Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  “That was discussed,” Murphy said. “But we discarded the idea as wishful thinking.”

  “I don’t see why,” Berndt said, turning to the President. “Maybe we should put out feelers through the Taliban government. Offer some sort of a reparation payment in exchange for getting word to bin Laden.”

  Murphy took several more photos out of his briefcase and spread them on top of those already on the coffee table. “That won’t work, Dennis, and this is why.” He was still having trouble accepting the young woman’s death. It was the worst thing that could have happened.

  “What’s this now?” Berndt asked. He’d lost a lot of his usual bluster. When he calmed down he was quite bright. The trouble was he was easily excited.

  “These are shots of bin Laden carrying a body across his camp minutes after the missile raid was over.”

  The President picked up one of the photographs and studied it for a long time. His shoulders seemed to sag. “Who is it?”

  “His daughter,” Murphy said softly. “Her name was Sarah. She was just nineteen years old.”

  The President closed his eyes for a moment. “You wouldn’t have brought these over if you weren’t sure about this too.” He looked up. “How did it happen?”

  “It looks as if she helped escort McGarvey out of the camp. She was coming back when the attack began, and she was caught out in the open.”

  The President’s eyes were drawn to the photograph of his daughter on the desk. “I never meant for that to happen,” he said softly.

  Murphy nodded. “It was a tragic accident, Mr. President, that none of us anticipated. But bin Laden will almost certainly strike back. Maybe even against you.”

  “He has the motivation now, if he never had it before,” the President agreed.

  “She was a terrorist who—” Berndt said, but the President cut him off with a withering glance.

  “She was just a baby girl, Dennis. Nineteen.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but accident or not, we cannot back down now. We’re going to have to go after the bastard with everything we have. The bounty hasn’t worked, and we’ll never know if McGarvey’s attempt to negotiate a solution would have worked—all that is too late now. We have to kill him. I don’t think there can be any argument about that now, can there be?”

  “How difficult would it be for us to arrest him?” the President asked. He was grasping at straws and Murphy could sympathize with him.

  “First we’d have to find him, and that in itself might present a big problem. The Taliban may have finally kicked him out of Afghanistan, and if that’s the case he could be almost anywhere.”

  “Khartoum,” Berndt suggested.

  “That would be my first guess,” Murphy conceded. “But even if we did find him, arresting him would be problematic. There would be casulaties, possibly heavy casualties.”

  “Kill him,” Berndt said.

  Murphy eyed the national security adviser with all the more distaste because this time he had to go along with him, even though he didn’t agree. “That might be the only viable option.”

  The President got up and went to the bowed windows where he stretched his back. This was the first real test of his administration, and he was learning, as every other President had, that there were never any easy answers, and that even the power of the United States was very limited.

  “Maybe the bomb is already here,” he said.

  “Mac didn’t think so.”

  “Would killing bin Laden stop someone else from using it against us? Does he have an heir apparent?”

  “We don’t think he is training anyone to take over, but of course we can’t be sure about that. What we do know is that he’s the one holding the organization together. Personal loyalty. He’s a hero to the Islamic peoples. They respect and trust him. When he’s gone the money will certainly dry up, and so will the contacts.”

  The President turned back. “Can we do it?”

  On the way over here Murphy had known that his briefing would probably come to this. But he no more had the answer now than he did an hour ago. “I don’t know, Mr. President.”

  “McGarvey got to him once, maybe he can figure out how to get to him again,” Berndt suggested.

  “It’s not that easy. Bin Laden wanted to be found. He wanted the meeting. This time it’ll be different. He’ll be expecting someone to come after him, so if we do something like this—assuming that we can find him in the first place—we’ll have to hit him very hard, but not with missiles—with ground troops. And most likely without the knowledge or consent of the local authorities.” Murphy shook his leonine head. “There’s a lot of room for disaster there, Mr. President.”

  “We’re not going to be held hostage by that sonofabitch like Carter was with the Iranians,” the President said forcefully. “I’m deeply sorry about his daughter, but he chose to keep her with him on the battlefield. And he chose to acquire a goddamn nuclear weapon and threaten us with it. His choices, General, every one of them. What does the CIA suggest we do about it?”

  “I’d very much like to see bin Laden dead, and the CIA will use all of its resources to that end even though it’s against the law and against national policy, if that’s what you want.”

  “There’s no other choice.”

  “Very well, Mr. President. But before we get started I would like that in writing.”

  Berndt started to object, but once again the President held him off. This was one administration that did not leave its people hanging in the wind. “It’ll be on your desk first thing in the morning, Roland.” The President gave him a penetrating look. “But I want you to keep in mind what we were faced with here before you think about making any public or historical announcement.”

  “Of course.” Murphy closed his briefcase and got to his feet. “Bad business, all of this,” he said. He thought the President had made a poor decision. But then any other decision would have been just as wrong. He knew what McGarvey was going to say about all of this, and for once he had to completely agree with his deputy director of Operations. The politicians had truly screwed up what could have been a successful operation. And now they were faced with a much worse problem; an angry, highly motivated madman with the capability and the willingness to explode a nuclear weapon on U.S. soil.

