Stabenow, Dana - Prepared For Rage

by Prepared For Rage(lit)

  Cal, resigned, made a come-on motion with his hand. At some point in every duty .station this conversation or one like it had to be endured. He'd learned fast that getting mad only exacerbated any preconceptions people had, and to suffer through and move on.

  Azizi took a deep breath. "Smart, nobody denies that, but the general consensus is too lazy to try very hard. And why should you? It's not like you had to work for anything, it was all dropped right into your lap."

  He paused again. Cal was frowning a little, but he didn't say anything.

  "Your crews love you, especially the women, although in spite of all the rumors you've never been accused of dipping your pen in the company ink. Word in the fleet is that your COs, even if they do wish you'd be a little more enthusiastic, rate your job performance as consistently good. One even called you brilliant after that incident on the Maritime Boundary Line in the Bering Sea" Azizi stopped obediently when Cal raised a hand, and then resumed."and you got an award for the volunteer work you put in at the World Trade Center after 9/11. Although you don't like to talk about either, and I hear tell you've had to be reminded to wear the ribbons."

  There was a brief silence. "You know a lot about me," Cal said finally, "for a guy I met less than a week ago."

  Azizi shrugged. "You're one of those people who get talked about, sir. Have I offended you?"

  Cal gave a tired laugh and pulled his cap off to run his hand through his hair. "Like none of that's ever been said before, to my face or behind my back. Tell me something I don't know, Commander."

  Azizi looked over Cal's shoulder at the stream of people heading down the gangway; men, women, children, all of them moving with a new sense of purpose in spite of the months and years of rebuilding their city, their community, their homes that lay in front of them. There were infants in arms, toddlers, kids from grade school to high school, parents, grandparents. Some of them had been through the nightmare in the convention center, some had lucked out and survived the deluge after the levees broke in their homes and later been evacuated. Most of them were black, and much had already been made in the national and international press of America's neglect of its Southern minority population in the destructive wakes of Katrina and Rita.

  Azizi was as dark-skinned as half of the people going down the gangway, which, Cal thought, might have been why they were having this conversation.

  "They call me Taffy, sir," Azizi said. "Mustafa's a little too much for most Western tongues to get around, and I've never liked Ziz, which is what I get stuck with when I don't tell people I've already got a nickname I can live with."

  "Taffy," Cal said, trying it out.

  "That's right, sir. Taffy."

  After a moment Cal held out his hand. "Hello, Taffy."

  "Hello, sir." Their hands met in a firm grip, quickly released before either man could be accused of overt sentiment.

  Taffy consulted his clipboard. "One of the water tankers threw a rod this morning. I've got a line on a mechanic but in the meantime I've got a rumor of a couple tankers over in Alabama. I'll need the helo to get the drivers there, and we'll need drivers we can trusthave you ever driven a tanker truck, sir? No? Well, it's fairly easy, once you master the gears and figure out just how high your ass is in the air, you shouldn't have any trouble ..."

  2

  WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 2006

  "So this is a new one, Patrick?"

  "It's a new name, sir."

  "But the same old faces?"

  "Certainly some of them, sir. Lights, please?"

  The lights dimmed in the anonymous conference room. Patrick Chisum, special agent newly in charge of the CIA's Joint Terrorism Task Force, tapped a button on his notebook and the PowerPoint program began, a series of head shots interspersed with graphic pictures of bomb scenes, maps, dates, and casualty figures.

  "They are calling themselves Abdullah."

  "Just Abdullah?" His boss, Harold Kallendorf, sounded a little disappointed. "No Lord High Everything Allah? No Holy Judges, Juries, and Executioners of the Great Satan and All Who Sail in Him? No Fuck You and the Horse You Rode In On Jihad?" He sighed in what everyone hoped was mock disapproval. "Just suck the romance right out of the world, why don't you, Patrick."

  There were dutiful chuckles from around the table, as in this group of government officials from the security departments of the FBI, the NSA, Immigration, Customs, the Border Patrol, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, none held a higher rank than the new director. A dutiful chuckle in response to the ranking man's sallies, no matter how lame, was de rigueur.

