“The attack on the Diplomat was not a one-off, Director. The noise that you just heard was the sound of the Crowne Plaza, down the street from the Diplomat, pancaking.”
Near the As Sulayyil Oasis
South of Riyadh
Islamyah (formerly Saudi Arabia)
“That white smudge on the black of the night is the backbone of our galaxy,” Abdullah said softly. The two men lay back on the pile of pillows and pondered the infinite sky. The galaxy was bright above the desert, far from the lights of the city and the flares of the refineries. Abdullah sat up on the carpet and smoked the apple-flavored tobacco of the hubbly-bubbly. Except for the gentle gurgling of the water pipe, no sounds broke the stillness that covered the rolling sand.
Ahmed rose and walked toward the embers of their fire. “You are such a poet, brother, but you try to change the subject.” He stirred the charred wood. “The Chinese are no different from the Americans when their troops were here,” he said as he spat into the dying fire. “They too are infidels.”
“Yes, they are infidels, Ahmed, but without the Chinese weapons, we will lie naked before our enemies. Many of our American weapons do not work anymore, without the American contractors and spare parts. My brothers in the Shura aren’t always right, but they may be right about this. We may need those weapons, and the Chinese must be here to make them work until we can.”
Ahmed shook his head in disagreement, prompting his brother to continue. “We must have weapons to deter our enemies. The al Sauds have bought important Americans to help get themselves back on the throne. The Persians stir up trouble among our Shi’a and those in Bahrain. And the Persians now have nuclear weapons on their new mobile missiles.” Abdullah stood up and walked slowly toward his younger brother. “We will keep these few Chinese inside the walls, deep in the desert.” He stared down at the remaining hot coals. “They will not stain our new society. The Chinese need the oil; they will stay in line. Besides, it is done. The missiles are here now.”
The two men walked away from the fire pit, with its semicircle of carpets and pillows, heading up to the crest of the dune. Below them the desert was bathed in the dim blue light of the stars and the halfmoon. “You know, Ahmed, the Prophet Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him, camped very near here, just at that oasis. And our grandfather used to come here as well. Both of them loved the beauty of this place.”
He grabbed his brother’s arm, turning him to look into his eyes. “I did not come all this way just to be bound in chains again. While you were in Canada learning to cure people, Ahmed, I was learning to kill them. I personally slew al Sauds last year, and before that, in Iraq, I attacked their American masters. I am not going to hand our nation back to those swine, or anyone else. Allah, the merciful and compassionate, has given us the mission to create Islamyah from the fetid carcass that was Saudi Arabia.
“Those so-called Saud princes sit in their unclean mansions in California, drinking and dancing as they count the money they have stolen from our people. They buy whores in the American Congress to deny us the parts to make our American weapons work. They bribe the Jewish reporters to whip up support for invading us. They connive with the greedy British diplomats to spy on our embassies and steal our papers.
“They will stop at nothing until they have regained control of this land. Even now, the al Sauds, and those criminals in Houston who help them, are hiring assassins to kill all of us on the Shura. The Persians, too, infiltrate agents into Dhahran and the rest of the Eastern Province, pretending to champion the Shi’a.”
Abdullah released his grip on Ahmed. He loved Ahmed, younger, taller, with the deep brown eyes of their late father. He wanted to persuade him. “But what we have done now may not be enough. What do both the Americans and the Persians have that lets them think they can intimidate our infant nation? You know the answer. It is the bomb of Hiroshima—the killer that turns the sand into glass and poisons the land for generations. If we resist, they will char our cities and incinerate our people, so they can again steal the oil beneath our sands. That is why, Ahmed, my so-called friends on the Shura Council think we need our own bomb.”
Ahmed did not back down. “What about the Pakistanis? The al Sauds gave them the money for a bomb. You found the records yourself. The Pakistanis will defend us.”
