by Jeff Rovin
“Thinks he may be there?” Williams said. “Is that the best you’ll give me?”
“You did not have eyes on, so yes,” Berry said. “You’d do the same if you were—” He did not bother to finish the sentence. “All right, parallel track,” he went on. “While everyone looks for him, there’s already talk about what to do with him when he’s found.”
“I guess that would depend on how he’s found,” Williams said. “Saddam preferred to be taken alive in a hole outside of Tikrit. His sons went down fighting in Mosul.”
“The consensus here and Homeland Security’s strategic psych assessment is that Ahmed Salehi is not Qusay or Uday Hussein.”
“No, he’s a veteran military man,” Williams said.
“Who did not go down with his ship after the strike from Elmendorf-Richardson AFB.”
“Correct,” Williams said. “He set fire to the Intrepid instead.”
Berry’s mouth twisted with annoyance. “All of which is premature and beside the current point. My feeling, frankly—and yours, too, I’m sure—is that it doesn’t matter whether he’s taken or taken down. We just want to get him.”
Williams did not dispute that.
“So, when we are done here, I will patch through to General Lovett so he can debrief his team,” Berry said. “While that’s going on, you rest while we arrange for you to be choppered to Leeward Point Field, Guantánamo Bay, and flown to Saudi Arabia. You will be equipped with local civilian clothes, cash, and a military escort to the Yemeni border where you will be met by Amit Ben Kimon. Any questions?”
“Is Amit your man? Apart from being Mossad?”
“He’s completely mine,” Berry said. “Converts large sums of cash for me while doing his thing for our friends at the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.”
“Without their knowledge?”
“On the contrary,” Berry said. “He gets a cut of every transaction and invests it with the Mossad’s venture capital division. Everyone benefits.”
Williams knew, from his work at Op-Center, that the Israeli spy organization invested heavily in cyber security and antiterrorism start-ups. It was an arrangement that gave them their own dark money funding and access to bleeding-edge tech.
“Money,” Williams ruminated. “Has Ben Kimon ever transported people?”
“I don’t know,” Berry admitted. “But I wouldn’t send you to him if I didn’t think he could handle this. And before you ask, I’m not paying him for this. If you get Salehi, Amit’s stock goes up in Tel Aviv. He’s been in Yemen for three years and change. He really needs to shake up his routine.”
Williams understood. At CENTCOM he had been in on debriefs of sleeper agents working with coalition partners, especially Tajikistan, Kuwait, and Nepal, among others. The phrase that always came to mind in these interviews was “burned out.” The psychological description that emerged from their medical checkups was more often than not “paranoid.” It was not just difficult living as someone else, it was difficult not developing sympathies with the people on whom you were spying. Even Saudi operatives who had infiltrated ISIS found themselves more militantly devout when they returned.
At the same time, Williams felt that one thing Op-Center had always lacked was deep-cover operatives. It was the ages-old battle between HUMINT and ELINT—human intelligence and electronic intelligence. Without the former, data and people like Salehi slip through any number of the digital surveillance. In this business, gut feelings were essential.
“So,” Berry said, “safe journeys, Chase. If I was a little hard on you about the pinpoint recon, I’m sorry. You did a helluva job in Trinidad.” He chuckled, but it sounded flat. “I thought that by this time you’d still be getting the lay of the land.”
Williams ended the video call. He couldn’t tell if there was a message between the lines: that maybe he should have taken it a little slower, that maybe it was their blitzkrieg approach that caused Salehi to leave early. And he might not be wrong to think that. Personally, Williams thought the operation was messy at worst and jury-rigged at best.
If we’re to have a safe journey, he told himself, Yemen will have to be better than that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dhamar, Yemen
July 23, 5:19 p.m.
