Heroes Proved

by Oliver North

  By listening carefully, Cohen learned that billeting space aboard the 145-foot vessel was at a premium because two of the boat’s seven “staterooms” were packed full of plastic-wrapped cartons of cocaine—apparently the tanker’s most frequent and profitable cargo. The captain apparently reserved only one cabin—just above the engine room—for Ahmad, his five accomplices, and their aluminum-foil-wrapped cargo. After a multilingual screaming match between Ahmad and the captain, two of the surly crewmen were ordered out of their compartment directly below the bridge and into other spaces so the kidnappers could have more room.

  Four of the terrorists carried Dr. Cohen into the filthy rat’s nest the two crewmen vacated. There Ahmad ordered them to hold their captive upright and begin unwrapping him from the top down. As they peeled the tape and aluminum foil off his face, Cohen momentarily saw Ahmad for the first time since he was bound on the speedboat. In the seconds before a foul-smelling cloth bag was pulled down over his head, he saw the terror chief was holding a radio-signal scanner.

  As they began removing the foil from Cohen’s right foot, the device emitted a telltale series of beeps and then a steady, high-pitched tone as the scanner centered over the PERT implanted there. The kidnappers hastily re-covered his leg to his knee in aluminum foil until the scanner stopped making noise. He felt them wrap the foil boot with layers of duct tape and then reattach the shackle to his left ankle. They sat him on a metal chair handcuffed, his mouth taped, and left him there until he urinated in his exercise suit trousers a half hour later. Only then did one of his captors guide him, like a Seeing Eye dog, to a head on the starboard side of the cabin.

  With his cloth blindfold and his mouth still covered with heavy tape, Cohen was placed on one of the bunks, where he remained throughout most of the first day. Just before nightfall, several of his captors—he wasn’t sure how many from the sound—arrived with what smelled like hot food. One of them unsnapped the cuffs from his left wrist and ankle, attached the free ends to the metal bunk, and pulled the scientist to a sitting position on the bunk.

  Cohen heard Ahmad mutter “raftan”—the command go in Farsi—and the cabin hatch opened and slammed shut. Suddenly he felt fingers reaching up beneath the bag covering his head. Instinctively the scientist pulled back as the duct tape was ripped painfully off his face. Then, just as suddenly, the bag was lifted off his head.

  Squinting into the dim light, Cohen could make out Ahmad and one of the men who had seized him in Houston. On the table beside the bunk was a metal tray with rice, beans, and a piece of what appeared to be baked fish on it. Beside the tray was a liter bottle of water. As he picked it up to quench his thirst, Cohen noted it was labeled “Bottled in Caracas, Venezuela.” Ahmad pointed to the tray and said, “Eat, Jew.” He did.

  Late that night, after he was told, “Sleep now,” Cohen was awakened by a verbal altercation from the bridge directly above his bunk. Someone—it sounded like the ship’s captain—was insisting to Ahmad that the vessel had to make a “short stop” off the Yucatan Peninsula to offload some cargo for a previously scheduled customer before proceeding to their intended destination.

  There ensued ten minutes of captain and kidnapper shouting almost unintelligibly at each other while Cohen strained to listen. As the argument became more heated, he heard the voice he assumed to be the captain’s assure Ahmad that he and his charter passengers would be in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, in plenty of time for the plane that was to meet them on September 17.

  It didn’t happen. Well before then, almost everything that hadn’t already gone wrong eventually did.

  * * * *

  Shortly after dawn on the fourteenth, Cohen felt the steady throb of the ancient six-cylinder Yanmar marine diesel, three decks and twenty-five feet below him, begin to miss badly, then start to chug and finally buck to a stop. Immediately afterward, he heard Ahmad jump off the top bunk on the other side of the cabin, shout something to Hassan, and rush out the hatch.

  Seconds later Cohen could hear the captain and Ahmad yelling at each other above him, on the bridge. A half hour later there was the sound of a smaller engine cranking—and refusing to start—in the machinery spaces below. From long experience at sea, Cohen assumed this was the auxiliary engine—likely a small 50–60 horsepower diesel to power a generator.

