Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  “Yes, but not as much as I’d like,” Kyra said. “I left my pack on the hill and Sherlock torched my truck last night . . . didn’t have time to move much over.”

  “We needed a diversion,” Jon offered in his defense.

  “I’m in a forgiving mood,” Marisa replied. “His practical joke worked. The locals bit hard. Security sweeps went out from four other facilities less than an hour after he called. We’ve got every one of their covert facilities pegged now. So, nice work,” Marisa said. A few hundred miles away she hoped it made him smile, but wasn’t optimistic.

  Her pessimism was justified. Jon just grunted, making Kyra grin. “Sherlock says, ‘You’re welcome.’”

  “No, he didn’t,” Marisa replied. “But thank you anyway. We’ll find out a way for you to deliver the intel.”

  “We do have another option,” Jon said.

  “What’s that?” Marisa asked.

  “We can try to recover the comms gear from the CAVIM site,” he said.

  “I think that would qualify as one of your ‘stupid ideas,’” Marisa replied after a delay.

  “Probably,” he admitted. “But maybe worth the risk if that’s really a nuke.” He tapped the iPad.

  “We’ll consider it. Hold your position. We’ll get you out soon.”

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “This is Drescher.” The watch officer set his pen down on the desk to give Mills his full attention.

  “Mills, down in Caracas,” the station chief replied. “I’m sending you a file. You’ll want to have some analysts from the Counterproliferation Center go over it first, but you might want to call Kathy Cooke in.”

  “She’s in a meeting with—”

  “I think you’ll want to pull her out,” Mills interrupted.

  Drescher’s eyebrows went up. “What do you have?”

  “Arrowhead found something on the security footage. And you need a bigger task force.”

  The Oval Office

  Drescher’s briefing had been terse and the single image from Kyra’s iPad spoke for itself. A group of analysts from the Counterproliferation Center and two other departments had filled in enough blanks that Cooke felt justified in interrupting the president’s private luncheon with the first lady with a call two minutes later. Rostow’s inclination had been to dismiss her with prejudice but Cooke’s manner had convinced him, hostility notwithstanding, to clear his schedule for the next hour. Cooke obviously disliked him but she was not suicidal, he supposed.

  Feldman and Marshall passed into the Oval Office ahead of her and she closed the door behind the last staffer out. “Whatever it is—” Rostow started.

  “It’s more important than whatever you were talking about,” Cooke said abruptly. She set her folder on the coffee table, pulled out the stapled packets, and passed them out. “This is the information that our officer recovered from the CAVIM facility night before last.”

  Rostow flipped through the pages, then stopped at the still images, marked over with technical notations. He looked up in disbelief. “You’re not serious.”

  “I am, I assure you. We’ve had analysts from our Counterproliferation Center and the Office of Weapons Intelligence, Nuclear Proliferation, and Arms Control study the photos along with some engineers from our Directorate of Science and Technology. We’ve also sent it to the Department of Energy for review, but our people concur. That”—Cooke said, pointing at the device in the photograph—“is a nuclear warhead in the final stages of assembly.”

  “The last estimate I heard from your people was that the Iranians wouldn’t have nuclear weapons for another few years!” Rostow protested.

  “Analysts’ estimates have always varied,” the director of national intelligence corrected him. “That’s been true for us, the Brits, the Israelis, and everyone else with a stake in the game. But given their rate of progression in acquiring equipment and expertise, there was never any question that Iran was going to get there eventually. The only real question was whether they would have the will.”

  “So much for our push to open talks with them about easing sanctions,” Feldman muttered. “Better to make them feel like they wouldn’t need nukes than to keep playing these hide-and-seek games.”

  “I’d have to disagree with that, sir,” Marshall replied. “Threat equals intent plus capability. Intent can change quickly and without warning, so if you want to make sure the threat is zero, make sure the capability is zero. Letting hostile countries develop capability while hoping their intent stays peaceful is rarely a winning strategy.”

  “Defense without offense is the art of losing slowly,” Cooke agreed.

  “Enough,” Rostow ordered. “So this isn’t an ammunition factory either?”

  “It’s also an ammunition factory,” Cooke corrected him. She reached over and turned the binder pages to a second set of images. “The footage shows that they’ve converted just one floor of the building for nuclear assembly. We can’t confirm what they’re doing with the rest of it.”

  “How long before that thing is assembled?” Feldman asked.

  “It’s difficult to tell from the image, but it could be as little as a couple of days. After that, Ahmadi could load it up and move it out on anything as small as a jeep,” Cooke told him.

  “And then we’ll never find the thing again,” Feldman said. “We can’t let that get out of the country. And we sure can’t let them mount it on some missile.”

  Rostow nodded. The president’s face had gone white and he looked shaken to Cooke. “Assemble the National Security Council. Meeting in the Situation Room in twenty minutes.” He stared Cooke directly in the eyes. “You know I’m going to release this to the UN.”

