“G’day, Bobby,” said Commander Ramshawe. “Thought you might be on your way up the bloody Khyber Pass by now!”
Bob Birmingham laughed. “They’re on their way now, nonstop to Paris, then Karachi.”
“We following them?”
“Damn straight we are. We have to—far as we can. You read their personal dossiers? The ones containing the stuff from various guards? Jesus, they’ll be working on a new 9/11 before you can say highjack.”
“I’ve read it all,” said Jimmy. “And I’m with you. That bastard Yousaf Mohammed, what a right bloody treat he is. You read that report by the supervisor? Let the towers fall and the blood flow . . . death to the infidel. Fuck that.”
The CIA boss smiled. He always smiled at Jimmy’s way of speaking; that famous irony of the outback. But what mattered was Jimmy’s diligence, the fact that he had plainly read every word of that massive dossier.
“Well, maestro,” said Birmingham, “What do you think?”
“Me? I think we need to take the bastards out. Because any other kind of action lacks logic. We already know they want to nail us again. We also know al-Qaeda never succeeded without guys like this. So why wait until they’ve knocked down the Empire State Building. I think we should nail ’em sooner rather than later.”
Bob looked nervous. “Any chance this room is bugged?” he asked uneasily.
“Hell no, it gets swept every day.”
“Well, I’m going to give you a lot of reasons why we cannot just order their assassinations. For a start, we can’t ask the police, we can’t ask the military, we can’t do it ourselves, and we dare not ask a foreign government.”
“Why not?” said Jimmy.
“Because these men were granted their freedom by the Court of the United States, and we’d be asking them to act in flagrant defiance of U.S. law. I wouldn’t ask them, and if I did they’d have to refuse.”
“Hmmmmm,” said Jimmy. “I suppose they would. But this must have happened before. When it was obviously in the national interest that a small group of foreigners be removed from circulation.”
“I suppose so. But as the current head of the Agency, with its enormous responsibilities to the president and government, I cannot risk openly breaking the law.”
“Nor can I, mate. But I’m still going to do it if I believe it will save thousands of lives. They might have dressed me up like a fucking bureaucrat, but deep down I’m something different.”
“It’s because half of you is Australian and you just don’t feel the same way about this country and its traditions—not like we do.”
“Bullshit. I’m just a lot less scrupulous than you guys. Aussies are frontiersmen, you guys have gone soft. Whatever it takes, right?”
“Okay, smartass. Now you can outline for me how we unload Ibrahim, Youssaf, Ben, and Abu without ending up in the slammer.”
“No worries. We get a small group of private guys and pay them to do the deed.”
“Thus leaving both us and our nation open to the most tawdry kind of blackmail ’til the end of time.”
“Good call, Bobby. Back to the drawing board!” Ramshawe grinned. “Want a cup of coffee?”
“I need a cup of coffee after five minutes with you. We playing golf this weekend?”
“Sure we are. Sunday morning. Eighteen at Bull Run with my father-in-law and Al Surprenant.”
Jimmy poured the coffee. And then he said with mock solemnity, “Bobby, we’re basically looking for a bloke with the skills of a Navy SEAL commander. But he can’t be a Navy SEAL because we cannot ask him to break the law, and he wouldn’t do it anyway. We need an ex-Navy SEAL. That’s precisely what we need.”
“No such animal, Jimmy. SEAL Commanders don’t leave. They become instructors or admirals. And they treat Coronado as if it’s the Vatican.”
“Well, how about a retired SEAL?”
“Oh yeah, right, a guy of almost sixty to get into armed combat against a bunch of friggin’ wild tribesmen at the ass-end of the Himalayas. He’d last about ten minutes.”
“I guess that leaves a hit with a rocket-armed Predator, just as soon as we locate where they’re living.”
“Maybe it does. But even that’s not ideal. And first we have to track them into the mountains. And then be prepared to fend off allegations that we deliberately and willfully murdered four men who had been exonerated of any crime by a superior Court of the United States of America. Don’t like it much.”
