FBI headquarters and tended to regard the organization as a cantankerous rival, even in the post 9/11 atmosphere of enforced cooperation. Unlike CIA headquarters, hidden away in a hillside glade of trees eight miles from Washington, the J. Edgar Hoover Building was in the heart of the capital, only a few thousand feet from the White House, occupying an entire city block between 9th and 10th Streets. FBI headquarters was vastly larger than CIA, with almost three million square feet of office space housing eight thousand employees.

  Rather than drive downtown himself and deal with the impossible parking problems in the heart of the city, Drayton took the ‘Blue Bird’ bus. Blue Bird was a fleet of small buses, shuttles that made a regular loop connecting the Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security, FBI, and CIA. This fleet was used mainly to transport physical documents, a kind of internal post office, but also accommodated passengers shuttling between federal centers of power.

  Drayton reached the Hoover Building a little after one in the afternoon. Passing through a phalanx of security more brutal than that at Langley, Drayton was met in the lobby by Alice Carulla, the CIA targeter whose life Kate Langley had saved in Quetta the previous February. Like Drayton, Carulla was a graduate of SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies, though their years there had not overlapped. Drayton had not met her before but knew her by reputation. She was considered to be one of the best of the post-9/11 analysts at CIA headquarters.

  Alice Carulla was a petite, attractive athletic woman, her Mediterranean complexion giving her the appearance of a beach tan. She had oversize brown eyes and long black hair, and a quirky smile.

  “I heard you were coming down,” Carulla said, “so I volunteered to be the meeter-greeter. I was assigned to HIG two months ago myself. I hate it, by the way.”

  “How come?”

  “Not the reason you think. I get along great with the FBI people. I don’t like HIG because it is an invention of bureaucrats and politicians rather than intelligence professionals. You’ve read all the stories?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Drayton said. “HIG was meant to signal a clean break with the big bad Bush administration. Creation of ‘interrogation lite’ teams so we don’t get in trouble with Dick Cheney-type third-degree brutality, waterboarding and all that sort of stuff.”

  “I like your cynicism.”

  “So why did you transfer down here then?”

  “Because this is the only game in town now. Most of the work I do is done from behind a computer screen anyway, but unless I want to be left out of the loop entirely, HIG is the only way to get access to a real terrorist if we’re ever lucky to get our hands on one alive.”

  Alice Carulla took Drayton down the length of a corridor on the second floor of the building that was so long, the walls and ceiling seemed to converge at a point in the very great distance. The HIG occupied a suite of offices at the far end.

  “Have you heard who we are after this time?” Drayton asked when they reached Carulla’s cubicle.

  “My old friend Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb from Pakistan, just like in February,” Carulla replied. “Only this time I hope it’s the real guy and not some imposter with a bomb strapped to his crotch.”

  “Olof thinks he’s got a way to find him. A Pakistani ISI general.”

  “Ha!”

  “Yeah, I thought it was strange too. And in keeping with the multiple political objectives of HIG, there may be an ulterior agenda here. The general in question is someone Wheatley can’t stand but whom Mort Feldman appears to trust. I think Wheatley wants to destroy him.”

  “Jeez, what a mess.”

  Drayton and Carulla spent an hour swapping information about what was known about Moscow Bomb. He was back in his office at Langley before four.

  ***

  Olof Wheatley left his CIA office after seven in the evening and drove his racing-green Jaguar XJ8 back to Georgetown and the Q Street townhouse he shared with Eloise. His wife was spending the week in Manhattan, as she often did. He was a bachelor for a few days.

  Wheatley was exhausted emotionally and felt physically sick. He was the man on the spot in Washington and the White House on the Moscow Bomb case, but he had to rely on others to provide him with accurate intelligence and to carry out his directives. Were they reporting the truth? Were they actually doing what he asked of them? He wasn’t sure. He could never be sure, and he often had doubts.

  It was an intolerable situation. He had grave responsibility and accountability but little freedom of action. He had not bargained for being a deskbound spy. Though he understood that he was not cut out for field work—he frankly disliked being overseas, had no interest in foreign cultures or languages—he was unwilling to put his reputation and his future in the hands of Mort Feldman and a man whom he considered to be perhaps as dangerous as anyone in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood.