  “I understand that,” she replied.

  Rostow furrowed his brow. “You’re not going to even try to argue with me about it.”

  “This is one case where the world really does ‘need to know’ what’s going on,” she said. It was a rare thing to hear that phrase invoked in reference to the general release of information rather than keeping it secret. Jon would find that ironic, she thought.

  USS Vicksburg

  21°21' North, 68°17' West

  150 miles north of the Dominican Republic

  By choice, Command Master Chief Petty Officer Amos LeJeune spent most of his time below with the enlisted men, coming up to spend time in the command centers only as necessary. He couldn’t complain about the view, but was happier to see the outside world from the deck where he could feel the sun. But captains lived on the bridge and Riley was no exception. The commanding officer stood facing a monitor that showed Vicksburg’s current position in the western Atlantic.

  LeJeune approached the captain and took the offered printout. The time stamp on the message fell within the past hour. “We’re being chopped to the Fourth Fleet.”

  “Really? And who else is joining our little party?”

  “Harry Truman, for starters,” Riley told him. “Fifteen ships total.”

  “That’s a lot of metal to be moving around the ocean. Did the rear admiral care to explain why we’ll be delaying our arrival at home?”

  “He did,” Riley said, surprising the petty officer. “You saw the news last night?”

  “That story out of Venezuela?” LeJeune nodded. “It’s all the news networks have been playing all day.”

  “The president’s just ordered a blockade. I guess he doesn’t want that Iranian gentleman to leave.” Riley scrolled the electronic map southwest until it stopped over a small point of Venezuela’s northern coast. “We’re assigned here, southeast of Curaçao. Half the fleet will be in place by tonight. We’ll be one of the last to show for the party, on station by tomorrow night. I have no idea how long we’ll be here.”

  “Mighty close to Aruba,” LeJeune noted. “A shame we won’t be making any port calls.”

&
nbsp; “I think most of the crew would just settle for home,” Riley said.

  “Most of the crew has never been to Aruba,” LeJeune countered. “I’ll let ’em know. ‘Ours to do and die.’”

  “Very well.”

  LeJeune handed the orders back to the captain and left the bridge to the officers.

  DAY SEVEN

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “Who’s Marcus Holland?” the courier asked from the doorway. Drescher pointed to the far corner where the analyst was sitting and the courier made her way around the table, ogling the mass of papers covering the entire space as she did. “Delivery from Treasury,” she said.

  Holland snatched the office envelope from her fingers, tore it open, and a CD in a jewel case slid out into his hand. “Yeah, baby,” he said. He looked up at the courier. “Thanks.” He swiveled in his chair, pulling the disc out as he turned, then grabbed a laptop from the conference table and slid the CD into the tray. The laptop considered the disc for several seconds, then opened a file window.

  Drescher caught the young man by surprise as he leaned over the analyst’s shoulder. “Any joy?” he asked.

  “Treasury actually coughed up the data. That’s something. Usually getting stuff like this takes a couple of months. The director must have pulled out the big machete to go through the red tape,” Holland said. “Ask me again in a few hours.”

  UN Security Council

  United Nations Conference Building

  New York, New York

  Cooke had never set foot in the Security Council chamber. No CIA director had since George Tenet had taken a seat behind Colin Powell, lending his authority to the case that Saddam was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence failures revealed after that had made any intelligence chief a liability to have in this room. But Cooke had understood Rostow’s reason for ordering her attendance the moment he’d called. He would make the presentation and, if events to come turned out to his liking, he would take the glory. If they didn’t, her presence behind him would give him cover. The media would assume she had misled the president of the United States and she’d have to resign in disgrace, which wouldn’t bother Rostow at all.

  The council chamber wasn’t the largest auditorium she’d sat in, only a few hundred feet square. Drescher had told her that the Norwegians had designed and paid for it. She looked behind the central table and studied the Per Krohg mural on the wall that overlooked the circular table—a phoenix rising from the ashes. The artist had meant it to depict the rise of peace in the aftermath of the Second World War. If that’s true, that bird is still having a terrible time trying to climb out of the fire, she thought.

  The U.S. seat at the circular table was at the one o’clock position and Rostow was already there, talking to the British prime minister, who was the council president this month. Feldman took his place next to Cooke, the secretary of state and ambassador to the UN both to the left of him. The chamber was full to capacity, with some functionaries crowding at the doors and sitting in the aisles. The room was large enough to seat a few hundred and often the chairs were not all filled, but all of the players at the table were heads of state today. The world had noticed the U.S. Navy moving to cut Venezuela off from the rest of the planet, which had lent credence to the rumor that Rostow was going to present something disturbing to the council. Cooke wondered whether Feldman had passed that tidbit to the Washington Post or if Rostow had done it personally.

  The British prime minister pounded his gavel against the table and the room went silent. “I should like to inform the council that I have received a letter from the representative of Venezuela, in which he advises that the head of state of the Bolivarian Republic has declined to attend the discussion of the item on the council’s agenda.”

