Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  10:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (6:05 p.m. Arabic Standard Time)

  The Situation Room

  The White House, Washington, DC

  Lawrence Keller was beginning to regret his decision.

  He had known Interim President Mark Baylor for two decades, or thought he had. Now he was starting to wonder who, and what, he had known.

  Keller was all for a strong military. He felt there should be a fierce American response to the Barrett girl’s kidnapping and what looked like her inevitable death. He could even see the logic in taking advantage of the situation to move some pieces forward on the board.

  Mark Baylor, on the other hand, was prepared to ignite the Apocalypse. And it didn’t seem clear that anyone in this room was prepared to stop him. If anything, General Stark was even more eager for it than Baylor.

  Keller looked around the conference table in the center of the room. People seemed nervous. But they were careerists who wouldn’t rock the boat, or were junior advisers who would speak only when spoken to. In a few cases, they were people who didn’t have an original thought in their heads. It would never occur to them that advice coming from someone at the Pentagon could be wrong. They didn’t make it to this table by questioning things.

  Keller glanced at the young aides and assistants lining the walls. They offered no hope. They were here to do exactly as they were told. Not one of them could stop this unfolding train wreck even if they wanted to.

  No. If this was going to stop, it was going to fall on Keller himself. The ultimate political animal, the sly operator, was going to have to put his own neck on the chopping block. He didn’t relish that thought.

  On the screen at the front of the room, there was a large map of the Middle East. General Stark stood in front of it with a laser pointer. He indicated various spots of interest with the pointer.

  “We have B-2 bomber sorties, along with fighter escorts, flying at the limits of Iranian airspace over Iraq, over Turkey, and over Afghanistan. They are prepared to make deep runs into Iran at a moment’s notice. We’re also flying fighter patrols at the edge of Iranian airspace in the Persian Gulf. We are coming into contact with Iranian fighter planes, but no provocations have happened as of yet.”

  The red dot of his pointer made a squiggle on the Persian Gulf, then settled on the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

  “American destroyers and aircraft carriers in the Gulf are at a high state of readiness. We are prepared to engage Iran with a massive, overwhelming attack that will significantly degrade their ability to respond, and will set their infrastructure back decades. We can also call in a targeted decapitation strike aimed at their leadership in Tehran.”

  “What do you recommend, General?” Mark Baylor said.

  “Personally, I would go with the decapitation strike, for starters. We have a network of moles, agitators, and if need be, guerrilla cells, that are salted through Iranian society. Some of that network has been rolled up in recent years, but some of it is still functional. Once we hit the leadership, the Supreme Council, then I would call for acts of sabotage and the organization of street demonstrations. Through a fairly narrow attack, combined with support for the resistance in-country, we may be able to destabilize Iranian society to a surprising degree.”

  He paused.

  “What is the Iranian response to our preparations?” Baylor said.

  The general shrugged. An aide leaned over to him and whispered something in his ear. “Well, we do have vulnerabilities. As you know, Iran has issued threats against the American airbase outside Doha, in Qatar, as well as our embassy in Baghdad. We have ten thousand servicemen and women stationed at the Doha air base, along with another twenty thousand family members living on the base and nearby.

  “To be fair, Iranian missiles could reach Doha in minutes. And CIA and NSA listening stations are reporting advanced states of readiness throughout the Iranian military—including their fast boat navy in the Persian Gulf, their air force, missile command, and the Revolutionary Guards. Missile silos are preparing to launch, with more reporting a state of combat readiness all the time. They’re on a bit of a hair trigger. That’s what we’re hearing.”

  “Does that concern you, General?”

  Stark shook his head. “Not really. The Iranian air force is more of what I’d call an air farce. And as much as they have a robust arsenal of conventional missiles, despite a lot of saber rattling in the past, they have never used it. My hunch is that their reluctance stems from knowing the kind of overwhelming, Biblical response they would get from us if they did dare to launch. I’m confident that we can engage in a surgical strike against them and receive almost no reply.”

  He waved his hand in dismissal. “Other than, you know, an appeal to the United Nations and some hand wringing and condemnation from the usual suspects. China, Cuba, Venezuela, a few others.”

  Keller’s breath was taken away by the man’s offhand confidence in his own assessments. He was suggesting a massive attack against a large, well-armed regional power, and expecting nothing in return. Meanwhile, he would nonchalantly put more than 30,000 American lives at risk.

  “In fact,” the general said, “I feel so good about this that I recommend the exact same approach in Syria, and I say we launch the attacks simultaneously. Bashar Assad is a squirrelly character, to put it mildly. He is good at being elusive. But we might get lucky, and Syrian society is especially brittle. Assad is part of the Shiite Alawite minority in a country that is predominately made up of Sunnis, and he holds his grip on power through violence and intimidation.

