Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  On the first pass he got the mansion on the tip of the peninsula, with its protective wall and huge gate, plus the fields being tended by estate workers, rows of barns and farm buildings, and the chain-link fencing that separated the fields from the cluster of cuboid white cabanas that seemed to be the workers’ village.

  Several people looked up, and he saw two in uniform start to run. Then they were over the estate and heading for French territory. On the pass back, he had the pilot fly inland, so that from the right-hand seat he could see the estate from the landward angle. He was looking down from the peaks of the sierra at the estate running away to the mansion and the sea, but there was a guard in the col below the Piper who took its number.

  He used up his second roll on the private airstrip running along the base of the hills, shooting the residences, workshops and the main hangar. There was a tractor pulling a twin-engined executive jet into the hangar and out of sight. The tailfin was almost gone. Dexter got one brief look at the fin before it was enveloped in the shadows. The number was P4-ZEM.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Jesuit

  Paul Devereaux, for all that he was confident the FBI would not be allowed to dismantle his Project Peregrine, was perturbed by the acrimonious meeting with Colin Fleming. He underestimated neither the other man’s intelligence, influence nor passion. What worried him was the threat of delay.

  After two years at the helm of a project so secret that it was known only to CIA Director George Tenet and White House anti-terrorist expert Richard Clarke, he was close, enticingly close, to springing the trap he had moved heaven and earth to create.

  The target was simply called UBL. This was because the whole intelligence community in Washington spelled the man’s first name, Usama, using the letter ‘U’ rather than the ‘O’ favoured by the media.

  By the summer of 2001 that entire community was obsessed by and convinced of a forthcoming act of war by UBL against the USA. Ninety per cent thought the onslaught would come against a major US interest outside America; only ten per cent could envisage a successful attack inside territorial USA.

  The obsession ran through all the agencies, but mostly through the anti-terrorist departments of the CIA and the FBI. Here the intention was to discover what UBL had in mind and then prevent it.

  Regardless of presidential edict 12333 forbidding ‘wet jobs’, Paul Devereaux was not trying to prevent UBL; he was trying to kill him.

  Early on in his career the scholar from Boston College had realized that advancement inside the Company would depend on some form of specialization. In his younger days, in the blaze of Vietnam and the Cold War, most debutantes had chosen the Soviet Division. The enemy was clearly the USSR; the language to be learned was Russian. The corridors became crowded. Devereaux chose the Arab world and the wider study of Islam. He was regarded as crazy.

  He turned his formidable intellect to mastering Arabic until he could virtually pass for an Arab, and studied Islam to the level of a Koranic scholar. His vindication came on Christmas Day 1979; the USSR invaded a place called Afghanistan and most of the agents inside CIA headquarters at Langley were reaching for their maps.

  Devereaux revealed that, apart from Arabic, he spoke reasonable Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and had a knowledge of Pashto, spoken by the tribesmen right through Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and into Afghanistan.

  His career really took off. He was one of the first to argue that the USSR had bitten off far more than it knew; that Afghan tribes would not concede any foreign occupation; that Soviet atheism offended their fanatical Islam; that with US material help a fierce mountain-based resistance could be fomented which would eventually bleed white General Boris Gromov’s Fortieth Army.

  Before it was over, quite a bit had changed. The Mujahedin had indeed sent fifteen thousand Russian recruits back home in caskets; the occupation army, despite the infliction of hideous atrocities on the Afghans, had seen their grip prised loose and their morale gutted.

  It was a combination of Afghanistan and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev that between them put the USSR on the final skidpan to dissolution and ended the Cold War. Paul Devereaux had switched from Analysis to Ops and with Milt Bearden had helped distribute one billion dollars a year of US guerrilla hardware to the ‘mountain fighters’.

  While living rough, running, fighting through the Afghan mountains, he had observed the arrival of hundreds of young, idealistic, anti-Soviet volunteers from the Middle East, speaking neither Pashto nor Dari, yet prepared to fight and die far from home if need be.

