“It might not be carried aboard, but it might get through customs disguised as electronic equipment, machinery or even office supplies. And unless it was damaged it wouldn’t leak radiation so it’d be invisible to most airport security measures. Even bomb sniffing dogs wouldn’t be able to sense it. Nor would our satellites, or NEST (Nuclear Explosives Search Teams) units. It could be moved anywhere around the world almost as easily as a case of beans or a sack of rice.”
FBI Director Herbert Weissman shook his head. “We have scenarios in place to deal with anthrax or nerve gas or a dozen other biological and chemical attacks, but not this. Not something this portable.”
“Until now there’ve been tight controls on the things,” McGarvey said.
Even Berndt was subdued. “Assuming for the moment that bin Laden has this weapon, and that he can get it here, how is it fired?”
“It’s exceedingly simple, sir. Almost foolproof. It can be set off by a simple turn of the key, by a timer, or even by remote control up to a mile away depending on conditions. Or, the signal to detonate could even come from a satellite, one disguised as a simple telephone call.”
“Christ,” SecDef Turnquist said. “Can we get any cooperation from the Russians?”
“I doubt it, sir,” McGarvey said. “They won’t even admit they ever built the things, let alone they lost one. They were never included in any of the SALT treaties. Neither were ours, for that matter.”
Berndt sat forward, “I think I know what Art is trying to get at. If we can get the Russians to help us, why couldn’t we send the signal to detonate the thing right now, while it’s still in Afghanistan?”
“No,” the President said sharply.
“It’s better than taking the risk that the crazy sonofabitch will actually try to bring it here.”
The President looked to McGarvey. “It could be anywhere by now, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, or in Kabul itself. Or even here in Washington?”
“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said.
“Then we’re at the bastard’s mercy already,” Berndt observed. “All the more reason to hit him with cruise missiles as soon as we can. Dead men don’t give orders.”
The President ignored his NSA, his eyes locked on McGarvey. “You have our attention, Mr. McGarvey. What do you think we should do?”
“Bin Laden wants to talk, so that’s exactly what we do.”
“Your man in Riyadh tried it, and it got him killed,” Berndt pointed out.
“Allen was probably killed on the orders of one of bin Laden’s followers. A fanatic. Someone who wants to use the bomb against us.”
“But bin Laden doesn’t necessarily agree,” the President said. “Are you saying that he got it as a bargaining chip?”
“I think that’s a possibility we have to consider, Mr. President.”
“Okay, who do we send?”
“Me,” McGarvey said. It was a bombshell around the table, even to Murphy who saw it coming. As DDO McGarvey was the third most powerful man in U.S. intelligence, bagging him would not only be a major coup for a terrorist such as bin Laden, but it had the potential of harming the U.S. even worse than Aldrich Ames had done. Ames had spied for the Russians in the eighties and early nineties. Because of him nearly all of our deep cover assets in the Soviet Union were blown, most of them assassinated. The CIA still was not fully recovered. “He wants to talk, so I’ll go talk to him.”
“It’s a suicide mission,” Admiral Halverson said. “If you’re wrong, and bin Laden did order Trumble’s assassination, you’d be walking into a hornet’s nest.” He shook his head. “Hell, even if you’re right, and it was one of bin Laden’s followers, what would stop him from ordering your death the moment you set foot in Afghanistan?”
“Considering what we’re faced with, it’s a risk I’m willing to take, Admiral,” McGarvey said. “The same risk your people signed on for when they put on a uniform.”
The comment stung, and the admiral sat back, chastised.
“I don’t think we have any other choice now,” Secretary of State Carpenter said in his studied way. “But what would you say to the monster that would make any sort of difference?”
“I’ll tell him that we got his message about the bomb, and ask him to turn it over to us,” McGarvey said. “I can’t think of any other reason he gave the serial number to Trumble. He wants to make a deal with us. We’ll give him back his assets, lift the bounty and try to get the Saudi government to let his family come home. At least that’d be a start.”
“We’ve been over that,” Berndt said.
“There’s something else he wants. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something he wants badly enough to agree to talk to us.”
“Kill him,” Berndt said flatly.
“Another failed missile attack could drive him into using the bomb,” McGarvey said. “None of us want that.”
“I mean if you actually get close to him, kill the man.”
McGarvey went eye-to-eye with the President’s national security adviser. “Are you giving me that order, Mr. Berndt?” The room was quiet. “Because if you are, I would like it in writing.”
“Dennis, we’re a long ways from ordering a suicide mission assassination,” the President said. “If we strike his camps with cruise missiles the mission will be to deny him the capability to wage a war of terrorism. We will not specifically target the man.”
It was a very fine point, barely within American law, and no one missed it, nor did anyone offer comment. Assassination as a political weapon was not an option, although if bin Laden were to be killed in a missile raid, then so be it.
“How sure are you that he’s not simply setting a trap?” the President asked. “It comes down to that.”
“If he is, he wouldn’t have killed Allen. He would have waited for someone like me to show up. He wants something, and I have to meet with him.”
