by Ward Larsen
The hand was pulling him tight to the gunnel. Slaton reached one arm over the top, but his effort ended there. After hanging beneath an airplane for half an hour, and swallowing a good portion of the Sea of Galilee, all strength suddenly left him.
It didn’t matter.
A second hand took hold of his arm, and he was hauled unceremoniously into the boat. He flopped to the deck like a boated tuna, spent and exhausted. For the second time in less than a minute, Slaton let his body go still. He relaxed with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, he saw a face that told him two things.
He was safe.
And he was indeed in Israel.
Anton Bloch, the man who had so many years ago recruited him into Mossad, into the life that still haunted him, was smiling down like a benevolent God. Which, as a former spy chief, he most certainly was not.
Slaton saw two other men in the boat, both young and fit. Bloch himself had retired, but the new director permitted him to keep a hand in the game. And there was no more fitting hand to play than this—Slaton, in so many ways, was Bloch’s crowning legacy.
Slaton worked himself onto a wooden bench along the port side. He coughed up more water, spit it over the side. Someone put a blanket over his shoulders. The man in back cranked a small outboard to life and began steering toward shore. The other boat fell in behind. Slaton looked skyward, searching for the Reaper. He saw nothing.
“I see you haven’t forgotten how to make an entrance,” Bloch said in his brusque baritone.
Slaton worked his right arm—the worst of the hits from his entry. “And I see you aren’t playing golf.”
“Are you all right?”
“Aren’t I always?”
“We have a doctor standing by on shore.”
“A good thing. The Americans could use some refinements to their extraction methods. I would characterize the endgame as suboptimal.”
Bloch smiled, a difficult process in which minor fissures appeared in his stony visage. “According to the Christians, the Sea of Galilee is where Jesus walked on water. You, it seems, are not so blessed.”
Slaton relented, allowing a smile of his own. His only reply was to look out over the calm lake.
“Welcome home, David.”
* * *
During the same minutes that Slaton was being hauled out of the Sea of Galilee, three travelers walked wearily from Syria into Lebanon. Though they could not know it, they were a mere fifty yards past the border when three men and a woman materialized out of the gloom.
“Welcome to Lebanon,” the lead man said in Arabic.
The reception committee were dressed in casual clothes, and even in the darkness their features belied their Western heritage. Through a series of handshakes and greetings—simplified by the fact that everyone spoke at least rudimentary Arabic—Ludmilla, Salma, and Naji were introduced to four officers of the CIA’s Beirut station.
“Is this your entire party?” the lead American asked.
Ludmilla said, “There were two others. We separated from the man who was guiding us out, but I think you’ve been in touch with him. The other is going back to Damascus.”
The American nodded. “We have two cars waiting. We should go now.”
No one argued, and Lebanon’s three newest arrivals set out again northward. Three of the Americans led the way, while the woman fell in behind. Ludmilla, exhausted from the travails of recent days, had trouble keeping up. The Americans seemed to be in a hurry. But then, in her experience, they usually were.
“Where are we going?” she asked the woman officer behind her.
“To the airport. There’s a jet waiting.”
“Where will it take us?”
“I don’t know.”
Ludmilla suspected the woman was being truthful. She paused, half turned, and looked back into the dark hills. She couldn’t say where the border was—there was no fence or wall or berm like in some areas. She only knew it was not far behind her. In the predawn darkness, she wondered if Achmed was still watching them. Suspecting he was, she raised a hand into the night and waved goodbye.
“We really should hurry, ma’am,” the woman said.
Ludmilla turned and began walking again, her stride suddenly energized, curiously light and free. More than it had been in a very long time.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The masters of intelligence agencies, at least those worthy of their positions, do not forfeit sleep by choice. Like the parents of a teenager prone to bust curfew, they do so out of worry. The waiting is the worst, those idle minutes in which dire scenarios permeate every thought. The ding of an incoming secure message can straighten a spine as well as any unexpected knock on a front door. Satellite feeds are watched for good news like a driveway for headlights. The main difference for spymasters is a sobering one: the chances of an actual catastrophe coming to pass are exponentially higher.