Three years before, upon his arrival in Yemen, the first thing Ben Kimon did was prevent the rape of a teenage girl who was working on a coffee plantation. The act was not entirely altruistic; the attacker was Amit’s size and build and the Israeli wanted his clothes and Chinese-made motorbike. The seat was made from an old rug and the tassels that hung from the handlebars were sun-blanched and sand-blasted; no one would doubt that the owner had been driving through the rugged north country for many, many years.
The thirty-year-old Haifa native had entered the country in May 2016 posing as a Saudi oilman who was offering a fat suitcase filled with riyals for qat. There was a total of 100,000 riyals in 500 riyal notes; $26,666 in American money. Amit knew that because his new American friend Matthew Berry had told him so. Berry wanted to get the money into Yemen so he could track the banks in which they were being deposited.
The deal was made shortly before midnight, under a half-moon that provided some light but little exposure. Once it was concluded, Ben Kimon returned to the SUV he had driven into Yemen, hummed off toward the horizon, and stopped when he reached the foothills of the Sarawat Mountains. There, he spilled a bottle of lamb’s blood on the seat, smeared it across the door and handle, fired three 9mm rounds into the driver’s side door, and then let the vehicle roll off a cliff. If anyone found it—and if anyone wondered—they would surmise that the driver had gotten out and died somewhere else. The SUV would be stripped for parts and that would be the end of the matter.
Ben Kimon began walking then, pulling on the short beard he had grown, glad he had broken in his sandals and happy for the ventilation of his loose, ankle-length white cotton thobe. Though he had worn the clothes for weeks before his mission began, the operative was less happy with his headgear—his tagiyah, a white-knitted skullcap; his ghutra, a square silk scarf worn over it; and the agal, a thick black cord that kept the two in place. The simpler yarmulke of his Orthodox brother was less burdensome, though being as devout as Yossi came with burdens of its own. Ben Kimon’s rabbi father was openly surprised by his youngest son’s choice of careers. The young man did not have the chutzpah to tell him he would rather face terrorists than Talmudic scholars. Because then he would have added, “At least you can shoot terrorists.”
It was the very early evening of the next night when he happened upon the assault. The man was preoccupied with pinning the girl’s arms to the ground and did not hear Ben Kimon’s stealthy approach, did not feel the tight chokehold favored in Krav Maga combat, did not see the girl nod not once but twice when her savior presented a questioning look asking if he should finish the job.
She redid her headscarf and brushed down her dress, then ran off with a bow and a shakkran, a Yemeni expression of thanks.
Ben Kimon would have killed the man anyway. He really needed the motorbike, clothes, and possibly papers and family photographs the man might be carrying. Anything to build himself a life here and also remain mobile. Motorbikes were difficult to obtain since the government restricted their sale due to the proliferation of shoot-and-scoot murders of prominent politicians, businessmen, and foreigners.
That was then. The challenges were new, exciting. The potential to impress his superiors and to build a relationship with an American ally—a man who somehow knew where he was going and what he was intending to do—was something he had never dreamed of. From there, the future could be so many things. But Ben Kimon had not counted on the crippling burden of suspicion of everyone he met. Of having to watch human trafficking operate in the open, girls sold at home and abroad as slaves, boys turned into companions for depraved older men. Of being murdered when he laundered money for Matthew Berry. Every poor Yemeni—every poor soul he met from any
where in the Middle East and Africa—wanted cash. All it took was one greedy man with a gun or knife to decide he wanted more than had been agreed upon.