  "Just Abdullah, sir," Patrick said, having waited patiently until he had regained everyone's attention. He hadn't chuckled, either. He didn't do chuckle. "It means 'servant of God.' The group came first to our attention with the bus bomb in Baghdad at Christmas."

  "Remind me of the damages."

  "Thirteen dead, over fifty injured, including bystanders."

  "Any Americans?"

  "No, sir, Iraqis."

  "Well, that's a mercy, anyway."

  Next to him Khalid stirred. "Yes, sir," Patrick said quickly, and clicked to the next slide before Khalid broke into rash speech. The screen displayed a large graph that resembled a genealogical tree, with head shots next to each name where they were available. Most of the photos were blurry, and most of the names were aliases. Patrick thought it was a perfect illustration of how much they didn't know about Abdullah, which was why he'd included it.

  There was a moment of silence while Patrick let them work their way through the chart. "We believe that the bin Laden organization funded the group initially with a grant of two hundred thousand dollars, at the instigation of al-Zarqawi. We believe that al Qaeda remains the main source of their money, although we believe that they encourage all of their cells to raise money independently, from whatever local Muslim population they happen to be in at the time."

  He called up the next slide. "Zarqawi's cell is for the most part made up of fellow Jordanians. One of the very few exceptions is a man we know only as Isa, and we believe Isa is the head of Abdullah."

  "Is that short for Isaiah or something?"

  "No, sir, we believe it is the Arabic name for Jesus."

  Kallendorf looked at him. "You are fucking kidding me."

  "No, sir," Patrick said. "Jesus was a prophet for Islam. There is also a suspicion among our analysts that the name was adopted to play on the evangelical Christian belief of the Second Coming."

  Kallendorf digested this. "So by adopting the name, this Isa is saying he's the second coming of Christ?"

  "With the prophesied worldwide death and destruction attendant on that, er, coming, we think so, yes, sir."

  Kallendorf leaned back in his chair. "Guy's got balls, I'll say that for him. And maybe even a sense of humor. Jesus." He shook his head, became aware of what he'd said, and laughed. The half of those present who got the joke laughed, too.

  "It also means that he has some education, we believe some of it possibly in the West," Omar Khalid said, speaking for the first time. He was of medium height, with dark hair and eyes. Arabian-born and a naturalized American citizen, Khalid was one of the few agents the CIA had who were fluent in Arabic and Farsi. Recruited out of grad school where he'd been majoring in Islamic studies, he'd spent fourteen years in the field in the Middle East, shadowing, eavesdropping on, and infiltrating mainstream and splinter terrorist groups from Beirut to Libya. When at last his cover was blown, his masters in Langley had pulled him out of the field one step ahead of his executioners and parked him behind a desk. He had predicted 9/11, or something very like it, and had been laughed at for his pains. Afterward, he had been thoroughly investigated, just to be sure he himself hadn't been part of the conspiracy. He bore it all philosophically, because like most immigrants whose families had sacrificed a great deal in pursuit of the American dream, he was a true believer in truth, justice, and the American way. Lately, however, Patrick had noticed that Khalid had begun t
o show signs of restlessness, even of anger. It's hard to be a prophet in one's own time and to have one's prophecies at first ridiculed and then suspect.

  Kallendorf shrugged, his massive shoulders throwing menacing shadows against the screen. "Most of the guys on the planes had degrees in engineering. That nowadays the terrorists are fielding intellectual ideologues is not news, gentlemen."

  "No, sir," Patrick said, and squeezed Khalid's arm before he spoke again. The slide show became a series of more blurry photographs of groups of men in jellabas and kaffiyehs, succeeded by a series of more head shots with the numbers across the bottom cropped off. "We believe Isa was the only non-Jordanian in Zarqawi's cell. We believe he may be

  Irani, or possibly Yemeni, although some sources have him Indian-born, which"Patrick allowed himself a small, disbelieving smile"we believe is reaching. We believe him to be in his late thirties or early forties."

  "We believe a hell of a lot," Kallendorf said. "Do we know anything?"

