And then it was locked, and Cole dove across the room back into his chair, hitting the seat just as the office door swung open and Quraishi glided back in, the expression on his face positively beatific.
‘My friend,’ he said kindly, ‘it is far too nice a day to stay inside. I believe we should continue our conversation in more pleasant surroundings.’
Cole nodded his head, wondering what Quraishi was up to. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Where do you suggest we go?’
‘Have you ever been to Riyadh Zoo, Mr. Chadwick?’ Quraishi smiled, and Cole could see his eyes were blank, like a shark’s. ‘I think that you will like it.’
6
James Dorrell peered over his half-moon spectacles at the man sat across from him. Lee Rawson was the head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, and the man he had entrusted with finding out everything he could about Abd al-Aziz Quraishi, and an associate known only as the ‘Hammer of the Infidel’.
‘So what do you have for me?’ Dorrell asked.
‘On Quraishi,’ Rawson said tentatively, ‘not a hell of a lot, to tell you the truth. As his file says, he’s connected to the Saudi royal family, he’s had a solid career in the military and government, and there’s never been any hint of anything else. Pretty low key character actually, has good relations with the US due to the exchange he did as a military cadet at West Point.’
‘Friends with Jeb Richards,’ Dorrell said, reading from the paperwork on the desk in front of him.
Rawson nodded. ‘That’s right, they met at West Point. Nothing untoward going on there that we can ascertain. He’s friends with a lot of people, actually.’
‘Richards has just gone to Riyadh, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes sir, apparently Quraishi wanted to update him on Arabian Islamic Jihad.’
‘We heard back from him yet?’
‘No,’ Rawson said, ‘not that I’m aware of.’
Dorrell made a note on a pad, nodding. ‘Okay.’ He spread his hands across the desk. ‘So Quraishi looks clean, as far as we know.’
‘Yes,’ Rawson agreed, ‘but we’ve really only started to look into him. He looks clean on the surface, but we’ve not had any reason to investigate him in depth before. We’ll know a lot more when the NSA sends us what they’ve got.’
Dorrell grunted in agreement. He’d asked Bud Shaw to start electronic surveillance on Quraishi, including office, home and cell phones, emails and any other computer records they could hack into. They were also trawling through the vast archives of previously obtained information they stored, but didn’t access due to time constraints unless a specific request was made.
The NSA routinely intercepted almost every electronic communication sent around the world through its sophisticated ECHELON system. Vastly powerful supercomputers used advanced search programs to highlight any key words from these intercepts, which would then initiate the next level of analysis.
It was possible, therefore, that somewhere in the NSA’s databanks were previously overlooked conversations had by Abd al-Aziz Quraishi which might be relevant to the current investigation. The only trouble was, finding them would take time. Shaw had informed Dorrell that a special search program would have to be written and inserted into the system, and then they would just have to wait with their fingers crossed.
But to Shaw’s credit, he had initiated the search immediately, and Dorrell knew he would feed any results back as soon as he had them.
‘So we’re waiting to hear about Quraishi,’ Dorrell said. ‘Okay. Now what can you tell me about this other character, the one they call ‘the Hammer’?’
‘The most likely candidate,’ Rawson said, ‘is a man called Amir al-Hazmi, rumored to have the nickname Matraqat al-Kafir, the Hammer of the Infidel, which is a reference to his supposed position within Arabian Islamic Jihad as the Lion’s executioner and enforcer.’
‘Is that confirmed, or just supposition?’
‘Supposition, but we’re fairly confident. Not much is known about him except the fact that he fought with al-Qaida since his early teens, after his family was killed by Saudi security forces. He led an attack on the Ministry of Interior headquarters, but was captured and tortured. Somehow, he managed to escape, and resurfaced years later as a leading lieutenant in the newly formed AIJ.’
Dorrell nodded his head in thought. ‘When did he lead this attack?’
Rawson consulted his notes. ‘The summer of 2010, just over ten years ago.’
Dorrell continued nodding, as he searched his own notes. ‘Quraishi was the head of the Mabahith back then, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Rawson answered. ‘Do you think there’s a link?’
Dorrell shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility,’ he said as he scratched down some more notes in his pad. ‘I’ll get Bud to check in more detail for anything that might link them. Do we know anything else about this al-Hazmi?’
‘If it is the same guy, he’s one of the most feared guys in the Middle East,’ Rawson said. ‘From what we hear, people are literally terrified of this ‘Hammer’ character. He uses an ancient Arabic dagger known as a janbiya, mutilates people with it. Again, it’s rumor, but word is that he hacks off bits of people’s bodies and collects them as trophies. He does this to ‘enemies of Allah’, which might be western hostages, or – just as likely – Arabs who don’t support the ideological goals of the AIJ. He’s skilled with it too, our sources tell us. It’s probably more myth and legend, you know how these things develop, but he’s supposed to have once killed a dozen men during a fight, just using his janbiya and his bare hands.’
Dorrell smiled. ‘Probably bullshit.’
Rawson smiled back. ‘Probably. But enough people are afraid of this guy to at least lend some credence to it.’
