by Ross Sidor
The Viper looked out for her contact.
Very little was capable of surprising her, but she definitely did not expect the fit European-looking man sitting at the park where Kashani had said to find him. She’d anticipated a Middle Easterner or one of the Latino converts to Islam Iran recruited in South America. After first spotting the man, she walked past him and then doubled back, thinking that this was not possibly the Iranian agent. But it was. The rolled-up copy of the City Paper Bogotá in the man’s left hand and the backpack resting on the ground near his left foot provided confirmation.
Despite the recognition signals, it was his eyes that gave him away. They were light blue and focused, highly aware, and attuned to his surroundings. He was dressed casually in tan pants and a blue polo shirt that was just loose enough to conceal his well-built shoulders and chest.
He remained seated where he was and made no move until she approached him and initiated contact by stating the pass number, seven. A pass number is the same as confirmation statements, which most people knew from bad spy movies, but numbers were simpler, easier to remember, and less idiotic.
On cue, the man provided the appropriate response, “thirteen,” and their identities were established to their mutual satisfaction.
He grabbed his backpack and accompanied the Viper down the path leading out of the park. Trujillo stayed with them, and Ibarra went ahead to start the car.
“What should I call you?” the Viper asked, knowing she would never know his real name, but it was easier to have something to call him.
“David.”
This was the name on his forged Canadian passport, Social Insurance card, and driver’s license, but his birth name, known only to a select few, was Mirsad Sidran. It had been several years since he’d heard anyone use that name, and the last had been his mother, who died shortly before he left his native Bosnia for the last time.
He was one of Quds Force’s most highly valued assets and one of the West’s greatest fears, an invisible. Sidran was a Muslim veteran of the war against the Serbs and had subsequently assisted Iranian intelligence operations in Western Europe. Not once in his life had he ever stepped foot within the Islamic Republic of Iran or entered any of its embassies. American security agencies would never be able to establish any ties between him and Iran or its terrorist affiliates.
Presently assigned to Quds Force’s North American branch, Mirsad Sidran had been dispatched to the United States and Canada for intelligence collection and to perform security assessments of potential targets in American cities for retaliation against American or Israeli first strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. One of his proposals to his superiors was a series of coordinated strikes against American airliners with shoulder-fired missiles.
Able to discard his accent or adopt an American or German accent at will, and fluent in American colloquiums, Mirsad Sidran could freely travel the United States and live amongst Americans without drawing the scrutiny from law enforcement agencies and the suspicions from civilians that inevitably faced Arabs, Iranians, or Pakistanis. He understood American society—or at least he understood how it functioned, as American social behavior and values still mystified him—and he knew how to avoid catching the attention of an observant police officer on routine patrol or a nosey neighbor. He could drink a beer at a local bar and talk baseball, or he could talk to a stranger on a subway train about what it was like growing up outside Toronto.
He’d entered Colombia the previous day from a secret Iranian base in Venezuela, where he received his briefing from Kashani, who carefully outlined Mirsad Sidran’s mission. He wasn’t there so much to assist the Viper, as he was to ensure that she was not taken alive by the Americans or their allies, as well as see to it that, however events played out, she did not live past the end of Plan Estragos.
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The Viper selected an Avianca flight as her first target. Aerovías Nacionales de Colombia, or National Airways of Colombia, is the country’s flag carrier, as well as the second largest airline in South America. It was an impulsive decision on the Viper’s part, to hit a target of opportunity, but she was well familiar with El Dorado International Airport from previous target reconnaissance and assessments, and she had contacts there that had helped her smuggle weapons out of the country in the past.
So the first thing she did upon arriving in Bogotá was leave a note in a shared airport locker that was used as a dead drop to exchange messages with Martin Garcia, an operating engineer. The note simply indicated the time and location for a meeting. Later that afternoon, face to face, the Viper explained to Garcia what she required.
