by Tom Clancy
39
Melanie Kraft did not mind working late in the operations center of the National Counterterrorism Center. Her work consumed her, especially after she’d been handed a project by her boss, Mary Pat Foley, the week before.
Mary Pat had tasked her with learning everything she could about a brigadier general in Pakistan’s ISI named Riaz Rehan. A curious tip to CIA from a one-time-use overseas e-mail address implicated the general as a former operative in both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. This was interesting, but NCTC needed to know what Rehan was up to now.
Melanie had worked the question from several different angles, and she’d struck out several times a day in the past week. But she’d been working the Rehan question all day, and she felt like she had something to show for it.
It was after midnight when she thought she had enough to go to the assistant director, and she knew Mary Pat was still in her office. She tapped on the office door, softly and somewhat reluctantly.
“Come in.”
Melanie entered, and Mary Pat’s tired eyes widened. “Dear Lord, girl, if you look that tired at your age, I must look like the walking dead.”
“I’m sorry to bother you. I know better than to troubleshoot theories with the boss, but my brain is fried and there isn’t anyone else to bounce this off of.”
“I’m glad you popped in. Wa nt to go grab a coffee?”
A minute later they were down in the cafeteria, spinning stirrer sticks in hot coffee. Mary Pat said, “Whatever you have has got to be more stimulating than what I’m working on. DHS is asking me to help with a report for Congress. I’d rather be doing something substantive, but you kids get to do all the fun stuff.”
“I’m working on Rehan and his department at ISI.”
“Joint Intel Miscellaneous, right?” Mary Pat asked.
“Yes. A misleading name for the division that runs all Pakistan’s foreign spies and liaises with all the terrorists around the world.”
“A lot of sneaky people work in government around the world,” Foley said. “It’s not below them to hide something nefarious behind bureaucratic-speak.”
Melanie nodded. “From what I can tell of Rehan’s organization, his department’s operational tempo has been through the roof in the past month.”
“Impress me with what you’ve found out.”
“The general himself is such a cipher, I decided to dig into his organization a little more, maybe find something that can lead to an understanding of what they are doing.”
“What did you find?”
“A thirty-year-old Pakistani was arrested two months ago in New York; he got in a fight buying a knockoff watch in Chinatown. In his possession NYPD found twelve thousand dollars, and thirteen prepaid Visa cards totaling thirty-seven grand, and a debit card for a checking account in Dubai. Apparently this guy was withdrawing cash with his debit card and then going to bodegas and drugstores and using the cash to buy the prepaid cards. A couple here, a couple there, so as not to attract attention.”
“Interesting,” Mary Pat said as she sipped her milky coffee.
“He was deported immediately, without much of an investigation, but I’ve been looking into the guy, and I think he was JIM.”
“Why?”
“A, he fits the mold. Heavy Islamic family ties to the FATA, he served in a traditionally Islamist unit in the PDF, and then left that unit, going into reserve duty. That’s common for ISI employees.”
“B?” Mary Pat asked, not exactly sold on the circumstantial nature of Melanie’s inference.
“B, the Dubai account. It’s registered to a shell corporation in Abu Dhabi that we’ve tied to contributions to Islamist players in the past.”
“A slush fund?”
“Right. The shell corporation has some transactions in Islamabad, and the bank itself has been used by different groups. Lashkar men in Delhi, Haqqani men in Kabul, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen in Chittagong.”
“Is there another shoe still to drop here?”
“I am hoping you will tell me.” Melanie hesitated, then said, “Riaz Rehan, we have determined, was the man known as Khalid Mir. Mir is a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative.”
“Right.”
“Well, Lashkar men working in India on missions that have been linked to Khalid Mir have been known to use prepaid Visa cards bought with cash in New York.”
Mary Pat nodded. “I think I remember reading that in the past.À in the ”
“And Riaz Rehan was also known as Abu Kashmiri, a known high-level operative for Jaish-e-Mohammed.”
“Yes?”
“Well, a three-man Jaish-e-Mohammed cell that was killed after an ambush in Kabul was found to be using prepaid Visas purchased in New York.”
Mary Pat shook her head. “Melanie, lots of terrorist organizations have been using these prepaid cards in the past years. It is the easiest way to move money without leaving a financial trail. And we’ve picked up other shady Middle Eastern characters in New York with loads of cash on trips to buy prepaid cards, presumably to pass them out to others to create an untraceable conduit of operating funds.”
“That’s my point exactly. The other people who have been picked up and deported. What if they were working for Rehan, as well?”
“The ones we were able to tie down had no known association with JIM.”
“Neither did Khalid Mir or Abu Kashmiri. I am just saying, if Rehan uses this MO, then the same method of operation might mean the same man is behind it. I am starting to think Rehan has more identities than the ones we know about.”
Mary Pat Foley looked at Melanie Kraft a long time before speaking, as if she was trying to decide if she should. Finally she said, “For the past fifteen years there have been rumors. Just little whispers here and there that there was one unknown operative, a freelancer, who was behind all of the lower-level attacks.”
Melanie asked, “What do you mean all of them?”