  By listening to the captain bellow commands in Spanish to his churlish crewmen, Cohen figured out their problem. The main fuel tanks were apparently contaminated with seawater. He guessed that neither the main nor auxiliary engine fuel filters had been changed and now the injectors in both diesels were probably clogged.

  With the Ileana Rosario wallowing dead in the water, it took the incompetent crew—aided in the end by Ebi—nearly six hours to change the fuel filters, replace the damaged injectors on the auxiliary engine, drain the water out of one diesel fuel tank, and bleed air out of the fuel lines. Cohen listened with relief as the auxiliary engine finally fired on the last gasp of the ship’s dying batteries.

  The crew-kidnapper celebration was short-lived. Though the four-cylinder auxiliary diesel was charging the batteries and powering the ship’s radios, radar, GPS, and navigation lights, it could produce enough electricity to rotate the propeller only at a mere 40 rpm—moving the vessel at less than 2 knots per hour through the water.

  At midnight, Cohen heard the NOAA weather forecast from a radio speaker on the bridge: “Over the last four hours, Tropical Storm Lucy has intensified and is now a Category Three hurricane with sustained winds in excess of one hundred ten miles per hour. The eye of the storm is located in the Yucatan Channel at twenty degrees, twenty-one minutes north; eighty-three degrees, eleven minutes west. The storm is tracking two-nine-zero degrees at fifteen miles per hour. At present heading, expected landfall, vicinity of Cancun, Mexico, between eleven hundred and twelve hundred hours local.”

  Though never a “worrier,” Cohen hoped the ship’s lifeboat or boats were in better shape than the engines.

  * * * *

  They never did get the main diesel plant to light off. After replacing three of the six fuel injectors in the Yanmar 6M-UT engine and cranking it for several hours, the electric starter motor caught fire. Smoke rising from the machinery spaces was accompanied by alarm bells, colorful curses in Spanish and Persian, and much profane shouting from the bridge.

  Over the rising wind, Cohen could hear the captain in the wheelhouse above him make several radio calls to another vessel he called Orfeo. As best Cohen could tell, there was no response. On one occasion, he heard a call from the Mexican Coast Guard inquiring if the vessel calling was in distress. By then the fire was out and the Ileana Rosario’s captain didn’t answer.

  Well before dawn on 15 September, everyone aboard the Ileana Rosario knew they were in serious trouble. The wind and seas were building heavily in advance of the storm and Cohen could feel the vessel barely maintaining steering way. Four of the kidnappers were too seasick to get out of their bunks except for an occasional retching rush to the head. Clothing, bedding, and the contents of two wall lockers were sliding back and forth on the pitching deck.

  Ahmad and Ebi seemed to adapt better than the other kidnappers to the deteriorating sea state. Though Cohen couldn’t understand most of their conversations, he could hear the concern in their voices. The two words they said most often were ones the scientist remembered: bâd and âb—Persian for wind and water.

  Just before sunrise, Ahmad escorted Cohen to the head at the end of their stateroom, but when the captive came out, the kidnapper-in-chief didn’t put the hood back on Cohen’s head. After reconnecting the captive’s leg shackle to the bunk, Ahmad placed a metal chair next to Cohen’s bunk, sat down, and over the wind screaming outside the bulkhead asked, “You were in American Navy, yes?”

  Cohen nodded but said nothing.

  “You know many secrets, yes?”

  “Some, I suppose.”

  Picking up Cohen’s slim leather-encased computer off the debris on the deck, Ahmad asked
, “Your secrets are in here?”

  Uncertain where the conversation was going, Cohen shrugged and replied, “Some.” Then, pointing to his head with his free hand he added, “But most are in here.”

  Ahmad stared at his captive for a moment and then said, “You have been in sea storms before?”

  “Many,” Cohen answered.

  “You are not afraid?”

