Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  “As-salāmu ʿalaykum,” Abdullah said, though peace was clearly not upon the boy.

  Whatever the boy said in response was lost in the meat of Shaher’s hand.

  Abdullah smiled at the effort. “I would like you to nod if you understand what I am about to tell you,” Abdullah went on. “Did you understand that?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Very good,” the warlord replied. “On my command, the wire around your ankle will be tightened. When it is, you will lose your right foot and your livelihood. Your right hand will follow, making it difficult to find any work other than begging. You may not bleed to death … but then again, you may. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded his head vigorously, nearly shaking off Shaher’s grip.

  “I offer you a far better alternative,” Abdullah went on. “Answer my questions and we not only let you go, we will pay you. You will work for us. Do you understand that?”

  The boy nodded again. Abdullah indicated for Shaher to remove his hand. Slowly, incrementally, the big man loosened his fingers. The boy made no sound, other than to pant as quietly as he was able. The Houthi leader raised his palm. The boy remained cooperative—and attentive.

  “What is your full name?” Abdullah asked.

  “Mūsá Basha, my lord,” he replied.

  The boy had used a traditional honorific for a fighter-chieftain. He might be young but he was worldly.

  “Mūsá,” Abdullah said, “you will whisper to me the identity of the individual whose information you carry.”

  “My lord,” the boy said, “my employers will take my sister and sell her in Riyadh. That is what they told me and my parents.”

  “They will not find out,” Abdullah promised him. “But if they find you here, with amputations, perhaps dead, they will assume you gave up the name and they will take your blessed sister anyway. Yes?”

  The boy did not deliberate long. He told them the man was a Sunni and a scholar of languages. Mūsá did not know his name but he told the fighters where they met at the University of Aden and at what time—at midnight. He did know the name of the Saudi who received the messages, but only because he heard it spoken when he handed envelopes to one of the seamen. It was Mahdi. The boy had seen him only once and provided a description.

  Abdullah thanked the boy and pressed a one-riyal note into his slender fingers.

  “You will be given more when we meet again, but you are cautioned to tell no one but your father of your newfound wealth, and then to spend it cautiously.” Abdullah signaled for Shaher to put the young man down and for the wire to be removed. He told the others to leave and moved from the darkness so that his eyes could be seen. “I will not tell you when and where we shall meet again,” the warlord said. “Inform anyone of what has transpired and it will not go well for you.”

  The boy said, “My lord, my family is Shia. Nothing has gone well for us since I was a child.”

  * * *

  Ibrahim Abdullah had not brought his phone with him. None of the men did. Sometimes, even warriors on the side of Allah lost battles.

  It wasn’t until several hours later, after they had slept, that he checked for messages. There were rarely any because of security concerns; this time there was one. He returned it at once. The call was very brief. It consisted of Abdullah listening while the man on the other end spoke.

  Abdullah spit after completing the call. He did not spit once but twice. He wished he had enough saliva for a third spit. His dislike of Sadi was as intense as the Houthis’ need for his finances. The feeling did not arise from their different points of view. They were both Shia, who believed that the son-in-law of Muhammad, Ali, was the Prophet’s true successor and that the three caliphs who came after were not. Sadi was profound in his faith. But he used his inherited money, not bravery, as a cudgel. And because they all needed it—the fighters and the politicians, even the ayatollahs—Sadi acted as if he were himself a caliph. A true Shia, a Muslim of any kind, should possess humility as much as he possessed faith and courage.

  I survive day to day, sometimes hour to hour, Abdullah reflected, while he can plan for the future. A man with that blessing should show more respect for the men on the front line.

  Abdullah had not taken the call—or spit—where his men could see or hear. He trusted them all, but torture could break even the most loyal warriors. And their enemies, the Saudis, the Sudanese, were experts.

  Despite the ever present dangers of his militant existence—in addition to the daily risks of living in a generally lawless state—the thirty-nine-year-old Houthi warlord had lived long enough to be known as the “old man” among his fighters. He had survived years longer than most of his fellow field commanders in part because his strikes were invariably bold and unexpected, and in part because of his conviction that he was destined to be an even older man among the triumphant Shia.

  Bareheaded and wearing a black Western-style blazer over his traditional white robes, Abdullah and seven members of his two-hundred-strong personal fighting force were oiling and cleaning their guns. As his second-in-command Khaled once observed, the weapons collect more sand than footwear on the beach.

  They were based in the Khormakser district of the port city where Sadi Shipping had many interests—as well as a storage facility where Ali and his people maintained cots, along with their Iranian-supplied weapons and communications systems. The Sadi warehouse gave him and his fighters cover to strike at the Sudanese troops backed by the Hanbali-Sunni Saudis, who had been trying to secure the city for four years. Sadi was also close to the Iranians, and in one way or another he was responsible for running both legal and illegal shipments to and from that nation.

