Direct Action

by John Weisman

  “You’ll need a network at headquarters, Tony.” Alan Martin’s expression grew intense. “Access agents, penetration agents, agents of influence, and most important, moles. You know how it is on the seventh floor. It’s all about job security. If you don’t have a handle on what the seventh floor is thinking, sooner or later they’ll scapegoat you.”

  Tony Wyman fixed the monocle into his right eye and stared first at STIGGINS, then swiveled oh…so…slowly toward Martin, then panned back again to STIGGINS. He released his facial muscles. The monocle fell. “And your point is…”

  Alan Martin got the message. “STIGGINS and Martin. It sounds like a vaudeville act.”

  Tony Wyman grinned. “It sounds more like the 4D-627 Network to me.”

  By 2:30 P.M. they’d reached a consensus. An hour and a half later, Antony Wyman, Bronco Panitz, and Charles Hoskinson had started the paperwork for their retirements. When Tony’s secretary asked what he planned to do, he said he and a couple of friends were going to open a private security firm.

  “What are you going to call it? Wyman and Associates?”

  “Wyman and Associates. Has a nice ring to it, m’dear, but perish the thought. Far too…égoïste pour moi. We are calling ourselves…the 4627 Company.”

  II

  EREZ CROSSING

  2

  15 OCTOBER 2003

  9:52 A . M .

  EREZ CROSSING, GAZA

  SASS RODRIGUEZ SHIFTED IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT of the armored Chevy Suburban and panned his Oakleys through the thick, bulletproof windshield of the big silver FAV.3 “Perfect day for the beach, huh, McGee?”

  “You’re right, Sass-man. It’s beer weather.” Jim McGee was riding shotgun. His dark eyes flicked up toward the clear blue sky. He sighed, ran his fingers through close-cropped, prematurely gray hair, then rapped scarred knuckles on the thick glass of the permanently sealed, two-inch-thick side window. “All that draft Carlsberg and all that beautiful Israeli booty and we’ll be stuck in this sardine can all day.”

  “You volunteered to waste your time, Jimbo,” Sass said. “Not my prob.”

  “You’re right—stupid me.” McGee scanned the knot of vehicles in front of them as Sass eased forward past the first line of scarred concrete Jersey barriers leading to one of the checkpoint funnels. “Time to check in.” The FAV halted abruptly as a cluster of nervous-looking Israeli soldiers in full combat gear signaled Sass to stop. Then, using the muzzles of their rifles to give instructions, they shifted half a dozen cars aside, pulled a white Citroën with four young Arabs from the line, yanked the Palestinians out of the car, and proned them facedown in the dust.

  McGee unlatched the microphone from the radio bolted to the console, pressed the transmit button, and said, “Tel Aviv Base, Lima-One. Pulling into Erez checkpoint.”

  There was a six-second pause. Then the radio crackled: “Lima-One, Tel Aviv. Position confirmed.”

  “What would we do without GPS?” Sass scratched his ear and swiveled toward the third man in the FAV. “Think we’ll get held up today, Skip?”

  “Nah.” Skip O’Toole tapped his earpiece, squelched the volume on the walkie-talkie, held his hand over the microphone clipped to the collar of his 5.11 tactical vest, and leaned forward. “It’s been quiet since the holidays.” He pointed toward the Citroën. Two of the four passengers were being flexi-cuffed, arms pinioned tightly behind their backs, Israeli M-16s pointed at their heads. “See how mellow the Is are today? They ain’t kicking anybody. They ain’t shooting anybody. Just poking ’em a little—enough to rile ’em but not enough to set ’em off.” O’Toole was smaller framed than the other two—a wiry little red-haired bundle of energy who ate like a horse and ran marathons when he wasn’t chasing what he liked to call long-haired dictionaries.

  But then O’Toole was a SEAL, a West Coaster out of SEAL Five who’d been forward-based in Guam. He was twenty-nine, and he’d loved the Teams. But even Froggish camaraderie wasn’t enough to prevent him from leaving the Navy after his third hitch to hire on at DynCorp. Hell, O’Toole had two ex-wives, three kids, and a Stateside girlfriend to support, something that was impossible to do on a petty officer second class’s salary. At DynCorp he brought down a hundred grand per year plus expenses, more than twice what he made in the Navy, and just about all of it tax-free.

  Sass and McGee were older and both former Special Forces. Sass had retired as a sergeant first class out of Fort Campbell after twenty-five years of soldiering. McGee, who was the shift leader, was an E-7, too. But he’d spent nine years on the far side of the fence with Delta. Plus, he spoke three-minus Arabic and kitchen Pashto. Rumor had it McGee spent time in Afghanistan as a part of a hunter-killer element of combined CIA/Delta shooters. Gossip was he’d spent eight months pursuing UBL and the AQL, which was how Pentagon memo writers referred to Usama Bin Laden and the al-Qa’ida leadership.

