by John Weisman
Vince pursed his lips. “All good. Another thing: I’m going to lay low for the next few days while we red-team all our existing intelligence. You saw his face. POTUS is pissed at me because he thinks I’m caballing behind his back. Maybe that’s what his politicos are telling him, maybe he’s getting paranoid because his approval ratings are in the toilet. Well, whatever it is, they’re all wrong. This is no effing cabal. But those guys at the White House have got to get past politics and start behaving like adults when it comes to national security policy.”
“Amen, Mr. Director. You’re preaching to the choir.”
Call Me Vince smiled wryly. “Yeah, but just because I’m right doesn’t mean the Chicago gang likes it. So my instinct is that it’s probably best not to go over there for a while. I’ve got my sources. They’ll let me know. And when I do go, I’ll make sure I’m well armed with irrefutable information. So we’ll take some time now. Build ourselves an unshakable case.”
“And on April nineteenth?”
“I think we should use a Powell Doctrine template. Overwhelming force, followed by inescapable conclusions. But no PowerPoints, no memos, no briefing papers. Like I said, it’s all ‘show me’ and no ‘tell me.’ You gotta make POTUS visualize how your SEALs and Rangers will get in, do the deed, and get out before the Paks even know you’re there. Tell it like it’s a movie. Captivate POTUS. Make him see it in his head.”
“Gotcha.”
“I’ll get our technical support people to build a scale model of the compound. Better yet, not just the house, but the whole area. Where the helos will land, how the SEALs will make their assault.”
“Agreed. It’s perfect.”
“Exactly. All ‘show me,’ no ‘tell me.’ That’s how you’ll convince him—by making it impossible for him to do anything except give us a go.”
“Aye-aye, Mr. Director.” It was good counsel, and Bolin intended to follow it.
Vince scratched his nose. “Where are your SEALs now?”
“California. Training.” Bolin paused. “I’ll bring them back. Give them a couple of days off while we finish the full-scale replica at Fort Knox.”
“Knox?”
“Yup.” The admiral saw the quizzical expression on the director’s face. “It’s close enough to Fort Campbell, where TF One-sixty, the Army’s Night Stalker unit, is based so that they can stage at Campbell and rehearse the approach in the helos they’ll use on the mission. Plus, Knox is big enough so that we can build the entire five-hundred-yard street and the houses as well as the compound. That way the pilots will learn the layout. We’ll bring in the Ranger blocking force, the supplemental helicopters, the whole Assault package. And no one will notice, because we’re constantly training there.”
“Great.” Vince was impressed.
“The helos are the important thing here, Vince. The flight and the air assault are the elements that can most easily go awry. For these SEALs, this is just another capture/kill mission. They’ve done hundreds. Thousands. Sure, there may be wrinkles inside the house. Bodyguards, suicide vests, human shields. But those are nothing these guys haven’t faced on a regular basis for the past ten years. Nah—this is nothing special for them. Except who they’re going after. Only the target is special.”
“So are you gonna tell them who the target is?”
“Yeah,” the admiral said, “at some point. I don’t want them surprised when they stare the sonofabitch in the face.” He grinned. “Shock can affect accuracy.”
“Can it now?”
“You better believe it.” Bolin stretched. “I’ll leave for J-bad within the next couple of days to start the ball rolling on the support side and make sure our JOC is up to snuff.”
“Jock? Like athlete?”
“Nope. JOC, like Joint Operations Center. It’s where the Ranger commander and I will be situated when this goes down.”
“Ah—just like our OC. But joint.”
Bolin caught the wry look on the director’s face. “Yes, Vince. You say OC and I say JOC.” He paused. “Anyway, I want to make sure all the elements are there ready to roll. That’s something best done face to face.”
Vince nodded. “Agreed.” Then, silence. All that Bolin could hear right then was the muffled hiss of the white sound piped between the quadruple panes of window glass, making them impenetrable to eavesdropping devices or lasers.
