The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  The deputy director of security stuck out his jaw defiantly. “You have misjudged the situation here, sir. You have greatly misjudged both me and the situation, I can assure you.”

  Ten minutes later Mark and Daria were led to a back room. The deputy director of security unceremoniously dumped a huge stack of flight records on a metal fold-up table.

  “The records you requested,” he said. Then, with some indignation, he made a point of saying that the airport security force had nothing whatsoever to hide and would assist the Department of Border Enforcement however they could, as quickly as they could.

  The flight records were in Kurdish. Daria was able to translate the headings of the different columns, explaining how one was for the date and time of each flight, one for the destination and point of origination, and another for the registration numbers of the individual planes.

  It was a low-traffic airport, with usually no more than ten arrivals and departures per day. Knowing the size of the runway—it was nearly two miles long—and seeing how little use it actually got, made Mark think that the Kurds must be an awfully optimistic group of people.

  Many of the registration codes popped up again and again, the same commercial planes making their biweekly runs to Dubai or Amman or Istanbul or Damascus. All Mark really cared about was a few days in July.

  He soon came upon a charter plane that had departed on the morning of July 16, at 7:05 a.m., headed for Dubai. Its registration code—M-GBHN—corresponded to a Lockheed Jetstar.

  It didn’t take long for them to check the rest of the flights. The Jetstar was the only Lockheed plane on the list.

  Daria, who was watching over his shoulder, said, “I don’t have any contacts in Dubai.”

  “I do,” said Mark.

  New York City

  Colonel Henry Amato was being driven down Forty-Second Street in a black Cadillac limousine, en route to the United Nations headquarters, when the call from Iraq came in. Lieutenant General David Obeir, a former protégé of Amato’s who’d stayed in Army Intelligence and had risen quickly through the ranks, was on the line.

  National Security Advisor James Ellis was also in the limo, reading a dossier on the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations—with whom he and Amato were about to meet. The meeting would be secret and pointless, Amato knew. The Iranian ambassador would pretend to be shocked at the US accusation that Iran was in the midst of a major military mobilization, and Ellis would pretend to be shocked at the Iranians’ denial.

  Speaking into his BlackBerry Amato said, “David, how are you?”

  Amato had felt uncomfortable asking Obeir for such a big favor—they’d never been personally close and hadn’t spoken in years—but Obeir had been decent about it.

  “NSA got a hit on the names you gave me.”

  Amato tightened his grip on his BlackBerry.

  “What’s the word?”

  “Mark Sava left Sulaimaniyah Airport three hours ago.”

  “Left

  “Yeah.”

  Which meant, thought Amato, that every cent of the $30,000 he’d wired private contractors—to watch both Esfahan and Ashraf—was down the drain. The Ashraf team wasn’t even supposed to arrive on site until later today.

  Dammit. He hadn’t thought it possible that Daria could have gotten so far so quickly. Dammit to hell.

  “When did he come into the country?”

  “We have no record of him entering, but he’s definitely on the departure list.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. He was traveling with a woman who checked in as Jennifer Tirani. But that’s almost certainly not her real name. The passport number matches a diplomatic passport stolen from a State Department rep in Baku a year ago. They’re both headed for Dubai, Iraqi Airways flight 180. They’ll touch down any minute. You got access to assets in the Emirates?”

  “Maybe.”

  Sure, he could get assets in place, but in time to make a difference? Amato didn’t think so.

  “Anyway, I just found out.”

  “I appreciate it, David.”

  After Amato hung up, Ellis said, “Who was that?”

  The limousine was passing through Times Square. Amato stared out at the electric-blue Chase Bank logo and Madame Tussauds and McDonald’s and the blinking NASDAQ tower with its LCD facade and streaming stock quotes…The intensity of the lights made him think, with something bordering on shame, of the Latin masses at Saint Mary, Mother of God, and of the mustiness of the old church, and he suddenly felt that those old ways, his old ways, didn’t stand a chance in this new world. He wasn’t even fighting for the old ways anymore. Somehow things had gotten all twisted up.

  “A guy I know from Army Intelligence,” said Amato. “He’s holed up in the Green Zone monitoring a couple of Revolutionary Guard units in Iraq. I want to be clued in when the Iranians really start panicking.”

  “Smart move.”

  Amato forced himself to turn his gaze from a giant billboard—advertising some action movie that he’d never see—to the screen of his BlackBerry.

  Ellis, who still hadn’t looked up from the file he was reading, said, “Any sign of panic yet?”

  “No. We’re still good.”

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  Nine years ago—the last time Mark had met up with Larry Bowlan—his old boss had still looked formidable. A bit grizzled perhaps, but with lines of experience that suggested a hard competence. They’d had a few too many drinks together.

  Those lines of experience had since deepened into lines of old age, Bowlan’s Adam’s apple had grown more pronounced, the skin that covered it sagged, his salt-and-pepper hair had gone completely gray, and he’d shrunk a bit.

  The Marlboro cigarettes he still chain-smoked used to seem like a cheerful poke in the eye to the young health nuts in the Agency, but now seemed more like a slow way to commit suicide.

