The Mercenary Option

by Dick Couch

  “You know,” Janos said, “you’ve been a real asshole during this whole ordeal. I ought to just set this thing off.”

  Garrett took the top off the bottle and tossed it away. Then he took a long pull. “Tell you what,” he said. “You disarm that thing, and I’ll save you a couple of swallows.”

  “A complete asshole,” Janos replied as he began to remove tools and test equipment from his backpack. He handed Garrett a small crowbar. “Here, make yourself useful.”

  Soon the two of them began to carefully disassemble the crate around the bomb. Next, they removed the metal casing. The device itself was egg-shaped and surrounded by heavy wiring and metal conduit. It looked like a crude science-fair project. Janos carefully inspected the assembly, then began to probe the weapon with his metered equipment. The inspection lasted close to ten minutes. Garrett sat on a rock nearby, occasionally taking a pull at the bottle.

  “You better hurry up,” Garrett offered. “This bottle won’t last much longer.”

  “Screw you, Yank,” Janos intoned as he concentrated on his work.

  Finally he removed a component from the assembly, cutting two wire leads in the process. Then, he sat back slowly and shook his head.

  “Oh shit—oh dear,” Janos said, eyes widening. “I blew it! The damn things going to blow in about thirty seconds, and there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it.” He leaned back from the weapon so Garrett could see an LED display on the device. It was counting down the seconds by tenths, like a basketball-game clock. He dropped his head in defeat. Then looking over to Garrett, “A drink, man, for God’s sake.”

  Garrett numbly handed him the bottle. He tried to say something, but his mouth had gone dry. There was about four inches of whiskey remaining. Janos turned the bottle up and emptied it like he was draining a water cooler. The two of them then sat there staring at the display until it was a line of zeros. Suddenly there was a loud crash as Janos broke the empty bottle across the bomb casing. Garrett involuntarily flinched.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Janos said with a knowing grin. “I guess the bloody thing was a dud. And after all that trouble we just went through.”

  “Janos,” Garrett managed, “I don’t know whether to kill you myself or give you over to that big Gurkha.”

  Janos reached into his backpack and pulled out a long, square bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and spit it into the sand. “Hang on there, mate,” he said, offering the bottle to Garrett. “D’you think we might first have a drink and talk about it?”

  In the comm van at Diego Garcia, they listened and watched. Dodds LeMaster followed the Pavehawk, surrendering altitude, which enabled the Global Hawk to keep up with the speeding helo. The lower orbit also gave them a great view of the drama and the two men. Per Steven’s instruction, Garrett had left his radio in the open transmit mode. If the unthinkable happened, the voice and video would be needed to piece together events.

  Judy Burks bit the hardest on the ruse of Janos. She was sure she was about to see the man she loved vaporized, given that vaporization could have been a visual event, as the electromagnetic pulse would have instantly fried the Global Hawk’s electronics package. All she could do was stare at the monitor. Her hands were pressed to her face to keep from crying out, but she could not take her eyes from the screen. Her knees almost buckled when she saw Garrett accept the bottle from Janos and take a generous swig.

  “Oh, my God!” she said in a barely audible voice. “I thought it was going to go off. I thought I was going to lose him!”

  She slid down the side of the van’s interior paneling, crouched on her heels, and began to weep softly.

  Janet Brisco closed her eyes for ten seconds, then lit a cigarette. Her hand was shaking so much that she had to steady her lighter with both hands. Then she was right back into it.

  “Boomer Lead, this is Home Plate. What is your state time?”

  “This is Boomer Lead. I have about two and a half hours left, over?”

  “Understood. Go back and retrieve our two friends and take them back north, over?”

  “Boomer Lead, returning for two pax and then heading north, out.”

  Brisco shifted to another frequency. “You with me, Steven?”