“Wes,” the CIA director massaged his nose between with his thumb and his index finger, “there’s one question that’s been nagging me for weeks now. And I think we have to have an answer ready for the nineteenth.”
“And that is?”
“What are we gonna do with UBL’s body? I mean, we don’t want a Che Guevara situation.” In October 1967, a Cuban American CIA contract agent named Felix Rodriguez had been instrumental in capturing the Argentine communist revolutionary and terrorist Che Guevara in Bolivia. Rodriguez even interviewed Che before the Bolivians executed him, amputated his hands, and ultimately sent them to Fidel Castro as proof Che was dead. Shortly after Che’s execution and autopsy, the Bolivian Army buried his body in an unmarked grave near the small Bolivian mountain city of Vallegrande. But by the early twenty-first century, someone who had been in Vallegrande and seen the burial talked, and Che’s body was exhumed. Vince understood all too well something similar must not happen with Bin Laden. “We gotta get rid of it before it becomes an icon or a relic.”
The admiral looked at the CIA director with mock shock. “You mean you’ve already assumed he won’t be brought back in cuffs, so your good friend the attorney general can try him in New York federal court?”
“Y’know, the sorrow of it all is that Eric Holder would probably try to do exactly that.” Then Vince gave Slam Bolin a wicked smile. “But gee, Wes, somehow I just don’t get the feeling Usama’ll be taken alive, y’know?”
“Well, in the infinitesimal case that he’s KIA,” Bolin said, pointing up toward the ceiling, as if a Department of Justice microphone might be concealed there, “I’ve given the matter some thought. Here’s what: the Carl Vinson is on station in the vicinity.”
“The aircraft carrier.”
“Correct.”
“What are you gonna do, launch the sonofabitch off the main catapult?”
“Only if he’s still alive.” The two men roared with laughter. “That’s exactly what I’d like to do,” Bolin said. “But as my Irish friends say, the proprieties must be observed.”
“So—burial at sea.”
“Precisely. Within hours of the takedown. No body. No way to find it. No iconic memorabilia, no relics.” Bolin imitated his version of a Brando-esque New York City Godfather. “Usama’s gonna sleep wit da fishes.”
“I love it,” Vince chortled. “It’s perfect. It answers all the questions. It solves all the problems.”
“And if the White House insists, we’ll even do the burial according to Islamic tradition.”
The CIA director nodded in agreement. “Sure. Why not.” He took a few seconds to make some quick notes. “Okay, we can check that box off. And as for anything else that might come up on the nineteenth, I’m going to bring Spike. From the intelligence side, if there’s anyone who can make the president paint himself into a corner, it’s him. Because there’s not a question POTUS can ask that Spike can’t answer.”
Vince scratched behind his ear. “Meanwhile, I’ll see what we can do on the ground in Abbottabad to make life easier for your guys getting in and getting out. High time to make those folks at Valhalla Base earn their hazard pay, right?”
28
Valhalla Base, Abbottabad, Pakistan
March 31, 2011, 1100 Hours Local Time
“Oh, crapola.” Matt Nassar read the burst transmission a second time. “This is not good.”
“Whassup?” Attila Harai peered around the doorway. “Who’s it from this time?”
“The Zoo—headquarters. Who else? We have to find Archangel.” Archangel was Langley’s call sign for Charlie Becker.
/> “And?”
“They’re sending a package. We have to dead-drop it to Archangel. And they’re sending us equipment, too. They want us to take soil cores.” Matt Nassar was a big, bulky, thirty-seven-year-old second-generation American of Lebanese descent who’d applied to CIA directly out of the University of Tennessee, where he’d majored in Arabic literature. Currently he spoke 5-level Arabic, and 3+ Farsi, Pashto, and Dari.
“Equipment? Soil samples? Tell them not to send anything. I’ll buy a shovel. They’ll get soil samples.” Attila Harai was an Ivy Leaguer—Cornell—who’d begun his career at CIA in 2001, shortly after 9/11, as a security officer.