  Ibrahim Abdullah understood the man’s importance to their cause. But the warlord had been ordered—not asked, instructed—by Sadi to break off his present plans and meet his private jet, which would be landing at the Hodeida International Airport at approximately two o’clock the following morning. After that, he was to bring the passenger to the warehouse, see to his needs, and wait for a call to take him to the tanker al-Wadi’i in the nearby port of Al Hudaydah on the Red Sea. There, they were to wait—to be attacked by a team of commandos.

  That was all the information Sadi had provided. It meant, of course, that there was no opportunity to go to the University of Aden and reconnoiter the Sunni scholar who was spying for the Saudis. He would survive to commit treason for another few days.

  Abdullah selected three men to go with him, told them to rest while the other four continued watching the professor’s movements. The four petitioned their leader to be permitted to carry out the assassination. But the plan they had just been working out called for eight men. They were going into an area heavily patrolled by Saudi puppets and a university where loyalties of the young were variable. He would not risk the others needlessly.

  No one argued with Abdullah. No one who served the man ever argued with Abdullah. Not because they feared him but because he commanded that level of esteem. Sadi’s wealth and the aggressive tactics of men like Abdullah had helped the Houthis to corner the black market on food and oil in Yemen. That had given them an enormous power base. That had allowed the Houthis to secure a great deal of legitimate power in the country. When the men in the field were finished, their grip would be absolute.

  But first we must nursemaid a friend or colleague of Mohammad Obeid ibn Sadi, he told himself.

  Abdullah resumed cleaning his weapon, trying not to become consumed with self-reproach for agreeing to something that would not permit him to plan and could conceivably endanger the lives of his men.

  He hoped that the visitor was worth the risk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  McMark Residence, Washington, D.C.

  July 24, 2:01 a.m.

  “You understand,” a hoarse President Midkiff said over the phone, “that what you’re doing could not just explode in your face, it could tear down my administration.”

  Matt Berry had left the Ova
l Office at 10:45 p.m. He had an important stop to make on the way home, but he had stayed long enough to fully brief the president on the activities of what he had dubbed Op-Center 2.0.

  “God save us from ‘semantic versioning,’” the exhausted president said as Berry had begun his briefing.

  The DCS had made it sound very positive, very much under control—as he felt it was, more or less. The part over which he had no control was the future, which the president understood.

  “What do we tell Hewlett?” Midkiff had asked.

  Abe Hewlett was the secretary of Homeland Security. To the annoyance of January Dow, the president had named him the point person on all incoming intelligence regarding Salehi. Midkiff had done it precisely because it did not sit well with January. She was jockeying too hard, too openly to make this operation her own. The mission itself seemed to be taking a backseat to that single-minded effort.

  “Let’s not tell him anything right now,” Berry said. “We have four people squarely in harm’s way. A leak could cost their lives and lose us Salehi.”

  The president had said he would go along with that, for the time being. If nothing else, it would give the other agencies time to triangulate their own intel, hopefully arrive at the same conclusion Williams and his team had reached.

  But Midkiff had obviously considered the potential blowback during the last hour and it was not sitting well.

  When the president called, Berry had been sitting on his new sofa, paid for by petty cash from the DLA. He was perched in front of the TV, still in his street clothes, watching a home renovation show to tire his eyes and mind. He muted the show but kept his too-wide eyes on the screen.

  “Mr. President, we have the same two objectives as we did when this started,” Berry said in the low, reassuring monotone he affected when he had to mollify the commander in chief. “The first is to capture or kill Salehi. We have the best opportunity to do that with the team that is en route to where we believe the target is headed. They are way downfield with the ball, no opposing players in sight,” he added to appeal to the football enthusiast. “If we rustle the leaves too much, he will vanish. Our second objective is to give General Lovett’s experiment, Black Wasp, a chance to work.”

  “You’re close to Chase Williams,” Midkiff said. “How much are you being influenced by that?”

  “Frankly, sir, not as much as I should be,” Berry admitted. “So far, he has supported my faith in him by giving Black Wasp its head. Consider, Mr. President: they went into and got out of Trinidad without a plan—just the four of them, two of them kids by comparison—and came away with more actionable information than our entire intelligence network! At the moment, their discrete nature is our greatest asset in this. They are following the trail in real time, not tracking it after the fact. That’s a very new tactic and I understand, sir, why it’s disconcerting.”

  “What did you mean about not being as concerned as you should about Chase?” Midkiff asked.

  “He’s a sixty-year-old military traditionalist who is running a democratically operated special ops force,” Berry said. “He’s not trained for this.”

  “Shit, Matt, that’s a big part of what concerns me here,” the president said. “He’s already dropped one ball—”

  “Making it vitally important to him that he doesn’t do it again,” Berry said. “Which, to answer your question, is why I should be concerned. I think he would trade his life to take Salehi down.” Berry watched a wall get plastered by a woman in very tight shorts. He shut the TV. “And the truth is, I’m okay with that.”

  The president was silent. Berry was troubled by the fact that he could even read the president’s moments of quiet. This was the impatient thoughtful Midkiff, breathing slowly through his mouth, not the unconvinced Midkiff breathing hotly from his mouth or the times-up Midkiff who had decided to move a plan in another direction and was exhaling fire from his nostrils.

