The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  The beep that brought him to the radio secreted in his cabin was from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. Parvin did not know the name of the caller: only that he must do as he was told. The requests were typically to make pickups and drop-offs along whatever route he was traveling. Upon completion, payment would be made to his special bank account in Tehran. It was a profitable low-risk arrangement.

  The Ghorbani had just left the Norwegian port with a cargo of shipbuilding equipment and parts bound for ports along North Africa and the Mediterranean. Parvin was told to divert to a spot in the Norwegian Sea ninety-eight kilometers due south of Sørkappin Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago. The caller provided the exact longitude and latitude and informed the captain that he should be prepared to receive, at ten p.m., and immediately conceal in its entirety, under tarpaulin, a Toufan helicopter. The pilot and his cargo were to be taken below, the aircraft was not to be approached by any of the crew once it had been secured, and the Ghorbani was to proceed to its initial port of call—Rabat, Morocco. Parvin was informed that he would receive further instructions, by radio, upon arriving.

  The captain’s only comment during the entire recitation was to acknowledge it at the end. He passed the new destination to the helm. They informed him that the transit would take approximately an hour. Parvin would hold off on informing the radio room of their instructions until after the rendezvous. Then he grabbed a cola from the mini-refrigerator and sat on his bunk, where he hand-rolled a cigarette. He used Balkan shag tobacco, one of his few personal indulgences.

  Parvin felt the faint, faint tickle of the constantly vibrating metal hull. He heard the distant hum of the ship’s powerful two-stroke, ten-cylinder engine. The order from Tehran was unprecedented. It made the captain afraid, as if the eyes of the world were somehow upon him. Certainly the eyes of the Minister of Intelligence were. The one constant in his occasional activities for the government is that they were not watched very closely and were relatively risk-free.

  Why would they want me to quarantine an aircraft? he wondered. And why under the shadow of night?

  He wished he felt excited or patriotic or something other than worried.

  “Whoever thought the shipping business would be more dangerous than the navy?” he asked himself with a nervous laugh after he had lit the cigarette with a wooden match and drained the can.

  He thought about his sister and his parents and how this was helping them. That calmed him somewhat, and he reminded himself that he was not alone; he had a very powerful ally in this particular assignment. The ministry itself was going to make sure that the harbormasters who were expecting him would stand down. That gave him a slight thrill of importance—not enough to offset the fear but not a bad sensation.

  The captain finished his cigarette, washed his face in the small basin beside his fold-down desk, and went up to the bridge. He would not be able to tell the crew anything about their mission, but that, too, was a consolation. It would elevate him in their eyes.

  The more he thought about it, the more surprised Parvin was to find himself growing excited about the next few hours. By the time they reached the coordinates, he was actually thrilled to be doing this, happy for the challenge and responsibility and whatever he might learn.

  DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA

  It had been a long day and a frustrating one.

  The great strength of intelligence analysts is that they can easily come up with a multitude of explanations for all the data they have to process. The great weakness of intelligence analysts is agreeing on which of those evaluations is correct.

  Lt. Jr. Grade Mark Mason had spent the entire day at his console, swapping information and interpretations with other analysts both inside the Naval Space Command and without. They had already collected radar and sonar records of all NATO shipping in the region to try and identify who did what, when, exactly where, and most important, why. There was no clear consensus because no one had a clue about what analysts refer to as the “big bang”: the object that set the events into motion.

  What was known, Mason had told Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt, was that after passing along the western coast of the United Kingdom, an Iranian frigate in the Norwegian Sea had encountered an ice floe that had been charted by ENVISAT ASAR. The frigate paused in the vicinity for forty-eight minutes, then aborted what were apparently intended to be cold-water maneuvers. The frigate now appeared to be on a full-speed course home. Before departing the Norwegian Sea, however, it appeared as though a boat or aircraft departed the frigate. Satellite confirmation was vague because of fog; the nearest vessel, the Ohio-class submarine USS Henry M. Jackson, was in the North Sea as part of the Commander Undersea Surveillance fleet monitored at the Naval Ocean Processing Facilities in Virginia Beach. It was ordered to shadow the frigate out of sonar range, using satellite guidance. In the words of the commander, the Iranian military vessel seemed to be “making tracks” toward home.

