Doc Tremblay’d had the toughest commute. He had had to come through Cairo traffic from his house in Maadi, six miles from Tahrir Square in central Cairo. Doc was on a two-year assignment here. You don’t want to know what he was doing, or who he was doing it for—because if he told you, he’d have to kill you. Anyway, glutton for punishment that he is, he’d volunteered to come along for the ride when I’d called him on the secure line and told him we’d be visiting.
That was a-okay with me. I always like to have a mole—a covert operator no one knows about—to wheel and deal for me. So, Doc took some accumulated leave and disappeared from the Military Assistance Group offices. He told the embassy people he was taking vacation time in Alexandria, Suez, and Ismailia. Instead, he’d slipped into Cairo’s back alleys, and by the time Nick, Tommy, and I arrived here, he’d assembled weapons, ordnance, bought a junker Peugeot and a pair of half-decent motorbikes, and arranged rooms at a local tourist hotel. All, I might add, without alerting the Egyptian secret police, the local Christians in Action station—Navy talk for CIA agents—or the State Department’s Foggy Bottomed apparatchiki.
Once we’d arrived and set up shop, it hadn’t taken us long to locate Azziz. Why? First, because we already knew where he lived. The Defense Intelligence Agency—DIA—had provided my boss, the chief of naval operations, with a detailed map of the area. And second, because, as cops are fond of saying, a perp is a perp is a perp (actually, cops say that everywhere but New York, where they say a poip is a poip is a poip). Translated into English, that means perpetrators are creatures of habit. And Azziz the perp’s habits were centered around politics and prayer.
Moreover, Azziz enjoyed a certain celebrity status on the local fundamentalist scene. No matter how low he may have wanted to keep his profile, the local mullahs singled him out, citing ol’ Mahmoud as an example of righteous dedication to Islam’s cause. He had defied the infidel. He had waged war against the Great Satan on the Great Satan’s turf—and he’d won. So they showed him off. They displayed him at their rallies. They stood him at attention during their sermons.
So, finding our Muslim needle wasn’t going to be hard—not in this here haystack. The challenge would be to snatch him up without creating a ruckus, in the same sort of low-key, quick-and-dirty kidnap operation I’d perfected more than a quarter century ago in Vietnam.
We called them parakeet ops back then. We’d take four or five guys and hit a village, nabbing a VC paymaster or political cadre out of his hooch in the middle of the night with such quiet efficiency that the people in the adjacent hooch wouldn’t hear a thing. They’d wake up the next morning, and Binh or Phuong or Tran would just have di-di maued—that’s disappeared in Vietnamese slang. His bodyguards would still be there—dead, of course, and nicely, cunningly, lethally boobytrapped. It was unnerving. It was intimidating. It was wonderful.
Parakeet ops took split-second timing. They also took good operational intelligence—you had to know how, and where, the bird lived before you could snare him.
So, when Doc had showed me the latest Cairo Weekly—a newsletter published by the embassy’s personnel office—and I read the listing titled “Security Advisory,” which said, quote, “AMEMB [translation: AMerican EMBassy] personnel should avoid the areas adjacent to the Rifai, Saiyida Sukayna, and al-Hambra mosques next Wednesday—five days hence—as DIPSEC [translation: Diplomatic SECurity] has been advised that Islamic rallies have been planned,” a hundred-watt lightbulb went off in my thick-as-rocks Slovak skull.
All three mosques were in the general area where Azziz’s family lived—the southern section of Islamic Cairo adjacent to the City of the Dead and below the Citadel. Odds were that Azziz would be featured at one or more of the rallies.
My plan was KISS simple. Duck Foot and Howie would surveil one mosque, Wonder and Nasty would cover the other, and I’d handle the third with Tommy. We knew what Azziz looked like—his red hair and broken nose made him easily distinguishable. We’d shadow him at a discreet distance, check out the opposition, see what patterns he established, and once we could be reasonably certain of them, we’d go in and grab his ass. DIA’s locals had no need to know we were in the city—which would protect their butts, bureaucratically, and our asses on the operational level.