  "We are still gathering information, sir."

  "Which, freely translated, means we don't know shit."

  Patrick refused to be rushed. "I'd rather not assume too much in advance of hard data, sir. Our original intelligence on Zarqawi was wrong. Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi hate each other, and that hatred only increases as time goes on. Bin Laden wants to kill Americans. Zarqawi is killing mostly Shiites. Bin Laden's mother is a Shiite."

  He nodded at Khalid, who leapt to life like a yappy poodle kept too long on a leash. "If Isa isn't Jordanian, it may explain why he has decided to strike out on his own. We're closing in on Zarqawi. When he's gone, we believe this Isa has no chance of being named to take his place as the leader of the Iraqi insurgency. There is an Egyptian, a protégé of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who we believe will be named as the next leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Zawahiri is bin Laden's right-hand man, and any protégé of his is certain to be seen as more trustworthy than a protégé of Zarqawi's."

  "Wait a minute, wasn't Zawahiri the guy who ran the op that killed all those tourists in Luxor in 1997? I thought the Russians had him locked up."

  "They detained him for six months in 1996," Khalid said. "He was carrying four different passports under four different names from four different countries. None of the countries would own him, so the Russians cut him loose on the Azerbaijani border. Where we lost him." It probably came out a little harsher than Khalid meant it, but it was only the truth, after all.

  "Ah." Kallendorf stroked his chin. He'd had a beard when he had been named director. Patrick thought he must be missing it. "So you think this Isa blew up a bus in Baghdad, killing"

  "Thirteen," Khalid said.

  "and wounding"

  "Fifty," Khalid said, adding helpfully, "including bystanders, some of

  whom staggered off home before help arrived. So we don't have a hard number on wounded."

  "and this is Isa's, what, his calling card? His debutante ball? His curtsey to the queen?"

  "We believe Isa did it to demonstrate his independence, yes, sir, his determination to distinguish himself from his master."

  "It also signals Zarqawi's determination to hand off operations to Isa when the time comes," Patrick said. "No matter what al Qaeda thinks about it."

  " 'Watch me, Dad, see what I can do'?"

  "Essentially, sir, yes. From both men."

  "Lights." The lights came up and Kallendorf swiveled around to face them. "This a one-off, or are we looking forward to more love letters from this asshole?"

  Patrick and Khalid exchanged a look. "We believe the bus bombing was Isa testing his wings, sir," Patrick said.

  "And what the fuck does that mean when it's at home?"

  "He was flying solo," Khalid said. "Seeing if he could operate on his own."

  "Maybe even a test," Patrick said. "To prove to Zarqawi he was worthy."

  Kallendorf got to his feet, moving with the ponderous authority of sheer physical size that reminded them all of the linebacker he used to be. Deliberately, Patrick thought. Kallendorf's was a carefully cultivated presence that had intimidated employees, superiors, and congressmen alike for twenty years, culminating in the top job at a federal agency less inured to the mood swings in the White House than everyone would like to think. New to the job, he wasn't new to the Beltway.

  But he wasn't a career bureaucrat, either, and he did not lack either intelligence or humor. He achieved his full six feet nine inches and said with deliberation, measuring and weighing each word as it was produced, "Gentlemen, I'm the FNG around here and I know it. You all think I'm just some candy-ass with enough money to buy myself the job the last guy screwed up, and I know that, too. I've shot my mouth off some in front of Schuyler's oversight committee down on the Hill, you've heard about it on O'Reilly and watched it on YouTube, and my guess is right about now

  you're wondering how to contain any damage I might do to your revered institution."

  Kallendorf meditated for a moment. "Yeah," he said finally. "Might as well go for broke." He raised his head, a look in his eyes that legend had it had disintegrated more than one defensive line in the three Super Bowls Kallendorf had started in. "It's not the damage I might do to your institution that you ought to be worried about, gentlemen, it's the damage this institution can do to the nation, and the world. The CIA's been making bad calls since they tried to blow up Castro with an exploding cigar. If I had my druthers, I'd take all the money we're pouring into our Middle Eastern antiterrorism efforts and write a check to the Mossad, with one set of instructions: Go get 'em, tiger. Then I'd go before every television camera from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera and tell them what I'd done."