  “All right, we give this quarantine—what? How many hours?” the president asked—as Berry had expected.

  “Flight lands around two-thirty p.m. Saudi time, that’s six-thirty a.m. our time—let’s revisit at noon after I’ve heard from my contact and hopefully Chase himself.”

  “I can go along with that,” the president said. “But don’t try and ‘revisit’ this in twelve-hour chunks. Barring an extraordinary or imminent development, there has to be a hard stop on the embargo sometime tomorrow.”

  Berry had picked up his tablet, was scrolling through files. “Do you remember what General Lovett said last month when we met with him for a preparedness update on the Wasp program?” He had opened a file and scrolled to a yellow-marked note. “‘The team burns through fuel like a Hummer. They will get results fast or not at all.’”

  “I remember,” Midkiff said.

  “I do not see this lasting very long at all, Mr. President.”

  Being reminded that there was a top military officer behind this program, this approach, that it was not just the bureaucrat Matt Berry, caused the president to exhale—tension gone, course maintained.

  “All right, Matt. It’s this day—the kind you don’t expect and you can’t screw up.”

  “We won’t,” Berry assured him.

  The president clicked off and Berry went back to the television. Like a flagellant, he went to the twenty-four-hour news channels and watched their coverage of the Intrepid, what they had somehow unanimously agreed was to be called “Assault on a Queen.” The same ghastly footage was shown over and over, with a “graphic content” warning.

  “You’re all milking this,” he muttered accusingly.

  There were images of the makeshift memorials in the street, the flowers, the notes, the teddy bears in sailor uniforms. There were services on other vessels and naval bases. Then—inevitably, every few minutes, cue more “graphic content” warnings of the carnage in Montreal. A crib photo of the dead Pakistani child, Amna, had been provided by her father and had somehow become the go-to image to illustrate the tragedy of the day. The anchors and reporters had stopped pointing out that she was not a victim of the Interpid but the granddaughter of the terrorist Dr. Akif.

  There were interviews with weeping family members, stunned neighbors of the victims, bicycle messengers and cabdrivers and passersby who had witnessed the attack. And, of course, there were the pundits. The terror experts, some of whom said we had brought this on ourselves by our reckless actions against Iran off the coast of Alaska—which they did not reveal because they did not know what those actions were. One woman actually trotted out, as legitimate, the explanation Tehran had provided for their vessel being there.

  “They were a geological research ship studying the undersea earthquake that occurred 155 miles off the shores of Chiniak, Alaska,” she intoned.

  “The assholes,” Berry thought.

  Then the intelligence and military experts cycled through, saying nothing new because there was nothing new. Some talked over Google maps revealing where the attack was planned, explaining how the attack was pulled off, speculating on how the terrorists escaped and where two of the three of them went.

  “To hell,” one anchor said—the only comment Berry liked. The others were all exhaling hot air.

  “Salehi will go back to Iran, where we must work to extradite him.…”

  “Salehi will go to an Iranian community in the United Kingdom or Austria, possibly even in Israel, where he will be hidden.…”

  “Salehi could only have gone to an Iranian community in the region, in any of the five boroughs, or he would have been found and arrested.…”

  There was, of course, speculation on “what’s next.” What new attacks, what military response, what sanctions. And then there were updates on “The Hunt for Salehi” illustrated with the security camera photo and one other Fox News had dug up, of the captain some ten years ago on the bridge of a ship.

  “I’ve been in the Oval Office during situations like these,” said one former national security advisor who ha
d been there so long ago the photos of him were even older than the shipboard image of Salehi. “The trail is cold and the hunt is stillborn,” the man said. “We have a diligent intelligence service, but they dropped the ball going into this and they are not equipped to quickly find a needle in a haystack. The system is a behemoth.”

  Berry clicked the TV off. It was bad enough to be living events with this carousel of noise, color, and nonsense. Terrorist acts were jarring enough, but the fear-mongering was how it spread and continued to breathe. And there was no useful reason other than it grabbed eyeballs, fueled ratings, and earned profits for the networks. Like so much of government, the goal was not serving the citizenry. It was personal enrichment.

  He peered into the now-dark den and drowsily reflected on the call from the president. It was a rare moment of candor and vulnerability from the normally collected, even courtly man. He was very clearly a leader who had reached the end of his endurance for governance … and for this day. And not just because the buck stopped on his desk.

  Everyone else was running a side operation. January, Allen Kim, Trevor Harward, Abe Hewlett, Berry himself—they all wanted first and foremost for the terrorist to face one kind of justice or another. But, as with the aftermath of September 11 and the long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the republic would endure. Berry knew from years of watching the History Channel that nations and empires were invariably destroyed from within, not from without. A populace always rallied to repel an enemy—then gnawed each other to death. At the end of this chapter, each one of them wanted to be standing tallest or with the best balance or, preferably, both. Berry was the dark horse, the deputy who had very little real authority but, unknown to all, had more power than any of them. He had cash, which, in the right hands, could destroy not just lives but small nations.