Sorensen monitored Slaton’s mission throughout the evening from the Langley operations center. When she finally got word from Anton Bloch that Corsair had been pulled from the Sea of Galilee, cold and wet and bruised, but fundamentally intact, it was ten o’clock D.C. time.
As it turned out, her night was only beginning.
What should have been relief at the completion of a successful mission was drowned out by the quagmire of a secondary crisis. Within moments of word coming from Lebanon that Ludmilla Kravchuk and two Syrian nationals were safe and sound on an agency plane near Beirut, an update arrived regarding another operation.
Sorensen’s division had ceded control of that investigation to the DOD, which was far better equipped to analyze chemical attacks than the CIA. The incident in Sudan, which had taken the lives of two individuals, along with a herd of livestock and various carrion feeders, had initially been categorized as an “unknown chemical event.” The preliminary report now before Sorensen narrowed things down. The culprit turned out to be a potent nerve agent, the specific signature of which was not in the army’s extensive library of such substances. A chemical analysis of swabbed samples, however, proved the agent to be remarkably similar to Novichok-class weapons long attributed to Russia.
Within minutes of reading the report, Sorensen was on the phone with Dr. David Gyger, the DOD’s preeminent expert on chemical weapons. She had met Gyger once, and remembered a man in his sixties who held a PhD from Princeton and an MD from Harvard. More off-putting for Sorensen, both then and now, was that his voice reminded her of her late father’s.
“How sure are we that this is a Russian product?” she inquired.
“The chemistry is certainly of Russian origin—we’ve identified a unique chemical structure common to all variants of Novichok. But the answer to your question isn’t so simple. While the design of the agent is provably Russian, it’s not out of the question that it could have been licensed and produced elsewhere.”
“You’re saying they could be selling their recipe?”
“I find it unlikely, but the possibility can’t be ruled out. There is also the manner of dispersal to consider.” Gyger described, in perhaps more detail than necessary, the dispersal hardware that had been recovered from the site. “We are clearly looking at a binary employment system, two precursor sources combined and aerosolized. In the past, the Russians have tended to be more direct, using liquid agents applied to skin through clandestine methods. The latter method is far more controllable, more specific when it comes to targeting.”
Sorensen thought about it, and a question rose to mind. “I’d like your opinion, Doctor. Given that this attack took place in the middle of nowhere, and the victims, by all accounts, were no more than random passersby—why would someone go to all this trouble?”
“I wondered the same thing,” Gyger admitted. “I can think of only two reasons. The first would be that we are looking at a demonstration, an implied threat if you will.”
“But that only works if you know who’s responsible. If ISIS or some Al-Qaeda branch had claimed responsibility, it would
be a model terror weapon. But nobody is taking credit.”
“Precisely. Which leaves option two. This is some kind of test—someone is making sure both the agent and the delivery system are effective.”
“Okay, but who?”
“I can tell you it’s not the Russians. They would do that kind of thing in-house, in their own Siberian backyard. If I were to guess, I’d say we’re looking at a state actor—someone from the region who wants to be sure their new weapon works before they actually use it.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“Not at all.”
“One more thing,” Sorensen said. “The hardware that was recovered—the canisters and metal tubing. Does it give you any idea how this weapon might be employed?”
A hesitation. “I’ve gone over the photographs thoroughly. The actual hardware is fairly straightforward. It reminded me of certain small-scale firefighting systems, which include any number of commercial applications. A closet with high-voltage electrical relays, inaccessible compartments on a ship, the engine bay of a city bus.”
“Good to know, but that hardly narrows things down.”
“I wish I could be more specific, but the possibilities are almost endless. There were some peculiarities in the mounting hardware—the shape and anchor points implied a very specific purpose. But without some idea of where to look … I’m afraid I’d only be guessing.”