I’d done time in Cairo back in the late eighties and was familiar with the city. It’s not an easy place to learn. There are thousands of unpaved streets and muddy alleyways that run together in labyrinthine mazes. There are cul-de-sacs from which it’s impossible to escape. There’s the City of the Dead—six square miles of cemeteries turned slums, where more than half a million people live in mausoleums and mud-hut shanties with open-trench sewers.
Doc Tremblay, whose passion is shopping, knew it like the back of his hairy fucking hand. But my youngsters had never been here before. I knew they’d have to get the feel of the place before they felt confident operating with the split-second timing the mission required.
There’s a philosophical point about clandestine operations I should mention at this juncture. It is that you can’t send a SEAL off to Cairo, Kabul, or Kinshasa and say, “Just do it.” SEALs have to be able to blend in. Just as we learned how to use camouflage in Vietnam to render ourselves invisible to Mr. Charlie, you have to be able to hide in plain sight when you’re in an urban jungle, too.
One thing that often helps immeasurably is the ability not to sound like a Yankee. Me? I speak French and Italian and get along in gutter Arabic, Spanish, and German. Tommy T is fluent in French, German, and Russian. Howie’s Spanish is better than his English. Nasty Nick and Wonder hablan español, too. Duck Foot can pass as Polish if he has to. He reads Arabic better than he speaks it, however. Doc Tremblay? His Arabic’s fluent, his Farsi’s passable, and his French? Superbe. Those linguistic abilities are what help make them dependable shooters overseas.
You send someone sounding like an American farm boy out in the Azerbaijani boondocks, and he’s gonna stick out like a sore szeb. That will compromise your mission. Then there’s the operational gestalt. You have to be able to blend in—whether it means passing as a tourist or a truck driver. If you “read” like
US GOVT ISSUE, you’ll probably be deadmeat body-bag material before you get to shoot or loot.
So the boys and I spent the next four days playing our own brand of tourist—familiarizing ourselves with the warp and weave of this huge, gawky city. We’d started at the trio of mosques where Azziz was likely to make his appearance. All three sat in the shadow of the Citadel—the fortified complex built by Salah al-Din in the twelfth century. The Citadel still dominates Cairo’s skyline, accented by tin mosque domes that reflect the sunlight and a series of needlelike minarets that look skyward like ready-to-launch SAM-7 missiles.
Each two-man team, dressed like tourists and equipped with the requisite cameras, guidebooks, and maps, worked outward through concentric circles, charting alleyways and narrow passages, making mental notes about the decrepit three- and four-story apartment houses that sat cheek-to-jowl on narrow streets, laundry fluttering like flags from shuttered windows and shaky balcony railings.
Nasty and Duck Foot (and their sweet teeth) hit the neighborhood teahouses. They sat at window tables, Duck Foot tried his Polish on the waiters, and they maintained cover by sampling dozens of honey-covered cakes. Tommy and Howie wandered the Khan al-Khalil—Cairo’s huge market district—munching grilled meat wrapped in hot Arab bread, seasoned with fiery green pepper and chopped onion and sold by voluble street vendors dressed in the kind of sweat-suit pajamas common to backstreet Cairo. (Whether the kabobs were cat or rat they couldn’t tell, but they’re snake eaters, so what difference would it make anyway?)
Wonder, Doc, and I poked our noses inside small grocery stores, reveling in the pervasive smells of cardamom, cumin, allspice, and cinnamon. I tried my backstreet Arabic and was gratified to discover I could still make myself understood. Doc Tremblay, whom I first met back in Naples when he was a second-class corpsman in s
earch of a good time and I was working for the legendary Frogman Everett E. Barrett, chief gunner’s mate/guns, at UDT-22, was positively loquacious, much to the delight of the natives. Doc reminds me of Jim Finley, my utility man from Bravo Squad, Second Platoon, in Vietnam. We called Jim “the Mayor,” because no matter where we went, he’d be out pressing the flesh, making friends, within minutes of our arrival. Doc’s much the same—he’s the kind of guy who looks like he just belongs, whether he’s in Chicago, Cairo, or Kathmandu.
While the rest of the men learned the streets, Doc and I worked out escape routes, logging hundreds of miles—at least it felt that way—bouncing along in the decrepit station wagon he’d bought. We should have used the motor bikes, because the rusty, dented Peugeot was a joke. I’d told Doc I wanted something that could pass for a Cairene’s car—and did I ever get it. The damn thing kept crapping out on us no matter how Stevie Wonder played with its innards.