  “Right here, Janet.” He too was all business, but there was a slight tremor in his voice that had not been there a few minutes ago. “After the pickup, tell Dodds to lock that drone into an orbit around the coordinates of that weapon. Then have him hand it back to the military controller. I’ll let Langley know where it is and what it is. It’s their worry now. Time to wrap this up and pretend that we were never there. We’ll pick everyone up in Herat and get airborne as soon as we can.”

  “Understood,” Brisco replied. “What can I do?”

  “We’ll be twelve hours getting back to Diego Garcia. We will need to stop in Karachi for fuel, but if you can get us a KC-135, that would save us a few hours and a fuel stop.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. We’ll have everything loaded and ready to go when you get here. I’ve already filed a flight plan for Singapore.”

  “Excellent. I’ll check in when we’re on the ground in Herat.”

  “Understood. Tell my boys I’m proud of them.”

  “Will do,” Steven replied and signed off.

  Dodds LeMaster handed off the Global Hawk drone to the controller in Qandahar, then pulled off his headset. He took a bottle from under his console, poured a generous dollop into a coffee cup, and handed it to Judy Burks. He then poured one for himself and handed the bottle to Brisco. She splashed some right into her cold coffee and raised her mug.

  “To the lads,” she offered.

  “To the lads,” Dodds and Judy echoed.

  “And to your man,” she said, touching Judy’s mug, and they all drank again.

  In the White House Situation Room, there was silence. Their audio feed ended abruptly after the woman directed the helo to recover the two men in the desert. They watched as the helo collected them, and then there was nothing but a slowly revolving, 360-degree presentation of the uncrated weapon and an empty wooden box. Finally President William St. Claire turned to one of the uniformed techs.

  “Can you run that back, please—fast reverse?”

  Immediately the monitor began to rapidly reverse the orbit. Helos flashed on and off the screen.

  “Hold it right there…. No, back it up a bit…There. Now focus in on the hand of the guy nearest the crate…perfect. Just as I thought; they’re drinking Bushmills.” He turned to a waiting steward. “See if you can find a bottle of that, the older the better.”

  While they waited, a soldier came over and whispered something to Barbata. “Sir, an Air Force special weapons team has taken custody of the first weapon, and they are on their way by helicopter to retrieve the second. They should have it aboard within the hour.”

  St. Claire nodded. “So what do we do with them? Armand?”

  “Perhaps we should hang onto them for a while and inspect them.” For the last several minutes, Grummell had been steadily polishing his glasses. Now he put the glasses away, carefully folded his linen handkerchief, and replaced it in his front jacket pocket. Two corners peeked from the pocket like a pair of rabbit ears. “It would be good to assess the state of their technology, and,” he added with a smile, “not unwise to let Musharraf and the Pakistanis stew about this for a few days. Then we can give them back.”

  The steward returned with a twenty-five-year-old bottle of Bushmills and five crystal tumblers. The President took the tray and poured out five neat shots.

  “Gentlemen, madam, to those brave men and that one tough lady, whoever they are.”

  They drank in a companionable silence until it was broken by POTUS. “Now we can devote our time and energy to that bastard Saddam Hussein, you’ll pardon the language, Rita.”

  “Of course, Mr. President,” Westinghouse replied.

  The MC-130 was not on the ground more than ten minutes and did not even shut
down. They had enough fuel on board to cross Afghanistan, southern Pakistan, and get well out into the Indian Ocean before they needed a drink. Thanks to Janet Brisco and a grateful U.S. government, a KC-135 tanker would be waiting for them some three hundred miles west of Bombay. Once they reached cruise altitude, Garrett climbed up to the flight deck. There Steven extended him a warm welcome.

  “Glad to have you back,” he said as they shook hands. Steven eyed him critically. “You okay?” Garrett nodded. “I wasn’t sure it was going to come together there for a while. And then that stunt with Janos.” Steven’s grin faded a bit. “You know, the White House hacked onto our audio and video link.”

  “How much did they see?”