* * *
Sorensen hung up to find another call waiting—a connection she herself had initiated ten minutes earlier. Somewhere above the Mediterranean, a company jet was whisking eastward. Among the eight people on board was a Russian defector who claimed to have knowledge of a pending terrorist attack.
Sorensen found herself talking to the leader of the extraction team, a man whose name was actually Smith. “What do you have so far?” she asked, eschewing any conversational openers.
“We interviewed Kravchuk for roughly twenty minutes. At that point she was pretty much asleep in her chair. We decided to let her rest.”
“Okay, but what did you get?”
“She gave a pretty detailed recount of the meeting between Petrov and Rahmani.” After providing the highlights, Smith said, “I made a digital file of the interview and sent it to you via secure link. Your comm guy there should see it any moment.”
“Okay, I’ll check.”
“Kravchuk also said the guy who brought them out had an SD card with an actual recording of the meeting. She said the two of them listened to it together before leaving Damascus.”
“Okay, we should have access to that soon.”
“Kravchuk and the others,” Smith said speculatively, “they’ve been asking about him—the guy who led them out.”
“He’s fine, made it out of Syria no problem,” she said, knowing Slaton might have viewed it differently.
“Good to hear, I’ll pass it on. Once Kravchuk wakes up, I’ll have another go at her. For what it’s worth, I think she’s legit.”
“I think so too. When will you arrive stateside?”
“According to the pilots, midday your time.”
“All right. Keep me posted.”
Sorensen cut the connection, then immediately looked at the comm officer. She wanted to compare Kravchuk’s interview with what was on the SD card Slaton was carrying. It was going to be a long night, but one thing was clear. Her two ongoing operations—one in Syria and the other in Sudan—were fast becoming one.
FIFTY-NINE
It seemed entirely fitting, Sultan thought, that he was viewing the desert around him in the light of a new day. His journey from Sudan had gone well—he’d caught the dawn flight out of Port Sudan to arrive in Baghdad, spent and weary, on a clear midmorning. A car had been waiting at the airport to deliver him on the final leg of what had once seemed an improbable journey.
“Finally, I have come home,” he murmured. He’d meant the words for himself, but the man next to him in the back seat responded.
“It must seem a very long time,” he said.
His seatmate was clad, rather asynchronously, in a worn Western business suit with a red-and-white keffiyeh framing his face. Such was the incongruity of present-day Iraq, a land trying to find its way in the world after so much war and sectarian violence. The endless national rehabilitations, the world-class corruption. The man sitting beside Sultan had lived through it all. His bushy black hair and mustache attested to his lineage every bit as much as his name: Ibrahim Ayman Al-Tikriti.
“It will be a large gathering,” Ibrahim said. “A handful will remember you. Friends, family, your father’s old business partners. Everyone remembers the old days fondly.”
“Everyone but me,” Sultan said.
“I should tell you to exercise caution—there will be a number of important clerics in attendance.”
“I suppose it is necessary.”
“Never underestimate the value of religion. The title you wish to claim is without parallel in the modern era.”
“The title I wish to claim is a matter of heritage and history—no one can deny my right.”
Ibrahim tipped his head to one side. “The Shiites control Baghdad and the south, but their grip is weak. If they lose Iran’s backing, they will be helpless. The Kurds are troublesome as ever, but they keep to their territory. They can be dealt with later. You will give true Iraqis the two things they desperately need; a war to preoccupy and weaken our enemies, and a legitimate leader who can reunite our nation.”
“You make no mention of the Americans. They still have a presence in Iraq, military bases.”
“It has fallen to only a token force. The Americans stay behind their walls. They will be distracted by this new war, and we should encourage them for a time, let them use our air bases freely. We can stand back and watch Saudis and Iranians annihilate one another. As they do, we will quietly get stronger, consolidate power. When the dust settles, a new Middle East will emerge, and the rightful ruler will be waiting to lead it—the Fifth Rashidun.”
