Clean Kill

by Jack Coughlin

  The general wasted no time commenting on foreign and economic policies. That wasn’t his job. “Should we plan a military intervention?”

  “Something might be needed,” Chairman Jiang said, returning to his window to gaze at the gray sky. “Of course, it is too far away and not enough time. What is your opinion of making such a movement?”

  The general joined him at the window. Direct eye contact was to be avoided when speaking in such general terms, so they stared at the big, blank buildings. The ornate and distinctive Chinese architecture of ancient times had given way to monstrous, bland concrete boxes.

  “Looking at it from a normal military perspective, it is virtually impossible. Xinjiang Province in our northwest shares borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, but we cannot consider marching through either place. The Americans would stop us in Afghanistan and the Pakistanis would never agree. It would result in costly fighting and not get us much closer to the Saudi oil.”

  The chairman noted that the window that had been cleaned last night was already sandpapered again by specks of soot and dirt. “No, that would not be the answer. Perhaps there is something smaller that could protect our interests?”

  “The logical move would be to go through the United Nations and perhaps join, or even lead, an international coalition to protect one of the world’s major oil supply networks? We could also move units of the People’s Liberation Army to Africa, closer to Saudi Arabia, while the diplomats are debating.”

  The chairman agreed. “We may, however, have to move without UN approval, by claiming that the imminent danger forced us to act. Once we are in, we would offer to help establish an international force.”

  General Zhu Chi stiffened. “To be clear, comrade. We should consider actually capturing the Saudi oil fields?”

  “Just consider all options, comrade general. The UN could be a useful ploy to delay a countermove by Washington. It should not ultimately determine our decision.”

  “Then I shall leave you now, comrade, and order the planning staff to start working on possibilities.”

  They bowed slightly to each other, and the general headed back to the elevator. As it descended, he found his handkerchief and mopped his brow. General Zhu had 2.3 million men under arms in the PLA, a total military head count of seven million people, and could get uncounted millions more if needed. He had a generous budget and could also get more money, if needed. Somewhere in the matrix had to be an answer that might stop short of World War III. The first need was to put some new eyes on the ground.

  23

  JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA

  A LLAHU AKBAR! G OD IS Great! Mohammed Abu Ebara allowed the small metal chain to trickle through his fingers like a child’s toy, and then lifted it to eye level and examined its only ornament, a long-bladed key.

  It was part of the contents of an envelope that was hand-delivered to him by an excited imam who had personally sped down from Riyadh to explain the magnificent gift from God.

  “The material was entrusted to me by Vice Sergeant Mas’ud Mohammed al-Kazaz, our martyr who eliminated the heretic who commanded the Saudi Royal Guard Regiment.” The imam was nervous and afraid in the presence of the powerful leader of the Religious Police. He fished in an envelope and handed over a scarlet red card of thick plastic, stamped with a string of black letters and numbers.

  The imam bowed his head in reverence. “The vice-sergeant confided that the items now in your hands are the codes and key needed to launch a missile carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile is at the base.”

  Ebara wanted to shout in glee, but reined his emotions in tightly to show no weakness to the lesser religious figure. Inside his chest, his heart was beginning to soar. A nuclear weapon!

  “Anything more?”

  “Yes. This book.” It was a slim volume with a red stripe across the cover and the seal of the House of Saud. “It contains top secret military documents and I took the liberty of reading it on the trip down here, in order to spare you valuable time.”

  “What does it say?” Ebara let the book rest on a small table and did not touch it. To even extend a hand might display his eagerness and the imam might think him weak.

  “Although I am not a military expert, my reading of the material indicates that it contains the locations of five nuclear missiles within the kingdom, and instructions for computers, such as pre-set latitude and longitude positions of possible targets.”

  “Humnh,” Ebara grunted, then sucked in a deep breath. “You have done well, my brother. Leave this with me and return immediately to Riyadh. Tell no one of what we have been given. Your loyalty and alertness will be amply rewarded when the rebellion is concluded.”