‘Okay. So this ‘Hammer’ – possibly Amir al-Hazmi – is one scary son of a bitch. And he might be connected to Quraishi, who might just be the leader of the AIJ. But we still don’t really know shit, do we?’
It was Rawson’s turn to shrug.
‘Do we at least know where al-Hazmi is?’ Dorrell asked. ‘The source we’re using suggests that he might have been the one to transport the package taken from the Fu Yu Shan.’
‘We’re working on it,’ Rawson said positively. ‘Between us and the NSA, we should nail him.’
‘I hope so,’ Dorrell said uneasily. ‘I hope so.’
Navarone was deep in thought. Should he contact JSOC? He knew what they’d say, and didn’t want to take the risk of being told ‘No’ officially.
The only thing he’d been told for certain before the mission began was that his remit was reconnaissance only; on no account whatsoever – save self-defense under extreme provocation – was he to engage the enemy.
But he’d seen enough in the crematorium to disregard those orders in an instant.
Fuck it.
He wouldn’t contact JSOC; not yet, anyway.
He could come up with a plausible scenario involving self-defense before he made his final report; for now, he was going to take his men in and do what he could to save this latest batch of prisoners from a fate which seemed worse than death.
Navarone knew that it was more sensible to wait until nightfall; and yet by evening it would be too late to do any good. They had to go in now, and that was the order that Navarone gave.
Frank Jaffett remained on the far side of the valley with three other men to carry on recon and make sure that nobody in the main camp noticed what was going on outside the fence; they were to radio in immediately if they thought that anyone was taking any undue interest.
Meanwhile, his two explosives experts had disappeared further into the valley, ready to do their own bit to help.
All the other SEALs, as well as the second liaison officer from the PLA, had now joined him over on the western side, and Navarone set two men up on overwatch duty. With a perfect field of fire, they manned their big M60 machine guns, ready to provide covering fire if
necessary.
Two more men settled down behind their massive .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, ready to shoot through concrete walls if they had to.
Navarone led the rest of the team down the forested slope, but this time Jimmy Cray – an experienced engineer – disabled one panel of the fence, disconnecting it from its power source. Tony Devine cut through the chain link, and everyone crawled through, careful to keep low to the ground.
The men massed at the rear wall of the crematorium – the only place that couldn’t be seen by the main camp’s guard towers – and Navarone checked his watch.
The timing was perfect – they were in position with a minute to spare.
Sweat trickled down Navarone’s face as he waited, saturating his bodysuit. The weather was poor, but it had no cooling effect on him.
And then it happened – four massive explosions which ripped through the valley, one after the other.
Navarone smiled; they were on, and the adrenalin hit him in an instant with a drug-like euphoria.
The explosives had been placed deep within the wooded valley on the far side of the encampment from the area Navarone was now in; the plan was to draw guards away from the camp, right in the opposite direction.
‘They’re going ape shit,’ Jaffett confirmed over the radio moments later. ‘Soldiers are hauling ass out of the camp, officers screaming orders, the place is one big cluster fuck. Nobody’s watching your side of the camp at all.’
‘Roger that,’ Navarone confirmed. ‘We’re a go.’
The prisoners who had been rounded up that morning were not being held in the crematorium – Navarone’s earlier search of the secondary compound had revealed that they were in what looked like a laboratory, a single story concrete box just a hundred yards further inside the fence line.
Knowing they had to move while everyone was distracted by the explosions, Navarone gave the nod to his men, and they burst into action, tearing away from the crematorium walls and racing for the laboratory building.
Most of the SEALs gathered around the three walls which faced away from the main camp, but Navarone and Captain Liu strolled confidently around the front, as if they had every right to be there. Navarone knew that only furtive movement typically drew the attention of security personnel, not the confident strides of men who belonged.
It was a ballsy move, but Navarone and Liu arrived at the front of the laboratory building seemingly undetected, Navarone pushing his way through the unguarded door.
They were in a foyer, and were greeted at last by an armed guard, who raised his rifle towards them upon seeing Navarone’s Caucasian features. But Navarone was faster, shooting two suppressed rounds from his M4 assault rifle into the man’s center mass, dropping him instantly.
He could already hear the sound of shouts and screams coming from further inside the building, and the short, sharp exhalations of suppressed shots being fired. His SEALs were in, and were taking care of business; the enemy wouldn’t have suppressed weapons, which meant that it was just Navarone’s men who were firing.
As Navarone covered the foyer, Liu secured the receptionist, two nurses and a doctor with plastic cuffs.
‘Clear!’ he heard Devine confirm over the radio.
‘Clear!’ he heard Cray call next, followed by two more confirmations.
‘All clear,’ Navarone said at last. ‘All section leaders on me.’
As he waited for the four section leaders to get to the foyer, Navarone toggled his radio. ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘what’ve you got?’
‘Nothing I can see from here,’ Jaffett reported back. ‘Everyone’s hightailing it into the valley, nobody’s looking your way at all.’
‘Good. The boys back yet?’
‘Roger that, they’re right here with me.’
‘Okay, tell ‘em good work from me. Keep an eye out for search parties, get ready to move if you have to.’