We finally pulled it off the pavement and into a quiet alley behind our hotel. “Once and for all, fix the damn thing,” I told Stevie. He’d saluted me with his middle finger and gave me a confident “Yes, sir.”
That had been on Tuesday. The next day, Tommy T and Duck Foot sighted our quarry coming out the back of the Sidi Almas mosque just north of Saleh ed-Din Square.
Azziz, they said, was flanked by a pair of bodyguards who looked as if they were packing heat. Azziz was in deep conversation with a huge black guy—could have been Sudanese or Somali, but they’d dubbed him the Nubian—dressed in flowing robes and cowboy boots. The quartet had climbed into a huge Mercedes limo with biacked-out windows and driven to a coffeehouse, where the Nubian and Azziz sat for two hours in deep conversation, while the bodyguards waited just outside the doorway.
Tommy and Duck Foot gave them a loose tail when they left. Azziz was dropped right here at his apartment house. He was patting his pocket as he got out of the car, which told Duck Foot he’d been given something valuable—perhaps documentation or money, or both. Tommy stayed with Azziz, watching as he and his shadows climbed the three flights of stairs to his flat.
Duck Foot followed the Mercedes, which wove its way downtown, finally pulling up on the long driveway to the Cairo Meridien. The Nubian disembarked there. Duck Foot, ever patient, walked into the lobby and plunked himself down at the bar, watching as the Nubian took the elevator to the sixth floor. Six minutes later, the tall black man reappeared, now dressed in a fashionable Western suit and carrying an overnight bag. He paid his bill in cash, tipped the concierge handsomely, and climbed back into the Mercedes, which Duck Foot followed out to the airport.
I’d listened to their report and immediately initiated a twenty-four-hour stakeout at Azziz’s apartment. I had Duck Foot shinny up the power pole that also held the phone line and drop a passive device in place. We couldn’t overhear Azziz’s conversations, but we knew he was making lots of overseas calls from the number of blips we heard as he dialed. Moreover, as soon as the Nubian had departed, Azziz started to receive a continuous stream of visitors.
The signs told me Azziz was about to skedaddle. We had to move first—even though we weren’t as ready as I might have wanted us to be. So, I faced Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca and prayed to every deity I could think of. I even made the old religious sign the priests had taught me when I was an altar boy: spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch. Please, sir—I prayed to the Deity—let the fucking car work.
The chain of events that had led me to this current and potentially precarious circumstance had actually begun roughly six months ago, when the feds grabbed Mahmoud in a grocery store in Brooklyn and charged him with being the ringleader of an alleged tango group that had pulled off six separate bombings all across the U.S. Usually in these cases, the accused is defended either by a William Kunstlerlike rad-chic, or a public defender.
Not so in Azziz’s case. The thirty-five-year-old Egyptian national who had no visible means of support was somehow suddenly represented in court by one of New York’s most prestigious Wall Street firms, whose $1,000-an-hour attorneys used the old-boy network to select the most liberal federal judge currently serving on the bench to preside at the arraignment.
After half an hour of “May we approach the bench, Your Honor” legalese double-talk and triple syllables, Let-’em-Loose Bruce allowed young Mahmoud to take a walk on $5-million bail, which the lawyer produced immediately—in cash. And, of course, not three hours after the Most Happy Fellah sauntered out of the Federal Detention Center in lower Manhattan, he’d forfeited the money by climbing on a plane to his hometown, Cairo, using a false passport that he’d somehow (?!?) obtained.
And why not? Azziz (and those azzisting him) knew all too well that the United States had neither the will nor the balls to bring him to justice from overseas. He also understood (given the tenuous political situation here in the land of the pharaohs) that the Egyptians, nervous over the intensifying influence of homespun Islamic fundamentalism, would turn a blind eye to his return and leave him alone unless he committed some heinous act of domestic aggression.
Heinous act? you say. You want an example? Okay—gang-banging the Egyptian president’s wife and daughter at the Giza pyramids at high noon would probably (although by no means certainly) prompt the local authorities to take a closer look at Azziz and his activities. It would take something more serious than that to make them actually act.
