The Mercenary Option

by Dick Couch

  The Gurkhas almost worshiped Bijay Gurung and held Garrett nearly in the same regard, but they reserved a special awe and fascination for Janet Brisco. It was as if she were royalty—some Amazon warrior queen. From the beginning, they treated her with a special deference. Each morning one of them crept into her office with a cup of tea. At first she accepted it out of courtesy and with carefully concealed irritation. Then she came to relish the tea and their company. She would nearly always take time from what she was doing to speak with them. Neither LeMaster nor Owens quite understood the relationship, nor what they talked about. But they were happy and animated conversations, and seemed to have a soothing effect on her. Occasionally they would ask her to walk with them, and four or five of the Gurkhas would be seen escorting her along one of the trails near the camp. She was a full head taller than them and sometimes would walk with an arm casually around one of their shoulders in a maternal gesture. Garrett took to referring to these outings as Snow Not-so-White and the Dwarf Squad. When he asked Bijay about it, the older Gurkha simply shrugged.

  “It is beyond my experience,” he replied, “but I do not think it is a bad thing.”

  A plan had been forming in Brisco’s mind, and she had been staging assets and aircraft in order to get IFOR into position for an operation. She, Steven, and Bill Owens talked at length about cover stories and documentation. But there was only so much any of them could do until they had a better idea of where the weapons might be and exactly how they might travel. To move too soon could tip their hand and send their quarry to ground. But good intelligence is often perishable. If they didn’t get themselves prepositioned and ready to strike, then they would have no chance to act if and when they did get an intelligence break. It was all on Janet Brisco’s shoulders. Steven Fagan would make the final decision, and Garrett would be in charge once they got to the ground, but she had to make it happen. It was for her to say, “This is our target, and this is how we are going to do it.” Of course Garrett and Bijay would work with her on the final operational and tactical details of the mission. But it was her call; she would say, “We go here and we go now.” If they received mission tasking.

  Janet Brisco had been planning and coordinating special operations since well before the Gulf War. For close to thirteen of her twenty years at the U.S. Special Operations Command, she was the go-to planner when there was a dangerous or difficult mission in the works. A succession of four-star commanders, on learning that their forces might have to go into harm’s way, had invariably turned to their chief staff officers and quietly said, “Let’s get Brisco read into this one.” Whenever she walked into an operations center, staff officers and senior planners braced themselves for a rough go of it—and with good reason. They knew she would be demanding, tenacious, and intolerant of anything less than a total commitment to the mission. Few really liked Lieutenant Colonel Janet Brisco, but no one questioned her competence or that when she was called in on an operation, it was because they wanted the first team on the job.

  “Hey, boss,” said Bill Owens as he watched a file downloading from a feed routed by Langley directly to them from their station in Bahrain, “we got something coming in you’re going to want to—”

  “I’m on it, Bill,” she replied, the excitement taking the normal bite out of her voice. “Dodds, get this information into overlays and have them ready for comparison with our composite of the area.”

  “Right-o,” replied Dodds obediently.

  Unable to confirm her theories, Brisco had pressed Jim Watson for some drone coverage of the area. The Predators were good, but they were vulnerable; they had a maximum ceiling of twenty-five thousand feet. The Global Hawk could fly at sixty thousand feet, which made them almost invisible on radar, and almost was touchy business in Iranian airspace. It had taken an authorization from the President to overfly Iran. Some ten hours earlier, a Global Hawk had been launched from the USS Carl Vinson and vectored into the area. As the crow flies, it would have been a six-hundred-mile journey, but sophisticated drones don’t fly like crows. It had taken the Global Star ten hours to find the soft spots in the Iranian air search radars and slip into the area. With something close to that for the trip home, the drone had about ten hours on station. Brisco and her planners had no need to control the Global Star on this mission. The aircraft had been sent in with a series of GPS coordinates and instructions to photograph the area from high altitude. Twenty minutes ago, they had asked the drone’s controllers to shoot a specific set of coordinates from a specific angle. While they waited, Owens took the drone imagery, converted it to semitransparencies, and overlaid the data on their composites. The existing imagery had been culled from both government and commercial sources. Satellite imagery had reached a point where it was a commodity. Often, information they needed could be obtained by wiring funds to a numbered account—sometimes it belonged to a commercial entity, sometimes to an official of a foreign government. A near-unlimited source of funds could produce some amazing results. Just then, another imagery document appeared on the screen. She studied it a few moments, then turned to LeMaster. He grinned and nodded

  “We got ’em. We got ’em cold.” Then she punched the intercom. “Steven! Steven, you there!”

  “Right here, Janet. What’s up?”

  “Steven, we got the bastards.”

  Moments later, Steven bolted into the operations building. Garrett was right behind him. Janet was ready for them as they joined her around the lighted photo-interpretation table. Owens and LeMaster crowded in.