  What was Mahmood really up to? He had to hand it to the Pakistanis. They had raised simple treachery to an art, a kind of strategy. What mysterious agenda lay hidden behind the kidnapping of Mort Feldman?

  And most intolerable of all: Wheatley never knew where he stood. There was no
score sheet that could be consulted on a periodic basis. In his previous life, one knew at the end of every business day, when assets were marked to market, whether one had won or lost, to the penny. But in Washington, this was not so. How could he tell he was on the right track? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? He could only guess. And all the while was a gnawing anxiety that doom was around the corner and that he would be blamed when things went pear-shaped, and worst of all, that he would feel that he deserved that blame. He did not have a plan.

  Wheatley was too tired to eat. Instead, he sat in the cherry-paneled study of his Georgetown house, enveloped in its womb-like semi-darkness, and drank blended Scotch whiskey, an undistinguished label—he called it ‘Industrial Scotch’—a brand he bought by the case and served only at ‘B’ List cocktail parties. In time, he became numb and sleepy, his worries dissolved in ethyl alcohol.

  Chapter 24 — Bharuch, India

  The Indian subcontinent juts like a squat Ceylonese dagger deep into the heart of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a peninsula teeming with human beings and their works—the most densely populated coastline except that of China. Indians have always loved the sea, and the sea has loved India in return, providing her with wealth, food, and cheap transportation.

  India has thirteen major seaports handling half a billion tons of cargo every year, and some 180 smaller ports. One of these minor harbors is Bharuch, the most ancient city in Gujarat, where the lethargic currents of the holy river Narmada swirl into the muddy Gulf of Cambey north of Mumbai.

  A day after sailing from Karachi, the freighter Nippon Yoku-Maru, 3,500 deadweight tons, a coastal vessel not much larger than three tugboats put end to end, pulled quietly alongside the Jageshwar Shipyard Jetty No. 2 in the brackish waters of the Narmada Estuary. She had made the uneventful voyage of 360 nautical miles from Karachi in 26 hours.

  The Jageshwar Shipyard was a small, privately owned shipbuilding facility covering 35 acres with 1,600 feet of sea access, including dry docks and three jetties sticking out perpendicular to the muddy banks of the wide estuary. These were available for loading and offloading the nearly constant flow of scrap, parts, and construction materials related to projects underway at all hours of the day in the shipyard.

  Founded by a local entrepreneur in the 1970s, Jageshwar employed 275 skilled employees and 1,200 unskilled contract laborers. The owners had them principally employed, on the day of the Nippon Yoku-Maru’s visit, on a highly lucrative project for the firm: the retrofitting of a vessel of 120,000 deadweight tons with new diesel engines and refurbishment of the superstructure and interior.

  Twenty-three other smaller vessels were in varying stages of production, modernization, or conversion in other berths in the shipyard. A railway siding at the rear of the yard connected it to the central rail station fifteen miles away in downtown Bharuch, a small city of 150,000.

  On any given day at Jageshwar Shipyard, twenty to thirty tons of parts, scrap, and matériel moved into or out of the shipyard via seagoing vessels at the jetties, railroad cars on the landward side of the yard, or semi trucks. The Narmada Estuary, one of the most industrialized areas of India, is served by, among others, Indian National Highway 8 connecting Mumbai to New Delhi, as well as by the Western Railway Division of the Indian National Railway.

  For all this activity, because Jageshwar was not a commercial port facility, the Indian government did not have on site any customs or tax authorities. The shipyard was a reputable, well-respected business. It was not considered at risk for smuggling and so it was left supervised largely by its management, with monthly visits from government authorities to check on paperwork and collect fees and taxes.

  The Nippon Yoku-Maru used her own onboard crane to offload three cargo containers from among the 59 on board the vessel. Two contained brass propeller blades and gearing necessary to connect them to the driveshafts of two of the vessels currently in the yard. They were expected. The third was a container shipped by Security Exports, S.A., officially destined for Jakarta. Though the clerk recording the cargo transfer for Jageshwar was expecting only two cargo containers, he simply assumed he had not yet been notified of the third. It had happened before, and the clerk knew that the Nippon Yoku-Maru had just sailed from Karachi, which was a major port of supply for the shipyard. Better to wait for the paperwork than refuse the shipment. He signed for all three containers. The Nippon Yoku-Maru left the jetty three hours after docking, without taking on fuel or new cargo.