  Devereaux knew what he was doing there: he was fighting a superpower that threatened his own. But what were the young Saudis, Egyptians and Yemenis doing there? Washington ignored them and Devereaux’s reports. But they fascinated him. Listening for hours to their conversations in Arabic, pretending he had no more than a dozen words of a language he spoke fluently, the CIA man came to appreciate that they were fighting not communism but atheism.

  More, they also entertained an equally passionate hatred and contempt for Christianity, the West and most specifically the USA. Among them was the febrile, temperamental, spoilt offspring of a hugely rich Saudi family, who distributed millions running training camps in the safety of Pakistan, funding refugee hostels, buying and distributing food, blankets and medicines to the other Mujahedin. His name was Usama.

  He wanted to be taken as a great warrior, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but in fact he was only in one scrap, in late spring 1987, and that was it. Milt Bearden called him a spoilt brat but Devereaux watched him carefully. Behind the younger man’s endless references to Allah, there was a seething hatred that would one day find a target other than the Russians.

  Paul Devereaux returned home to Langley and a cascade of laurels. He had chosen not to marry, preferring scholarship and his job to the distractions of wife and children. His deceased father had left him wealthy; his elegant town house in old Alexandria boasted a much-admired collection of Islamic art and Persian carpets.

  He tried to warn against the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan to its civil war after the defeat of Gromov, but the euphoria as the Berlin Wall came down led to a conviction that, with the USSR collapsing into chaos, the Soviet satellites breaking westwards for freedom and world communism dead in the water, the last and final threats to the world’s only remaining superpower were evaporating like mist before the rising sun.

  Devereaux was hardly home and settled in when in August 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At Aspen President Bush and Margaret Thatcher, victors of the Cold War, agreed they could not tolerate such impudence. Within forty-eight hours the first F-15 Eagles were airborne for Thumrait in Oman, and Paul Devereaux was heading for the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

  The pace was furious and the schedule gruelling, or he might have noticed something. A young Saudi, also back from Afghanistan, claiming to be the leader of a group of guerrilla fighters and an organization called simply ‘The Base’, offered his services to King Fahd in the defence of Saudi Arabia from the belligerent neighbour to the north.

  The Saudi monarch probably also did not notice the military mosquito or his offer; instead he permitted the arrival in his country of half a million foreign soldiers and airmen from a coalition of fifty nations to roll the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and protect the Saudi oilfields. Ninety per cent of those soldiers and airmen were infidels, meaning Christians, and their combat boots marched upon the same soil as contained the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Almost four hundred thousand were Americans.

  For the zealot this was an insult to Allah and His prophet Muhammad that simply could not be tolerated. He declared his own private war, firstly against the ruling house that could do such a thing. More importantly, the seething rage that Devereaux had noticed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush had finally found its target. UBL declared war on America and began to plan.

  If Paul Devereaux had been seconded to Counter-Terrorism the moment the Gulf War was over and wo
n, the course of history might have been changed. But CT was a too-low priority in 1992; power caused to William Clinton; and both the CIA and the FBI entered the worst decade of their twin existences. In the CIA’s case, that meant the shattering news that Aldrich Ames had been betraying his country for over eight years. Later it would be learned that the FBI’s Robert Hanssen was still doing it.

  At what ought to have been the hour of victory after four decades of struggle against the USSR, both agencies suffered crises of leadership, morale and incompetence.

  The new masters worshipped a new god: political correctness. The lingering scandals of Irangate and the illicit aid to the Nicaraguan Contras caused the new masters a crisis of nerve. Good men left in droves; bureaucrats and bean-counters were elevated to chiefs of departments. Men with decades of frontline experience were disregarded.

  At eclectic dinner parties Paul Devereaux smiled politely as congressmen and senators preened themselves to announce that at least the Arab world loved the USA. They meant the ten princes they had just visited. The Jesuit had moved for years like a shadow through the Muslim street. Inside him a small voice whispered: ‘No, they hate our guts.’