“Nor do I, mate. But at least we’re agreed on one thing. We have to take the bastards out. And no error.”
“Shut up, Jimmy, for Christ’s sake. You make me nervous. You sure no one’s listening?”
“Not here, old mate. But I’ll tell you somewhere they were listening.”
“Oh?”
“Yup. Right outside those law offices that were eliminated this morning.”
“Who was listening?” asked Birmingham, ingenuously.
“The bloody Mossad. Who do you think.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I swiftly worked out there must have been a connection between the blowing up of two law firms, one in London, one in Washington, simultaneously, and apparently for no reason. Using precisely the same method. Classic Mossad, big bang, no chance of missing, evidence totally destroyed.”
“So what did you do?”
“I called the bloody Mossad in Tel Aviv about two hours ago and asked Charlie. Took him about ten minutes to call back and tell me they’d been keeping tabs on both law firms for several weeks. He also told me the CIA knew all about it. So did MI6 in London.”
“And then?”
“I checked with your Middle East desk and got a confirmation.”
“They could have been lying.”
“Bobby, old mate, no American lies to the National Security Agency. No American.”
“So, I suppose you now think the Mossad blew up both of those law firms for daring to help al-Qaeda to free four mass murderers.”
“I know bloody well they did, old mate. They were absolutely furious. And I’m not sure you didn’t give ’em a helping hand.”
“Yes, to the first. We gave ’em a hand to bug the place. No to the second. We had no idea they would go to those lengths. And no one will ever prove it anyway.”
“And I’ll tell you something else. The guys who blew the buildings were on their way home in a private El Al Boeing five hours before the explosions. Timed detonators. For what it’s worth, they’re all in King Saul Boulevard right now. How do you like them apples!”
Bob Birmingham was temporarily shaken. “Whatever you think, that was a pretty extravagant reaction by the Mossad.”
“Bobby, for Christ’s sake, they didn’t just want to wipe out a couple of lawyers. Matter of fact they didn’t care one way or another whether the attorneys died or not. They were formally issuing an international warning, that if any law firm in future played a prime role in assisting terrorists to get their freedom, that law firm may not survive to talk about it.”
“Jimmy, has it ever occurred to you that the Mossad may be getting way above its station?”
“Yeah. Often. But they’re too good, and too important a friend to us for anyone to start issuing reprimands. And I suppose we ought to remember those little bastards Ben and friggin’ Abu nutcase killed or maimed over two hundred people, mostly women and children, with just two bombs.”
“Maybe we should get the Israelis to take ’em out.”
“In a funny way, the law firm explosions made that even less likely. Because if the four terrorists died, and the Mossad were suspected, they’d sure as hell be suspected of getting rid of the lawyers. And that might be a bit too hot. Even for them.”
“Even they won’t do our dirty work, right?”
“No, Bobby, they won’t. Not this time.”
FOUR HOURS LATER the Mossad leaked the story to the al-Jazeera television news network in Qatar, which has always been slavishly followed by America’
s left-wing media. It pointed out the sinister connection between two “gigantic bomb blasts,” which had occurred simultaneously in Washington and London in the dead of night.
The killer-message did not emerge until the fourth paragraph on the al-Jazeera website story, which stated, “Sources say this was a warning to both American and British law firms that they should not continue to assist known terrorist killers to obtain their freedom under the new U.S. habeas corpus law.”
Al-Jazeera then quoted the senior partner in a Saudi law firm with strong connections in Washington: “This firm has never partaken in cases that involve the freeing of terrorists. And this latest outrage makes it unlikely that we ever will.”
The story was scarcely in print and on the air-waves when the security forces of the UK and the United States went into a collective reign of terror, because they believed both blasts were state-sponsored, and that it was probably the same state doing the sponsoring.
The CIA immediately began demanding answers from a diverse collection of foreign embassies, from officials unused to being grilled in such a manner. MI6, Great Britain’s overseas Intelligence agency, working in tandem with Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, caused havoc in Her Majesty’s Court of St. James’s, to which more than 150 foreign embassies are accredited.