In fact, the Egyptian foreign minister, a Turhan Bey look-alike if ever there was one, had only three weeks ago oozed over to the American embassy in dramatic response to a vapid State Department démarche on said tango’s whereabouts and personally assured G. Throckmorton Numbnuts Jr., or whatever our current ambassador’s name is, that Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin was nowhere in Egypt. He had personally looked into the matter, and said conclusion was the result of his investigation.
Of course Ambassador Numbnuts Jr., a heel-rocking, change-jingling, striped-suited, no-load pencil-dicked Foggy Bottomed foreign-service diplo-dink cookie pusher, who believes in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and Barney, took him at his word.
Sure. Right. Absolument. Just the way the same Foreign Ministry swore back in October 1985 that the Palestine Liberation Front Achille Lauro terrorists who’d murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer had left the country, when in fact they were still safely holed up in a four-star hotel just outside the Cairo International Airport perimeter fence, drinking mint-fucking-infused tea, eating honey-and-nut fucking baklawa, and waiting for their first-fucking-class Egyptair flight back to Tripoli.
We at DOD, of course, knew better. But the Department of Defense doesn’t write démarches—not in this administration at least. So the State Department performed as usual: the Foggy Bottom apparatchiki held long meetings, wrote internal memos to the file, wrung their hands, and finally resolved to do—absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, Ambassador Numbnuts Jr. sat at his Texas Instruments laptop and composed directives forbidding his political officers, mil-group advisers, or rezident intel gumshoes from scouring the streets in search of the missing MIQ, or Muslim-In-Question.
“We do not,” he opined in bits and bytes on embassy letterhead, “wish to offend our generous Egyptian hosts by appearing to doubt their good word.”
Unfuckingbelievable, right? Well, I know he wrote it, because I’ve seen the goddamn thing.
But not everything at AMEMB/CAIRO was a total clusterfuck. Under quiet orders from an anonymous, modern, fourteen-story building in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, Defense Intelligence Agency assets (they’re called assets in the trade because you sets dey asses on de street) were told to keep loose tabs on our man Mahmoud from the time he stepped off the plane from Frankfurt into his Muslim mummy’s loving arms. They did their jobs successfully.
They backchanneled their data to headquarters by sending it via courier, not cable or telephone, because they knew there’s not a single fucking communication posted from an embassy—not a secure fax, not a scrambled phone call, not even a go
ddamn code-word secret CIA cable—that an ambassador can’t get a copy, tape, or transcript of, if he so desires.
Anyway, DIA’s intel nuggets caromed around the chain of command until they reached Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Secrest’s antique walnut desk on the fourth-floor E-ring of the Pentagon. CNO, one of the few admirals these days who can actually be designated a warrior, not a manager or a technocrat, decided it was time to do something militant and military. He lobbied his fellow service chiefs, stroked SECDEF—that’s the SECretary of DEFense—and wheedled, needled, and diddled the folks at CIA until they all saw things his way.
When the ducks finally came up in a row, he picked up the phone and called my extension.
Two weeks after that, me and my guys were on our way here. We’d paid for our tickets with the counterfeit credit cards and traveled on the ersatz Irish, German, British, U.S., and Canadian passports we’d received from a USG—that’s U.S. Government—employee I’ll call Freddie the Forger, whose very classified shop sits in plain sight about a thousand feet from the State Department’s main entrance.
Freddie’s a gem. He looks like Bob Dylan, circa 1967, and he only takes a shower once a month or so. Who cares—his work is perfect, and his documents are all genuine and up-to-date. There’s not an ultraviolet scanner, magnetic-strip decoder, or bar-code reader in the world that can tell one of Freddie’s IDs, passports, credit cards, or driver’s licenses from the real McCoy—until the bills come in and nobody pays ’em.
Still, we needed the best documentation we could get. After all, I had personal orders from CNO to maintain, as he put it to me in technical language, “a completely Stealth fucking profile.”
I understood all too well the reasons for CNO’s stricture. First and foremost was the Egyptian government, which frowns on foreign military operations conducted on its sovereign soil. Second was our own American ambassador and his superiors at State, most of whom frown on American military operations, period.
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