“Lots. An incredible amount. Some of our forensic guys over at Langley would point to little pieces of tradecraft that were used across all the operations. Everyone started using Dubai accounts around the same time. Everybody started using steganography around the same time. Everybody started using prepaid phone cards around the same time. Internet phones as well.”
Melanie continued to look incredulous. “Playing the devil’s advocate, it’s not uncommon at all to find similar tradecraft in operations from unconnected groups. They learn from each other’s ops, they pass field manuals around Pakistan, they get advice from ISI. Plus, when they do evolve individually, it is at a similar pace, using technology that they can get their hands on. It just stands to reason that, for example, all the groups started using long-distance phone cards around the time they became popular, or thumb drives when they became cheap enough. I don’t buy this ghost story.”
“You’re right to be skeptical. It was an exciting theory that explained things the easy way, without any more work than saying, ‘Forrest Gump probably did it.’”
Melanie laughed. “His code name was Forrest Gump?”
“Unofficial, he never got an official designation. But he was a character who showed up everywhere something happened. The name seemed to fit. And remember, some of these groups I am talking about had nothing to do with one another. But some at the Agency were convinced there was one common thread running through them all. One coordinator of operations. Like they were all managed, or advised, at least, by the same individual.”
“Are you saying Riaz Rehan might be Forrest Gump?”
Mary Pat shrugged. Drained the rest of her coffee. “A couple months ago he was just another low-level general running an office in the ISI. Since then we’ve learned a lot aboutÀd a lot him, and it’s all bad. Keep digging.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Melanie, and she stood to return to her desk.
“But not tonight. Get out of here. Go home and get some sleep. Or better yet, call Junior. Have him take you to a very late dinner.”
Melanie
smiled, looked down at the floor.
“He called today. We’re getting together tomorrow.”
Mary Pat Foley smiled.
40
John Clark was new to trout fishing, and he recognized he had a lot to learn about it. On a couple of occasions he’d managed to catch a few rainbow and brown trout in his neighbor’s creek, though the streams and brooks on his own farm had so far yielded him nothing but frustration. His neighbor had told him there was good trout to be caught on Clark’s own property, but another local contradicted that, explaining that what were called trout in the little streams like those on Clark’s farm were actually just creek chubs, a member of the minnow family that grew up to a foot in length and could be feisty enough when on the line to fool amateur anglers into thinking they were battling a trout.
John figured he’d get a book on fishing and read it when he had the time, but for this afternoon he just stood out here alone in his waders in his neighbor’s creek, whipped his line back and forth, dumped the fly in a slow-moving pool, and then repeated that process, over and over and over.
It looked a lot like fly-fishing, except for the fact that he hadn’t caught a damn thing.
John gave up for the afternoon and pulled his line in an hour before dark. Though he hadn’t managed to fool any fish into biting his fly, it had been a good day nonetheless. His gunshot wound had all but healed, he’d gotten a few hours of fresh air and solitude, and, before his afternoon of relaxation, he’d put a first coat of paint on the master bedroom of the farmhouse. One more coat this coming weekend and he’d bring Sandy out so he could get a thumbs-up from her to begin painting the living room.
On top of that, he’d neither been shot again nor found it necessary to kill anyone or run for his life.
Yeah, a good day.
John packed up his fishing gear, looked up to a gray sky, and wondered if this was what retirement felt like.
He lifted his tackle box and his fly rod and shook off the thought like he shook off the cold breeze rolling down from Catoctin Mountain to the west. It was a good half-hour’s slog through the woods back to his farmhouse. He started the hike to the east by climbing the stones out of the creek up to an overgrown trail.
John’s farm was in Frederick County, west of Emmits-burg and within a mile of the Pennsylvania state line. He and Sandy had been looking for rural property since they’d returned from the UK, and when a Navy buddy who’d retired to a small dairy farm up here to make cheese with his wife told John about a “For Sale” sign in front of a simple farmhouse on fifty acres, John and Sandy came up for a look.
The price was right because the house needed some work, and Sandy loved the old house and the countryside, so they’d signed the contracts late last spring.
Since then John had been too busy at The Campus to do much more than drive up during a rare free day off to work on the house ƀand to do a little maintenance and fishing. Sandy came up with him now and again, together they’d visited Gettysburg just a few miles up the road, and they hoped to get away soon for a weekend trip to Amish Country in nearby Lancaster County.
And when they retired, they planned to move up here full-time.
Or when Sandy retired, Clark reminded himself as he pushed his way up a thick copse of evergreen brush that covered the hill leading away from the tiny stream.
John had bought the property for their golden years, but he had no illusions that he would be one to just fade off into the sunset. That he would live long enough to retire and make cheese until his body slowly crapped out on him from age.
No. John Clark figured it would all end for him a lot more suddenly than that.
The bullet through his arm was about the fiftieth close call of Clark’s life. Six inches inside its flight path and that 9-millimeter round would have gone right into a lung, and he’d have choked to death in his own blood before Ding and Dom could have carried him down to street level. Another four inches to the left and it would have pierced his heart and he would not have even made it out of the attic. A couple of feet higher and the round would have nailed the back of his head, and he would have fallen dead like Abdul bin Mohammed al Qahtani had dropped in the elevator of the Hôtel de Sers.