Everyone wanted answers, and, in both capital cities, literally hundreds of embassy officials and attachés were questioned. But no one knew anything. And the curious thing was, there was only one embassy in London and one in Washington where no one was even approached—the embassies that represented the State of Israel.
MEANWHILE THE FOUR most closely guarded men on the planet had landed in Paris. One of the CIA’s top field operators in Europe, Phil Denson, had flown in from the London station as the designated U.S. tracker. Phil’s job was to stay in the deep background, but not to let the terrorists out of his sight.
Phil, a forty-six-year-old southerner from Georgia, had worked in Baghdad, Tehran, Riyadh, and Islamabad. On this mission he would be assisted by twenty-nine-year-old Ted Novio, a six-foot, five-inch ex-baseball pitcher from Massachusetts, a tower of strength who had made the Yankees triple-A but had to retire with a shoulder injury.
Ted had been assigned as a bodyguard for Phil, but he had been very successful himself, exposing an amateur terrorist cell in southeast London before the leaders could set up a rocket site on the edge of a swamp, west of London’s Heathrow airport.
Now Ted and Phil caucused on the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle Airport. They had already befriended the French police, and Phil had had coffee with General Jobert.
Also on the tarmac were six armed members of the First Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment, France’s prime special ops unit, which has been at the forefront of almost every antiterrorist move made by the French in the past ten years. These men formed the guard that would escort the former Guantanamo prisoners on the central leg of their journey, out of the Western world and into a major Islamic Republic.
At the request of the Pakistani government, the French military escort would travel on the new PIA A310 Airbus from Paris to Karachi, since the four freed men would no longer be required to wear handcuffs.
Pakistan Airlines had nothing personal against these brand new celebrities, who would most certainly be worshipped in a large part of the Pakistan nation. It was just that PIA valued its fleet of airbus passenger jets sufficiently to try and avoid the highjacks and high explosive that often accompanied such men on their travels.
Phil and Ted would travel incognito, as would two other CIA men—four Americans still on duty, when finally Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu arrived in the land that would be, at least temporarily, their first proper home for five years.
Also on the flight, and also incognito, were two al-Qaeda “freedom fighters.” These two, Nawaz Salim and Fahd al-Ghamdi, had both arrived on the aircraft but had not disembarked. Their task was to scour the passenger seats on the journey to Karachi, searching for any American or French undercover agents who might be tracking the ex-prisoners.
So far, Ibrahim and his cohorts had been silent, eaten very little, and requested only water. Well separated from each other, they had slept most of the way, and would probably do so again as the aircraft flew across the eastern Mediterranean, and then high over the Gulf of Iran, before landing on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Arabia.
The changeover at Charles de Gaulle took a couple of hours, as everything in airports is apt to do. And it was a very relieved General Jobert who noted everyone was in place, and then watched the white airbus, with its green livery, climb away to the southeast and out toward the distant peaks of the Alps. General Jobert did not care where it went, just as long as it flew the hell out of France, taking with it those four Islamic maniacs, and their neurotic American escorts.
THE GENERAL PERFORMANCE of the four earnest high handicap players on the notorious uphill 448-yard fourth hole at Bull Run probably would not have caused Tiger Woods to announce his retirement. Bob Birmingham had almost hit a long, straight drive down the fairway, but it had veered into the first-cut rough on the left. Jimmy Ramshawe, from the same rough, stepped up to take a tricky, angled long-iron to the green. The NSA director slashed it straight into the trees, swore like a Queensland sheep-shearer, and questioned the sanity and the parentage of “whoever the hell invented the bloody game.”
On the other side of the fairway, the Navy attorney Al Surprenant rifled a perfectly angled high four-iron onto the front of the green. The full majesty of the moment was only slightly marred by the fact that it was his sixth shot, having driven out of bounds into the dried up creek in front of the tee, and then put a second ball in there, this one landing in a clump of bushes that should have been growing in the jungle of Borneo.