  He looked around the table, looking as if he were savoring the moment. Most of them were veterans who'd seen their share of congressional hearings and so maintained their poker faces, but he appeared to be satisfied. "I'd bet my left nut that it'd take all of two seconds before terrorist cells'd be folding like cheap card tables all over the world, because I guarantee you that our enemies are way more scared of the Mossad than they are of the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, and all the rest of you yahoos who opened the door into Iraq II combined."

  Patrick had worked for the CIA for too long to blink at this trenchant assessment. "Understood, sir."

  "I doubt it," Kallendorf said. "I want intel, gentlemen, I want a lot of it, I want it yesterday, and I don't care how you get it." Yes, sir.

  There wasn't much to be said after that. Patrick exchanged meaningless pleasantries with the rest of the men and women as they filed out the door. Some of them looked a little shell-shocked. Others looked angry. Patrick looked at his watch, and estimated that the first outraged phone calls would hit his desk possibly before he got back to it.

  Speaking of which, Khalid could barely contain himself until the door closed behind the last of them. "Jesus fucking Christ." He pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open.

  "Don't do it," Patrick said. When Khalid, unheeding, started punching numbers, Patrick reached over and closed Khalid's phone. "Don't do it, Omar."

  Khalid looked indignant. "Why the hell not? You heard him. This guy's got no experience, he's a hack, he admitted it right here in this room. He's going to have all the gears jammed in six months, probably less."

  Still staring at the door, Patrick said slowly, "A lot of reasons, not least of which is in trying to screw over Kallendorf, you'll screw yourself worse. This guy isn't a fool."

  Khalid wasn't ready to give up. "Senator Schuyler will listen to us. He's always been a friend to the agency. Maybe he can help us get somebody in here with a clue about operations."

  Not without sympathy, Chisum said, "Kallendorf was handpicked for the job by the president of the United States, Khalid. You want to go up against the White House? Especially this White House? They'll crucify you. Hell, what's worse, they'll leak your wife's name and your kids' schools. Besides." He stacked his notes together. "You won't be telling Schuyler anything he doesn't already know."


  Khalid folded his cell phone and pocketed it, but he wasn't convinced. "You remember the Church hearings, Patrick."

  "Not personally, no," Patrick said mildly. "I'm not that old."

  Unheeding, Khalid said, "You know what they did to the agency. You know what kind of damage this administration can do in the two years it's got left. Kallendorf's the end result of that Iraq witch hunt on Capitol Hill. They're still looking for somebody to hang for Gulf War II, the president knew he wasn't going to get anyone with a paper trail through the confirmation hearings and so he used the job to pay off a campaign debt instead. I mean, hey, I can see his reasoning, if Congress is never going to allow you a competent director, might as well use the position to pay off someone who helped get you elected." He reached for the phone again.

  "Don't do it, Khalid," Chisum repeated.

  "Why the hell not?" Khalid said again, in understandable frustration. "What the hell have we got to lose?"

  "Most of all..." He turned and looked at Khalid and said soberly, "Most of all because Kallendorf's not wrong."

  3

  IRAQ, JUNE 2006

  They met for the last time in a cramped, dark room in a tumbledown house at the edge of a dusty village well off the beaten track, miles outside of Baghdad and as secure from surveillance as one could reasonably be and still be in Iraq. He looked around at the men left to him. They looked back, fearful but trusting. They had been together a long time, and they believed in him.

  And if they didn't believe in him, they had believed in Zarqawi, and Zarqawi had chosen him to be second in command. Zarqawi's legend lingered on.

  How many times could the Americans have killed him? In Mosul, in Ramadi, time and again in Kurdistan? He knew noweveryone knew, that was the wonderful thing about the Western mediathat the American military had forwarded plans for attacking the Khurmal camp at least three times, and that each time Bush the Unbeliever had been so busy plotting his invasion of Iraq that the attacks had been brushed aside.