John was certain that, sooner or later — and John was running out of “later”—he’d die on a mission.
When he was young, really young, he’d been a Navy SEAL in Vietnam working in MACV-SOG, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group. Clark, along with others in SOG, had lived within a hairsbreadth of death for years. He’d had many close shaves. Bullets that whizzed by his face, explosions that sent lethal shrapnel into men within arm’s reach, helicopters that lifted five hundred feet into the air before deciding that they did not feel like flying anymore that day. Back then these brushes with death just pumped him full of adrenaline. Made him so fucking ecstatic to be alive that he, like many others of his age and in his profession, began to live for the drug called danger.
John ducked under the low limb of a young poplar as he walked, careful to keep his fly rod from snagging on the branches. He smiled a little, thinking about being twenty-two. So long ago.
The bullet that nearly dropped him dead on the Paris rooftop didn’t exactly fill him with the same giddy thrills he’d felt as a young SEAL in ’Nam. Nor did it fill him with dread and fear. No, John wasn’t going soft in his old age. More like fatalistic. The bullet in France and the farmhouse in Maryland had a lot in common.
They both told John that, one way or another, there is an end to this crazy ride.
John climbed over a split-rail section of the fence at the southwest corner of his property. Once on his own land, he hiked through a small wood of loblolly pine where the slope of a hill led down into a tiny valley where a shallow creek wound from north to south near the fence line.
He looked down at his watch and saw it was four-fifteen. He didn’t have any cell phone coverage out here, so for the three hours that he’d been out for his impromptu fishing trip he’d been “off the grid.” He wondered how many messages he’d have back on the landline at the house, and he thought back again to his past, fondly remembering a time before mobile phones, when he didn’t feel guilty for a walk in the damn woods.
Being alone here in the wilds of Maryland made him think of being alone in the bush in Southeast Asia. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but not so long if you’d been there, and Clark had damn well been there. The plants were different in the jungle, obviously, but the feel was the same. He’d always liked being out in nature; he’d sure gotten away from that in the last several years. Maybe once the OPTEMPO at The Campus died down to a reasonable level, then he could spend a little more time out here in his woods.
He’d love to take his grandson fishing someday — kids still liked stuff like that, didn’t they?
He stepped into his creek, felt his way forward through the knee-deep water, and found himself especially thankful that he’d worn his waders this afternoon. The water was ice-cold, spring-fed, and deeper than usual. The current wasn’t as fast-moving as it often was, which is why he crossed here as opposed to a hundred yards or so upstream, where large flat stones protruded just an inch or so out of the water across the width of the creek to make a natural, if slippery, bridge. But today Clark had no problem crossing right through the center of the stream, and even wading through a deeper pool created by a limestone depression, he found the water not more than waist deep.
John moved through the deepest part of the creek, stepped through a weed bed that sprang out of the limestone, and then he stopped.
He noticed something shining in the water, reflecting the setting sun’s rays like steel.
What is that?
There, surrounding a clump of grass poking out of the knee-deep water, was a shiny pinkish film. As the water flowed downstream, the pink film trailed in the direction of the current, individual globules broke away from the rest of the form and floated on.
Unlike many Vietnam ve
terans, Clark did not have flashbacks, per se. He’d done so much in the intervening forty years since ’Nam that his years in country weren’t any more traumatic than many of his later experiences. But right now, while looking at this viscous substance clinging to the grass, he thought back to Laos in 1970. There, with a team of Montagnard guerrillas, he had been crossing a stream not much deeper than this one, under a primeval rainforest. He’d noticed black film trailing downstream by their crossing point, and upon inspection he and the others determined it to be two-stroke engine oil. They then turned upstream, and found a spur of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that led them behind a group of North Vietnamese Army regulars who’d lost a scooter in the heavy current while trying to cross the stream. They’d fished out the bike, but not before its oil leaked out into the water, ultimately giving them away.
Clark and his team of Montagnard guerrillas had wiped out the enemy from behind.
Looking at the oil in the creek in front of him, he couldn’t help but think back to Laos. He reached out and put his fingers into the thin film of pink, then brought them to his nose.
The unmistakable smell of gun oil filled his nostrils. He even thought he could determine the make. Yes, it was Break-Free CLP, his own favorite brand.
Immediately Clark turned his head to look upstream.
Hunters. He couldn’t see them, but he had little doubt they had passed on the natural footbridge a hundred yards north sometime in the past half-hour or so.
There were whitetailed deer and turkey all over his property, and at this time of the evenˀe of theing the deer would be in abundance. But it wasn’t deer season, and Clark’s fence line was damn well posted. Whoever was on his property was breaking a multitude of laws.
Clark walked on, crossed the rest of the stream, and then picked up the trail that led through the woods to the open fields around his house. His walk through the forest seemed even more like Southeast Asia, now that he knew he was not alone out here in the bush.