Out there this morning, in a cold but glorious landscape, just a few miles from the scene of some of the most formidable fighting of the Civil War, each member of the foursome struggled with his game, the way ultra-busy men do after weeks with scarcely any practice.
And when Ambassador Peacock, Jimmy’s father-in-law, three-putted the sixteenth green from seven feet, the pure humiliating nature of the royal and ancient game sprung into sharp perspective. Jimmy changed the subject and talked about work, and the long hours he seemed always to put in, which, incidentally, had prevented him from becoming the natural successor to Greg Norman.
When the round was completed, Al and the ambassador had won fifty bucks apiece from Jimmy and Bob, who shared a ride back to Washington in defeat. On the way they talked not of golf, but of a game involving much higher stakes.
“I hear they landed in Karachi,” said Jimmy.
“Sure did. But God knows where they’re going. Our guys followed them to a train headed north up to Lahore. It’s the Karakorum Express, and it takes darn nearly eighteen hours to get there. Arrives in Lahore tomorrow morning, their time. From there on, we don’t know.”
“Our guys on the train?”
“Uh-huh. Four of them.”
“You still agree we need to eliminate them?”
“Of course. Because we all know they will seek revenge for those five years of incarceration and the torture they think they suffered.”
“Bobby, you know what I think we should do? I think we should arrange a private meeting with a senior Navy SEAL commander and get his input. He might not have anyone who could pull this off right now. But I bet he knows someone who might.”
“You sure we haven’t done enough betting for one day?”
“Almost. But you know what these bastards are capable of. And I just don’t want ’em on the loose for much longer. In those court papers there were about four U.S. army guards who swore to God those fanatics were taking vows to get out and start killing Americans. We need to stop them. And we can’t recruit the Mossad to do it for us.”
“I know, I know,” said Bob. “It’s just that the whole darn thing is so goddamned illegal.”
“Then we better look bloody sharp about
it,” replied Jimmy. “Before some interfering bastard finds out what we’re up to.”
THE RETIRED HEAD OF SPECWARCOM in Coronado, Admiral John Bergstrom, was mildly surprised to receive a summons to the National Security Agency in Maryland. He had left California to retire to a beautiful family home on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina for a couple of reasons. One was that it had belonged to his mother, so it was essentially free. Two was that it was very close to many friends who had served with the SEALs in their east coast headquarters at Virginia Beach. Today it was very close to the National Security Agency, and “young Ramshawe,” as the admiral referred to him, had dispatched a helicopter right to his front door to deliver him to Fort Meade in person.
When he arrived he was mildly surprised to find the CIA Director Bob Birmingham awaiting him. Also in attendance was Admiral Mark Bradfield, the ex-Carrier Battle Group Commander who now occupied the Chief of Naval Operation’s chair in the Pentagon. Also sitting in was Rear-Admiral Andy Carlow, Commander, SPECWARCOM, Coronado.
Commander Ramshawe introduced everyone and announced that as far as he was concerned, Admiral Bergstrom was about to have a chat with four of the sanest people in the entire nation. He added the short and slightly mysterious rider that this particular group did not include many judicial figures from Washington’s appeals court system. Everyone chuckled, except Admiral Bergstrom, who had not the slightest idea what Jimmy was talking about. But it took him about twelve seconds to realize that they were discussing the fate of those four Islamic fanatics, which some judge had let loose from Guantanamo Bay.
“Where are they?” he asked
“On an express train in Pakistan heading up to Lahore in the Punjab. And, if we are not gravely mistaken, on to the Swat Valley where al-Qaeda are training their forces to strike at us again.”
“In case any of you had forgotten,” said the admiral, “I actually did retire about fourteen months ago. I also got married to a somewhat dashing Beverly Hills widow, fifteen years my junior, and still elegantly assembled. And I no longer command the finest fighting force this world ever saw.”
Intercept Page 10