  The imam stood and bowed. “Allahu akbar!”

  “The peace of the Prophet, praise be unto him, remain with you,” Ebara replied.

  W HEN THE OTHER MAN left, Ebara remained alone in the dimness of a large room in his mosque and let his thoughts weigh what was before him. Nuclear weaponry. This changes everything!

  He was a tall and gaunt man, whose robes hung loose around his bony frame. Thick black eyebrows met atop a long nose. The mouth seldom smiled behind the long beard. He had risen swiftly through the ranks of the Religious Police with his unforgiving view of the world as an evil place and his patchwork philosophy of violence that he could trace to specific parts of the Koran.

  Through years of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, he had taken control of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, and wore the trademark red headpiece with great pride. Ambition, hard work, and a single-minded dedication to power had paid off. Now he was at a peak of power, a place in which he could do no wrong simply because he was the one doing it.

  When the mysterious outsiders had come quietly shopping for an accomplice who might be installed to head a new government for Saudi Arabia, Ebara had been a natural choice. He was, by careful stages, outraged at the idea at first, then reluctant, and eventually, a full participant. In exchange, he had become extremely rich.

  The goals of the plotters had been mutual. A coup to displace the House of Saud with a stringent, theology-based government and a shift in the control of the petroleum production facilities. Ebara would become even more feared and ever more powerful.

  His only direct contact with the outside was with a German banker, Dieter Nesch. Through him, a message could be relayed to the president of Russia, who was funding the overthrow of the king. Ebara played with the key and the card and the book, thinking about the situation. The balance of power had tilted as suddenly as shifting sand in a storm, and Ebara, after all, was still a Saudi. Bargaining was part of his blood. The new weapons meant new negotiations. He could remain the visible head of the rebellion and ratchet up the pressure and the rhetoric, as outlined in the original plan, but more money could now be demanded, and more control must come to him in the eventual takeover of the oil business.

  The Russian should pay dearly for a workable cache of nuclear weapons already in place in Saudi Arabia.

  Still, Ebara knew nothing about nuclear bombs and such. He had not been recruiting scientists, since they were part of the intelligentsia that he had been targeting and persecuting for being in league with the current regime. The military still was unreliable, so those officers could not be trusted. Might some foreign scientists be hired to make these things work? No, it would take too long and tempt foreign rivals to enter the fray.

  Dieter Nesch was the one who funneled the money from Moscow that was making things happen, and it was Nesch who had personally found the terrorist known as Juba to run the tactical portions of the rebellion. So far, Juba had done a brilliant job. That was the answer. Juba would know how to use the missiles.

  Ebara shouted, and a young servant appeared. The boy was instructed to go immediately to the seaside villa of the European businessman and escort him back to the mosque for a private meeting. No topic was given. Just tell him to hurry.

  To impose a savage control on thi
s new situation, Ebara would order Dieter Nesch to immediately get the terrorist genius to emerge from hiding, fly into Saudi Arabia, and take direct control of the nuclear arsenal. He would work directly for Ebara. No one else.

  24

  KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA

  K YLE S WANSON INVADED S AUDI Arabia all by himself, scrunched in a window seat on an ancient King Air 90 twin-engine turboprop that was grinding its way south down the coast of the Arabian Gulf over the one hundred kilometers from Kuwait to the oil patch semiautonomous city of al-Khobz. His documents identified him as a specialist in fiber optic sensor security systems and stated that he was on contract with a company within the massive al-Khobz Joint Operations petroleum complex.

  The cream-colored plane was flying just out over the shoreline and Kyle watched as oil rigs, boats, piers and pipelines, storage tanks, and support facilities passed below the wing. There was a long, curving beach at the eastern edge of a cluttered city. At the western edge, bleached raw desert extended all the way to the horizon. Somewhere in between those borders, a nuclear-tipped missile was hidden. Kyle’s job was to find and destroy it.