  On 26 February 1993, four Arab terrorists drove a rented van into the second level of the basement vehicle park below the World Trade Center. It contained between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds of home-made, fertilizer-based explosive called urea nitrate. Fortunately for New York, it is far from the most powerful explosive known.

  For all that, it made a big bang. What no one knew for certain and no more than a dozen even suspected was that the blast constituted the salvo at Fort Sumter in a new war.

  Devereaux was by then the deputy chief for the entire Middle East division, based at Langley but travelling constantly. It was partly what he saw in his travels and partly what came to him in the torrent of reports from the CIA stations throughout the world of Islam that caused his attention to wander away from the chancelleries and palaces of the Arab world that were his proper concern into another direction.

  Almost as a sideline, he began to ask for supplementary reports from his stations; not about what the local prime minister was doing, but about the mood in the street, in the souks, in the medinas, in the mosques and in the teaching schools, the madrasas, that churn out the next generation of locally educated Muslim youths. The more he watched and listened, the more the alarm bells rang.

  ‘They hate our guts,’ his voice told him. ‘They just need a talented coordinator.’ Researching on his own time, he picked up the trail once again of the Saudi fanatic UBL. He learned the man had been expelled from Saudi Arabia for his impertinence in denouncing the monarch for permitting infidels onto the sacred sand.

  He learned he was based in Sudan, another pure Islamist state where fundamentalist fanaticism was in power. Khartoum offered to hand the Saudi zealot over to the USA, but no one was interested. Then he was gone, back to the hills of Afghanistan where the civil war had ended in favour of the most fanatical faction, the ultra-religious Taliban party.

  Devereaux noted that the Saudi arrived with huge largesse, endowing Taliban with millions of dollars in personal gifts and rapidly becoming a major figure in the land. He arrived with almost fifty personal bodyguards and found several hundred of his foreign (non-Afghan) Mujahedin still in place. Word spread in the bazaars of the Pakistani border towns of Quetta and Peshawar that the returnee had begun two frantic programmes: building elaborate cave complexes in a dozen places and constructing training camps. The camps were not for the Afghan military; they were for volunteer terrorists. The word came back to Paul Devereaux. Islamist hatred of his country had found its coordinator.

  The misery of the Somali slaughter of the US Rangers came and went, caused by rotten intelligence. But there was more. Not only was the opposition of the warlord, Aideed, underestimated, but there were others fighting there; not Somalis but more skilled Saudis. In 1996 a huge bomb destroyed the Al Khobar towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen US servicemen and injuring many others.

  Paul Devereaux went to see Director George Tenet.

  ‘Let me go over to Counter-Terrorism,’ he begged.

  ‘CT is full and it’s doing a good job,’ said the DCI.

  ‘Six dead in Manhattan, nineteen in Dhahran. It’s Al Qaeda. It’s UBL and his team who are behind it, even if they don’t actually plant the bombs.’

  ‘We know that, Paul. We’re working on it. So is the bureau. This is not being allowed to lie fallow.’

  ‘George, the bureau knows diddly about Al Qaeda. They don’t have the Arabic, they don’t know the psychology, they’re good on gangsters but east of Suez might as well be the dark side of the moon. I could bring a new mind to this business.’

  ‘Paul, I want you in the Middle East. I need you there more. The King of Jordan is dying. We don’t know who his successor will be. His son Abdullah or his brother Hassan? The dictator in Syria is failing; who takes over? Saddam is making life more and more intolerable for the weapons inspectors. What if he throws them out? The whole Israel–Palestine thing is going south in a big way. I need you in the Middle East.’

  It was 1998 that secured Devereaux his transfer. On 7 August two huge bombs were detonated outside two US embassies in Africa: at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

  Two hundred and thirteen people died in Nairobi, with four thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two injured. Of the dead, twelve were Americans. The explosion in Tanzania was not as bad: eleven were killed, seventy-two injured. No Americans died, but two were crippled.