Abdullah turned and began walking slowly back down the hill to the camp. “Yes, perhaps, Ahmed, but the only thing that concerns the Pakistanis is India. They say the right things about Islam, but they will keep their few weapons to scare the Hindus. The Pakistanis cannot be relied on. Besides, their missiles are primitive. We need more than a few little Pakistani arrows.”
A low cough and then a high-pitched whine stirred beyond the next dune. A wisp of sand flew above it into the desert night. The helicopters were starting. It was time to return to the city.
“So why did we come here tonight, Abdullah? I doubt that it was just to stare at the heavens and reminisce about Grandfather.” Ahmed was seven years younger and four inches taller than his brother. He had marked his twenty-ninth birthday only two weeks ago, when he had returned home after eight years in Canada, ending his residency early, because Abdullah had become a member of the new ruling Shura Council. And Ahmed wanted to be part of his big brother’s team now, just as he had wanted to play football with Abdullah and his friends twenty years ago. Since his return, Ahmed had pressed his brother on how he could help him with the new government of their country. But each time the answers were vague.
“No, not just to remember Grandfather.” Abdullah looked down at the sand and placed both hands inside his robe. “It has been very hard for me to gain agreement from the Shura for you to work in my ministry. Many members distrust you because of your years away.”
“But there are no decent medical schools here,” Ahmed shot back.
“Not yet. Someday we will again lead. And you must stay in medicine, Ahmed,” he said, looking back up the dune.
“But Abdullah, I want to work with you. I want to help our country, help bring back the pride of our people!”
Abdullah smiled. Ahmed sounded just like a little boy again. “And you will. You will start at a hospital next week.” Seeing the disappointment on Ahmed’s face, he ended the teasing game. “But you will actually be working for me, directly. The hospital job will be only a blanket thrown over your real work. You will be my eyes and ears in the nest of vipers across the causeway.” Abdullah smiled broadly, as if he had just handed an expensive present to his brother.
“Bahrain?” Ahmed asked in confusion.
“Yes. It may be only sixteen miles away on the causeway, but that place is home to thousands of infidel sailors and their boats. The Persians are there, too, smiling and pretending to be merchant traders as they go back and forth in their dhows, but actually plotting against our new nation.
“You will go there, publicly estranged from me and supposedly upset with our new government. You will do your work at the Medical Center in Manama, but what you will also do is collect special information, just for me. You are going back into the belly of the enemy again, little brother.” As he said that, Abdullah playfully punched hard against Ahmed’s soft abdomen. Ahmed did not flinch.
A white Land Rover appeared from over the far dune, to drive them to the improvised heliport on the sand. As they came upon the Black Hawks, Ahmed turned and poked back at his brother, punching him in the arm. “Abdullah, you’re really sure these American helicopters are still safe without the spare parts?”
“For that the Pakistanis are useful. They can find parts for us, at least for now.” With that, Abdullah bin Rashid, Vice Chairman of the Shura Council of the Islamic Republic of Islamyah and Minister of Security, jumped into his personal Black Hawk. Beneath the tan-colored coating of the helicopter, the outline of the green seal of the Saudi Arabian air force could still be seen through the new paint.
As the Black Hawk rose, kicking up a dust storm, Ahmed placed the helmet on his head. He did not pl
ug in the long cord that connected to the intercom system. He wanted to think, not to listen again to the incomprehensible babble of the crew. They flew low over the dunes, the Black Hawk’s rotors beating through the thin air, speeding toward a light that spread across the horizon.
The aircraft’s side door was open and Ahmed could see camels below, standing like statues, unfrightened by the aircraft’s noisy appearance. Off beyond the camels, Ahmed saw the towers of the refinery, shooting giant orange flares that danced in the night sky.
They are the problem, he thought, the towers and the corrupting blackness that oozes from below our sands. It gives prosperity for our people, he thought, but it is also like the blood of a wounded camel on the sand. It draws deadly scorpions. And, Ahmed thought, Islamyah is now like a wounded camel. The Americans, the Iranians, the Chinese smell the blood of this land, oozing out from below its sandy skin.