Mirsad Sidran objected to the deviation from plan and the impulsivity and lack of discipline the Viper’s decision demonstrated. Before planting a bomb at an American army barracks in Iraq or assassinating an Israeli diplomat, Hezbollah or Qods Force spent months in the planning stages, learning everything they could about the target and its environment, and leaving nothing to chance.
But Sidran kept his concerns to himself, knowing the Viper was too insecure and defensive to take anything he said into consideration. So he stayed out of the way and observed. Besides, it was far better for the whole operation to unravel here rather than later in the United States.
At the safe house, Sidran gave the Viper agents a primer on SA-24. The weapon was simple to use and almost fired itself. The Viper once used an earlier Russian-model missile to bring down an American drug eradication plane, and Benito Trujillo had experience on similar weapons from his time in the Peruvian army.
The following day, Martin Garcia procured for the Viper an official 4x4 service truck that belonged to Operadora Aeroportuaria Internacional, or OPAIN, the consortium of construction and engineering firms that managed the airport’s operations in conjunction with Flughafen Zurich AG, a Swiss company.
El Dorado is twenty minutes from Bogotá’s downtown area, which is itself an urban space the size of New York or Mexico City. El Dorado is one of the largest airports on the continent and one of the busiest in the world. This meant tight security, including a US Air Force Combat Arms Training and Maintenance (CATM) contingent, but the Viper knew that even the strictest security systems were still fallible to human error
The main passenger terminal area was presently undergoing extensive renovation, and there was another construction project underway to expand the cargo terminal, so the airport was even more hectic than usual, with all manner of construction vehicles coming and going, and the Viper fully intended on using this to her advantage.
The Viper travelled with Benito Trujillo in the borrowed OPAIN truck. Trujillo drove. Wearing worker’s overalls with her hair concealed beneath a cap, Arianna sat in the passenger seat. The forty-two pound, five foot long launcher with a twenty-six pound missile sat in the truck’s bed, wrapped in canvas and concealed beneath rolled-up tarps and a ladder. The OPAIN staff badges clipped to Arianna’s and Trujillo’s shirts allowed them to breeze past the Colombian security officers and onto an access road leading onto the airfield.
If the security officers could have been bothered to take half a minute to stop the truck and give the IDs even the barest cursory examination, they would have seen that the pictures on the badges did not at all resemble the occupants of the truck. Instead the officers demonstrated the laziness and complacency common to those doing a long shift of guard duty.
Trujillo slowed but didn’t come to a complete stop as he approached the security checkpoint. He lowered his window and held up his ID and security badge, and the guard waved him through without a second thought.
The Viper directed Trujillo where to go.
He swung the truck behind the cover of the maintenance building and pulled to a stop several yards into the grassy field near the southern banks of the Bogotá River, just over a mile from the control tower and even further from the airport terminals.
The truck barely came to a complete stop within the five hundred foot gap between El Dorado’s two main run
ways before the Viper swung her door open and hopped down from the cab. She came around to the back of the truck, unrolled the canvas wrapping around the missile, and heaved it out of the bed. She leaned it upright on the ground against the truck’s fender and checked the time. It was 4:43PM.
The target was Avianca Flight 224, departing at 4:45PM on Runway 13L-31R for New York. The plane was an Airbus A320, and well over a hundred of its one-hundred-fifty seats were to be filled, according to the ticketing information Ibarra had obtained. Many of the passengers were Americans.
The whine of the A320’s two turbofan engines picked up and carried over the airfield, and the Viper heard the jet accelerating down the twelve-thousand foot long runway. She had her back to the maintenance building, the open grassy field and river in front of her, so that she would be presented a clear field-of-fire.
The Viper hoisted the SA-24 onto her shoulder, angling the long missile/launch tube combo upwards into the sky. She placed her left hand beneath the battery coolant unit at the front of the launch tube to help support the weight, with her right hand clasped around the grip stock. Her index finger reached around right of the grip stock to flip the arming switch from “safety” to “arm.” The battery powered up the missile’s systems. Once activated, the battery lasted less than a minute and needed to be replaced after each launch.
