by Jeff Nesbit
“Which means you are government,” Abe said to himself. He started a search on articles about Andrei Rowan. There were thousands of them, from his many publicized adventures. But after a couple of dozen, he discovered what he was looking for.
Nicolai Petrov was Andrei Rowan’s chief of staff. He’d been with Rowan for years, always in the background. His name rarely showed up in the press.
Well, I’ll be, Abe thought. Why in the world would the prime minister of Russia send his chief of staff down here to sign a partnership agreement with our national oil company? What do they know that we don’t—or, perhaps, want?
Abe pulled the oil register out and studied the INOC oil license again. Nowhere did it say that their new funding partner was the government of Russia. He thumbed through the preliminary geological survey maps and findings.
It was impossible to know for certain, but it appeared as if they were going to commit some serious dollars to looking at the formations around the Dead Sea. Their scientists planned to conduct detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology—and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry—throughout the area. They also planned to work with an American university to generate 3D maps and algorithms of the area.
But the last two paragraphs of the preliminary report struck him as odd. They expressed an interest in experimenting with research on oil shale extraction technology in partnership with INOC. That was indeed strange. There had been a flurry of trade reports recently about interest in the previously worthless oil shale in the barren Shfela Basin south and west of Jerusalem.
Abe had heard promises of “new” technology to extract oil safely from shale for nearly as long as he’d been deputy oil commissioner. Almost none of it seemed to work, most of it was farfetched, and the technology that did actually work was both environmentally ruinous and much more expensive than drilling for crude oil in proven deposits.
But Abe also knew that hope always springs eternal. And should someone develop safe, inexpensive ways to extract oil from shale, well, then Israel was certainly sitting on one of the biggest deposits the world had ever seen in the Shfela Basin. That sort of scientific advance—combined with what the scientists were saying about the natural gas deposits in the Levant basin off the coast of Haifa—would make Israel an oil and gas superpower within a decade.
It was all very strange to Abe. Hunting for oil in Israel had always been a loser’s preoccupation. To be honest, the Russian interest made no sense. Israel had no oil—at least not any that was worth the cost of recovering. There were more than four hundred dry wells in northern Israel alone. So perhaps the Russians know something we don’t, Abe thought. Either that, or there’s some serious misdirection going on. Once the camel has its nose under the tent, it eventually makes its way inside.
Either way, Abe figured, now was a good time to take a firsthand look at that area around the north end of the Dead Sea. It was a short drive. And while he was out, he figured he might pay a visit to the Shfela Basin, then take a drive south in the Negev to see the Ashkelon-Eilat pipeline work he’d been hearing about.
12
Somewhere on the border between Iran and Pakistan
It was an ordinary Boeing C-135 transport plane. But the American air force leadership was justifiably proud of it and its role. The RC-135 Rivet Joint plane had been extensively modified and outfitted with an amazing array of onboard sensors that could detect, track, and ultimately locate targets geographically throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.
The air force believed it could track anything—even people— if given enough information to feed into its onboard sensor network. It had been used extensively for all kinds of missions for the better part of twenty years, from Desert Storm to the effort to oust the dictator of Libya.
The two pilots of this particular RC-135 Rivet Joint were especially keen about their target right now. It was well after midnight, but Saudi human intelligence on the ground in Pakistan had provided some extraordinary information.
The claim was that the operational deputy of al Qaeda, Ali bin Rahman, had chosen to move from a safe house in the mountains of northeastern Pakistan, near the China border, and was traveling on a highway that ran south and west along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The hard intelligence placed bin Rahman—who had once been a Saudi citizen—in a small, nondescript vehicle moving past Quetta in Pakistan. Incredibly, it seemed as if bin Rahman was headed toward the border of Iran and a town called Zahedan just inside eastern Iran.
Why bin Rahman would move into the open like this wasn’t clear. But the two pilots aboard the Joint Rivet didn’t care. Their job was to find and then track bin Rahman if he was, in fact, somewhere along the highway between Quetta in Pakistan and Zahedan in Iran.
The al Qaeda deputy was well known to Western intelligence officials, even if he wasn’t to the public in America and elsewhere. He’d essentially run the fractured, disparate al Qaeda network for years. The House of Saud was especially focused on bin Rahman’s intentions and his whereabouts.
The speculation at Langley was coalescing quickly around the belief that bin Rahman had set up the cell and the attack on the Airbus plane carrying the Saudi prince near Dulles airport. No one, as yet, had emerged to take credit for the attack. But the attack fit bin Rahman’s style of operations, the CIA and NSA leadership believed. And if it walks like a duck, it’s most likely a duck.
Ali bin Rahman was as anti-American as any leader in the loose al Qaeda network, but he was even more determined to remain a thorn in the side of the Saudi royal family. There were many guesses as to why, but the most logical reason seemed to be that he’d been denied a family inheritance in a family dispute and had then blamed politics inside the House of Saud for it.
One thing, though, was clear. Ali bin Rahman believed as passionately as anyone that the House of Saud stood firmly in the way of the true restoration of Sharia law across the Arab world and that it was centrally to blame for Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs.