  “Everything, including the little drama with you and our South African friend. How is he, by the way?”

  The plan had called for them to leave Janos in Herat and fly him commercially from there to Karachi and on to Rome. They wanted to be done with him as soon as possible. But between them, Garrett and Frederick Janos had killed a quart and a half of whiskey, with Janos getting the lion’s share. When the Pavehawks landed in Herat, he could barely crawl. Steven decided to sober him up on the way to Diego Garcia and get him to the airport when they went back through Singapore.

  “He’s snoring like a wino on a park bench.”

  “Is he going to be a problem?” Steven asked. A covert operator was always looking ahead.

  “No way. He saw what we do to people we consider a threat. Give him a bonus and tell him that all he has to do is keep his mouth shut. He does that, and he’ll never see another Gurkha for the rest of his natural life. And speaking of Gurkhas, how’s Padam?”

  “They have him at the Naval Medical Facility on Diego Garcia. From what Janet says, they will have him ready to go, and we can take him with us.”

  “Guess that’s it, then. All we have to do is get the lads home and the gear repositioned.”

  Steven hesitated a moment, then continued. “Well, the threat has been taken care of, but not the cause.”

  “Oh, really?” Garrett replied, his interest now fully aroused. If there were any lingering effects of the whiskey, they were suddenly gone.

  “On the way up here, I checked my messages for any loose ends. There was a call from a banker in the Caymans who suddenly found it in his interest to commit a breach of bank confidentiality regulations. So we talked. There were several large transfers of money that involved one Imad Mugniyah. I was able to trace it to a corresponding bank in Bahrain, which led me to two other accounts; one was a payer, and the other was a payee. I think I know who and where.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it will be in-house. We’ll not need to involve Langley on this one.”

  They were silent for several moments before Garrett spoke. “Is Janet still up on the net?”

  Steven nodded and smiled. “She won’t rest until all her boys have been safely returned to her bosom.”

  Garrett grinned and picked up the handset. “Home Plate, you still with us?”

  “Right here, Garrett. How’s the hangover?”

  “Tolerable. You wouldn’t have a federal agent handy, would you?”

  “Right here, but don’t clutter up my net for too long.”

  “Whatever you say, mother.”

  While Garrett soothed a very anxious Judy Burks, Steven Fagan put through a call to Joe Simpson. He was in San Francisco, speaking to a corporate gathering about the good works of the Joseph Simpson Jr. Foundation.

  Epilogue

  The morning after the recovery of the second bomb, David Wilson was walking through Site South. He was on his way to one of the huge diesel storage bladders they used to fuel the site construction vehicles. If they were to abandon the facility, he wanted them towed away from the camp in case one of the scavengers that never seemed to be too far away came into the camp after they had gone. Diesel oil was not that easy to burn, but the last thing he wanted to see was his camp torched with his own fuel. Using bulldozers, they had them hitched up and were just starting to drag them off when Colonel Carswell came roaring up in his Humvee. He was wearing battle dress, complete with flack jacket and helmet.

  “What’s up, Tom?” Wilson asked, turning away from the bladder drag.

  “It’s like I said,” Carswell replied with a huge grin, “it was a false alarm. We’re back to a Level Three alert, but my guess is that it too will be lifted in twenty-four hours.”

  Wilson smiled and shook his head. He led up a clenched fist to the lead dozer driver, then drew a finger across his throat to signal the bladders need not be moved. Then he spoke a few words into his Motorola transceiver. After getting a reply, he turned back to Carswell.

  “What was the problem?”

  Carswell shrugged. “Who knows? Might have something to do with that convoy that’s still halted south of here. Maybe they intercepted a couple camels loaded with dynamite.”

  “Thanks, Tom. I better get with my foremen and get these crews back to work.”

  “Take care, Dave.”

  On the way back through the site, Dave Wilson stuck his head in to tell Trish that the alert status had been downgraded, but as he expected, she was already unpacking.

