by Brad Taylor
He remembered the disbelief he had felt when the North Vietnamese had said a reconnaissance team was in the area. At first, he had dismissed the alarm, since he knew for certain where every recon team was targeted and had routinely passed that information on to the NVA. The nearest one was a full day’s walk from the camp. After the gunfire erupted, he had fled with his Chinese counterparts, desperate to beat the bombing that was sure to come.
Returning to his job as CIA liaison to MACV-SOG, he had been relieved to learn the team had died, then mortified to hear one man was MIA. He had lived in absolute terror for weeks, waiting for Chris Hale to pop out of the jungle and finger him. As time went on, and the man never appeared, the terror faded, only spiking briefly in 1973 when the POWs were released by North Vietnam. Chris Hale wasn’t among them.
Returning to the United States, he had forgotten all about the man, until the drive for MIAs in Vietnam had reached a fever pitch in the U.S. consciousness. He’d used his position as a newly minted congressman to be updated on the status of Hale and had done so every year since, more out of a perceived connection to the man than anything else.
He opened the report and felt a small sliver of fear. The only items listed were a reconnaissance journal and a camera. He immediately willed himself to calm down. No way any film has lasted this long, and even if it has, the odds of it having anything besides some bamboo bunkers is nil.
Just to satisfy his curiosity, he Googled “processing old film,” and felt the fear return. Apparently, it not only could be done, but it was done routinely. There were whole Web sites dedicated to finding old cameras at garage sales, developing the film, then trying to determine who is in the picture. Several companies were solely dedicated to developing outdated formats, and claimed success with film from the early 1900s. A roll of film from 1970 was well within the art of the possible.
He returned to the JPAC report, seeing the items were currently located in the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia and that the investigation was labeled INITIAL, which meant JPAC wouldn’t get to it for at least six weeks.
He closed out his account. He had too much on his plate to worry about it now. Just have to beat JPAC to the camera when I get back.
11
P
eering out of the grimy Kentucky Fried Chicken window, through the growing throngs of Egyptian tourists, Rafik saw a young man wearing a white shirt enter the café and look at his watch. At precisely one o’clock, he sat down and removed his sunglasses. Rafik waited. The man pulled a tattered paperback book from his pocket, thumbed through the pages, then placed the book facedown on the table, still open. So far so good. Rafik had never met the contact from the Muslim Brotherhood and didn’t know what he looked like. The only way he could be sure he wasn’t walking up to a stranger or into a trap was if the contact followed his instructions to the letter. When the man crossed his legs, the final signal, Rafik started to rise, then abruptly sat back down, a spike of adrenaline coursing through him. Left leg over right. Not right over left. To protect himself, he had given the contact an emergency signal. If the man was compromised and was making the meeting under duress, he was to cross his left leg over his right. If everything was fine, it would be right over left.
Rafik stared in disbelief, running through his mind all of the connections that could have lead to compromise. He came up with very, very few.
He saw the man give a small start, then recross his legs right over left. Rafik debated. The idiot probably just screwed up. Rafik knew he should leave and reestablish contact, but he was running out of time. A new meet might take another week to set up.
There was one more check he could do. The book was supposed to be on page 100. Anything else, and he’d leave. Approaching was a risk, but a small one. If the contact had been turned, the authorities would want the meeting to continue for the information they could glean. They wouldn’t make a hasty arrest.
Rafik left the KFC and circled around to the contact’s blind side. Walking as if he had another destination, he slipped into the seat next to the contact at the last second. He grabbed the book before the man could react and saw it was on page 100. He tossed the book on the table and said, “I’m the falcon. Follow me.”
He stood up without looking back and wound through the close-packed alleys surrounding the food court, getting lost in the Dumpsters and garbage. When he was sure they couldn’t be seen from any street, he turned abruptly, pulling a knife and thrusting the contact up against a grimy cinder-block wall.
“Empty your pockets.”
The man struggled for a second, until the knife bit into his neck. Then he sagged, doing nothing.
Rafik backed off a foot. “I said empty your pockets. And open your shirt.”
In short order, Rafik had determined that the man had no recording or transmitting gear.
“Why did you swap your legs?”
The man clasped his hands as if he was praying. “It was a mistake. I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m with you. I’m one of you.”
“You make a mistake like that again and we might all die.” Rafik raised the knife until it was a millimeter away from the contact’s left eye. “Understand this: If it happens again, one person will die for sure.”
The man twitched his head vigorously, attempting to nod without putting out his eye.
Rafik said, “I’m told that you are the man who can help me get into El Nozha Airport.”
The contact nodded his head but said nothing, apparently afraid to speak.
“And that there is a plane coming with special cargo.”
The man nodded again.
Exasperated, Rafik said, “Tell me something I don’t know. How are you, a mistake-prone child, capable of this?”
“It’s coming in at night. We don’t know when. My boss will get a call twenty-four hours before. I’m in the Army unit that provides security for the airport. Nobody checks anything there. I could dress up my mother in a uniform and put her on the gate. It’s a closed airport, after all. Nothing really to protect.”
