by Tom Clancy
Friday finally left the private sector five years ago, bored with working for the oil industry. They had become more concerned with international profits than with the vitality of America and its economy. But that was not why he quit. He left the private sector out of patriotism. He wanted to work for the NSA full-time. He had watched as intelligence operations went to hell overseas. Electronic espionage had replaced hands-on human surveillance. The result was much less efficient mass intelligence gathering. To Friday, that was like getting meat from a slaughterhouse instead of hunting it down. The food didn’t taste as good when it was mass-produced. The experience was less satisfying. And over time, the hunter grew soft.
Friday had no intention of growing soft. So when his Washington contact told him that Jack Fenwick wanted to talk to him, Friday was eager to meet. Friday went to see him at the Off the Record bar at the Hay-Adams Hotel. It was during the week of the president’s inauguration, so the bar was jammed, and the men were barely noticed. It was then that Fenwick suggested a plan so bold that Friday thought it was a joke. Or a test of some kind.
Then Friday agreed to meet with some of the other members of the group. And he believed.
Oh, how he believed. They sent him here and, through contacts in Iran, he was put in touch with the Harpooner. Iran did not realize they were going to be double-crossed. That once they had an excuse to move into the Caspian Sea, a new American president would move against them.
And the Harpooner? He did not care. Friday and the Harpooner had worked closely organizing the attack against Battat and the program of disinformation to the CIA.
Friday was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. In case anyone saw him, that would support the story he would tell them. It was just one of the many stories he had perfected over the years to cover meetings he had to make with operatives.
Or targets.
Friday was glad the Harpooner had put one of his other men inside the hospital as backup. They had hoped that Friday would be able to get both Moore and Thomas while they were outside. But the way the ambulance was parked he did not have a clear shot at Thomas. Friday hoped the Iranian assassin had been able to get the other man. It would have been easier, of course, if Friday could have taken all three men out in the embassy. But that might have exposed him. The embassy was not that large, and someone might have seen them. And there were security cameras everywhere. This way had been cleaner, easier.
After firing the shot, Friday had dropped the rifle the Harpooner had given to him. It was a G3, a Heckler & Koch model, Iranian manufacture. He had others at his disposal if he needed them. Friday had tossed the weapon in a shallow pond near the hospital. He knew the local police would search the area for clues and would probably find it. He wanted it to be traced back to Teheran. Friday and his people wanted to make very sure that the world knew Iran had assassinated two officials of the United States embassy. The Iranians would disavow that, of course, but America would not believe the Iranians. The NSA would see to that.
The Iranians who were working with the Harpooner had made cell phone calls to one another during the past few days. They had discussed the attack on the oil rig and described the two pylons that had to be destroyed: “target one” and “target two.” The Iranians did not know that the Harpooner made certain those calls were monitored by the NSA. That the conversations were recorded and then digitally altered. Now, on those tapes, the targets the Iranians were discussing were embassy employees, not pylons.
In a phone call of his own, the Harpooner had added that the deaths would be a warning, designed to discourage Americans from pursuing any action against Iran in the coming oil wars. The Harpooner pointed out in the call that if Washington insisted on becoming involved, American officials would be assassinated worldwide.
Of course, that threat would backfire. After President Lawrence resigned, the new president of the United States would use the brutal murders as a rallying cry. He was not a live-and-let-live leader like the incumbent. Someone who was willing to cooperate with the United Nations to the detriment of his own nation. The assassinations, like the attacks on the oil rigs, would underscore that the United States had unfinished business from the previous century: the need to strike a decisive, full-scale blow against terrorist regimes and terrorist groups that were being protected by those regimes.
Friday entered his apartment. He saw the red light on his answering machine flashing. He walked over and played the message. There was only one, from Deputy Ambassador Williamson. She needed him to come to the embassy right away. She said that she had tried his cell phone but could not reach him.
Well, of course she could not. His cell phone had been in his jacket, and his jacket had been slung over a chair in another room. He had not heard the phone because he was in the bedroom of a woman he had met at the International Bar.
Friday called her back at the embassy. Williamson did not bother to ask where he had been. She just told him the bad news. Tom Moore had been shot and killed by a sniper outside the hospital. Pat Thomas’s throat had been cut by an assassin inside the hospital.
Friday allowed himself a small, contented smile. The Harpooner’s assassin had succeeded.
“Fortunately,” Williamson went on, “David Battat was able to stop the man who tried to kill him.”
Friday’s expression darkened. “How?”
“His throat was cut with his own knife,” she said.
“But Battat was ill—”
“I know,” said the deputy ambassador. “And either Battat was delirious or afraid. After he stopped the killer, he left the hospital by the window. The police are out looking for him now. So far, all they’ve found was the rifle used to kill Mr. Moore. Metal detectors picked it up in a pond.”
“I see,” Friday said. The assassin did not speak English. Even if Battat were lucid, he could not have learned anything from the killer. But Fenwick and the Harpooner would be furious if Battat were still alive. “I’d better go out and join the search,” Friday said.
“No,” Williamson said. “I need you here at the embassy. Someone has to liaise between the Baku police and Washington. I’ve got to deal with the political ramifications.”