“Cores, not samples. We’ve been sending samples for months.” Matt had been chief of Valhalla Base since Valentine’s Day. He’d volunteered to stay until either it was all over, he got pulled out, or the Paks killed him. He was, to say the very least, passionate about his work.
Attila, Valhalla Base’s junior officer, laughed, “What’s the difference? It’s dirt, right?” In 2005 Attila was accepted into the National Clandestine Service and took the six-month case officer’s course at The Farm, the Agency’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia, followed by immersion in Pashto and Dari, languages spoken fluently by fewer than two dozen of CIA’s forty thousand employees prior to 9/11. He’d been picked for this assignment because of his language skills, as well as the fact that he could pass for Pakistani, right down to his thick, black Pashtunwali mustache.
Matt ignored Attila’s comment. He stuck his head into the stairwell. “John, when can you burst Archangel?”
Valhalla Base’s third occupant was John Brasseux, a Navy communicator assigned more or less permanently to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. He’d been cooped up for Valhalla Base virtually since it opened. A chief petty officer at twenty-nine, he was an honors graduate of Corry Station Navy Technical Training Unit in Pensacola, Florida, where he’d been top Sailor in his cryptology section. He had been looking for a slot in the fleet, but Corry Station, a low-profile installation located adjacent to Pensacola Naval Air Station, through which just over seven thousand students passed annually, was where NSA trolled for the best communicators, cryptologists, and SIGINT (signals intelligence) slurpers. No Such Agency snapped up the petty officer second class with the promise of a signing bonus and a kick up the ladder to chief within twenty-four months if he mastered Pashto. Brasseux, never one to turn down a challenge, accepted on the spot.
Of course, no one at NSA ever mentioned that the MA in Information Warfare might ultimately volunteer for an assignment that kept him sequestered in a safe house for five-plus months, setting up and operating a half-dozen sophisticated eavesdropping devices that targeted the walled compound that sat 265 yards away. Nor had they bothered to explain, when he did volunteer, that there was no decent food in Pakistan. None at all. And that the water sucked. And that, due to security considerations, he would have to live entirely on local products because, as he’d learned during the three-week indoctrination course called “Denied Area Operations,” which he’d taken at a CIA training site in Rosslyn, Virginia, even your shit can betray you.
And absolutely no one—no one—had told Brasseux that he’d have to wear a fricking man dress, which is how he referred to the traditional Pakistani shalwar qameez, the knee-length tunic and baggy trousers he thought of as harem pants, to make his infil to Abbottabad.
“John?” Matt climbed the stairs and walked into the second-floor bedroom the NSA tech used as his lab. “C’mon—when can you burst Archangel?”
Comms with Charlie Becker were complicated. The Paks were sophisticated—and good. And they had decent equipment, some of it from the U.S., some of it from the Russians, and some from the Chinese. If Valhalla Base bursted Charlie at a regular time, the transmissions would be discovered. And so John had worked out a pattern that, unless you were really looking, appeared to be random.
But it wasn’t. Brasseux checked the clock on his console. “He won’t be looking to receive for another five hours.”
Matt double-checked the message. “When you send, tell him there’ll be a dead drop in twelve days. And a package he’ll have to cache for a while.”
“ ‘For a while?’ ” The tech looked over his shoulder. “That’s real specific.”
Matt shrugged. “That’s headquarters. That’s why it’s the Zoo. ’Cause it’s filled with dumb animals.” Matt watched the Sailor’s expression change. “What’s up?”
“We’ve got movement.” Brasseux tapped the thermal reader. “Somebody started a vehicle.”
“I’ll get on it.” Matt scrambled for the stairs. His single-lens reflex camera and its 300mm lens were on the top floor of the villa. The house was roughly 250 yards from the target and slightly higher. From the third floor, he could see about two-thirds of the exterior of the compound and its structures, and a slash of one of the compound’s interior yards. Unfortunately it was the yard where they burned the trash, not the one the occupants occasionally used for walking and conversation.