  Exactly seven days after the recovery of the second nuclear weapon, Armand Grummell was seated quietly in his study at Langley, reading intelligence summaries and estimations. Most of his agency was paperless, and the reading was done on-line, on computer terminals. Computer management and distribution of intelligence were essential, and Grummell found the computer a useful tool, but only to screen his reading documents. So late each afternoon he scrolled through the series of reports, which represented a great deal of his agency’s intelligence product—most of it now concerned with Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. He tagged those he wanted to revisit or spend some time with later. Then he hit a button, and a high-speed printer did the rest. He liked his reading formatted in Times New Roman font, size twelve print. Over the years he had come to know his analysts and production staff well. Some handled the English language effectively, and some didn’t. Most presented the facts in a straightforward, antiseptic manner. Yet a few could, within the strict reporting format, craft the information so that it was actually fun to read. It was the difference between reading a piece by William Safire and one by Charles Krauthammer. Some writers just made it less of a chore.

  Grummell worked through the stack of selected reports. Most he set aside; these would find their way to the shredder. Others, he scribbled a line or two across the top in red ink. These reports had raised a question for which he wanted clarification, or he found issue with the content. And there were those few, the ones that were both discerning and clever, to which he penned a compliment, or a simple “Well done, A. G.” in blue ink. They would find their way back to the originator, by way of their superiors, to let them know the DCI personally approved of their work.

  “Sir, Mrs. Johnstone is here to see you.”

  Grummell glanced at his watch; it was six-fifteen. She had no reason to be here this late, he mused. Grummell was from a generation that still found it curious that a woman could have the same passion for professional excellence as a man.

  “Please ask her to come in.” He was at the door to meet her when she came in. “Good afternoon, or I suppose I should say good evening, Elizabeth. Let me guess; this has to do with our old friend Imad Mugniyah.” He seated her in one of the armchairs away from his desk and took a seat opposite her on the settee.

  “Yes, sir, it does. You had asked me to find him and the second atomic weapon, but as we know, he was well ahead of us. The man that Mugniyah entrusted with the bomb was Youssef Amhaz. It seems he passed through Damascus on his way to Baghdad several weeks ago. From there we lost him, but it’s certain he arrived in Karachi soon after Mugniyah. He was a low-level Hezbollah operative and a fanatic. He was chosen as the courier for the nuclear weapon—the ultimate suicide bomber. The driver of the truc
k was a Pakistani national with connections to al Qaeda.

  “As for Mugniyah, he was in and out of Karachi before we knew it. We are quite certain that he is now back in Lebanon, probably at a safe house in the Bakkah Valley. We’ve had some pretty intense satellite coverage of central Iran over the past few weeks. That big Mercedes was seen northwest of Kerman the day before the capture of the second bomb and on the outskirts of Tehran the day of the recovery. I think it’s safe to conclude that the MIS got him out of Iran as quickly as possible. Then there’s the matter of the bank transfers that Mr. Watson showed me. I don’t know how he was able to come by that information, but it would seem that Mugniyah and Hezbollah are some fifty million dollars the richer for their part in this venture. I wonder what his benefactors think of paying him that much for a failed operation?”

  “It’s pocket change for them. It may cost the Royal Family some regional political capital, or serve as leverage in some of our future dealings with them, but who really knows? They are as arrogant as camels. Thank you for all your hard work during this crisis.”

  She smiled shyly. “It’s my job. I just wish we could have caught Mugniyah. He is a bad one. Perhaps another time. I’ll certainly continue to keep an eye on him.”

  “I know you will. Elizabeth, you’ve been putting in a lot of late evenings lately. You want to be careful about that, or you’ll end up like me.” They both smiled at this. Grummell hesitated, as if he were at a momentary loss for words, then plunged ahead, “There is this new Chinese restaurant over in Chevy Chase that I understand has some very decent Szechuan cuisine. I don’t suppose you would care to join me for supper?”