  Last time he was back in Virginia on a week’s home leave, Sass heard whispers that McGee’s final Delta assignment was a joint U.S./British op in Iraq: he’d been a squad leader for one of the Coalition’s preinvasion insertion groups—the sneak-and-peekers who spent two weeks clandestinely designating targets just prior to D-day. RUMINT, which is how they referred to urinal gossip at the DynCorp cafeteria, had it McGee’d spent nine days in Baghdad setting up phone taps and positioning laser target designators.

  But that’s all it was—rumor. Because McGee never said anything about Afghanistan, or Iraq. He was pretty closemouthed. About himself in general, and about his time with the Unit, as he called it, in particular. “Been places and done things,” is all he’d ever say, in an accent that was tinged with North Carolina but originally could have been from just about anywhere between Miami and Detroit except New England.

  Sass Rodriguez wasn’t closemouthed. He was a professional Texan from San Antonio—hence Sass, call-sign shorthand for Tex-sass. And he had an opinion about everything. Sometimes two or three opinions, all voiced in a lackadaisical Paul Rodriguez Tex-Mex drawl that McGee, O’Toole, and the rest of the DynCorp crew swore got thicker with the addition of any significant quantities of beer. Sass had been in Afghanistan, too. The big, barrel-chested blankethead worked the mountains with the Northern Alliance—Sheikh Massoud’s boys—on horseback and shot himself a lot of Taliban. The CENTCOM commander—General Tommy Franks himself—had pinned a Bronze Star with combat “V” on Sass’s blouse. Sass carried a picture of that event in his wallet.

  O’Toole’s arm stretched between Sass and McGee. “There’s our escort,” he snorted derisively.

  McGee shifted the M4’s collapsible stock, which was resting against the snuff can in the cargo pocket of his tan Royal Robbins trousers, and snugged it between the glove compartment and the door trim. He plucked the instant-focusing field glasses from the console and held them to his eyes. A hundred yards beyond the Israeli side of the crossing, two dirty, mud-encrusted black Subarus with dinged quarter panels, bald tires, and Palestinian Authority plates sat idling, thick, noxious-looking exhaust farting from the rusted tailpipes. Half a dozen sloppily uniformed Palestinian gunsels cradling banana-clipped AKs were leaning up against the cars, sandaled feet idly pawing at the dust.

  McGee examined their faces up close and personal. Then he dropped the binocs back where they belonged, swiveled and glanced back through the Suburban’s rear clamshell doors to make sure the second embassy FAV, the one containing the junior-grade consular officer and driven by Jonny Kieffer, the fourth man in today’s detail, was positioned where it should be. Jonny caught McGee’s eye through the tinted glass and threw him an A-OK wave. McGee gave Jonny an upturned thumb.

  It was a visual pun. In Arab culture, the upturned thumb wasn’t the good-to-go sign. It meant “up your ass.”

  McGee turned back, shifting his body so the Sig-Sauer P-229 that rested just behind his right hip didn’t get between him and the seat back. Today was a milk run. They’d hightail past the Israeli-controlled industrial zone on the Gaza side of the check
point, then drive straight through Beit Hanoun to Gaza City.

  McGee caught himself up. Driving straight through anywhere in Gaza was an oxymoron. The roads—and he used the term loosely—had been ruined by neglect and war. There were axle-snapping potholes and huge gouges made by tank and armored personnel carrier tracks. Palestinian drivers were worse than Beirutis—huge trucks belching black clouds of noxious fumes would cut through intersections without pausing for oncoming traffic. And there were other hazards, too: donkey carts, bicycles, and the deerlike Palestinian kids who paid no heed to the anarchic traffic but sprinted between cars willy-nilly and more than occasionally got themselves smacked like Bambi.

  Well, they’d creep and crawl past Beit Hanoun, then weave their way off the garbage-strewn main road to a dusty municipal office next door to the crumbling Red Crescent headquarters on El-Nasser Street, where the consular kid was interviewing some Palestinian honor student about a Fulbright. The route was highlighted on the clear plastic cover of the map McGee’d tossed up on the dashboard.

  It was all bullshit of course. Smoke and mirrors. Cover for action. The consular kid was a wet-behind-the-ears Agency case officer. And the honor student was some nineteen-year-old Fatah rock-chucker who was going to be cold-pitched. In English, of course, because the spook didn’t speak much Arabic past min fadlak and shukran. The whole episode was going to be an exercise in futility.

  So the only real development to take place this morning was that another Tel Aviv CIA case officer’s identity was going to be blown to the Palestinian Authority—not that the PA had had any doubts in the first place about who was Agency and who wasn’t. It was laughable. No, it was pitiful. The whole goddamn situation was textbook absurdity.

  And it wasn’t the people. There were a few good folks at CIA. Hard workers. Risk takers. McGee had operated with some of them in Afghanistan. But the leadership sucked. There was no leadership at CIA these days. CIA had devolved into a huge, unwieldy, risk-averse, molasses-slow bureaucracy. Just like McGee’s beloved Army, CIA was controlled by managers, apparatchiks, and bean counters. The Warriors all took early retirement.