There was the howling scream of the engines as the Airbus lifted off the ground, but the Viper did not see the aircraft until two seconds later as it passed over the low maintenance building behind her. The aircraft’s nose was pointed steeply up as the Airbus darted into the sky. The Airbus’s massive shadow passed over the Viper as she tracked her target through the launcher’s iron sights while half-applying the trigger. She recalled the words of Mirsad Sidran in her head, instructing her on how to use the weapon in both a manual engagement and automatic mode. The latter was necessary for use against fast moving targets, like a fighter jet equipped with defenses. The former was sufficient for the giant, helpless civilian airliner.
The Viper elevated her aim to match the aircraft’s ascent. The Airbus was at a thousand feet altitude and sharply rising, maybe a mile away from her now. Her finger depressed the trigger the remainder of the way. She felt the kick of the grip stock and the back blast of the heat exhaust several feet behind her. She flinched for a second, blinked, and when her eyes flicked open they followed the smoke contrail through the sky as the missile, guided by the infrared and ultraviolet sensors in its thermal seeker head, travelled at four-hundred-seventy meters per second toward its target.
Adding to SA-24’s lethality, even if the missile did not achieve a direct hit, its proximity fuse would detonate when it passed within five feet of the target, spraying the targeted aircraft with high velocity shrapnel fragments. Quite simply, there was no escape from SA-24.
The plane’s flight crew had no warning of the missile launch and, even if they did, they had no defenses against it, like chaff, flares, or jamming capabilities. The missile impacted the Airbus in the undercarriage below the rear inlet for the auxiliary power unit, which provided the power to start the aircraft’s engines. The impact immediately detonated the fragmentation warhead’s two pounds of high explosives.
If the missile had hit a wing, where fuel is stored, the entire aircraft could have exploded in mid-air. Instead, in this instance, those inside the doomed Airbus felt the impact and the extreme turbulence as the aircraft’s flight was destabilized as a result of the shredding of its tail structure and rear fuselage by the explosion and the subsequent shrapnel. This was followed by the quite abrupt and terrifying descent as the Airbus dropped through the sky and returned toward the earth. The pilots tried to maintain control of the aircraft. It was a futile effort from the start, but they weren’t going to simply give up without at least giving the people under their care a chance at living through this. Passengers screamed, held onto whatever they could, and others were thrown from their seats. Some remained quiet, accepting and making peace with their impending end. Several of the passengers seated in the very back of the cabin were already dead or wounded, bloodily sliced apart by shrapnel. Thick black smoke poured out of the flaming hole in the fuselage where the missile hit, while pieces of luggage flew into the sky through the perforated cargo bay.
The second the missile connected with the Airbus, the Viper had turned around on her feet and climbed with the launch tube into the cab of the truck. When the 110,000lb plane collided into the earth and broke apart, she felt the ground shake beneath her feet.
Trujillo threw the truck into gear and pressed the accelerator, taking them back across the airfield. Not long later, fire trucks and ambulances with sirens blaring raced past them, heading in the opposite direction toward the crash site. The presence of the emergency vehicles and first responders was exactly why the Viper opted not to use the narrow access road cross the Bogotá River on the northwest end of the airfield, near the crash site.
They abandoned the OPAIN truck and proceeded on foot through the terminal building, which was now filled with police and USAF Security Forces personnel as word quickly spread of the crash. Despite personnel in the control tower having witnessed a smoke contrail, indicating a missile launch, this information had yet to be passed along, so the authorities thought they were dealing with an accident.