  “Okay, the folks at Langley first put our friend Imad and his new pal Khalib somewhere near Kerman in central Iran some three months ago, right? We assume that they had something to do with the missing weapons. Mugniyah probably doesn’t care, and Khalib and al Qaeda would gain little by a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India. Except for the van and the dead scientists, we found nothing in Kashmir. So we focused our search around Kerman and the routes there.” She pulled out a section of overhead photography. “The bombs were taken maybe six weeks ago, headed for Iran, we think. A little more than four weeks ago, we have two Ford Explorers making their way south through Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border.” She circled the two small dark rectangles on the imagery with a dry-erase marker, and pulled another sheet across it. “Then we see them again in Iran on the way to Gazak, the main highway up to Kerman. Got to be the same two Explorers. How many black Ford SUVs traveling together are there out there?” Another sheet. “Here we see them on a layby after they had turned off the main road past Bam, in all probability heading somewhere near Kerman. This is some of Dodds’s work. Pretty good, huh?” They were looking at a grainy tire print in the sand. “Nothing that would stand up in court from a crime scene, but you can see that it’s a—what, Dodds, a twelve-inch tread print made by a fairly new tire.” LeMaster nodded his affirmative at the assessment. “And a very expensive tire, probably a top-of-the-line Bridgestone. We got lucky with this—clear desert air, good elevation—about as good as a satellite can do. Other vehicle print is identical, like someone went out and bought a pair of new four-by-fours with the same equipment at the same time. Who does that, besides some dotcom yuppie couple?

  “Then we don’t see them again. Where are they? Probably holed up in some remote village, but we don’t know for sure. Given the roads in the area, we’re looking for two needles in a twenty-four-hundred-square-mile haystack. We gotta get closer, but that’s a big area even for overheads. So Dodds suggests we look for garages and warehouses where two big vehicles could be hidden. The Global Hawk did it. Look at this.”

  Brisco laid a photo enlargement on the table that was not more than forty-five minutes old. One was a near-vertical shot that showed two sets of wide tire prints tracking across the sand and into a small garage just outside of the town of Baghin, just forty miles west of Kerman and some fifteen miles north of a village called Khalabad.

  “Khalabad is very primitive and a known refuge for al Qaeda. That wou
ld fit.”

  “So how do we know they’re still at this garage?” Garrett asked.

  She tossed down a second enlargement, like she was filling an inside straight with a hole card. It was still warm from the document copier. “We pulled the drone out a ways for a quartering shot at the garage for a more depressed angle. Fortunately, it’s a hot day in Iran, and the garage door was open. See that headlight and section of grille.” She smiled. “It’s a Ford. If the bombs are there, that’s one of the vehicles that brought them there. My guess is that the bombs are in those buildings. If not, they probably aren’t far away.”

  “Well done, Madam Planner,” Steven replied. “Very well done. And now?”

  “And now I recommend that we launch to the primary staging area. From there, if we’re still in the game, we can consider a direct-action mission on those two vehicles. If they move before we get there, we have to track them. Since we think we know where they’re going, it shouldn’t be hard. The only chance to do this quietly is to catch them in a remote area, and if the central Iranian plateau is anything, it is remote. Then it’s decision time. The President will have a tough call to make. Do we send in an SOF element, a Tomahawk missile, or Garrett and friends? But we can’t wait for him to make up his mind; we have to assume it will be us. I want the IFOR airborne as soon as possible.”

  Janet and Steven immediately set their contingency plan in motion. While Bijay prepared the Gurkhas to leave the compound, Garrett was tearing along the coast road about thirty miles an hour over the speed limit. Strapped into the passenger seat was a very apprehensive Bill Owens. Things were coming together quickly. Garrett really didn’t have time for this, but right now, he had the least to do. Fortunately the road to the airport from Waimea was an excellent two-lane highway across deserted lava beds. For the most part, it was straight as an arrow and sparsely patrolled. It was like speeding across Wyoming.

  Owens now needed to be closer to the potential forward staging areas to ensure that everything was in order before the rest of them arrived. Garrett had reluctantly volunteered to meet the FBI liaison officer assigned as IFOR’s official contact, as well as get Owens to his flight. The imagery and operational intelligence data would still come through Jim Watson, but any requirements IFOR might have that involved the military or some government agency would be handled by this, this—Garrett pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket—this J.D. Bechtel. Garrett had only a name and a flight number. Contact instructions had been passed through Langley. The meeting was originally to have taken place in Honolulu, but as time was becoming critical on their end, Bechtel had agreed to come to Kona. There was a small open-air bar at the little Kona airport. Garrett figured he could brief the guy, set up a contact plan, and have him back on the next Hawaiian Air shuttle back to Oahu. Government liaison, he admitted, was a necessary evil, yet it could prove to be an asset if this guy knew his stuff. He found himself wishing for an experienced CIA hand rather than someone from the Bureau. In any case, he wished he was back with the lads, and Steven were here to meet the federal agent.

  “Thanks for the flight to the airport,” Owens said, mopping his brow. “See you in a few days.”

  “Take care, Bill,” Garrett replied as Owens ran off to the civilian air terminal. A GSI Gulfstream was waiting for him.