Rafik knew that the aging El Nozha Airport had been closed for close to a month, with all commercial traffic diverted to Borg El Arab Airport outside of Alexandria. Whether this was for renovations or was a permanent condition, Rafik could never determine.
“And how is this plane landing at a closed airport?”
“I don’t know. Someone was given baksheesh, I guess. I only know that we’re being paid to turn on the runway lights for a period of three hours. The plane will land, do whatever it’s going to do, then take off again.”
Rafik already knew everything being said except the three-hour window. That would make things tight.
He knew that an American private air contractor had leveraged the chaos of the current Egyptian government by bribing several government departments to use the decrepit airport without any official knowing. Well, at least any official who was not on the payroll. He also knew the cargo, something this low-level foot soldier did not. Somewhere, during the six months of complex secret negotiations, using intermediaries throughout the Egyptian government, the cargo had been revealed. This knowledge meant little to most of the people involved, but one man, another member of the Muslim Brotherhood, had understood the significance and had sent a message to al Qaeda. Rafik had been lucky enough to be one of the many in the nebulous chain of the reporting used by the terrorist network. He was supposed to pass it along in its complex path to the al Qaeda leadership, but he instead chose to use it for his own plan.
For six months he had wondered if the message was real. If maybe he was basing a plan on a chimera. Sometimes, lying awake at night, he hoped it was fake. The mantle of responsibility was enormous, weighing him down like a wrought-iron chain around his neck. He had no grand organization like bin Laden’s. Outside of his small circle, men who would follow him into hell, he had to rely on others for help. Algerian contacts in Montreal, prison recruits in the United States, and radical members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. And h
e still had to convince another organization to provide him with an aircrew for the plane.
Today, though, all of that was forgotten. The aircraft was real, which meant the cargo was real. Soon, insha’Allah, his victory would be real.
12
B
ull and Knuckles were waiting for us when we returned to our hotel in Phnom Penh. “Any issues with the embassy?” Knuckles asked.
“No,” I said. “They didn’t even want an ID. It was strange. Like they couldn’t give me the stuff quick enough.”
“They probably just figured there was no way someone would fake a name like Nephilim.”
“That’s what I mean. Usually, I spend fifteen minutes trying to sort out the message traffic because some idiot changed my name to Nicholas or Nestor. This time Nephilim was right on the sheet, and when I said that was me, they started throwing the stuff my way.”
“Let me see it.”
I pulled the Nikon SLR out of my bag and tossed it to him. Jennifer began packing her suitcase, saying, “If we get out of here quick enough, we can catch today’s bus to Siem Reap. This little detour won’t cost us a day at Angkor Wat.”
Knuckles turned the camera over in his hands, then put it to his eye like he was taking a picture. He cocked the film lever and said, “Hey, I think this thing’s loaded.”
“Really?” I went over to him. “Careful. Don’t break it.”
He held it away from my hands. “I’m not going to break it. I’m going to get it out.”
He unfolded the rewind lever and began to crank, with me hovering around like a nervous hen.
Jennifer put her hands on her hips. “Come on, guys, let’s pack. We’ve got plenty of time to mess with that camera on the bus. Bull, can you pack up the laptop?”
“Don’t force it,” I said. “If it won’t crank, let it go.”
“I’m not forcing it. Calm down.” He continued winding until we both heard the lead spin inside the camera. He smiled. “See. It’s done.”
Opening the back, he pulled out a roll of black-and-white Kodak TRI-X film. Exasperated, Jennifer said, “Pack up your stuff. Please. We’re going to miss the bus.”
From behind her, Bull said, “Yeah, pack your stuff. But don’t worry about the bus.”
He was looking at our corporate Web site, pulling up our e-mail through a VPN.
“What’s up?” I said.
“We got a mission.”
Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Jakarta, Indonesia, playing with my smartphone. Jennifer was sitting across from me, looking a little peeved. I guess I didn’t blame her. We had left Cambodia immediately, without going to Angkor Wat, and chances were we wouldn’t be going back.
She said, “I thought we weren’t allowed to do this stuff until we had the business established.”
“Well, ordinarily that’s true, but it’s the risk that counts. This can’t be too much adventure. Probably something simple that Johnny would rather not do for whatever reason.”
All the message on the VPN had said was that Johnny—meaning Johnny’s team—needed some help and had given the location of the coffee shop with a time. Because of our separate covers, Johnny wouldn’t contact us directly but would use a digital dead-drop instead. We’d never even see anyone from his team. Someone would just walk or drive by and launch the message from their smartphone to ours, using an encrypted Bluetooth connection. When it was done, there’d be no history of the transmission that would connect us, unlike a cell phone text message, e-mail, or a call.
Jennifer said, “What if it’s not something simple? Maybe it’s something that could jeopardize our company. Are you going to do it?”
“It depends. I won’t know until I see it. Anyway, you know how I feel about that. The company’s just a means to an end. Not an end unto itself. You start worrying too much about that shit, and you end up paralyzed, never doing anything for fear of burning something.”