Ben Kimon missed women. He missed open, talkative, gregarious, sexual women who had not been beaten down physically and emotionally or were themselves afraid of a chance encounter with some man who felt they were shameless by his interpretation of Sharia law. The government in Sana’a had made token, occasionally sincere efforts to improve their lot. They created a Women’s Development Strategy and a companion Health Development Strategy—which they failed to enforce and which the rigidly patriarchal society failed to acknowledge. The worst part of it all was that Ben Kimon had to act like a Yemeni man or risk exposure. He could not court anyone, not with his itinerant and dangerous lifestyle—and the knowledge that he would leave them and any children at some point. There were options, of course. Almost daily he was offered girls, teenagers and younger; sex slaves who were often sold or offered by their parents. Suffering was burned into their eyes and their miserably strained smiles made it impossible even to think about them. But there was another, less heinous option. For that reason, he had finally broken down, this past year, and created a separate identity as Hisham Nuwas, a wealthy hotel owner from Qatar. With Matt Berry’s cash, it was an easy disguise to maintain. He did not have to use it all, just show a little of it to men he knew would not rob him. Six times over the years he had gone to prostitutes for what were called “tourist marriages” with Somalian refugees. Though prostitution was illegal for Yemeni women, punishable by three years in prison or worse, the government looked the other way when men from the Gulf states came for sex. They also came with a great deal of cash.
These occasional encounters were necessary biological experiences, emotionally dead, but those were times when there was very little to keep him going other than the body of a woman—and he took some consolation that these poor women were able to feed their children. They were closer to their families than he was and Ben Kimon was surprised to find himself missing them. The Mossad occasionally sent him updates, events like his brother’s marriage and first child and his mother being one of the winners of the prestigious Dan David Prize. One million dollars was part of the honor. After that last one, he would lie in bed at night, in the room he rented from a man who worked at a diesel-run power plant, and muse about his very different road to wealth. The more he thought about it, the more degenerate he felt. She was teaching history, he was moving contraband and occasionally cutting throats.
After these three years he felt like his conscience was drowning in a sea of brutish, suspicious, aggressive physicality. And he saw no way out as long as he remained here.
Unfortunately, before he was accepted for training by HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim—before he was taught colloquial Yemeni Arabic, exhaustively trained in the psychology and culture, and shown how to use all the weapons he was likely to encounter or purchase on the black market as well as how to send messages without being discovered—Ben Kimon had to agree to stay in-country for five years. Then, within weeks, his superiors signed off on the deal with Berry in exchange for an added year. At the time, it seemed like a wildly sensible trade-off. It mocked the old saying, “How do you make a million dollars in Israel? Start with fifteen million.” With the venture capital investments, the young man would come home wealthy. Only later did it occur to him that the six-year tenure had always been the plan. Berry did not randomly appear. There had probably been another Ben Kimon before him.
He never asked about that. There really wasn’t a way for him to ask any of his contacts anything. They sent messages via a sophisticated receiver disguised as an old cellular flip phone that no one would bother to steal and which would survive being run over by a truck. The screen was pre-cracked and inside that crack was a powerful fiber optic wire that received messages that were announced with a loud beep one minute before transmission, two beeps thirty seconds before transmission, and then lived on the screen for a minute then died. When Amit was on his motorbike, or asleep, he did not have a lot of time to stop and get to it. The tone had been pulled from a 1980s videogame so that it would be authentically archaic. Even if the nation’s brigands, terrorists, and corrupt officials had the sophisticated technology required to receive the signals, the communications were all too brief to be traced or tracked.
Ben Kimon heard from Matt Berry far more than he heard from his own people. When he did, it invariably meant a trip to Jizan or thereabouts to collect money. The Saudi courier was a banker who would physically remove the Israeli’s portion and show him the Bank Leumi, Haifa, receipt from his previous deposit. This time, however, the mission was different. Ben Kimon was to meet four Americans at the border and bring them to Sana’a. The Israeli made that trip often, was known in cafes along the way. It wouldn’t be difficult to come up with a cover story for the others. What puzzled him more was why they were here. Europeans and Americans stood out in Yemen—unbearded, uneasy, mute because they did not speak the local jargons and dialects. There had to be a powerful reason for coming, and it did not take a Mossad agent to figure out what that was.
The Americans attacked Yemen’s terrorist leaders with drones and occasionally piloted aircraft. He knew of no special forces operating here. The only target that required boots on the ground was Sadi in his bunker. And the only reason the Americans would suddenly want him was if he had something to do with the terror attack in New York.