  The audience muttered at that unwelcome piece of news and Cooke heard Feldman cursing under his unpleasant breath. Rostow turned back and looked at Cooke, frustrated. She held his gaze, returned his stare, and gently shook her head. I guess Avila’s not following the plan, she thought. Hard to have an Adlai Stevenson moment when Zorin doesn’t show up. She held herself still in her seat, knowing the news cameras in the gallery could see her sitting behind Rostow, but she searched the room. Avila’s not here. His ambassador isn’t here. She searched the room and saw none of the faces she expected. The Iranians aren’t here, she realized.

  “The Security Council will now begin its consideration of the item on its agenda,” the UK prime minister said. “The purpose of this meeting is to hear a presentation by the United States. I call on His Excellency Mr. Daniel Rostow, president of the United States of America.”

  Rostow leaned forward in his seat and opened the leather binder on the table before him. “Mr. President, members of the council, honored guests, I would like to begin by expressing my thanks for the special effort that each of you made to be here today,” he began. “My purpose now is to share with you some disturbing information the United States has obtained regarding a conspiracy between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran to traffic in illegal nuclear materials in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to which both countries are signatories, and in violation of sanctions that this council has imposed on the latter country.”

  The silence in the room died in an instant, forcing Rostow to stop as cries and yells rent the air. A hundred different conversations mixed with excited utterances and the UK prime minister had to gavel the room back to attention.

  Rostow nodded toward the council chairman, then started again. “The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are United States sources and some are those of other countries. Some of the sources are technical, such as photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what President Avila and his Iranian counterpart are doing. To protect our intelligence sources and methods, I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you is deeply troubling.”

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  “But why would the Iranians build their nukes here?” Kyra asked out loud. “It would be a lot easier to maintain security on their home soil.” She stuffed the last of her garbage into the MRE pouch and tossed it into a garbage hole they’d dug.

  “I could only guess.”

  “Your guesses are usually pretty good.”

  “Maybe they aren’t building them in Iran because everyone is looking for them in Iran. Nobody was looking for them here,” he said. Jon cleaned out the last of his dessert pouch while he thought. “Chávez was already courting Iran before the September eleventh attacks. Then he was ousted for a few days in a coup in 2002 and the U.S. didn’t lift a finger. After that he probably thought that he was an unwritten charter member of the ‘axis of evil,’ so he started making alliances with every anti-U.S. ally who would talk to him . . . Iran, Libya, Syria. But Chávez was smart enough to see that he was only three hours away from the U.S., so maybe he figured he needed a little insurance after we invaded Iraq and Gaddafi decided to come clean on Libya’s WMD program. The threat of chemical weapons hadn’t deterred us from taking down Saddam and biological weapons are big bags of hurt to manufacture and maintain, not to mention you can’t control their spread after release. That left nukes.”

  Jon cleaned up the remnants of his breakfast and tossed it into the hole. “Iran had the same problem. There were rumors they had a covert weapons program called the ‘Green Salt Project’ since the days of Khomeni, trying to get uranium hexafluoride for a bomb, and they’d gotten some help from AQ Khan. But after September eleventh the risks of getting caught building one went way up and their facilities were getting outed. Ahmadi could bring Iran’s nuclear production infrastructure to the table and Chávez had uranium deposits in the Roraima Basin. Iran had the means and Venezuela had raw materials. Avila’s people mine and ship uranium to
Tehran, where it’s enriched, then Avila ships the fissile material back here for final assembly where no one is looking. While we’re looking all over Iran for nuclear facilities, Avila builds them in our backyard. No aspiring nuclear power has ever built its infrastructure outside its own country, so no one considered the possibility until you took that video.”

  UN Security Council

  “I hesitate to reveal this information to you, but I believe that circumstances compel it and there is historical precedent of a U.S. president declassifying even the most highly sensitive information during a crisis of an exceptional nature,” Rostow said. The crowd shifted in response and the president hesitated, playing to the group. “In the first video you saw two days ago, a U.S. operative penetrated a Venezuelan warehouse and witnessed officials from both countries colluding to commit murder. One of those men was Dr. Hossein Ahmadi, who our intelligence collection confirms is a nuclear proliferator. We will make some of this intelligence available to the members of the council immediately after this session. Dr. Ahmadi’s appearance raised fears that his presence on Venezuelan soil was a sign of a larger operation. I must report to this body now that those fears are confirmed. Less than twenty-four hours ago, another highly sensitive U.S. operation recovered video footage from a Venezuelan facility near the town of Puerto Cabello, where Dr. Ahmadi’s presence was also recorded. The facility is an ammunition factory jointly constructed in 2007 by both the Venezuelan and Iranian governments. The still photograph you see behind me is taken from that video, which was filmed by the facility’s own security cameras.”