  “We are currently flying sorties over the Mediterranean near Lebanon, over Israel and the West Bank, over southern Turkey, and over Western Iraq. We enjoy vast air superiority and have Syria completely surrounded. Our ships in the Mediterranean are on standby to launch missiles at the Presidential Palace in Damascus, as well as half a dozen other known hideouts that Assad uses. If we hit Assad, then lend some encouragement to Sunni extremists on the ground during the ensuing confusion, there is a chance that Syria will devolve into chaos.”

  “I like it,” the Interim President said.

  Lawrence Keller resented this. He hated it. He felt a tide of anger rising within him. They were going to force him to risk his career by stating facts that should be painfully obvious to every single person in this room.

  “General,” he said.

  “Yes? Mr.…”

  “Lawrence Keller. I’m President Barrett’s Chief of Staff.”

  “Well, Mr. Keller, I think your team might have left the locker room.”

  Mark Baylor spoke up. Thank God for that. “Lawrence is an old Washington hand, General. He’s valuable in any administration. He’s staying on to ease the transition of power, if it comes to that. In the meantime, he’s currently President Barrett’s representative in these meetings.”

  The general nodded. “I see.”

  “General,” Keller began again, “aren’t Sunni extremists the ones who attacked us on September eleventh?”

  “I believe so, yes. But they weren’t Syrians, as far as we know.”

  “Aren’t Sunni extremists also the ones who bombed the USS Cole? Aren’t they an existential threat to the future of Iraqi society? And considering that the video we’ve seen of Elizabeth Barrett being held bears all the hallmarks of videos previously made by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the legendary Sunni terrorist, isn’t it likely that Sunni extremists are the ones holding Elizabeth?”

  General Stark shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d describe Zarqawi as legendary. Infamous, maybe. Despicable, certainly.”

  Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at Keller now. With just one short sentence, he had outed himself. One of these things didn’t belong, and he was that thing. It was almost like he was giving off a bad smell, the smell of someone who had just soiled their pants.

  Nevertheless, he plunged on.

  “Regardless of how you might describe Zarqawi, if
Sunni extremists are the ones who kidnapped Elizabeth, who destroyed the World Trade Center, who bombed the Cole, and are making Iraqi society ungovernable, then why in God’s name would you support them in Syria?”

  The general’s response was not at all what Keller expected. Stark pointed at him and smiled. “That’s a good question, Mr. Keller. And it’s a question with the answer already embedded in it. The reason we would support Sunni extremists in Syria is because they do such a good job of making Iraq ungovernable. We want Assad out. We want Syria ungovernable. If that means supporting Sunni extremists, so be it.”

  “Sunni extremists are our enemies,” Keller said.

  Stark nodded. “Assad is also our enemy. And he’s the enemy of Sunni extremists. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  “Our friends are the same people who attacked on September eleventh?”

  The general shook his head. “Those were Saudis, for the most part. I’m talking about Syrians. You’re comparing apples and oranges.”

  “And you, General, are suggesting that we attack two Shiite-dominated societies, even though the attacks against us have come almost exclusively from Sunnis, and it’s very likely that the people who kidnapped Elizabeth Barrett are Sunnis.”

  He stopped and took a breath. He hadn’t realized he was going to have an outburst like this one. And it occurred to him that he was only halfway done.

  “During your planning, have you considered for one moment what effect all these attacks will have on the life of Elizabeth Barrett? We don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. What we do know is that a heavy-handed response is going to put her life at risk.”

  Suddenly it came to him that earlier, in his rush to move David Barrett out of the way, he had been callous about Elizabeth and her chances of survival. But now the sense of her humanity seemed to flood his system. She was a real person, young and certainly naïve, but she was not a pawn in a game.

  General Stark stared at Lawrence Keller for a long moment. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t quite know what to make of everything Keller had said. Did they let traitors in the Situation Room now? The general looked over at the Interim President, as if Mark Baylor was a referee and Stark was hoping for an objective ruling.

  Baylor, in turn, looked at Lawrence Keller. He furrowed his eyebrows a little bit.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Keller said. He thought about it for a moment. “No, I suppose I’m not okay. Instead of talking about all the ways we can attack Iran and Syria, I’d suggest we talk about all the ways we can find Elizabeth Barrett.”

  General Stark lifted a stack of papers on the table near his elbow. “Do you know what this is?” he said.

  Keller shook his head. “No. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “This is pages and pages of leads about Elizabeth’s possible location. This is lists of more than two hundred high-level detainees with ties to Islamic extremists who are currently being questioned. This is seven dozen covert operations that have taken place just today in an attempt to find her. This is frozen bank accounts and police raids in Switzerland, in Brussels, in Paris, in Madrid, all over Germany, and in London and Manchester, not to mention in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Minneapolis. This data is an hour old. There’s more flooding in all the time.”

  “What are you saying, General?”

  “I’m saying Elizabeth Barrett is one person. Yes, she’s an important person, but one person nonetheless. And many, many competent people are working to find her, whether she’s dead or alive. In the meantime, we have bigger fish to fry.”

  “So we, the people in this room, have no responsibility to her?” Keller said.