He’d set up the third-floor room just like a sniper would. The entry door had bedspreads nailed to the top of both the interior and hallway door frames so they could function as light blocks. No one would ever be silhouetted going in or out. The camera was on a tripod that was screwed into the floor to keep it stable. The window facing the compound was permanently open. But suspended a foot behind the window frame was a light gray gauze net. From the outside, anyone peering up would see nothing but a darkened room. The netting did not affect the quality of the photos.
Matt slipped behind the exterior drape, opened the door, closed it behind him, and stepped around the inside drape. He squinted into the Canon’s viewfinder, focusing the long lens first on the third-floor balcony’s privacy wall, then dropping to the exterior gate, squinting and squeezing off frame after frame as the gate opened inward and the red Suzuki nosed out onto the unpaved road. Tareq got out, closed the gate, and climbed back into the vehicle. The driver turned left and accelerated slowly southward.
Matt zoomed in, catching the driver. It was Arshad. He was laughing at something Tareq had said. He couldn’t read the Pashtun’s lips, but he hoped that Brasseux, one floor below, was getting audio. NSA’s techno wizards—they were known as NSA elves, NSA being Nasty Santa’s Assistants, had built what appeared to be two of the boxy, exterior ductless air-conditioning units common to Southwest Asia. They’d been affixed to the exterior wall of the safe house that faced the Khan compound. But the lines running inside weren’t carrying refrigerated air. They were attached to an array of listening devices, some of which could be manipulated remotely in order to pick up conversations up to five hundred meters away, and others that were fixed on portions of the three-story structure in the hope of hearing a voice that could be identified as Bin Laden’s, or someone referring to him either by name or one of the codes he used.
Matt panned as the SUV disappeared out of frame. He pulled the memory chip out of the camera, replaced it with a fresh one, and headed for the first floor so he could download the pictures, examine them closely, and then transmit anything new to HQ. On his way he stopped by Brasseux’s workspace. “Get anything?”
“I’m just filtering now, Matt. You’ll have it by the time you’re downstairs.”
“Thanks, dude.” Matt galumphed down the narrow stairs to the ground floor. “Attila?”
“Yo.”
“Check these out.” He handed the memory chip to Attila. “If you see anything new, lemme know.”
“Roger that.” Attila inserted the chip into his computer. “What’s with the soil samples?”
“Soil cores. I told you. They’re sending a corer.”
“A what?”
“It looks like a pipe. It takes a core sample. You drive it into the ground—straight down. You pull it out, and you send the whole thing back for analysis.”
“We’re gonna do that?”
“Yup.”
�
�How we gonna do that?”
“We’re going to put on our Cloaks of Invisibility, walk out at high noon, take our samples, and—”
“C’mon, Matt.”
“We’ll figure it out, okay? Do it at two in the morning or something. We’re operations officers. We’re supposed to be good at this stuff.”
“Shit, we are good at this stuff. But we’ve never done something like that before.”
“Can’t be any worse than filling a mailbox or servicing a dead drop. And we’ve done that half a dozen times since we got here.”
“True.” The younger man paused. “Why do you think the Zoo wants soil samples—cores?”
“Dunno.” Matt scratched his cheek. “Could be they want to see if the ground near the compound would support weight.”
“Weight?”
“Weight.” Matt’s brow wrinkled. “Weight. Like a plane.” He pumped his thumb toward the compound. “That field to the south? You’ve got more than five hundred yards of flat, plowed land back there. They could land a STOL—a short takeoff and landing aircraft.”
“Or a big helo,” Attila said. “Or a couple big helos.” He considered what he’d said. “Think something’s up?”
“Could be.”
“Think they’ll fill us in about what’s up?”
“Who,” Matt snorted, “the Zoo? Fill us in? You gotta be shitting me. You probably believe in the Easter Bunny, too.”
“Oh, dude, say it ain’t so.” Attila pouted and kicked the ground. “You can’t tell me there’s no Easter Bunny.”
29
Cumberland Parkway, Virginia Beach, Virginia
April 1, 2011, 1948 Hours Local Time