  Before he could answer, there was a banging on the hatch. Ahmad jumped up and unbolted the door. Cohen recognized the voice and for the first time since coming aboard he got a glimpse of the vessel’s captain. He was bigger and younger than Cohen imagined him and his words were alarming: “Señor Vargas, tell your men. Pumps do not work. Rosario taking on water.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  HIDEOUT

  CAIR PARAVEL

  ATLANTIC AVENUE

  PAWLEYS ISLAND, SC

  WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2032

  0633 HOURS, LOCAL

  The footfalls on the street-side stairs were fast and light. Newman knew from long experience, if there were several people coming for him, at least one would be coming up the front stairs as well. To avoid being silhouetted by the gray dawn spilling through the ocean-side windows, he raced for the windowless guest bathroom, pulling the .45 out of the shoulder holster as he moved.

  Once inside the room, James tossed the holster to the floor, “took a knee” in front of the sink to reduce his target profile, and pushed the door partway closed. Anyone entering the house from the street-side doorway would have to pass his ambush.

  He crouched in the dark, gripping the weapon with both hands at the ready, the muzzle resting on his upraised knee, anticipating it would take the intruders several minutes to deal with the lock. Seconds later he was surprised to hear the electronic dead bolt click open and thought, They must have our access code in a PID.

  James immediately brought the .45 up, stretched out his arms, thumbed off the safety, and prepared to fire as the first interloper passed the bathroom doorway. His right forefinger was gently taking up the slack on the trigger when he heard, “Dad?”

  As he silently flipped up the safety and took a breath, he saw his nine-and-a-half-year-old son, Joshua, pass the doorway, followed closely by Seth. When he heard both boys tear upstairs heading toward the bedrooms—clearly not under any duress—he arose, popped the magazine out of the weapon, cleared the round out of the chamber, and was putting the pistol back in the holster when the overhead light suddenly came on.

  Newman spun around to see Sarah, wide-eyed and clearly shocked. She recovered more quickly than her husband and said, looking at the gun: “James? What are you hunting for in the bathroom?”

  He took a deep breath and said, “I wasn’t expecting you. What are you doing here? Where are the twins?”

  “David and Daniel are asleep in the car beneath the house. Your dad is down there with them.”

  “Is he asleep?”

  “No, but he should be,” she answered. “He drove nonstop all the way from Narnia. Even with the car on autopilot he was awake all the way—all six hours.”

  “When did you leave? I had no idea you were coming.”

  “It was after midnight when we left the farm. It was all very sudden because of a message Mack Caperton sent your dad. We didn’t stop or communicate with anyone the whole way down.”

  “Did Mom come?”

  “No, she is going to fly down this weekend. Elizabeth came with us. She was a big help getting the kids ready and on the way down in the van. I’m just glad we’re here,” Sarah added.

  James shook his head, placed the holstered weapon on the sink, put his arms around his wife, pulled her close, and said, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

  “Good,” she replied. “Now go help your father with the twins so I can use the bathroom.”

  * * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Peter, James, Sarah, and Elizabeth were seated at the kitchen table over mugs of coffee. As Peter explained their unexpected arrival to James, the four Newman boys played with toy soldiers on the front porch.

  “I would have let you know we were coming,” the general said. “But Mack Caperton insisted we communicate only with him using PID-Text.”

  “That’s the same instruction he gave me,” James said. “When did you get the SSCI PID?”

  The general pulled the little device out of his shirt pocket, put it on the table, and replied, “Mack gave it to me yesterday at the CSG Ops Center while we were waiting for you to come in from Dulles.”

  “Are these things as secure as Mack thinks they are?”

  “I don’t know. They’re probably pretty good against foreign penetration but not from someone in our own government who may not care it’s against the law to intercept communications to or from a U.S. senator. Mack was adamant about not using voice communications of any kind, but you understand this technology better than I do.”