  His appearance certainly didn’t suggest that this was a man who’d graduated from Yale with a degree in classical studies, although Bowlan had. He was old-school CIA, the white elite.

  Mark and Daria sat down across from him at a table in the Take Five restaurant at the World Trade Center Tower in downtown Dubai. It was really just a run-of-the-mill self-serve cafeteria, located a few floors below the US consulate. The surrounding tables were empty but the cafeteria lines were long because the Mahgrib salat, the evening prayer coinciding with the setting of the sun, had just ended, marking the end of the day’s fast.

  Bowlan palmed a large cup of cardamom coffee and glanced with disgust at the food line. He shook his head. “I can’t wait until this crap is over. Every restaurant closed from sunup to sundown and then it’s a feeding frenzy. Christ, just look at them go.”

  “It’s good to see you, Larry.”

  Bowlan smiled. “Good to see you too. An unexpected surprise.”

  “Kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  Mark introduced Daria. Bowlan shook her hand lightly and awkwardly, as though embarrassed by the huge gap between her youth and beauty and his current condition. He said it was a pleasure to meet her and asked whether her flight over was comfortable.

  Daria started to reply when Mark interrupted. “We’re in a bit of a time crunch, Larry. By the way, I’ve left the Agency.”

  “No kidding? On your terms?”

  “Mostly. I wasn’t pushed out.”

  “I don’t blame you for leaving. Kaufman’s a prick. I assume you heard that I came back.”

  “Yeah, I did hear that.”

  Five years ago, Larry Bowlan had been running his own station in Belarus. When Langley recalled him, instead of taking a figurehead position, he’d retired. A year later he’d begged to come back. Only he hadn’t been rehired at his former GS-14 level. Instead he’d been offered a temporary contract analyzing suspicious visa applications in US consulates and embassies abroad. It was roughly the equivalent of an executive vice president at a major company retiring and then coming back to work in the mail ro
om.

  Mark said, “Dubai’s the place to be—good for you.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Sava.”

  Mark had no love for Dubai. The place was like Disneyland. The tallest building in the world! An island resort shaped like a palm tree! A mall with a ski resort inside of it! But it was also true that Iranian and American spies were all over the city—the Iranians to keep an eye on antiregime activity and to protect the flow of black market goods going from Dubai to Iran, and the Americans to keep an eye on their business interests and on the enormous port of Jebel Ali, which the US Navy used more than any other port outside the United States. The whole spy-versus-spy game that had developed as a result reminded Mark of the Cold War.

  “It’s a spy’s paradise,” he said.

  “If you’re actually in the game. Which I’m not. But I’ll grant you that being a spectator is better than rotting away at home. Believe me, I tried rotting. A lot.”

  Mark tried to picture Bowlan gardening, or even just playing golf—ridiculous notions unless paired with booze and some duplicitous espionage-related scheme.

  “The thing is,” said Mark, “something’s come up. I’ve come back temporarily on a contract basis.”

  “Well, I hope they’re paying you better than they’re paying me.”

  “Two thousand a day.”

  “What?” said Daria. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You bastard,” said Bowlan. “Well, good for you. What’s the contract?”

  “You heard Jack Campbell was assassinated?”

  “Damn, they pulled you in for that?”

  “They didn’t have much choice.”

  “That’s big time.” Bowlan coughed.

  People were beginning to sit down at the tables now. The noise of chairs being pulled out, silverware clinking, and conversation was growing louder. Mark glanced around to assure himself that he couldn’t be overheard.

  “Who hired you?” asked Bowlan.

  “Kaufman. Larry, I could use your help.”

  Bowlan stared at him for a while. Mark noticed the thin spider veins around his nose, evidence that Larry still liked his cocktails.

  “Shoot.”

  Mark took the coffee-stained napkin out from under Bowlan’s coffee cup and scribbled down a series of numbers and letters. “This is the registration ID of a Lockheed Jetstar that flew from Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, to the airport here in Dubai on July sixteenth. I need to know where it went after it landed in Dubai, and who owns the plane.”

  Bowlan took the napkin and stared at it for a moment. “Why me? Why not go through Kaufman?”

  “Because Kaufman will want to know more than I prefer to tell him at this point.”

  “Whereas you figure you can get by without telling me jack shit, is that it?”

  “Pretty much. We have history, Larry.”

  Bowlan fingered the napkin. “I’m aware of that.”

  Mark had just been twenty-two years old when he’d first met Bowlan.

  “Can you do it?” Mark pressed. “Do you still have your security clearances?”

  “When do you need this?”

  “Now.”

  “Is this going to come back to bite me in the ass?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why don’t I feel reassured?”

  “Because you’re not an idiot.”

  “Meet me back here in an hour. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Bowlan returned to the restaurant at the appointed time and handed the napkin with the Jetstar’s registration code back to Mark.

  “The plane’s been sold—by a company called Bede Limited to a company called the Doha Group. Bede is registered on the Isle of Man and the Doha Group is registered in the Seychelles, but the Doha Group also has an address here in Dubai. The transaction took place here the same day the plane flew in from Iraq.”

  “Private companies?”

  “I think—couldn’t find either listed on any exchanges. Couldn’t find out who owns them either.”