Jaffett confirmed, and Navarone got a similar report from the fire team he’d left on the nearby slope; the compound was all clear, the assault on the laboratory apparently having gone unnoticed.
‘Okay,’ Navarone said, ‘but make sure you tell us the moment you see any movement at all towards this building.’
His men confirmed the order back to him, and he turned to see his four section leaders stood in the foyer, suppressed assault rifles still smoking.
Devine smiled. Handcuffed next to him was the major they’d seen the night before, the man who had held the clipboard as the names were read out that morning.
Navarone smiled too.
The major was a man he really wanted to speak to.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Commander Ike Treyborne breathed as Navarone finished his emergency field report.
Navarone’s Bravo Troop had really stumbled upon the mother lode, without even realizing it when they’d gone in.
Treyborne understood that Navarone had disobeyed a direct order, but that was the least of his worries. What was more disturbing by far was what Navarone had managed to find out.
He had managed to find out details of the weapon which had been developed at Camp 14 – the same weapon, part of which was now at large somewhere in the wider world, ready to be used – and also what it had been developed for.
Computer files found at a laboratory within an off-site compound – partially translated by the Chinese liaison officers – and questioning of the scientific personnel had given Navarone the details of the weapon. Major Ho Sang-ok, Chief of the Third Bureau of the RGB and now a prisoner of the SEALs, had provided the rest.
And it was even worse than they’d all feared.
‘What are our orders, sir?’ Treyborne heard Navarone ask, half a world away.
He thought about giving the SEAL leader some shit about not following his last orders, but decided better of it; Navarone had seen a situation and did what he’d thought was right; there was no point in armchair quarterbacking him, especially when he had so much else on his plate.
‘Has the weapon been stockpiled there?’ Treyborne asked at last.
‘Affirmative sir, personnel say that it’s stored here and all over the camp.’
Treyborne exhaled slowly. He knew that Navarone and his men had raided the laboratory just in time; the prisoners who had been rounded up that morning were not just due to be experimented on, but were to be the real thing. Major Ho Sang-ok had arrived from Pyongyang to set the ball rolling. The hijack of the weapon had ruined the RGB’s original plan, and Ho had been forced to improvise.
If Navarone and his men had got there just a few hours later, the weapon would already have been on its way to South Korea.
‘Can the stockpiles be destroyed?’ Treyborne asked next.
‘Yes sir, but only by extremely high temperatures, and we don’t know for sure exactly where it’s contained. Might be multiple locations around the camp, and we might not get it all.’
Treyborne nodded to himself. ‘Okay son, I’ll have to go to General Cooper and probably Olsen too, and you know what the order’s gonna be.’
‘Yes sir,’ Navarone said.
‘So I suggest you get the hell out of there as fast as you can.’
‘What about the other prisoners, sir?’
Treyborne paused, and closed his eyes. He knew what would happen to anyone who was left in the camp.
‘Just get you and your men the hell out of there as fast as you can, Navarone. Do you understand me?’
Treyborne wasn’t at all surprised when Navarone didn’t reply; the silence at the other end of the line said it all.
Shaking his head, he shouted for the nearest aide. ‘You!’ he called out. ‘Get General Olsen on the line and organize an emergency meeting of the National Security Council. Immediately.’
Navarone knew what the generals’ orders would be.
Camp 14 would be entirely obliterated by an air strike, a couple of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers dropping their payloads of 30,000 pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator bunker bombs on the pla
ce and reducing it to ashes.
The horrifying, evil weapon developed there would be gone forever; and yet so would nearly four thousand prisoners, including an unknown amount of women and children.
Navarone thought quickly. Even in an emergency, it would take an hour or so for authorization; and the B-2s were all based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, over six thousand miles away. At six hundred miles an hour, it would take them at least ten hours to get here.
So he had a ten to twelve hour window.
Navarone stroked his chin as he thought about the prisoners; about the odds.
Yes, he thought. Yes.
We just might make it.
7
Riyadh Zoo was a relatively small affair, based right in the center of the city. Quraishi had accompanied Cole in a black Mercedes sedan with two security guards from the Ministry of Interior. Quraishi had claimed it was standard practice when ministers travelled through Riyadh, and Cole had had no reason to doubt him. He had wondered about the second sedan which had followed them all the way through the city streets, though.
The two security guards followed from a distance as Cole and Quraishi passed through the large steel gates into the dusty concrete mass of the zoo, waved through by the ticket officer. Cole noticed immediately that the zoo was eerily quiet. In fact, save for a few people who obviously worked there, Cole could see no other visitors whatsoever.
There was a lot more excitement directly outside, where a private company from Dubai was offering hot air balloon flights across the city; there had been a queue down the street.
Cole looked around, then back to Quraishi, who was strolling peacefully past deserted kiosks, pink flamingos to one side splashing in some dark water which only half-filled the concrete bowl which was their home.
Cole had seen happier places.
‘Is the zoo not a popular destination?’ Cole asked Quraishi.
‘Oh, it is one of Riyadh’s most visited attractions,’ Quraishi replied. ‘But today, it is closed for maintenance. I’m not one for crowds, you see, and I much prefer it this way. Luckily, the management and I have an understanding.’
WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller Page 23