As the Black Hawk rose to match its flight with the contour of the giant dune below, Ahmed thought, these nations are like the scorpions. And the scorpions are coming again.
Intelligence Analysis Center
Foggy Bottom
Washington, D.C.
“It’s sixty-eight degrees on January 28th and the White House still claims that global warming isn’t a problem? The Artic ice cap is melting, the polar bears are dying, the Eskimos are drowning, the trees and flowers are blooming three months ahead of schedule, and they still say that there isn’t enough evidence?”
Russell MacIntyre flicked his wrist to see his watch. It was a cheap digital model that displayed the time in military style. It read 19:28, almost 7:30 P.M. He was going to be late meeting his wife at the Silversteins’ in McLean, again. “Anything left, Deb?” he said, looking over at his attractive assistant, asking her a question that was actually intended to evoke an answer, unlike so many that he posed about politics and weather.
“Ms. Connor is still waiting down there,” she answered, in a voice that suggested that the waiting young staffer had been sitting in the reception room for a long time.
“Shit,” he replied and instantly regretted it. Connor was one of the best of the crop of newly minted analysts that he had recruited from the nation’s top graduate schools. He had promised them an exciting job. He had promised them that they could make a difference. He had promised them access. MacIntyre sighed. “Okay, Debbie, please go get her and send her in.”
Russell MacIntyre was, at thirty-eight, the Deputy Director of the new Intelligence Analysis Center, or IAC. Although it was sixteen years since he’d been on the Brown swim team, he still tried to work out in the pool at the Watergate twice a week. There were only slight flecks of gray in his auburn hair, but his wife Sarah wanted to “touch them up.” The IAC, where MacIntyre was the number two, had been created as the final piece of the intelligence reorganization started by the report of the 9/11 Commission and the fiasco over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The combined failure of both the CIA and the new Director of National Intelligence to foresee the coup, or “revolution,” in Saudi Arabia had finally convinced Congress to do something about analytical capability. The IAC was that something. It was empowered to see everything gathered by all the branches of the U.S. government and to order those agencies to try to get whatever information IAC wanted.
At the insistence of Senate Intelligence Chairman Paul Robinson, the analytical function was separated from the intelligence collectors, so the analysts would be unbiased, uncommitted to their agency’s sources. Robinson also dictated that the new IAC have the resources to utilize open sources—press, blogs, academic papers, television from around the world. “I am determined that I will never again have to chair one of those ‘oh my God’ hearings after something critical happens that we should have seen coming, but didn’t,” Robinson had fumed on the Senate floor.
With an elite staff of two hundred handpicked specialists, the new IAC was bureaucratically independent from the intelligence collectors in the other so-called three-letter agencies: CIA, NSA, NGA, FBI, and NRO. The analysts were a mixture of old and young, top career specialists taken from longtime niches and new whiz kids who had just parachuted into their first government job. When Robinson and a group of key Senators and Representatives from both parties had essentially forced the President to name Ambassador Sol Rubenstein to head the new agency, the sixty-eight-yearold government veteran had almost turned them down. It was only after he’d gotten every possible operational and budget issue resolved in his favor that he’d turned to the issue of the location for his new agency.
When he had cocktails on the roof of what was then the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, over thirty years ago, Rubenstein had been fascinated by the complex of old buildings he had seen nearby on the hill above the Potomac. They sat across the street from the State Department in the Foggy Bottom section of the city. Called Navy Hill, it had been the first home of the Naval Observatory. After the Observatory had moved in the nineteenth century, the Navy’s Bureau of Medical Affairs had taken the Hill. In theory, they were still there, but at the outset of World War II some of the Navy buildings had been emptied out so that America’s first real intelligence agency, the Office of Special Services, the OSS, could move in.
Ambassador Rubenstein had insisted on the ten-acre site for his new agency. He took as his own office the suite on the ground floor that had been home in 1942 to Wild Bill Donovan, the first OSS director. Rusty MacIntyre, the first Deputy of the Intelligence Analysis Center, had the office next to his new boss. Both men loved their river views, but the two spent as much time as they could wandering through the three buildings they called “our little campus.”