  ***

  The following morning, seeing the third intermodal container still sitting on the jetty and suspecting now that it had been offloaded in error, the processing clerk at Jageshwar typed the standardized ISO 6346 Reporting Mark emblazoned on each end of the container into a computer registry maintained by BIC, the International Container Bureau in Paris. This code, which could be read automatically by a handheld device or typed in via a computer terminal, provides a unique visual identifier for all 200 million containers in circulation throughout the world. The Reporting Mark points to a unique serial number, the owner, a country code, and the size of the box. The BIC spit back the name of the shipper—Security Exports, S.A., and the destination: Jakarta, Indonesia.

  Clearly, someone aboard the Nippon Yoku-Maru had screwed up. They had correctly offloaded the two containers destined for Jageshwar containing propeller parts, but then they offloaded in error a third container that should have been retained on board. Most likely, the offending container had been on top of the two boxes correctly destined and had to be moved. Instead, it was taken off the ship and left behind. It happened.

  The clerk sent an urgent email to the Bharuch office of his shipping agent, Global-Modal Asia Limited, which had directed the Nippon Yoku-Maru to Jageshwar with the two containers of propeller blades and parts, telling the agent of the offloading error. Mistakes of this sort took place several times a year. In fact, his contact at Global-Modal had once told him that in spite of all the precautions built into the intermodal transport system, between one and two thousand intermodal containers actually fell off vessels worldwide every year, a total loss of $400 million annually sunk to the bottom of the oceans. Thousands more were mis-routed in the complex, labyrinthine maze of interconnected ships, trucks, trains, and yards that comprised the global intermodal network.

  Fortunately, the BIC registry system was so efficient that almost all of these misrouted containers, unlike those lost at sea, were eventually recovered and correctly routed. Meanwhile, the misrouted container sat on the jetty under the hot rays of a subtropical Indian sun.

  ***

  The local bureau of Global-Modal Asia Limited occupied the topmost floor of a dusty, mustard-colored five-storey office structure on Station Road, where it terminates at the Bharuch Railway Yard in the heart of central Bharuch, across from the Relax Cinema Hall. Junior Clerk Ashok Bhatt read the email from Jageshwar Shipyards minutes after it had been sent and endeavored to perform a calculation to determine the cheapest and quickest way to return the misplaced container at the shipyard into the vast global intermodal system and send it along to its correct destination. Bhatt discussed the matter with Babu Patel, his supervisor.

  “It’s all a question of weight,” Patel said. He had taken the newly hired Bhatt under his wing and was teaching him the ropes. “It is weight which determines whether we have the option of trucking, or if we are limited only to rail or ship.”

  Patel located some additional data about the container in his computer files.

  “This container is practically empty, do you see?” he said. “It is rated at 9,450 pounds, of which 8,500 is the steel in the empty container itself.”

  “So how do we get this one back on track?” Bhatt asked.

  “This is not difficult. We truck it thirty miles to the Port of Magdalla and put it on board the next ship to Jakarta.”

  “Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to let it sit in place until the next coastal freighter comes by Jageshwar?”

  “I
f there were no fines for delay that might be true, but the clock is ticking my friend. Every day of delay reduces our fee. Cheapest way is almost always the way that minimizes time lost and therefore also late fees. This one is quite straightforward. This box will again be on the high seas by tomorrow noon.”

  “Never did I dream I would ever have a model train set this big to play with!” Bhatt enthused, only half-joking. “This power to move anything anywhere in the world, it is truly astonishing.”

  “Truly, my friend,” said Patel. “The most unheralded revolution in the twentieth century was the invention of this intermodal system that everyone takes for granted but us.”

  Chapter 25 — Karachi

  Within 72 hours of the radiation alert at the port of Karachi, more than half of the potentially suspect containers had been tracked down, inspected, and declared safe.

  Kate Langley called Mort Feldman in Islamabad to provide him with twice-daily updates. She had commandeered a spare desk at the U.S. Consulate.