  It was also trailing radiation. The big question was whether the frigate had been sent to retrieve something; whether they had been testing something, such as a new weapon; whether the frigate was a front for a seagoing nuclear laboratory—something India and China had done before they produced their own bombs—or whether global warming had unearthed a vein of nuclear material the likes of which no one had ever seen. Dr. Dave Pearl, a physicist at DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects, suggested it could be a meteoroid that had landed anytime from the day before up to four billion years ago. Dr. Cyril Planke of the U.S. Geological Survey said that a plutonium-laden space rock was unlikely. Both men agreed that a half-life reading would be of inestimable value—which was precisely the information Mason did not possess.

  After an initial encrypted communication that was still being decoded, the frigate had gone into complete radio silence. So there was no information to be gleaned there. Added to that was the administration’s deferential stance toward the Iranian theocracy: bent on diplomacy rather than confrontation, there was a strict hands-off policy toward any lawful operations on international waters. Mason could not imagine that Admiral Breen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would define an irradiated Iranian vessel as “lawful,” but that was a matter for the International Energy Agency to handle; by the time the bureaucracy had done even a fast-track study, the frigate would be back in the Persian Gulf.

  The NSC had thick files with countless white papers containing “what if” scenarios, everything from a plausible event like a tsunami striking a U.S. naval base or a great white shark attacking a SEAL rescue mission to an unlikely event like Somali pirates commandeering an American nuclear submarine. Mason word-searched “plutonium” and “Arctic” from the start of the nuclear age to the present and came up dry. He expanded his search to NATO files and also found nothing.

  However, he did find an interesting footnote in the files of Bundesnachrichtendienst, the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was a reference to an Office of Strategic Services file that mentioned “plutonium.” The OSS file was among the more than 35,000 documents declassified by its successor, the CIA, in 2008, and sent to the National Archives. Mason went to the NA website and looked up the document in question. It was the personnel file on an operative, Largo Kealey. The flag came up because Kealey was tested for radiation exposure due to “proximity to plutonium in Brest.”

  Why would there have been radioactive materials in the French port in 1944? Mason thought.

  There was nothing about that in any of the files he checked. He got in touch with Dr. Pearl who directed him to Sally Massina, DARPA historian.

  “Sally’s a living library of R&D,” he said. “She’s seventy-two and retired now . . . but there’s no one who can connect historical dots better than her.”

  Mason called but she insisted on Skyping.

  “I don’t get to see many faces these days,” she told him.

  “Why? Where are you?”

  “The Temecula Valley, California,” she said. “I’m on twenty-three
acres of mountaintop. I’ve got golden eagles, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, mountain lions, illegal immigrants—and a shotgun. But no neighbors.”

  Mason was happy to make the video call. Sally was not what the young man had expected. She had a long sun-bronzed face and long henna-red hair, both beneath the largest cowboy hat he had ever seen on a human being.

  “Here’s the connection,” Sally said without preamble. “In October 1941, Allied intelligence operatives working in Denmark eavesdropped on a meeting between a Danish physicist whose name they did not know and a German scientist whose name, unfortunately, they did know: Werner Heisenberg. This chat, in a park, I think, convinced MI6 in London that the Nazis were moving full-ahead to develop an atom bomb. At the same time, a heroic gent, Professor Leif Tronstad—who designed and helped construct cutting-edge power plants—had not fled Scandinavia like most of his colleagues when Hitler’s goons took over. He stayed to spy. At great personal risk, he sent coded telegrams to Sweden that made their way to MI6 about the Nazis using a plant in Norsk to produce heavy water—which, as you probably know, is necessary to produce nuclear weapon isotopes such as Plutonium-239. Brit commandos tried, and failed, to destroy the plant. It was called Operation Freshman and it was a disaster. The Allies tried again in Operation Gunner-side. This was pretty late in the game, mind you—1944. MI6 learned that the Germans were planning to ferry a butt load of heavy water across Lake Tinns for a rail trip to Germany. A second team of commandos used eighteen pounds of plastique to sink the ferry. Lotta passengers drowned along with most of the heavy water.”