MacIntyre had been Rubenstein’s first hire for the new agency. The silver-haired retired ambassador picked him out of the executive suite of a defense contractor because, as Rubenstein had said, “You have a reputation for getting shit done and not worrying about who you run over while you do it.” MacIntyre worked hard to live up to that reputation. Rubenstein had also been very clearly told by Senator Robinson that MacIntyre would be a good pick.
“I’m sorry that I pushed Debbie so hard to see you tonight, Mr. MacIntyre. I know you are busy with the Bahrain bombings, but you said that whenever we really needed . . .” Susan Connor was clearly nervous as she walked into the big room and sat on the edge of the couch, sweat showing on her high forehead.
“It’s Rusty. Mr. MacIntyre was my late father,” the Deputy Director reassured the attractive twenty-three-year-old African American. He then fell into his beaten-up leather chair by the window. “I said that whenever you really needed to see me, anytime, day or night, you could see me. So what’s up?”
“Well, sir, you told us at the off-site that intelligence analysis was ‘literally looking for needles in haystacks. The trick is looking in the right haystack, the one where they don’t expect you to look.’ Right?” Connor seemed to be reciting the lines from memory.
“That does sounds like something I might have said.” MacIntyre smiled, amused to hear his own words bounced back at him and pleased at the impact they had clearly made on at least one listener. “So, have you found an interesting haystack, Susan?” What the hell was Connor’s assignment anyway, Saudi—he corrected himself— Islamyah military?
“Maybe, sir. Maybe an interesting needle.” Connor began to relax, warming to the story she was about to tell. “I found this 505 report this morning.” A 505 report was a type of dissemination from the National Security Agency, the electronic listening headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was a routine, low-priority report without special restrictions on its distribution. The NSA issued thousands of these reports every day, jamming the e-mail in-boxes of intelligence analysts connected to the highly secure interdepartmental Intelwire network.
“Okay. Well...?” MacIntyre wanted to cut to the chase. He stared out at the river, which was now being pelted by a January rain. He pushed the intercom button for his assistant. “Deb, call my wife on her cell and tell her I
can’t make dinner with the Silversteins. Tell her I’ll call her in a bit, but they shouldn’t wait dinner on me.” MacIntyre’s friends were well used to his frequent no-shows, and had long ago learned not to ask why. He motioned for his eager staffer to continue.
“Well, sir, it was a frequency not used by the Saudi military, but it was coming from the middle of the Empty Quarter, the open Saudi desert. Burst transmissions, heavily encrypted, narrow beam straight up to the Thuraya.” The Thuraya was a commercial satellite over the Indian Ocean. Connor was now unfolding a map of Saudi Arabia on top of the coffee table.
“Yeah, so . . .” Oh shit, he thought, this kid is talking about some standard 505 report, just the usual low-level crap...Maybe I should have gone to the Silverstein dinner . . . Sarah will be pissed at me again.
“So I called NSA, like you said we should when we needed more information than they gave us in the reports. I got the runaround almost the whole day, but finally, just after five o’clock, the assistant chief of D-3 called me back.” The young analyst started taking coffee mugs from MacIntyre’s collection of agency cups on the nearby stand, placing them on the corners of the map to keep it from coiling back up. Connor carefully secured the northwest corner with an NSC mug, the southwest with a NORAD cup, the northeast corner with one from CinCPAC, and the southeast one with a chipped blue cup with a gold SIS on it.
“D-3?” The Deputy Director sat up in his leather chair, which had been with him since his first job on Capitol Hill. “That’s NSA’s branch for Chinese military, not the office that handles Saudi.”
“I know, sir.” Susan smiled for the first time since she had entered the room. “The freq in the report is used only by Chinese Strategic Rocket Forces. It’s their nuclear command link.”
The Scorpion's Gate Page 2