  Holding the SSCI PID Caperton gave him, James shrugged and said, “The innards and technology are complicated, but the principle is pretty simple. When we turn on a PID, the device accesses the nearest open MESH portal much like an old-fashioned Wi-Fi Local Area Network, only PIDs work on a global scale at much higher transmit/receive rates. When we make a call or send data, the PID transmits its distinct identification code and GPS location, the electronic address of the recipient—whether it’s a phone or a computer—and then passes an encrypted digital stream of either voice or data through the MESH. On a government-issued PID, the encryption algorithms are very sophisticated—less so for the commercial versions.”

  “How about when I use my PID to pay for something at the store?” Elizabeth asked.

  “A PID being used for payment uses NFC—Near Field Communications—or magnetic field induction technology—just like old-fashioned credit cards or products with embedded RFID—radio frequency identification tags. You just wave the device near the magnetic induction coil at the checkout counter where it says ‘Pay Here by PID.’ Of course, a PID transmits a whole lot more data into the MESH than just your payment amount and your bank account.”

  “What do you mean by a ‘whole lot more data’?” Sarah interjected.

  “Every time a PID is used, it sends out who you are, where you are, what you bought, and tells your bank whom to pay. It also transmits all the personal information you gave to your MESH service provider when you applied for the device. At a store, your digitized image pops up on the clerk’s screen so he or she can see you’re not using a stolen PID. The same information—and a whole lot more—gets sent when you pay by PERT. Those things even transmit your biometric data—practically your whole medical record.”

  “Now wait a minute, big brother,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I’m a doctor. All this information isn’t available to just anybody. That data is supposed to be protected by HIPAA—the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—and the new All-American Medical Plan.”

  “Well,” James said with a shrug, “whatever a PID or a PERT transmits can be intercepted as a radio signal where it originates or as a data stream when it passes through a MESH node. On a commercial-version PID the data has some very basic encryption, but nothing that can’t be broken with enough time and a good computer.”

  “What makes the PIDs Mack gave you and Dad different from the ones Sarah and I have?”

  “The SSCI PIDs are government-issue so they have higher-level, multilayered encryption, better transmission and download speeds, longer range and battery life, and are a little more durable. The real security advantage with these comes from a very small circle knowing the real identities of the people using SSCI PIDs with the addresses JL001 or PJ001. That’s why Mack insisted we use only data mode and communicate only with him.”

  Elizabeth shook her head and said, “I don’t understand. How is voice different from data, and why did Mack tell Dad to send data only to him and no one else, not even you?”

  “It was actually very clever on his part,” James responded. �
�First, because every PID transmits its GPS location, Mack didn’t want two SSCI-issued PIDs—one at Narnia and the other here—communicating directly with each other. He’s also counting on the law Dad mentioned that forbids intercepting communications to or from a member of Congress. Third, data is much faster—and therefore harder to detect in all the other electronic noise than a voice transmission. And last, even encrypted, every voice can be run through vocal identification software that can match an intercepted voice with a known individual.”

  “Got it,” said Elizabeth. “As long as you and Dad never speak over those PIDs nobody knows for sure who is using the device, even if they know its address and where it is.”

  “You’re very smart, sis.”

  “So are you, big brother. Where did you learn all this stuff?”

  “At the ‘small boat and barge school’ when I was a mere midshipman. We got more of it in the Marines. Most of what I know about the hardware and software is just OJT from the MESH and communications security work we do at CSG. The youngsters we employ to do this work are just phenomenal. What amazes me is Mack Caperton thought of all these precautions. They weren’t teaching this stuff at Annapolis when he and Dad were there.”

  “No, they weren’t,” Peter responded. “Back then, most of this ‘stuff,’ as you kids call things like PIDs and PERTs, hadn’t even been invented. My guess is Mack picked up a lot of this on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees.”

  “Well, we can ask him when he gets here. What time is he arriving?” Sarah asked as she rose to quell a small riot erupting on the porch.

  “His last message before we left Narnia was he would be here at eight thirty,” Peter replied. “We also need to ask who else, other than Mack, knows about these two PIDs and how confident he is everyone is abiding by the law that prohibits intercepting communications with a U.S. senator.”