“How soon could you set it up?”
“We’ll put the word out, and if he responds it’ll be within the week, maybe two,” McGarvey said.
“Safeguards?” the President asked.
“We have some limited resources in Kabul.”
“Assuming he’s still in Afghanistan, how would you get there? Government transport is out.”
“Ariana Airlines, through Dubai,” McGarvey said. “For the moment it’s the only reliable carrier to Kabul. From there I would expect he’d send someone for me.”
The President shook his head. “I don’t like this, but I don’t see any other alternative under the circumstances.”
“No, sir,” McGarvey said.
“General?” The President turned to Murphy.
Murphy gave McGarvey an odd, almost pensive look. “He’ll have to go in clean. If we try to set something up for him, some kind of a backup, and bin Laden finds out about it, Mac will be a dead man.”
The President looked around the table. “Have there been any leaks yet?” To this point the media was accepting the FBI’s story that the shooting in Orlando was a case of mistaken identity in a drug cartel war. The eye witnesses said that the shooters were slightly built and dark-skinned, which was a close enough fit to generalize that they were Colombians. Bari Yousef’s identity and Allen Trumble’s real employer were being kept secret.
“No, sir,” Berndt assured him.
“Then we’ll keep it that way,” the President said. He looked again at McGarvey. “Do it,” he said softly.
“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. A whisp of something from Voltaire came to him: I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom. Before he put himself into the lion’s den he would try to even the odds as much as possible. He wanted to stop bin Laden, but he also wanted to make it up to Trumble’s family.
The Oval Office
Berndt and Admiral Halverson remained behind as the others filed out of the room. When everyone was gone they followed the President upstairs. On the way in
he told his chief of staff to push everything back for another ten minutes, then he went to his desk.
“We can monitor McGarvey’s movements into the Afghan mountains, am I correct in this?”
“To within a few meters,” Berndt confirmed.
“Okay, if he actually comes face-to-face with the bastard, and if bin Laden so much as farts, I will order the immediate missile attack on his camp once McGarvey is clear.”
“Or dead,” Berndt said darkly.
The President nodded. “But I’ll need an ironclad confirmation of that before we go. Clear?” Berndt nodded. “Admiral, I want the Carl Vinson and her battle group moved into position as soon as possible. And we’re keeping the lid on this.”
“I’ll see to it immediately,” the admiral said, happy to go into action.
“It’s a trap,” Berndt predicted. “All he’s going to accomplish is get himself killed.”
“McGarvey is a capable man. We will give him the chance before we do anything.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Berndt said. “Now, what about the funeral for Allen Trumble and his family? We’re going to have to stay out of it, officially, if we want the cover story to hold.”
The President’s eyes went to the photograph on the desk of his wife and daughter. He was doing this for them, he thought. For all Americans, but especially for them. “The CIA will handle it. Whatever they want.”
“But, Mr. President—”
The President looked up, an angry set to his jaw. “Allen Trumble was an American hero, Dennis. He will be treated as such.” His eyes narrowed. “Let’s keep focused. We’re facing a madman in possession of a nuclear bomb who has shown a willingness in the past to kill innocent men, women and children. Don’t forget it.” The President shook his head. “God knows, I won’t.”
SARAH BIN LADEN
The trumpets blew, and the walls came tumbling down at the battle of Jericho. But in reality Joshua probably used a hammer.
SIX
Kabul, Afghanistan
In the ten days since the President had given his approval to the operation being called Meteor, the mood on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters had gone from one of anger and disbelief to one of quiet acceptance. If bin Laden had the nuclear device, and that was still a big if in a lot of people’s minds, then they had no choice except to send an emissary.
McGarvey sat in a window seat near the back of a half-filled shabby Ariana Afghan Airlines 727 inbound for Kabul’s International Airport. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the flight out of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates was already an hour late. But no one aboard, most of them businessmen, a few of them diplomats from India and Germany, was in any rush to arrive. Afghanistan was not a tourist destination. He’d been thinking about Katy and their last night together. She’d clung very close to him, but she refused to press him for details. He was going out of the country, he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about his assignment, and he’d already begun to withdraw to that special place of his where he went to distance himself from his friends and family. She was not a stupid woman, she had an idea where he was going and why. At Trumble’s funeral in Minneapolis last week, she’d been impressed to see a tear roll down her husband’s cheek, but she’d said nothing about that either, though just now McGarvey realized how hard it must have been for her not to reach out for him, to hold him and console him; tell him that everything would be okay. He probably would have snapped at her, he thought, and she probably had known that too.
He was torn in two directions, as he had been for most of his life. On the one hand he loved his ex-wife with everything in his soul; he wanted them to have a life together. A real life, because he had some alternatives. He didn’t have to go out into the field, almost no DDO before him had. In fact he didn’t even have to stay with the CIA. He could always go back to teaching Voltaire, maybe back at the small college in Delaware where he’d taught before. Or, he had enough money so that he could retire; they could travel, just be together.