  “Most.”

  “Most,” Sally said. She took a swallow of beer from a stein that sat on a pair of curled ram’s horns. “Brewed this myself,” she said proudly. “Anyway, the Nazis salvaged three canisters. The containers made their way to a materials testing laboratory at an air base in Anklam, a town in the Western Pomerania region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The OSS learned about the transfer after bombing the crap out of Germany’s other R&D sites, notably the V-2 rocket facility at Peen-emünde. They dropped in paratroops and recovered documents that pointed them toward Anklam. This was a classic good-news, bad-news scenario: they got that new facility with bombs, plastered it flat, but aerial recon suggested that the contents had already been relocated.”

  “To Brest?” Mason asked.

  “No—don’t get ahead of me,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I like ambition in a young man. Just not when I’m telling a story. What happened was, there was a mirror lab. That’s what they called backup facilities, and Berlin was smart enough to have them. The backup to Anklam had been built in Denmark. The Nazis always expected to have to finish the work there. They were close. Real close to getting their bomb. So close that they had already worked out a means of getting the finished product out by U-boat.”

  Sally went silent and regarded the monitor.

  “MI6 picked that up by following the trail from Anklam with a Geiger counter,” Sally went on. “Then, with Kealey as a spotter to ID the sub and its departure, the RAF blew the U-246 all to hell and back. Nothing was ever found of it—not even trace radiation. Of course, after the war no one went looking because the files were still classified.”

  While Mason was absorbing what she’d told him, Sally grinned at the camera.

  “Someone find it?” she asked. “I know, you can’t answer. But—jeez. If that’s the case, I only hope it was someone who doesn’t mean us any harm.”

  “Is there any reason you would say that, apart from the obvious?” Mason asked.

  “Mind you, I don’t know this for a fact—no one alive does. But there were rumors about the device. If I were you I’d skip whatever my next meal is to have a look at the debrief files of Professor Paul Dammann.”

  She spelled it for him. Mason brought the file up. “There are a lot of pages here,” he said. “Can you give me a clue where I should start?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Look up ‘steamer trunk.’ ”

  CHAPTER 4

  RABAT, MOROCCO

  Rabat is a modern-looking port city that spreads in all directions from the wide, busy Ave Mohammed V. Beyond its towering palm trees, on the northern end of the concourse, is a sprawling bazaar.

  Qassam Pakravesh looked like any other bootleg DVD vendor, his wares spread on a blanket between the mountainous, somewhat haphazard piles of shoes being sold by two other young salesmen. But Pakravesh was neither ordinary nor Moroccan. He was a sarhang sovom of the Seph-e Psdrn-e Enqelb-e Eslmi, a lieutenant colonel in the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. He had only arrived in Rabat the day before and, after exchanging currency, immediately purchased both the goods and the spot of the previous bootlegger. He also gave him enough extra to start a new business in any neighboring town of his choice.

  That was what Pakravesh did. Using passports meticulously counterfeited in Tehran and a business credit card from a Venezuelan energy company, Caracaz Oil, that was co-owned by Iranians, the short, mustachioed man received his assignment in a coded post on a website run by the company, went to the location, took over some public spot where he would be seen and known, and waited for further communications on the website. In the last two months he had been to Thailand, where he planted a bomb in a pro–United States bank, killed the editor of an anti-Islamic newspaper in India, assassinated a terrorist leader in Yemen who used Iranian money to kill a rival al Qaida leader, and purchased the specs on a new pipeline in Azerbaijan—in case it ever had to be destroyed. He had been schooled in over a dozen languages and there were few places in the world where he could not fit in easily.