“What political ramifications?” Friday asked innocently. This was going to be sweet. It was going to be very sweet.
“The police found the rifle they think was used in the attack on Moore,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this on an open line. I’ll tell you more when you get here.”
That was good news, at least. The deputy ambassador had concluded that the killings were political and not random.
“I’m on my way,” Friday said.
“Watch yourself,” Williamson said.
“I always do,” he replied. Friday hung up, turned around, and left the apartment. “I always do.”
THIRTY
Baku, Azerbaijan
Tuesday, 6:16 A.M.
The Harpooner and his team reached the oil rig just before dawn. The boat cut its engines one thousand feet from the nearest of the four columns. Then the Harpooner and four members of his Iranian team slipped into the water. They were all wearing wet suits and compressed air cylinders. Slipping beneath the dark surface of the sea, the men swam toward the rig.
Two of them carried waterproof pouches containing watergel high-energy explosives. The Harpooner had carefully injected the blue sticks with heat-sensitive pentanitroaniline. As the sun rose, the heat would cause the foil packet to warm. The sunlight itself would detonate the explosion.
Two other men carried an inflatable raft. This would allow them some stability underneath the platform. Many rigs had sensors on the columns and motion detectors along the sea line. Avoiding the columns and going under the motion detectors was the safest way to get inside the perimeter. Once the explosives were placed, it would be virtually impossible for the crew of the rig to get to them in time.
The Harpooner carried a spear gun and night-vision glasses. He would use the gun to fire the watergel
packets around the support struts beneath the platform. The Harpooner had brought along only a dozen of the seven-eighths-inch sticks of explosive. He had learned long ago that the trick to destroying something big is not necessarily to hit it with something big. In hand-to-hand combat, a foe could be driven back with a powerful roundhouse punch. He can be debilitated faster, more efficiently, and with more control, with a finger pressed against his throat, just below the larynx and above the clavicle. Hooking the top of a foot behind the knee and then stepping down with the side of the foot will drop someone faster than hitting them with a baseball bat. Besides, all it takes to neutralize a bat attack is to move in close to the attacker.
The Iranian oil rigs in the Caspian Sea are mostly semisubmersible platforms. They rest on four thick legs with massive pontoons that sink below the waterline. There is a platform on top of the legs. The riser system — the underwater component, which includes the drill — descends from the derrick, which is mounted on the platform. The key to destroying a platform like that is not to take out the columns but to weaken the center of the platform. Once that has happened, the weight of the structures on top will do the rest. The Harpooner’s team had been able to get copies of the oil rig blueprints. He knew just where to place the watergel.
The men reached the underbelly of the rig without incident. Though it was dark in the water, the higher struts of the rig caught the first glint of dawn. As the Harpooner eyeballed the target, two men inflated the raft while the other two attached a pair of watergel sticks beneath the tip of three spears. The twelve-inch-long sticks were carefully taped belly-to-belly. This configuration allowed the spear to be fitted into the tube muzzle. It also made sure that the sticks of watergel would not upset the balance of the spear. Though it would have been easier to assemble the package on the boat, the Harpooner had wanted to keep the watergel packets as dry as possible. Though moisture would not harm the explosives, wet foil would take longer for the sun to warm. These packets would only be exposed to direct sunlight for a half hour. He had to make certain they were dry enough — and thus hot enough — to explode within that time.
The raft was a six-man hexagonal platform. The Harpooner did not need it to hold six men. He wanted the larger size for stability. Larger rafts tended to ignore the smaller waves. That was important when he lay on his back to fire. He had removed the canopy to make it lighter. The large case in which it had been carried was discarded. The Harpooner climbed on board while the other men hung onto the sides to steady the raft even more.
The speargun was made of stainless steel. It was painted matte black to minimize reflected sunlight. The spears were also black. The weapon was comprised of a forty-inch-long black tube and a yellow grip and trigger at the end. Only a foot of spear protruded from the end. Normally, a rope was attached to the spears so that prey could be hauled back to the spearman. The Harpooner had removed these back on the boat.
There were six-inch-thick acoustic dampeners beneath the platform. They were located fifty feet above the sea. The hard rubber pads had been placed there to muffle the sounds of activity. This was done so that people who lived on the rig would suffer as little noise pollution as possible. The Harpooner had chosen his targets from the blueprints. He would fire two harpoons. The first would go into the padded area below and to the northeast of the derrick. The derrick was in the southwest comer of the platform. When the detonation occurred, the derrick would fall toward the center of the platform. A second harpoon would be fired into the platform at the point where the heavy center of the derrick would land. The second explosion, plus the impact of the derrick, would shatter the platform and cause it to collapse inward. Everything would slide to the center and tumble into the sea.
The Harpooner would not need the third harpoon to destroy the rig, though he did not tell his people that.
The terrorist donned night-vision glasses and lay on his back. The speargun had terrific recoil, equivalent to a twelve-gauge shotgun. That would give him quite a bump. But his shoulder could take it. He aimed the weapon and fired. There was a sound like a metallic cough and the spear flew through the dark.