  “We didn’t create the situation, Roland,” the President said. “He did.”

  “Yes, sir. But we might be looking at an even bigger problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If he should somehow pull this off—get the bomb here and detonate it—it won’t be the end. It’ll just be the beginning.”

  CIA Headquarters

  Murphy had served four Presidents, his tenure as DCI by far the longest in the history of the CIA, and during that time he had been a part of every crisis to hit the United States in nearly twenty years. He’d seen it all; from the fallout precipitated by the breakup of the Soviet Union, to the embassy crisis in Iran, the wars in Kuwait, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia and Kosovo, the terrorist attacks against Americans in Africa, Italy, Germany, the Middle East and even here at home against our airline industry; spies from the Walker family to the Bureau’s Robert Hanssen and the CIA’s own Aldrich Ames and a dozen others whose cases never hit the media; downsizings and budget restrictions and congressional witch hunts. But there was one thing that never changed, and that was the need for the CIA or some intelligence-gathering organization like it. President Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s famous quote that gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail didn’t apply then, and it certainly didn’t apply now.

  Riding in his limousine across the river he thought again about his retirement, something he’d been doing a lot of lately. It wasn’t enough to know how many missiles and tanks and submarines the other country had, you needed to know if they intended to use them, and when and where. That was a job for a much younger, much less cynical man than himself. He’d seen it all, he had the experience, but he was burning
. He was finding that there were times when he simply didn’t give a damn.

  He didn’t believe that, of course. In twenty years every problem the CIA had solved was immediately followed by ten new ones. For every ten successful operations that never hit the media, there was one failure that was splashed all over the front pages of every newspaper in the country. The CIA screws up again! And they howled for blood, oh, how they howled for blood up on the Hill. Their cries were driven by their constituents and the next election. He was starting to ask himself what kind of howls of protest their constituents would be making if there wasn’t a CIA, and if we were constantly being blindsided because we were too shortsighted to open other gentlemen’s mail?

  One segment of the media was sharply critical of the administration for talking to bin Laden. No negotiations with terrorists, they said. Another segment of the media criticized the missile attack on his camp. The U.S. was being a bully again, moving carriers into an intimidating position and attacking a sovereign nation. The administration would weather these storms, previous administrations had, but the real problem was that no one suggested any solutions.

  Okay, don’t negotiate with terrorists. What then, Murphy asked himself. The critics didn’t say.

  Okay, don’t attack the terrorist’s base camp, don’t destroy his weapons, or his will to continue to slaughter innocent civilians. What then? No one was making any real suggestions other than to stop doing whatever it was that pissed off the terrorists in the first place.

  Dismantle all of our godless institutions, like IBM and General Motors and Microsoft. Take all the money from the billionaires and give it to the poor people. Make it a law that families could not live in big houses and drive fancy cars unless everyone else on the planet could live in a big house and drive a fancy car. Let’s take away all incentives. Don’t use pesticides, or cut trees, or use animal antibiotics, or irradiate food, but make sure that everyone on the planet is fed as well as everyone else on the planet. Get out of Saudi Arabia, get out of Bosnia and Kosovo, give the American Indians back all of their land including Manhattan, spend the entire GNP on welfare programs for the rest of the world. If we have too much because we’re clever enough to have earned it, give it away. Dismantle our army and air force and especially our navy. Give in to every special interest group here and in every other country in the world, because they have rights too. Take the flag down and toss it in the trash.

  Murphy’s limousine took the CIA exit off the George Washington Parkway and followed the road up to the main gates. They were passed through without stopping and parked in the back at the DCI’s private entrance. His bodyguard, John Chapin, opened the door for him and escorted him up to the seventh floor.

  “You can stand down, John. It’s going to be another late night,” Murphy said at the door to his office.

  “Yes, sir,” Chapin said, not surprised. He’d seen the look on the general’s face when he came out of the Oval Office.

  Murphy went through the outer office into his own office, his secretary jumping up and trailing behind him. “You’ve had a dozen calls, nothing urgent, the memos are on your desk. Mr. Adkins wanted to speak to you when you returned. And Mrs. Murphy would like to know when to expect you home.”

  “Late,” Murphy said, putting his briefcase down and loosening his tie as he went around his desk. He lifted the phone and hit Adkins’s number. “Come on over, Dick, we need to talk.”

  His secretary brought him a mug of coffee, black, no sugar, and the briefing book with the afternoon summaries of the news stories from the top fourteen foreign newspapers. “Would you like me to stay for a while?” she asked.

  Murphy shook his head. “It’s going to be one of those nights. You might as well go home.”

  “I’ll call Mrs. Murphy first.”

  “Thanks.”

  When she was gone, Murphy turned and looked out the windows at the rolling Virginia countryside. Everything was green and new and fresh. His forty-two-foot Westsail ketch was docked at Annapolis, and he wished that he and Peggy were aboard her now. Cocktails this early evening with a few friends. Maybe find a reasonably quiet spot to anchor a few miles downriver. Something on the grill, then to bed with the setting sun and up with the rising sun in the morning. He closed his eyes for a moment, and he could almost smell the sea smells, feel the gentle rocking of the boat.