Carlo Ibarra waited in a Nissan Pathfinder in the lane of vehicles picking up newly arrived passengers. The Viper and Trujillo climbed in. Ibarra pulled into the traffic on the outbound lane of Avenida El Dorado, which ran nine miles from El Dorado to downtown Bogotá. After covering two miles on the highway, they exited and made their way into Bogotá’s Engativá locality, where the Viper’s safe house was located.
TWELVE
Eighteen hours later, National Police officers waved the Lincoln Continental through the front gates of the US Embassy compound in Bogotá. Avery and Culler got out and identified themselves to the marine security guards at Post One, near the main entrance, where Avery flashed his ID and the green badge identifying him as a CIA contractor. Culler had called the station chief earlier to clear Avery, and Avery was handed an additional bar-coded badge giving him access to the embassy’s most secure areas.
The building itself is one of the largest and most expensive American embassies in the world. The white fortress-like compound with dark reflective glass sat atop bright green, flawlessly maintained lawn. Satellite dishes and antenna jutted out from the roof of the main building. Monserrate, a 10,000 foot tall mountain in the center of Bogotá, was prominent in the background, reaching up toward the low clouds. In addition to serving as one of America’s most opulent diplomatic outposts, the embassy also housed one of the largest regional American intelligence bases in the world.
Avery followed Culler into an elevator, down a corridor, past another security checkpoint, and through the cipher-lock doors into the top secret Intelligence Fusion Center. Known as the Bunker, this is a small, enclosed, windowless Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), a fortified, copper-plated room-within-a-room secured against all manner of internal and external electronic and audio surveillance.
Manned twenty-four hours by a rotating staff of CIA analysts and NSA signals and communications specialists, this is where American intelligence agencies track enemies of the Colombian state all across the country. Intelligence collected in the field was analyzed and relayed to regional fusion centers by the Real Time Regional Gateway, an NSA-designed computer link-up, which, as its name suggests, allows for the real time sharing of intelligence.
Interactive digital maps laced with red, blue, green, and white dots were displayed on wall-mounted monitors with chyron labels indicating the positions of assets, ongoing operations, and possible targets.
At crowded rows of computer workstations, NSA analysts worked with Colombian army SIGINT technicians to decipher radio, cellular, and digital communications intercepts from satellites and American aircraft that scoured the Colombian skies tracking cell phones. M
onitors at other terminals displayed the live footage from Predator surveillance drones.
The stench of coffee, cigarette smoke, and microwaved food left sitting out hung in the cool climate-controlled air, along with sweat and body odor from technicians who seemed to live at their computers, forgetting to take breaks. Trash receptacles overflowed with plates, food containers, and aluminum cans. The sound of computers humming, fingers tapping keyboards, radio chatter, and voices calling out to one another filled the background.
“Look familiar?” Culler asked Avery.
“Feels like I’m back at the Death Star. Only thing different are the maps.”
The Death Star was the nickname given to Joint Base Balad, where CIA and JSOC once coordinated its search for insurgent and terrorist high value targets in Iraq. JSOC might hit a terrorist safe house and seize the occupants’ cell phones and laptops. Data from those devices would be passed to the NSA spooks at the Death Star, and within hours NSA would have another target for JSOC. It wasn’t uncommon for them to launch as many as three or four raids in a single night based on intelligence fusion, and that was the model for the Bunker.
Daniel and Slayton were present, the former drinking coffee and looking like he hadn’t slept in days. They were speaking to a shorter, heavier, haggard-looking bald man, with his tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, and sweat stains beneath his pits.
Culler introduced the man as Vincent Rangel.
Avery had caught glimpses of the CIA Bogotá station chief the previous week during the planning for Operation Phoenix, but they hadn’t formally met until now. The son of first-generation Guatemalan immigrants to Miami, Rangel was a twenty-year veteran of the National Clandestine Service’s Latin America Division. He’d spent his career pursuing FARC, M19, ELN, and Shining Path terrorists; disrupting Bolivian and Colombian drug cartels, rigging elections, buying politicians, and playing a role in more than one coup.