  Garrett walked around to the commercial arrivals gate, getting there just as the passengers were deplaning. Feeling a little foolish, he waited by the security exit door with the hotel limo drivers and tour guides, holding a little paddle-sign that read, “GSI.” As a SEAL he had worked with Bureau agents on occasion. He generally found them too bureaucratic and sometimes too aggressive—SWAT team wannabes. He did like and respect the agents on the Hostage Rescue Team, but then why shouldn’t he? There was a liberal sprinkling of special-operations guys on the HRT. Suddenly he was taken by an odd feeling. Then, for no apparent reason, the hair on the back of his neck went up. A moment later he saw her.

  “You can take the paddle down now, sailor,” she said. “And close your mouth. Jeez, I thought you’d at least have a couple of those flowered leis for me.”

  “Judy, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Shhh. The name is J. D. Bechtel, or Ms. Bechtel, if you like. Gawd, I just love this spy stuff. And we finally get to work together. I’m stoked. I’ll bet you’re excited too, or you will be, once you calm down a bit.”

  “I need a drink,” Garrett said feebly.

  “Sounds great,” she replied, slipping a hand through his arm. “You can brief me in the bar. Gotta be one around here someplace. I want something pastel with two long straws and a little umbrella in it.”

  Saturday, December 28,

  the White House

  The issue that the IFOR planning team discussed over the latest imagery was now being considered by four very serious men. They were in one of the informal conference rooms in the West Wing, seated in overstuffed chairs around a low coffee table. Three of them were dressed in slacks and polo shirts, looking more like duffers at the nineteenth hole than the power structure of the United States of America. Only one, Armand Grummell, looked like someone for whom a round of golf might be a frivolous undertaking; he wore an oxford-cloth shirt with an open collar and a blazer. He was of the old school, a man for whom the absence of a jacket meant that you were about to mow the lawn or change the oil in your car. Oddly enough, while he did consider golf a silly pastime, he had been the only serious athlete of the group. He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox out of high school, and had played a summer of triple-A baseball. He was a serious big-league infield prospect until called away to the war in Korea. Now his only connection to the game, or any sport for that matter, was talking baseball with George Will, something they did on occasion over an informal dinner—both wearing bow ties and herringbone jackets.

  The President turned to James Powers. “So there it is, Jim. If it’s your problem, how do you solve it?”

  Powers, like the others, was all too aware of the missing weapons and now their probable location. He and his department were also heavily engaged in diplomatic wrangling about the use of force in Iraq. Now he had to turn his attention to Iran. Powers and his colleagues at State had worked hard to improve relations with Iran, and were encouraged by their progress to date. It was not likely to become the next Turkey any time soon, but they were making headway. Now this.

  “I don’t have any good answers for this one,” the Secretary of State replied. “We have no indication that Tehran has any knowledge, but then the Ministry of Intelligence and Security may be operating without the knowledge of the mullahs. I doubt that Mugniyah would be in the country without the knowledge of the MIS. My guess is that President Khatami is clean on this one, not that it would matter a great deal. I spoke with their foreign minister, Kamal Khaffazi, this morning again about Iraq. He gave no indications that something was amiss, but he’s a pretty cool customer. If we go to them with this, I can almost guarantee a flat denial. Iran would like nothing better than for us to disarm Iraq and take Pakistan’s nukes away from them. And they have no interest in seeing that we succeed with the pipeline. At best they will plead ignorance; at worst, we will have just made Iran a nuclear power.”

  “Tony.”

  The Secretary of Defense pursed his lips and began. “I’ve had the Special Operations Command working on this since we learned of it. I have two platoons of Navy SEALs and an Amphibious Ready Group quietly moving into the northern Arabian Sea. They are scheduled to transit the Strait of Hormuz tonight and will be in the Gulf by midday tomorrow. The Persian Gulf is not the best place geographically to launch into central Iran, but with the buildup for Iraq, I don’t think anyone will notice. We also have a contingent of Rangers and Special Forces standing by in Afghanistan. I recommend the SF if it’s to be a small action; Rangers if it’s to be company-sized assault or larger. If the intelligence is good, they’ll get the job done. The SEALs can handle this mission as well. But any way you cut it, it will
be an invasion. There is a chance we can get in and out undetected, but I can’t promise that. This is a mission our special operators have trained hard for. There are some very capable and dedicated young men waiting for the green light. Or”—Barbata turned his palms face up—“we can simply bomb the shit out of them, and there are any number of ways we can do that. We can probably get a Tomahawk in there at night without anyone seeing it coming over the beach. Or if you want a smaller munition, a Hellfire missile from a drone, but either way, there’s going to be a smoking hole in the ground, and if the bombs are there, it will be very radioactive, perhaps dangerously so.”

  “I’d like to keep this as quiet as possible,” the President said. “Is there any covert way to get in there and bring those bombs out?”

  Barbata expelled a long breath. “Possibly. It would have to be a small, surgical special-operations strike, in and out in a single night.” St. Claire nodded. “There’s a chance, but as I said, we would have to stage out of Afghanistan or from a carrier. The electronic order of battle for their coastline and along the central plateau is not too difficult, but it would not be without risks. We’re a lot better than we were back in 1980 when we failed in Desert One, and this is a much easier target than the embassy hostages outside of Tehran. But then, the Iranians are a little better now as well.”