And he didn’t, Ben Kimon knew. A shipping titan did not attack a ship. The reprisal would be swift, obvious, and very bad for business.
No, if Americans were here it meant that Ahmed Salehi was here. And if that were true, his capture or assassination would mean more to the Israeli than simple justice. If Amit Ben Kimon were the one to get him, he would have a ticket to wipe a year or two off his stay in this pit of hell.
Amit Ben Kimon had left his room and set out to make the 150-mile journey at a somewhat leisurely pace. If word of their presence had become known to the Yemeni intelligence forces, he would know by the additional traffic and gatherings of watchful outsiders in public places. It had been his experience that Yemeni intelligence operatives worked in groups of three or four—enough to offer some degree of mutual protection, but too few to merit a suicide attack.
As he mounted his motorbike in the sharp, slanting sun of early evening, Amit Ben Kimon did not see, hear, or feel the bullet that entered his brain from behind and ended his life.
* * *
Bader Abu Lahem of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, Ministry of Defense, stood over the corpse of this Yemeni who posed as a Qatari and moved around with large quantities of cash. The dead man was lying facedown with a corner of his head still rocking on the ground nearly a meter away.
“The price of sin,” he thought—not with judgment but as a matter of practicality. Local men should know their place and it was not in Gulf state whorehouses.
It was Lahem’s job to make sure Gulf state men who entered the country for sex left the country after sex. Given the tolerance of the government for that particular corruption, it was an easy way for Sunni insurgents to enter the country and then blend in with the populace.
The thirty-eight-year-old Shia agent—who had begun his career studying to become a translator before being recruited by the CTU—was one of the few holdovers from before the Shia insurgency began in 2004. Most intelligence agents were smart enough to collect and share intelligence information on the upward chain of command. They called it the Secular Barricade. For most of them, who were products of the slums, protecting their job was more important than advancing theology. In Lahem’s case, a homosexual encounter between the Minister of Education and a young friend—the friend being a cousin of Lahem’s who suddenly had a great deal of spending money—was what got Lahem into university. He chose a profession that, he hoped, would actually get him out of the country, possibly an embassy appointment. But his father was ailing and he needed an income. Both parents
were unable to work now, which was one reason he was here. His wife had her hands full with two young boys, and her small rug business contributed little to their economy.
The agent had been watching this man for several weeks after his visit to the whorehouse in the basement of a partially bombed-out brick apartment building on Almanzil Street. With a thumbnail-sized tracking device hidden under the rear fender of the motorbike, Lahem had tracked this man from a distance in his four-wheel-drive military truck, its markings painted-over. Cash came in and out from Saudi Arabia, always from the same location in Jizan, the regional airport. Lahem had come to know the suitcases and what they contained. He could earn a handsome profit from this trip, get his parents a more comfortable residence and, in the process, discover who in Saudi Arabia was providing Yemenis—most likely Sunnis—with funds.
Lahem checked the man’s papers. There was no photograph, which was not uncommon; there were few institutions that could be bothered taking them, and few documents that were authentic in any case. The dead man was Hisham Nuwas, and everything was up-to-date. Lahem would make it across the largely unguarded border with no difficulty. Twenty-five hundred riyal notes in the man’s documents would ensure it. The Yemeni agent had never seen that much money in one place, outside a bank. He felt wealthy already.
He also examined the man’s cell phone. It seemed old and fairly useless, but someone might call with information he needed. He had his own phone in his right pocket and put this one in his left. The CTU agent removed the tracker from the motorbike and crushed his own unit. That was not something he would wish to explain at the border crossing.
Lahem only knew by sight the man Hisham was supposed to be meeting in Jizan at the airport. Moreover, his past trips had been erratic in terms of time and duration. It didn’t matter. Lahem was a patient man. Whoever Hisham had been intending to meet, and whenever, they would meet Bader Abu Lahem instead.