  Bowlan handed Mark a few more sheets of paper. “This is everything I’ve got on the Doha Group. They’re a small oil services company whose specialty is injecting carbon dioxide into aging fields to boost production. Dubai address actually looks legit. I checked—it’s not just a mail drop.”

  Mark leafed through the information Bowlan had printed out. The Doha Group was operating in United Arab Emirates, and…“Says here they have a contract to develop the Maraj field in Iran?”

  “Yeah,” said Bowlan. “That’s their biggest project as far as I can tell.”

  “I know that field,” said Daria warily. Bowlan and Mark turned to her. “The Revolutionary Guard company that was supposed to redevelop it wound up backing out of the contract after getting paid for two years and doing nothing. A newspaper in Tehran made a stink about it, but the government killed the story.”

  Mark was reminded of how much Daria had taught him about Iran.

  It was common knowledge that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard troops were heavily invested in a variety of businesses throughout Iran. But Daria had dug deeper and found out the names of the life insurance companies and banks and shopping malls owned by the Guard—along with the names of the top generals who ran those businesses. And Daria had been the one who had given him a better sense of all the factions within the Guard: the professional soldiers truly dedicated to protecting the Islamic regime; the businessmen soldiers who only paid lip service to Islam; the politicians who only joined the Guard to advance their careers…It was a complicated organization, and no one knew it better than her.

  She said, “So if this Doha Group is working on the Maraj field, it’s because the Guard subcontracted the work. But I’m sure some general is getting a big cut out of whatever the Doha Group is getting paid.”

  Mark considered what Daria had told him. If anything he was more confused than ever.

  The MEK had stolen highly enriched uranium, allegedly to give to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But instead of handing it over to the IAEA, it looked likely that they’d instead transferred it to the Doha Group, a company that was tight with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

  But why? The MEK wouldn’t have stolen the uranium from the Iranians just to give it back to them.

  Mark said, “So this Lockheed Jetstar plane that Daria and I are tracking flies from Iraq to Dubai, and right after it lands in Dubai it’s sold to the Doha Group. Do we know what happened next? Is the plane still here?”

  “I made some calls,” said Bowlan. “The same day it was sold, it took off for Salalah, Oman. I know a Brit that works down at the embassy in Muscat. He talked to the Omanis. They have no record of the plane ever landing.”

  “So it just disappeared.”

  “It just disappeared.”

  “We could check other airports.”

  “There are a lot of airports out there. And half of them are private, or military.”

  With records that neither Bowlan nor the CIA would be able to get at, Mark knew. Bottom line was that if whoever was flying that plane had wanted to disappear, it wouldn’t have been difficult.

  “So we go after the Doha Group,” said Daria. “They bought the plane. Someone in the company has to know what happened to it.”

  Mark bought a new pack of SIM cards for his cell phone and checked into a room at a Ramada Hotel. Larry Bowlan met him there after telling the consulate he was sick and needed to leave early.

  “Just like old times,” said Bowlan cheerfully.

  “Something like that.”

  Bowlan called room service and ordered two Heinekens for Mark, two for himself, and a salad with fat-free dressing. He chain-smoked while he waited for the food and beer as Mark, who’d bummed a cigarette, kept an eye on a four-story limestone building just across the street.

  They talked about how screwed up Langley was until around five in the evening when men in business suits—some Caucasian, some Arab—started to trickle out of the building across the street. Most w
ere carrying briefcases. Some were picked up by taxis, others walked. Mark and Bowlan watched them all through binoculars.

  As each one left, Bowlan would study the guy and then say, “No.”

  This went on for the better part of an hour.

  Eventually Mark said, “Larry, you have to pick one. If you don’t, I will.”

  Down on the street, Daria waited to be told which one to follow.

  Another man left. “No,” said Bowlan.

  But then a long snow-white chauffeured Rolls Royce pulled up to the front of the building. A couple of minutes later a man in a dark suit strolled out to meet it.

  “That’s our mark,” said Bowlan.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Prey on the little guys—the weak, the young, the needy. That was the Larry Bowlan way. That was how Mark, when he’d only been a stupid and idealistic graduate student, had wound up a prisoner of the KGB in Soviet Georgia, forcibly addicted to heroin, sleeping in a deep ditch fouled with his own shit, and watching other prisoners get shot at point-blank range in front of him.

  You used the little guys to learn about the big guys. You didn’t start with the big guys.

  “It’s not his Rolls,” said Bowlan dismissively.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just by looking at it. It’s a white Phantom. Belongs to the Burj.”

  “What’s the Burj?”

  “The Burj al Arab. It’s a hotel, you’ve seen it.”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “Yeah, you have. Just drive to the coast. It’s huge, shaped like a sail.”

  “Oh, that thing.”

  Mark hadn’t known what it was called, but he’d seen pictures of it everywhere: on postcards, on advertising posters at the airport, even on the room service menu Bowlan had just ordered from. It was an enormous structure, shaped like the billowing spinnaker of an Arab dhow blowing in from the Persian Gulf. Dubai’s version of the Eiffel Tower.

  The chauffeur opened the rear door of the Rolls and their mark climbed inside.