A long time ago, I had had a teammate almost die because another government agency refused to help. He survived, but in the after-action review, I found out that we’d been left high and dry because the other agency was afraid of blowing its cover. The method that facilitated the operation had superseded the operation itself. I had decided then and there that I’d never let cover stand in the way of a critical mission. I wouldn’t do anything stupid, but I also wouldn’t let it paralyze me.
She said, “Yeah, I remember what you told me, but we haven’t even started yet, and we might be destroying what took six months to build. That’s something to consider, isn’t it?”
Apparently, she was still wondering if I was a loose cannon like I had been when we first met. Before I could answer, my phone vibrated.
“It’s here.”
Jennifer looked a little startled, then glanced around trying to spot the teammate, which I knew was a losing proposition.
The message was a location for a physical dead-drop. I called Knuckles and relayed the directions.
Jennifer said, “Did it even say ‘should you choose to accept it’ or anything like that?”
I smiled. “Nope. Let’s get Bull and Knuckles their coffee orders and see what this is about.”
By the time we returned to the hotel, Knuckles had serviced the dead-drop, retrieving an encrypted thumb drive. He had it in our computer and was reading the screen.
“Well,” I said, “what’s the mystery?”
“Nothing big. Looks like Johnny’s tracking a guy named Noordin Sungkar. He’s supposed to be a facilitator for Jemaah Islamiyah and runs a travel agency here in Jakarta.”
Jemaah Islamiyah, or JI, as we called them, was an Indonesian terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda. Like every other fanatic associated with AQ, they wanted an Islamic state based on Sharia law and were constantly blowing shit up to accomplish it. They were responsible for the Bali massacre in 2002 that killed more than two hundred innocent tourists.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s that mean to us?”
“Well, they’ve been trying to get a handle on this guy for a while. They’ve been watching his travel agency for over two weeks now. So far, nothing. All they want us to do is go inside and see if we can confirm or deny he even works there. If eyeballing the place is a waste of time, they want to know.”
“I still don’t get why they called us. Just go in there, for Christ’s sake.”
“There’s CCTV cameras all over the building. They’re afraid of pulling a Dubai if they have to hit the guy here in Indo.”
A couple of years ago, someone had whacked a Hamas leader named al-Mabhouh in Dubai. Since he’d freely admitted to the stone-cold killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, the odds-on favorite was the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Whoever it was did it pretty smartly and had successfully exited the country, but the Dubai police unraveled the plot by looking at every CCTV video in the entire city, piecing together who had done what, starting with the dead guy’s hotel. It had turned into a huge diplomatic row when it was discovered that the killers had used falsified passports from European Union countries. Dubai had also spread the killers’ faces, taken from their passports, all over the worldwide news. Johnny was afraid of the same thing happening to them and wanted to avoid any CCTV footage linking anyone on his team to the target. Which made sense to me.
“So all he wants us to do is go in there and confirm or deny his presence?”
“Yep. And I don’t want to do it, for the same reasons as Johnny. I could end up with this target two months from now.”
“I don’t want you to do it either. I want Jennifer to go.”
Jennifer jumped up. “Me? I’m not an… I’m not in the Taskforce.”
“You’re not what?” I said.
Knuckles said, “I think that’s a great idea. It’s a travel agency, so you can just do what we were already doing. Find some old shit here in Indo that we can go look at. That should make you happy.”
She looked from Knuckles to me, then at Bull, who n
odded his head with a grin.
“Jesus Christ. What a bunch of babies. Let me see the instructions.”
13
C
ongressman Ellis looked at his watch. He had rushed over to the Cairo convention center to meet his contact while the rest of the delegation got over jet lag at the hotel, but he couldn’t spend a great deal of time here before the delegation began to wonder where he was. He expected a quick meeting, and now didn’t like the answers he was getting. “What do you mean you can’t do anything?” he said. “This guy has a camera that might have my picture on it with Chinese officers. It could destroy our relationship.”
Han Wanchun gave a little shrug. “What on earth do you want me to do? I’m a simple businessman. I cannot help it if you get in trouble.”
“Don’t give me that shit. I have a copy of his passport and his last itinerary. He’s in Jakarta right now. That’s close enough for your people. We need to get that camera.”
Han was attending the international trade fair in Cairo as a representative of the Great Wall Industry Corporation, hiding his association with the People’s Liberation Army.
“You wish me to track someone down in Jakarta while I’m in Egypt? I think you’re growing a little paranoid. Is there something else I should be aware of? Something to do with our business?”
“I’m not paranoid. Just careful. The camera was in the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia. It should have stayed there until I could get to it, but somehow this man managed to get them to hand it over, against regulations. I did some digging on him, and he owns a company that has no history. No travel, credit purchases, or anything else. It stinks.”
Han smiled. “So you think this company is fake? A costume for something else?”
Exasperated at the dance, Ellis said, “Yes, just like your damn company. I’m not asking you to fly to Indonesia. Get some friends in the MSS to do it.”
Han looked at the booths to his left and right, making sure nobody next door had heard the outburst. Ellis realized he’d overstepped. While they both knew how ludicrous the pretending was, Ellis had never outright called any of his Chinese contacts liars or mentioned their association with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the organ that conducted foreign espionage.