It hit the target with a faint thunk. The Harpooner quickly repositioned himself to fire the second shaft. It, too, struck its target. He motioned the men to start back. As soon as the others ducked underwater, the Harpooner pulled the tape from the spear, grabbed one of the equipment bags, and slipped the watergel sticks inside. Then he slid into the water and followed his men back to the boat.
Upon boarding the vessel, the men dropped the remains of Sergei Cherkassov into the sea. On the way over, they had burned the body. It would look as though he had been killed in the blast. The photographs that had been taken from the airplane were already in his pocket. As far as the Iranians on board knew, the Russians and the Azerbaijanis would be blamed for the attack.
The Harpooner knew differently.
When Cherkassov was in the water, the boat departed. They were nearly out of visual range when the oil rig exploded.
The Harpooner was watching through high-powered binoculars. He saw the puff of yellow red smoke under the platform. He saw the tower shudder and then do a slow pirouette drop toward the center. A moment later, the muted pop of the first explosion reached the boat.
The Iranians on the deck all cheered. Which was odd, the Harpooner thought. Even though they thought they were doing this for the national good, they were happy about the deaths of at least one hundred of their countrymen.
A moment before the derrick hit, the second watergel packet exploded. The Harpooner had positioned the two to go off nearly at the same time. It would not have done for the derrick to crash, knock the spear from the rubber padding, and drop it into the sea. A second cloud of red and yellow smoke began to form, but it was flattened and disbursed when the derrick struck the platform. It hit with a small-sounding crunch. Debris flew into the morning sky, chasing away the distant gulls.
The entire rig shuddered. The whole thing reminded the Harpooner of a vignette he had seen as a child. A poplar tree had been split during a storm and fell across power lines. It hit them, bounced, then hit them again. The lines hung there for a moment before sagging and then ripping from the poles on the left and right. That was what happened here. The platform stood for a moment after the derrick struck. Then, slowly, the steel and concrete sagged where the second blast had weakened them. The platform bent inward. Sheds, cranes, tanks, and even the helicopter began sliding toward the crease. Their weight caused additional strain. The Harpooner could hear the ugly collisions in the distance, see the smoke and shattered pieces of wood and metal fly into the air.
And then it happened. The added weight was too much for the platform to bear. It cracked and dumped everything into the sea. The boat was now too far away for the Harpooner to make everything out. The collapse looked like a waterfall from this distance, especially when the cascade of white and silver debris hit the sea, sending up waves and spray.
As the rig disappeared beyond the horizon, all the Harpooner could see was a large ball of mist hanging in the new day.
He turned away, accepting the congratulations of the team. They were treating him like a football hero, but he felt more like an artist. Using the medium of explosives and a canvas of steel and concrete, the Harpooner had created a perfect destruction.
He went below to wash up. He always needed to wash after creation. It was a symbolic act of completion and of getting ready for the next work. Which would be soon. Very soon.
When the boat reached the docks, the Harpooner told the crew he wanted to go ashore. He told the Iranians he wanted to make certain that the Azerbaijani police had not already learned of the blast. If they had, the police might be checking incoming vessels. They might be looking for possible terrorists and also for eyewitnesses to the explosion.
The men thought that was a good idea.
The Harpooner told them that if he did not come back in five minutes, they should leave the dock and head to the open
sea. The Harpooner said that if the police were talking to people, stopping them from leaving the area, he would figure out a way to elude them.
The men agreed. The Harpooner went ashore.
Six minutes later, there was a massive explosion in the harbor. The Harpooner had stuck a timed detonator into one of the sticks of watergel. He had set it and then left it below, under one of the bunks. Evidence from the attack was still on board. It would take a while, but eventually the authorities would find traces of the watergel on the boat and on the rig and realize that the Iranians, aided by a Russian terrorist, had attacked their own operation. The Iranians would dispute that, of course, and tensions would rise even higher. The United States would suspect that the Russians and Iranians were working together to seize the Caspian oil wells. There would be no way to avoid what was coming.
The Harpooner got in the repainted van and drove it from the harbor. There were no police there. Not yet. At this hour, the Baku police force was involved primarily in traffic management and accident investigation. Besides, there was no indication that a boat had attacked the rig or that it had come to Baku. That would come later, when they found the Russian and the Americans had sent over satellite photographs of the region.
The Harpooner headed toward the Old City. There, he drove up Inshaatchilar Prospekti toward the hotels on Bakihanov Kuchasi. Two days before, he had taken a hotel room under an assumed name. Here he was Ivan Ganiev, a telecommunications consultant. It was a name and profession he had chosen with care. If he were ever stopped by customs agents or police, he could explain why he was traveling with high-tech equipment. And being Russian had another advantage, especially here. One that would help him get out of the country when the time came.
He had left clothing, gear, and cash in the room and a do not disturb sign on the door. He would clean himself up, dye his hair, and then take a long nap. When he woke, he would apply a fake mustache, slip colored contact lenses into his eyes, and call a cab to take him to the train station. A cabdriver was always a good hostage in case he was discovered and surrounded. He would use his fake passport to leave the city.