  The border town at the tip of Saudi Arabia was a neutral zone shared by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and foreigners were plentiful, for the worldwide oil business created its own polyglot culture wherever it drilled, built, and manned the rigs and support facilities.

  Behind Kyle was a talkative Belgian engineer whose gabbing about his work on the offshore control system modifications filled the otherwise peaceful cabin. He was a geyser of meaningless statistics and acronyms and discussed at boring length how his company’s numeric instruments would work so much better in linking the digital measurements with onshore equipment so they could phase out the old tie-worm system. It was good cover. Swanson didn’t want to at talk all.

  Kyle tuned him out and took in the passing panorama, trying to remember the background briefing about Khobz that had been sent to him a few hours earlier by the Lizard, Trident’s brainy intel officer back in Washington.

  The city did not exist until a few decades ago. Back in those rough days, there was only a collection of a few huts near the beach, where traders did business with roving Bedouin tribes. Then the British discovered a huge reservoir of oil just offshore and money roared in. “Khobz” was the Arabic word for “bread” and was an appropriate name for the new settlement that had been created to farm the oil, which was on its own a guarantee of life-giving sustenance. Glittering new construction replaced the trader huts and the place grew daily. About two hundred thousand people now lived and worked there, with most of the foreigners residing in a special compound that was separated from the Arabs by a big fence, armed guards, and strict religious and cultural differences with their Saudi hosts.

  He liked what he saw, for cities were his sanctuary. Since he was a child roaming the narrow streets of South Boston, Kyle Swanson had been accustomed to the deep, subtle rhythms of metropolitan areas, learning the advantages and dangers of shadows and corners, rooftops and doorways. Nothing focused the attention on the streets like being a short six-year-old Irish kid running one step ahead of a gang of older Italian boys. The Marines and special ops training and experience had intensified that knowledge. Although the names, languages, and skin colors of the people might change, all cities shared things in common and those things were etched in his memory.

  Out in the open desert, a solitary man stands out in a landscape of nothing. Here, he could blend into the population as just another person. Swanson knew how to work cities and considered al-Khobz to be just another stop on the sniper bus, a new place in which he could be an urban predator. Something was going to happen here. He could smell it.

  T HE PLANE WAS OPERATED by the Boykin Group, one of the many small foreign contract companies that supported the oil operations, and it routinely made the hops between Khobz and Kuwait City, Qatar, Dubai, Bahrain, and the other nearby countries. It carried six passengers today: Kyle, the talkative Belgian, a Kenyan engineer working on the submarine fuel pipeline from a gas lift platform, two Malaysian rig rats, and a pleasant Chinese accountant from Hong Kong who was heading down for an audit.

  Kyle had mentally examined them all and decided it would be worthwhile to exchange greetings with the Chinese guy seated directly across the narrow aisle. The man introduced himself as Henry Tsang, immediately producing a pale business card with dark embossed Chinese symbols on one side and the English translation on the other: Henry Tsang, an accountant from a Shanghai auditing company. He wore blue jeans, a maroon golf shirt, and a blue baseball cap with a faded Beijing 2008 Olympics logo. The English was fluent, with a British accent that indicated an education in Hong Kong, and his handshake was strong. The skin had been hardened by exposure to the weather and a thin scar ran just above his right eyebrow, like a healed wound. Accountant, hell. This guy was no pencil pusher. The Chinese were sniffing around the oil patch. “Call me sometime. Perhaps we could have a lunch or dinner together,” Tsang said. “Do you have a card?”

  “Nope, but I do have a number.” Kyle scrawled his name and an 800 number on a slip of paper torn from the edge of a magazine and handed it over. They had opened a back channel: Muscle to muscle, spook to spook.

  Everyone on board wore a necklace of plastic credentials. They were just men coming to work, part of the ongoing, ever-changing force required to keep the wells pumping out three hundred thousand barrels of oil every day. Routine jobs, routine flight, routine day. The twin-engine aircraft slowed, lowered its wheels and joined the landing pattern that came in straight over the bustling city.