Sultan diverted his gaze and looked searchingly out the window. The landscape seemed familiar, but he supposed it was not much different from Jordan. Thatched hardscape, distant brown hills. Plots of green rimming the wandering Tigris River. He wished the bond he felt was a direct memory, but that had never been plausible. He’d left this place when he was eighteen months old, bundled into a car with his mother and two guards—or so he’d been told. A fast ride to the airfield, an unrecorded departure. All because his father had deemed it so. And just like that, after a one-hour flight, his history, his very existence had been wiped away.
He, of course, remembered nothing of those days. Indeed, his mother hadn’t told him the story, had not confided his lineage, until his fourteenth birthday. Yet others here had never forgotten. Elders had tracked him from a distance, made sure he became educated. They kept the prospect of his return alive. They all knew the reason for his being expelled from the family. Knew that his mother had been exiled with him, in disgrace, apparently, for having issued a defective heir.
Ironically, in the end, that banishment had saved them both. And the clubfoot that had caused him to be shunned as an infant would only support his rise inside the hierarchy of faith. Blind clerics had once been all the rage. A cripple, surely, must be imbued with the wisdom of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
He looked down at his foot. It hurt more than usual, but that was to be expected after so much travel. The defect could have been surgically repaired after birth, at least in part. But his father had simply shunned him as imperfect. How ironic that, after so many years, he, the shamed and crippled child, was the one left standing tall.
The city of Tikrit began to encompass them. Sultan looked more closely, saw rows of grand buildings pockmarked from the wars. All seemed in various stages of recovery. What the city had suffered was incalculable, indeed the inverse of the largesse that had once been showered upon it. Twenty years ago, the roads had been the best in Iraq, the utilities the most r
eliable. Every member of the tribe who’d wanted work had found it. Those who didn’t were guaranteed food and medical care. Here in Tikrit, the pulsing heart of the nation, everyone was in the tribe.
The new government had appropriated the most ostentatious palaces, and of these there were many. The grandest, of course, had been built for his father, while others had risen for uncles and sisters and important patrons. Sultan had researched many of them on the internet, a parade of images documenting their besieged histories. The most famous had been either obliterated in battle or desecrated during occupations, the Islamic State reveling in the latter. Yet a few of the minor houses had come through unscathed.
The edifice that began filling the front windscreen did not look familiar. It was modest in scale, but in reasonably good shape. Even from a distance he saw intricate carvings in the sandstone, soft curves and expansive balconies.
“It is one of the few palaces to survive untouched,” Ibrahim said, following his gaze. “It was built for one of your cousins, but he fled to Greece just before its completion. The local council has taken control, although there is a rumor the governor wants to turn it into a tourist attraction.”
“That will not come to pass, God willing.”
Ibrahim looked at him and smiled approvingly.
The driver followed the semicircular driveway to a high portico. A uniformed guard was waiting, and he opened the back door. Ibrahim led the way. A soaring archway fed into a courtyard brimming with greenery, much of which, Sultan suspected, was not native to Tikrit. After passing through a massive pair of ornately carved doors, which seemed better suited to a mosque than a home, Sultan found himself standing on a floor of black-and-white tile in a checkerboard pattern. All along the edges, like so many pieces on a chessboard, two dozen men stood arranged in neat rows.
On some unseen command, everyone bowed their head and said in near unison, “As-Salaam Alaikum.”
The Fifth Rashidun responded in kind. He could not deny that he was moved. He’d left these old sands thirty-four years ago, before his second birthday. Yet somehow it felt intimately familiar. The faces around him were his people, the roof over his head their sanctuary. On the far wall he saw two flags. One was a variant of the black standard carried by the first four Rashidun Caliphs. The other was the flag of Iraq, although not the contemporary version. This red, white, and black tricolor displayed the three stars and handwritten message that had been removed in 2004: the takbir, “God is great,” that had been scripted in the regal hand of his father.