  The trip to Rabat was unusual because it had been ordered quickly—while he was already en route by rail to Tbilisi, Georgia, from Baku, Azerbaijan. He continued on to Kars, Turkey, at the end of the line and caught a flight to Rabat. Flying from Georgia was never a good idea, what with labor strikes and mechanical breakdowns.

  At nine in the morning, Pakravesh received a text message with a series of numbers. They referred to paragraphs, and words within the paragraphs, on the Caracaz Oil website. Because of where he had been sent, the harbor, the Iranian agent knew that the first letters of those words—G-H-O-R-B-A-N-I—spelled the name of a vessel he was to meet. If it had been an individual, an honorific—such as agaye for “mister”—would have been provided.

  Wearing sunglasses and a pleasant smile, he made sure he was facing the port so he would see the ship when it arrived. Pakravesh had to wait three hours until it was cleared to dock. He knew that his contact onboard would have the remainder of his instructions. As always, it was with a welling of anticipation that he awaited the orders. The challenge was always exciting, though the pressure was also great: he had a reputation for achieving impossible goals. He never wanted that to be sullied. In a society where an uneducated man from an impoverished village could never have been the nation’s greatest cleric or politician, the highest military leader, or even a mediocre physician, it was important that he be the best at the brand of intelligence work he had embraced—and that had embraced his particular talents for patience, observation, and deceit. Failure on any mission would be unacceptable not just to his colleagues in Iran but more to him. In a world where he could—and did—kill people who bothered him too much, that was Pakravesh’s one hair trigger.

  As soon as he saw the gangway stairs lowered to the dock, Pakravesh bundled his wares in the blanket and threw them on his back. He made his way to the ship casually, ostensibly to sell entertainment to the sailors for the long voyage.

  He lit a cigarette, looked around, then climbed the stairs. At the top he was met by a seaman who had been told to expect him. Pakravesh was told to open his blanket on the deck. Almost at once he saw that something was different: a tarpaulin stretched over an object, guarded by an armed sentry. From the way the shroud radiated outward on a ribbed surface, it had to be a helicopter.

  Several men gathered aroun
d the blanket, selecting DVDs and paying for them. One of those men was the captain. He was carrying a canvas sack over his shoulder, as if he were going on shore leave. It was large and it was pointed in several places; a box, Pakravesh surmised. It was also heavy, about eighty pounds he guessed, judging how it pushed against the canvas and the way the captain carefully, slowly eased it from his back. Pakravesh cleared the DVDs from the fabric and they spun across the deck. He didn’t think the box was fragile; when the captain placed it on the blanket, it landed with an echoing thunk.

  The captain bent, picked up several DVDs, and paid for them with a 5,000-rial note. Pakravesh glanced at it as he tucked it in his pocket and scooped up his blanket. There was writing on the face. He made sure to run the edges of the blanket through the thick cord at the top of the canvas bag. If the sack broke, the blanket would hold the contents.

  Pakravesh was prepared for the heft when he slung the parcel on his back. Even so, he revised his estimate upward by about ten pounds. He was not going to get very far with whatever it was, not this way. He staggered down the stairs, then stopped on the dock. He walked to where a group of seven stevedores were waiting to be hired.

  Pakravesh carefully laid his burden on the concrete. “Would one of you sell me a wooden dolly?” he asked the group.

  There was general laughter. “Then how will we make our living?”

  Pakravesh grinned. He pulled a 200-dirham note from his pocket. “I need one man to help me for an hour.”

  The laughter ceased abruptly. The sum was more than any of these men made in a month.

  All of the men volunteered. Pakravesh selected the one who looked the most relaxed, the most anonymous, someone who would seem like a natural companion for him. The volunteer was a shorter man, compact but thin, in his mid twenties. He looked like a native; his accent definitely was. The Iranian tore the bill in half and handed it to the young man.