  Dick Adkins, McGarvey’s chief of staff and acting DDO, knocked once and came in. “How’d it go, General?” he asked.

  Murphy turned around. “They want us to kill him.”

  Adkins stopped in midstride. “Just like that?”

  “With bin Laden dead they feel that his organization will fall apart, and they’ll no longer be a threat.”

  “That’s assuming we could get to him in time—if at all.”

  “Well, we’re going to try to find him as well as the bomb, and hope to God we’re not too late.”

  Adkins smiled wryly. “Hell, General, I don’t know what’s going to be worse—tracking down bin Laden again, or telling McGarvey what they want us to do.”

  “He’ll have plenty to say about it,” Murphy said.

  “Indeed he will.”

  Karachi, Pakistan

  The three-wheel Fiat delivery truck with PRANDESH DELIVERIES, LTD. stenciled on its doors rattled to a stop in line at the west wharf of the International Terminal Customs Center. When it was his turn, the driver, a small man with wide dark eyes, handed a copy of the bill of lading, repair order and temporary customs release form to the uniformed inspector.

  As the inspector took the forms back into the customs shed, Kamal Azzabi lit a clove cigarette and nervously drew the sharp smoke deep into his lungs. He had picked up the package and paperwork at a repair shop near the airport. He didn’t know what was in the container, nor did he want to know. His only job was to deliver it to dock 24 west. No problem, except that he had been paid too much cash, which made him suspicious, and he had been warned not to deviate from the route laid out for him or else someone would come for him and his family.

  He’d almost turned down the job, but he needed the money and his mullah had asked him to do it as a personal favor. It was nearly time for afternoon prayers and then supper. That and the monetary windfall was all he could think about. Even the terrific heat didn’t bother him today.

  A couple of minutes later the inspector came back with another uniformed officer and a large black dog on a leash. Azzabi tossed his cigarette away, and it was all he could do to keep from pissing in his pants. It was drugs back there. He was suddenly convinced of it, and he was going to jail for the rest of his life. Why else would they have brought out the dog?

  He started to get out of the truck to come clean, tell them about the money, when the customs inspector came over.

  “Did you pick this up for repairs yourself?” the inspector asked.

  Azzabi had no idea what the man was talking about. But he bobbed his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, it says on the order that it was you.”

  Azzabi stole a glance in the rearview mirror. The dog’s forepaws were on the back of the truck bed and he was sniffing the fiberglass container.

  “Is this the same cargo that you picked up from dock 24 yesterday or isn’t it?”

  Azzabi bobbed his head again. “Yes, of course it is,” he said. His bladder was very loose.

  The customs inspector signed the forms and handed them back. “Okay, you’re clear.”

  Azzabi just stared at him for several seconds. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the other officer heading back to the customs shed with his dog.

  “Is there something wrong with your hearing?” the inspector shouted.

  “No, sir,” Azzabi said, and he drove out onto the crowded docks busy with the activities of loading and unloading ships of all sizes, shapes and descriptions, his truck just another delivery van among literally hundreds.

  The 694-foot container ship M/V Margo was in the final stages of loading t
he last of more than two hundred containers on its wide cargo deck when Azzabi went up the boarding ladder and found the loadmaster.

  The huge man glared at him. “What do you want?”

  Azzabi handed him the papers. The loadmaster glanced at them, then looked down at the truck. He said something into a walkie-talkie, then signed the receipt, handed it back and walked off, shouting something at two men perched atop the stack of containers towering six high.

  By the time Azzabi got back to his truck the package was gone. “Good riddance,” he muttered with relief and drove off, wondering if he should tell his wife the full extent of his windfall or keep a little for himself.

  TWENTY

  Chevy Chase

  Bahmad sat forward as Kathleen McGarvey’s gunmetal gray Mercedes 560SL convertible came off Laurel Parkway and headed south on Connecticut Avenue toward the city. He got a good look at her as she passed and he was mildly vexed that she did not seem distraught.

  The dark blue windowless van with government plates came right behind her. The driver’s eyes slid casually past Bahmad behind the wheel of the Capital City Cleaning van at the stop sign on Kirke Street, and then he was gone in traffic.

  “Was that her?” Misha bin Ibrahim asked from the back. He and the other one, Ahmad Aggad, who had come down from Jersey City, were idiots, but they would do as they were told and they were expendable.

  “Yes, we’re going in now,” Bahmad said. He waited for a break in traffic then crossed Connecticut Avenue and headed up Laurel Parkway.

  Her house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. In the two days it had taken Bahmad to arrange for the help, the van and the other equipment they would need, he’d spot-checked the neighborhood and done some phone calling.

  On both days Kathleen McGarvey left her house around eleven in the morning and returned between two and three. Presumably she’d gone out to lunch. It was only slightly bothersome that she’d apparently not yet learned about her husband’s death, but things like that often took time, and it might not be something the CIA wanted to make public so soon.