  The organizing force behind both bombs was quickly identified as the A1 Qaeda network. Paul Devereaux handed his Middle East duties to a rising young Arabist he had taken under his wing and moved to Counter-Terrorism.

  He carried the rank of Assistant Director, but did not displace the existing incumbent. It was not an elegant arrangement. He hovered on the fringe of Analysis as a kind of consultant but quickly became convinced that the Clintonian rule of only employing sources of upright character as informants was complete madness.

  It was the sort of madness that had led to the fiasco of the response to Africa. Cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory on the outskirts of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, because it was thought the long departed UBL was manufacturing chemical weapons there. It turned out to be a genuine aspirin factory.

  Seventy more Tomahawk Cruises were poured into Afghanistan to kill UBL. They turned a lot of big rocks into little rocks at several million dollars a pop, but UBL was at the other end of the country. It was out of this failure and the advocacy of Devereaux himself that Peregrine was created.

  It was generally agreed around Langley that he must have called in a few markers to get his terms accepted. Project Peregrine was so secret that only Director Tenet knew what Devereaux intended. Outside the building the Jesuit had to confide in one other: White House Anti-Terrorist Chief Richard Clarke, who had started under George Bush Senior and continued under Clinton.

  Clarke was loathed at Langley for his blunt and abrasive criticisms, but Devereaux wanted and needed Clarke for several reasons. The White House man would agree with the sheer ruthlessness of what Devereaux had in mind; he could keep his mouth shut when he wanted; more, he could secure Devereaux the tools he needed when he needed them.

  But first, Devereaux was given permission to throw in the trash can all talk of not being allowed to kill the target, or use to that end ‘assets’ who might be utterly loathsome, if that is what it took. These permissions did not come from the Oval Office. From that moment Paul Devereaux was performing his own very private high-wire act, and no one was talking safety nets.

  He secured his own office and picked his own team. He headhunted the best he could get and the DCI overruled the howls of protest. Having never been an empire-builder, he wanted a small, tight unit, and every one a specialist. He secured a suite of three offices on the sixth floor of the main building, facing over the birch and osier towards the Potomac, just out
of sight save in winter when the trees were bare.

  He needed a good, reliable, right-hand man: solid, trustworthy, loyal; one who would do as asked and not second-guess. He chose Kevin McBride.

  Save in that both men were career ‘lifers’ who had joined the company in their mid-twenties and served thirty years, they were like chalk and cheese.

  The Jesuit was lean and spare, working out daily in his private gym at home; McBride had thickened with the passing years, fond of his six-pack of beer on a weekend, most of the hair gone from the top and crown.

  His annual ‘vetting’ records showed he had a rock-stable marriage to Molly, two youngsters who had just left home and a modest house in a residential development out beyond the Beltway. He had no private fortune and lived frugally off his salary.

  Much of his career had been in foreign embassies, but never rising to chief of station. He was no threat, but a first-class Number Two. If you wanted something done, it would be done. You could rely. There would be no pseudo-intellectual philosophizing. McBride’s values were traditional, down-home, American.

  On 12 October 2000, twelve months into Project Peregrine, Al Qaeda struck again. This time the perpetrators were two Yemenis and they committed suicide to achieve their goal. It was the first time the concept of suicide bomber had been evoked since 1983 in Beirut against US armed forces. At the Trade Towers, Mogadishu, Dhahran, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, UBL had not demanded the supreme sacrifices. At Aden, he did. He was upping the stakes.

  The USS Cole, a Burke-class destroyer, was moored in harbour at the old British coaling station and one-time garrison at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Yemen was the birthplace of UBL’s father. The US presence must have rankled.

  Two terrorists in a fast inflatable packed with TNT roared through the flotilla of supply boats, rammed itself between the hull and the quay and blew itself up. Due to the compression between the hull and the concrete, a huge hole was torn. Inside the vessel, seventeen sailors died and thirty-nine were injured.