It was for this reason that Saudi intelligence had made special efforts to locate the al Qaeda deputy. They believed that removing bin Rahman would solve many problems for them.
“We have all the signature data we need?” the first pilot asked.
“Fed into the onboard computer by the tech crew right before we took off,” said his copilot.
“Car and mobile device guesses?”
“Most likely.”
“And if we get a hit?”
“I brought a bottle of single malt to celebrate.” The copilot grinned.
There was a loud plink from the console. Both of them glanced instinctively at the place where the sound had come from.
“Well, I’ll be,” the first pilot murmured.
“We’ve got something, that’s for sure.”
They both quickly switched frequencies so they could listen to the chatter from the tech crew spread throughout the back of the plane. Genuine excitement rippled through the plane’s crew. They’d gotten not one, but two, hits. The first was on the car, which had been confirmed almost instantly through an electromagnetic detection pattern. And they’d gotten a second hit on a mobile device almost at the same time. The car’s occupant was talking to someone.
After several long minutes, the crew had confirmed that it was bin Rahman’s car and his mobile device. He was talking to someone on the ground waiting to meet with them at Zahedan, inside Iran.
“Who is it?” the first pilot asked after listening to the crew discuss what they were eavesdropping on from their vantage point.
“Sounds like someone named Bader at the other end, they’re saying.”
“Bader? A German name? In Iran?”
They both listened for several seconds. “No, it’s Bahadur.”
The first pilot’s jaw dropped reflexively. “Hussein Bahadur? The head of Iran’s air force? That’s who bin Rahman is meeting in Zahedan?”
“Sure sounds like it,” said th
e second pilot.
The first pilot whistled softly. “That isn’t going to sit well with the Saudis.”
“Nope,” said the copilot. “They’ll call for action as soon as we send this out. So should we? Do we have confirmation?”
They did, in fact, have all the confirmation they needed for Global Hawk, the unmanned aerial vehicle made by Northrup Grumman, which was also airborne right now.
“Tell the crew to transmit,” the first pilot said.
The orders went back, and the data was transmitted an instant later to the modern successor to the U-2 spy plane. The Global Hawk dutifully plotted the coordinates from the data. It had a rough calculation within seconds and then a very firm coordinate match shortly thereafter.
The Global Hawk sent the coordinates forward a moment later to analysts at a ground station. Once transmitted, the two pilots knew it was out of their hands. The information would soon be passed on to a command center for targeting.
From there, the command center would send the coordinates and likely route of the target to an E-3 Sentry AWACS command-andcontrol plane—essentially a flying battleship capable of directing warplanes in the area to the target.
From there, a fighter with advanced sensors could hunt the target without any further information needed, either from the air or the ground.
The decision to “acquire” the target was well above their pay grade. Neither pilot was quite sure whose call it was. Perhaps this one would go all the way to the president. But they’d done their job.
13
The White House
Washington, DC
The Saudi ambassador to the United States was literally knocking at the door of the White House complex a few minutes after the data and coordinates had been transmitted from the Rivet Joint, to the Global Hawk, to a command center, and then to an E-3 Sentry AWACS. The town car had pulled up to the gate, and the ambassador had asked to meet with President Camara. He had not called ahead.
Omar al Faisal was usually a polite man. But not at the moment. He’d already made sure that the Saudis and US intelligence agencies were sharing information in real time. The Saudi human intelligence asset on the ground had provided the lead, and the American planes had confirmed that bin Rahman was, in fact, in a car along a highway from Quetta to Zahedan.
He was here, at the end of the day in Washington, to make certain that the Americans would take the necessary action. And if they would not, for whatever reason, he intended to make sure that they shared the coordinates immediately so the Saudi Royal Air Force fighters could take the appropriate action.
“Mr. Ambassador,” a tired voice said over the phone at the guards’ box, “if you’d called ahead…”
“There is not time.” Omar al Faisal closed his eyes to control his anger. “If you can just tell the president that I’m here, and that I need an audience with him immediately.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “Let me connect you with the chief of staff.”
“No, I need—”
There was an audible click. Anshel Gould, the president’s chief of staff, came on the line an instant later. “Mr. Ambassador, how are you this evening?” Dr. Gould said politely. “The president isn’t available at the moment. Perhaps I can help?”
Dr. Gould was an inveterate gatekeeper. No one got to the president without passing by him first. Not even the vice president.
“If I may, Dr. Gould,” said the ambassador, “there isn’t time for a polite talk. I must see the president immediately.”
“It can’t wait until the morning?”
“It cannot,” al Faisal said impatiently. “And I believe you know the reason for my visit.”
“I may,” Dr. Gould said noncommittally, “but still…”
“Can we meet, please?” the ambassador said curtly.
Dr. Gould didn’t hesitate. He never did. “I will be out shortly.”
Anshel Gould had just been reviewing the coordinate file from the reconnaissance planes in Pakistan—which included both a recommended course of action and the troubling news that the voice at the other end of the call in Zahedan was most likely none other than Hussein Bahadur, the head of Iran’s air force.