  “Sir, we do have a responsibility to her,” Stark said. “In all likelihood, she’s already dead. And when the video turns up of terrorist savages beheading her for the world to see, our job is to avenge her death with a firestorm that no one will ever forget. We need to have a plan in place to do that.”

  Stark paused, and nodded at the truth of what he had just said.

  “That’s our responsibility.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  6:25 p.m. Arabian Standard Time (10:25 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Sinjar Mountains

  Nineveh Governorate

  Northwestern Iraq

  They were both running out of time.

  Ahmet sat on the dirt floor across from the girl Elizabeth. They were inside an old stone building, which was very badly deteriorated, and left over from some distant past that had long ago faded from memory. There was no longer a door, and most of the roof had collapsed. There were large chunks of broken rock all over the floor.

  They were high up on the western edge of the mountain ridge. By Ahmet’s guess, there was less than half an hour of daylight left. Once the sun set, it was going to become cold up here. The night would be frigid, probably with a biting wind.

  The mujahideen planned to execute the girl in the morning, after prayers. Ahmet thought she might not survive that long.

  “You have to get me out of here,” she said, in a low voice.

  She was still wearing the orange jumpsuit in which they had dressed her for the video. She wore a black scarf over her head. The clothes were not warm. She had no gloves, no hat, and she was wearing open-air sandals on her feet.

  Her wrists were bound with leather straps attached by a short chain. A sturdy chain was wrapped around her waist and attached to spikes, which were driven into the stone wall on either side of her.

  It was a makeshift arrangement, which gave her some small freedom of movement. Indeed, it almost looked like she could squirm out of there, but what then? She was high in the mountains, far from any civilization, with dozens of Sunni fighters outside that door, holding this ridgeline. There was nowhere to run.

  The militants had not fed her at all since she arrived. They had given her nothing more than a few sips of water. It was not out of cruelty or spite—they had very little food, and barely any water, for themselves. And with Kurdish fighting units roaming much of the lower reaches of the mountains, protecting the villages to the north, the east, and the south, it was unlikely the mujahideen were going to obtain more food any time soon. They were free to head west, except there was nothing but more barren wasteland that way—no villages or farms to raid.

  Ahmet had also eaten nothing, but like the holy warriors, and unlike the girl, he was accustomed to the feeling. In the camps, they often made you go without food for days. It was done to toughen you. He supposed it worked. He had spent a year eating well in Geneva, whatever and whenever he liked. Now he had not eaten since the day before, and he wasn’t hungry at all. He was a little lightheaded, but he thought it was more from exhaustion, from stress, and from the altitude, than from lack of food.

  He realized that he might never eat food again. The thought didn’t trouble him.

  “They’re going to kill me,” the girl said now.

  Ahmet nodded. “Yes. There’s nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid.”

  But was it really true? Was there nothing he could do for her?

  An odd thing had begun to happen. Before he had really met her, he had thought of her mostly as a thing, a prize, a goal to be reached. She was the daughter of an imperialist, someone to be targeted, taken, and killed. She should be slaughtered as an animal is slaughtered for the table.

  But his feelings had begun to change. She was a person. She was a person adapted to comfort and fine things, who suddenly found herself in an alien environment, surrounded by people who hated her and planned to kill her for the whole world to see. And yet, she was trying to be brave. She was trying to adapt. She had not completely collapsed in the face of these things.

  He realized now that her death would in no way avenge the deaths of his sister and brother. It was a tragedy, it was a crime, but another tragedy would never fix it.

  Perhaps there was something more he could do for her.

  “They’re probably g
oing to kill me, too,” he said.

  That part was true. He was a little surprised it hadn’t happened already. The men of this militia unit were savages. Uneducated, ignorant, vicious, and traumatized by combat. They were religious fanatics, yes, but they were also like dogs that had been beaten too much. Whatever affection or friendship that had once been in them was gone. Now, they knew only how to bark, and to bite.

  Far from a hero, they saw Ahmet as a stranger, and as a liability. He was well-educated in the sciences, and he spoke four languages. He had spent time in Europe. He was not a guerrilla fighter. His body was not built for the rugged terrain here. If it came to fighting the Americans on these hillsides, or the Kurds, he would be useless, possibly worse than useless.

  “They only keep me alive to communicate with you. After that…”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t care what happens to you,” the girl said. “You did this to me, so it only serves you right if you die.”

  She said it calmly and without spite. It was a simple statement of the facts, as she understood them. The girl, who was raised surrounded by opulent wealth and power in the Western world, could not know the circumstances of Ahmet’s life. She could not imagine the forces that had brought them both to this place. He did not feel a strong need to try to explain them to her.

  Nevertheless:

  “American special forces raided my village at daybreak two years ago. They killed my brother and my sister, ages fourteen and eleven. They killed numerous other people. Then they left. There was no explanation for their actions.”

  She shook her head and started to cry again. She had cried a lot today. He was surprised by her capacity for it. He would have thought that by now she would have gone numb and been beyond tears.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t believe a word you say. You were supposed to be a nice, normal guy from Turkey. You had a migraine headache, remember? Everything about you was a lie.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”