Who the hell am I kidding, he asked himself. He could see Allen Trumble’s face in his mind’s eye. The man had no names, no conditions.
Elizabeth had come back from Paris for the funeral, and dealing with her had been even more difficult than her mother, because she was more direct. Word had spread around the DO that bin Laden was on the move and that her father was probably going after him. But no one outside of a handful of people knew the details.
“Otto won’t tell me what’s going on, and I suppose you’re not going to make it any easier for me to find out, are you, Daddy?”
“Just watch yourself, will you, sweetheart,” McGarvey said distantly. They were at the airport in Minneapolis to catch her flight back. She’d already said goodbye to her mother who stood a few feet away talking with some of Trumble’s family.
“Is there anything you want me to take back to Tom?” Liz asked. She was a pretty young woman of twenty-three with a round face, short blond hair and electric-green, inquisitive, sometimes mischievous eyes. McGarvey pulled himself back to the present.
“Things might get a little dicey in the next few weeks, so keep your head down, okay? Don’t take any chances.”
She smiled wryly and glanced over at her mother. “What’s Mother say?”
McGarvey shrugged. It was none of her business; she was trying to draw him out further. “She’s okay.”
She nodded. Her mother and father were her world, but they had decided not to tell her they were getting remarried. Not until this was over. “Give ’em hell, Dad,” she said seriously, then she gave him a peck on the cheek, waved goodbye to her mother, and headed for the jetway.
He could see her reflection in the glass of the window. I am what I am, he thought. A leopard cannot change its spots. And yet for a brief moment he felt a genuine stab of pain thinking what he was jeopardizing. What he had been jeopardizing all of his professional life.
Below, the mountains spread to a broad plateau and he could see the sprawling city of nearly two million people, and beyond it the international airport five miles to the northeast. Kabul, which was at an elevation slightly higher than Denver’s, was obscured by a pale brown haze and looked just as drab and colorless as the gray and brown countryside. After the Russians had pulled out in ’89 and the Taliban had taken over, life in Afghanistan had become dreary and brutish. Women had to be covered head to toe, and they could not hold any jobs, not even as medical doctors. It was one of many catch-22s. Women could not be examined by male doctors, and since there were no female doctors, women were never treated for any sickness or injury. The death rate among the female population was becoming horrendous, yet the Taliban ruling party did nothing about it, nor would it allow much of anything to be done by outside agencies. The entire nation of sixteen million fiercely proud people was spiraling downward into a dark age, its borders all but sealed off to the outside world, which for the most part seemed content to allow Afghanistan to self-destruct in civil war.
It was a dark country, McGarvey thought. A brooding place, filled with secrets and repressions and death; a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden and his fanatical followers to wage their jihad against the West.
Coming in, the American-built airport looked like any other around the world; long paved runways, a large fairly modern terminal and control tower, maintenance hangars, warehouses. But there were very few jetliners on the ground, and only a handful of cars and a few trucks in the parking lot. Definitely not right for a city this size; it was as if the place were holding its breath, waiting.
He closed his eyes as they touched down with a jolt and a sharp bark of tires, putting his family and that life completely behind him. Divorcing himself completely from one life of normal routines, for the other more dangerous existence in which the slightest misjudgement, the tiniest error, the briefest hesitation at the wrong time, the most innocuous miscalculation could cost him his life. It was a self defense mechanism, an instinct for survival in which he fell back on a set of
skills that he’d honed over twenty-five years in the business; automatic reflexes, an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings and the dangers they held. When he opened his eyes again, the transformation was nothing less than startling. Had the French businessman seated next to him been watching he would have sworn that his seatmate on landing was not the same who’d flown from Dubai. But then the only differences were in McGarvey’s cold, gray-green eyes, and in the way he held himself; loosely erect, yet like a coiled spring ready to strike. He was back in the field.
McGarvey’s only luggage was a small overnight bag and a laptop computer in a leather case, both of which he had carried aboard. Bags in hand, he followed the line of passengers across the tarmac into the customs hall of the terminal. Armed military guards seemed to be everywhere, and unlike the security people in many airports he’d flown to or from, these men looked as if they meant business. They were alert, their attention constantly shifting from passenger to passenger as if they expected an attack to come at any second. Nothing sloppy here, McGarvey thought.
When his turn came he laid his bags on the low table in front of a uniformed customs inspector and handed over his passport. The man looked up comparing the photograph to McGarvey’s face.
“Wait here,” he said, and he walked off to a military officer who was talking on a phone at a standup desk. When the officer was finished the customs inspector handed him McGarvey’s passport.
The customs hall was a long, narrow room with windows facing the parked airplane, several doors leading to offices, a set of large swinging doors through which incoming baggage was brought in and a pair of turnstiles leading to a corridor marked: To TERMINAL in Arabic and French. A top line of print that had probably been in Russian was painted out. A pair of armed guards, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, flanked the exit. They were checking everybody’s entry cards.
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