He grabbed his coat from the back of a nearby chair, where it had been draped since 5 A.M. when he’d arrived at the White House. He made his way quickly through the West Wing complex, stopping only to let his executive assistant know he was headed out to the driveway to greet the Saudi ambassador.
“Do you need someone with you, Dr. Gould?” she’d asked as he’d practically flown by her desk.
“No, I have this,” he said.
He took the spiral staircase that separated the West Wing from the Eisenhower office complex three steps at a time. He practically whirled down the narrow staircase. Just as he got to the bottom, he nearly ran over Daniel James—who had just been named a principal deputy White House press secretary for national security—as he was beginning to make his way up the staircase.
“Dr. Gould!” DJ said, stepping down and off the staircase quickly to avoid a collision. “Is there a fire?”
“No—at least not here.” Dr. Gould started to hurry off but then stopped and turned around to face DJ. “You know what,” he said quickly. “Come with me. I can use the moral support.”
“With?”
“The Saudi ambassador.”
“Omar al Faisal? Why is he here? He’s not on the schedule today.”
“He showed up unannounced. You’ll find out why in a moment because you’re joining me for the meeting. On the driveway.”
“The driveway?”
“He’s in a town car at the gate, demanding to see the president.”
DJ nodded. While this was a little unusual, it occasionally happened with allies who felt they were justified in demanding immediate action from those in the White House they worked with closely— especially on sensitive national security or intelligence matters.
“You’re going to meet at the gate?”
“You bet. It’s as good a place as any. I needed the exercise.”
DJ tried to keep up with Dr. Gould as he made his way down the corridor. He loved these moments. They almost made up for the fourteen-hour days, fast-food dinners, modest pay, and halfhearted office accommodations they afforded the press office staff. Almost.
Dr. Gould burst through the doorway that led to the driveway between the two White House office complexes. The guards had been forewarned and had already stepped aside from the doorway. This wasn’t the first time Dr. Gould had raced from one building to the next. DJ could see that they were keeping a careful, respectful eye on the president’s chief of staff as he marched briskly up to the gate and the guards’ box.
“We’ll just be a moment,” Dr. Gould called out over one shoulder to the guards as he and DJ walked out of the complex to see the Saudi ambassador.
Omar al Faisal was already out of the town car and approaching the gate. He shook Gould’s hand quickly, then said without preamble, “You know what I am seeking, Dr. Gould.”
“I believe I do, and I can assure you we are prepared to take appropriate action,” Gould said.
Only then did Omar al Faisal glance at DJ. “I can talk with him present?”
“By all means.” Gould nodded. “The president regularly includes him in such discussions.”
“Very well,” the Saudi ambassador said. “What, exactly, do you mean by ‘appropriate action’?”
Gould knew the Saudis would eventually see some version of the conversation picked up by the planes, so he chose not to conceal it. “There is a slight complication.”
“Complication?”
“The person that bin Rahman is meeting in Zahedan is someone of note in Iran. Given the delicate situation we are in with our relationship to the leadership of Iran, we must be exceedingly careful.”
The blood nearly drained from the Saudi ambassador’s face. “We do not care if he is racing to meet the Supreme Leader himself…”
/> “Hardly. We both know that Reverend Shahidi rarely leaves Tehran. No, it is one of their top military officials.”
“Fine!” the Saudi ambassador said brusquely. “Then let him—whoever it is—be collateral damage. We both know that bin Rahman is responsible for the terrorist attack on our prince at Dulles.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Gould said mildly.
“We are arguing technicalities, while the opportunity slips through our grasp like the sands of an hourglass.” Omar al Faisal’s face darkened with anger. “If you will not act against bin Rahman immediately, then please do what you have always promised. Give us the coordinates so we may take action.”
DJ held his breath. He was frantically trying to read between the lines of this conversation. It wasn’t easy. But as far as he could divine, American reconnaissance planes had picked up the notorious al Qaeda deputy Ali bin Rahman on his way to a meeting in Iran. DJ was stunned that bin Rahman would risk exposure by leaving his safe house in the mountains of Pakistan. There must be an awfully good reason, he thought.
DJ could only guess the identity of the person bin Rahman was meeting in Zahedan. Most likely, he reasoned, it was either Iran’s air force chief, Hussein Bahadur, or the head of the Revolutionary Guards, General Ali Zhubin. He couldn’t imagine why either would be there, however.
What really complicated matters, DJ knew, was that the US government was in direct talks with Iran’s leadership about a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian problem and a ceasefire with Israel. The near-nuclear confrontation between Iran and Israel was off the table while the talks were underway. But it wouldn’t take much to derail the talks—and push Iran and Israel to the brink of war again.
If the US ordered a strike against bin Rahman, and there was any collateral damage against either of Iran’s top military leaders, then the uneasy peace between Iran and Israel would be immediately shattered. It would be nearly impossible to predict what might happen in such a scenario. Iran’s leadership was stable—but also highly capable of irrational overreactions.