  A BULLET SMACKED INTO the right engine with a loud, tearing thud and the Belgian screamed, “They are shooting at us!” The King Air plane jolted sharply to its right as the engine began to smoke and a spinning prop stuttered. Several more rounds popped through the right wing, boring holes in the thin metal but not striking any fuel or electrical circuits. The window beside the Chinese accountant sang as a bullet glanced off of it with a loud smack, webbing the thick Plexiglas with fracture lines. Henry Tsang did not flinch.

  The pilot fought the aircraft under control and brought it level as a fire suppressant sprayed the smoking engine. Less than a minute after the shots were fired, the plane touched down on the long runway and began its roll to the terminal. The copilot leaned out of his seat and looked back down the aisle. “Emergency over. Anybody hurt back there?” he called.

  The pilot shut down the steaming engine and steered off the main runway toward the fire engines racing out to meet them.

  “You okay?” Swanson asked the Chinese man, who had seemed quite unperturbed that a bullet had just missed him.

  “Yes,” he replied. “That was exciting. Now I have a story to tell my children back home. Accountants like me don’t have many exciting stories.”

  Swanson just smiled. A normal accountant would have been pissing his pants.

  The small door opened and a man with a tanned, sweaty face stuck his head in. Obviously American. “End of the line, folks. Everybody out. Right now, and follow me to the minivan.” The six passengers hurried toward the hatch. Outside, fire crews had doused the wrecked engine with foam and a mechanic was opening panels to review the damage.

  The minivan had the same color scheme as the plane and magnetic signs stuck to the sides identified it as another vehicle of the Boykin Group. When everyone was aboard, the man who had met the plane slid into the front passenger seat. He had an old-style crew-cut with flecks of gray, was of middle age but still muscular, and wore wrinkled khaki trousers and a red-and-white plaid shirt with short sleeves. He adjusted his big body so that he could partially face the passengers. As the minivan moved toward the terminal, he dealt business cards to everyone and spoke with a pleasant voice that reflected Oklahoma roots.

  “I’m Homer Boykin, the head honcho of the Boykin Group, which is made up of me and my driver here, Jamal Muheisen. You might call us fixers. We arrange things. Any of y’all need anything while you are in
Khobz, just give us a call.”

  Swanson pegged him as an old-time oil roughneck who had worked his way off the platforms and into an office job.

  “You’re the third flight today that has been hit by random fire from the rooftops,” Boykin continued. “Only one person has been slightly wounded, but bet your asses that the landing patterns are going to change so we can circle in from the water. The powers that be don’t like air traffic other than helicopters flying over the rigs. Well, fuck them. We don’t like being slow targets.” The voice was steady and matter-of-fact, as if he was reciting dry data.

  The nervous Belgian spoke. He had lost all interest in telling everyone about his important job. “What is happening? The Saudis announced just this morning that everything was calm throughout the kingdom. Are we in danger?”

  The beefy American laughed and punched the shoulder of the driver, Jamal, who glanced at him with a touch of humor in his own eyes. “The Big Lie, boys. Things are still pretty quiet because of all of the security protecting the oil fields, but little ole Khobz is no bed of roses. I will personally escort y’all through customs, which is tougher than usual but still not a problem if you have the right papers and some baksheesh, bribes. You do have your IDs, right? I’m supposed to tell all of you that everyone is confined to the protected zone, absolutely no going beyond downtown, and that a nine o’clock curfew starts tonight.”

  Kyle asked, “So since the king is dead, who’s really in charge?”

  “The government is still in control, very truly so, but no successor has been chosen. Without the king to keep them in line, the Religious Police are getting pretty harsh and that’s building resentment among the locals. Some gangs are running around claiming to be enforcing their sharia law, through the quasi-governmental outfit called the Committee on Virtue.”