  That’s the way things went in Afghanistan back in 2001. For the first few weeks, the war was executed by black-ops Warriors and unconventional forces. Then Washington declared victory, the staff pukes took over, and the paper started flying. Among the first directives: all Special Forces were henceforth to reassume military grooming standards. That meant no more beards or native garb. It also meant that hundreds of SF personnel became obvious targets because they were no longer able to blend into the indigenous woodwork. The casualty rate went up. But the two-star who issued the order didn’t give a damn. He had an MA in public administration, he lived in Tampa, and by God, he was going to make those hairy-assed SF mavericks over there conform.

  Same sort of numbskull thinking was going on at CIA these days. And the situation wasn’t going to change, either. Not in McGee’s lifetime. McGee plucked a Styrofoam cup from the dashboard cup holder, spat tobacco juice into it, then used the rim to wipe his lower lip. He cocked his head in the direction of the Palestinian escort. “Y’know, you can tell from how professional they look they were trained by da Company.”

  “Nasty, nasty.” O’Toole stifled a giggle as McGee replaced the cup. But it was true. As a part of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s plan for cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, CIA had trained more than a thousand members of Yasser Arafat’s security forces in everything from sniping and close-quarters combat to bomb disposal, defensive driving, interrogation, threat assessment, and counterintelligence.

  The two guys who headed what the Palestinians called their Preventive Security Services, Jabril Rajoub and Mohammad Dahlan, were even flown as honored guests to Langley, where they were ushered into the DCI’s seventh-floor private dining room. Rajoub and Dahlan ate lamb tenderloin, haricots verts, and garlic mashed potatoes on bone china emblazoned with the DCI’s seal. They toasted the latest road map to Middle East peace with Opus One drunk from Baccarat stemware. After the second of these lunches went right according to plan, Tenet even allowed a few of the PSS’s upper-echelon trainees to be brought to the holy of holies: Camp Peary, the Agency’s clandestine facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, for a few hours of instruction.

  Lesser mortals were flown to ISOLATION TROPIC, the huge CIA explosives-and-mayhem school at Harvey Point, North Carolina, or to clandestine sites in South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida, where they received training from retired case officers and paramilitary contract employees. Everyone from the senior instructors at the Farm to the grizzled ex–Special Forces sergeants in Ocala agreed the Palestinians were excellent students—and DCI Tenet issued commendations to all involved. Then, when those excellent students returned to the West Bank and Gaza, instead of using what they’d learned to muzzle Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the PSS officers promptly turned every bit of their new tradecraft skills against the Israelis.

  Sass could see U.S.-financed Beretta pistols tucked ostentatiously into the Palestinians’ waistbands. The youngsters reminded him of the neighborhood gangbangers of his childhood. Out of habit he shook the M4 carbine in its custom roof rack to make sure it was properly secured. “This is a cluster fuck waiting to happen,” he said adamantly.

  “Orders is orders,” O’Toole said. But Sass was right and everybody knew it. The embassy’s rules of engagement specified that all American diplomatic convoys had to provide twenty-four-hour notice of the precise time and specific route to the Palestinian Authority. Automatic weapons were to be unloaded and kept out of sight.

  So far as Jim McGee’s DynCorp crew was concerned, the only thing the embassy was doing by giving out their route and insisting on dangerous ROEs was providing aid, comfort, and intelligence to the enemy. And diplomatic milk run or not, McGee insisted that all of his people maintain what he called Condition Orange. That meant weapons loaded, rounds chambered, safeties on, no matter what the State Department rules might be. If crap hit fan, it wasn’t going to be McGee’s people who came home in body bags.

  It wasn’t that he’d taken sides, either. It was a matter of operational security pure and simple.

  McGee’d been in Israel just over six months now. And being a former Delta trooper, he hadn’t needed more than a few days to evaluate the situation on the ground pretty damn thoroughly. But even a novice could have seen the Palestinian security apparatus was completely penetrated by the same terrorist elements the PA was pledged by treaty to eliminate.

  Worse, the situation in Gaza was deteriorating by the day. Each of Gaza’s separate regions was under nominal control of one of the Palestinian Authority’s local Palestinian Resistance Committees. In point of fact, the entire Strip was run by a crime syndicate headed by a Bedouin clan led by one Jamal Semal-Duma, a fifty-year-old drug and weapons smuggler who lived in Rafah, the city that straddles the Gaza–Egypt border. Not that anyone at the embassy cared. The only thing the cookie pushers at the embassy seemed to care about was the process. The talking. The back-and-forth.

  It didn’t take a genius to understand that the Palestinians were bringing more and more heavy weapons into Gaza. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that sooner or later they’d manage to smuggle a chemical or biological bomb—or worse, the makings of a dirty nuke—into the Territories, or into Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, where the top-five list of targets included the U.S. embassy.

  But those facts, inescapable to McGee, never seemed to cross the embassy’s radar. Nor did the nebulous but still unquestionable link between the Palestinian terror organizations and al-Qa’ida, or the similar liaison between the Palestinian militants and Hezbollah, which was a creation of Seppah-e Pasdaran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Or the ultimate unthinkable: a marriage of convenience between Tehran and al-Qa’ida. But not according to AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv. The way McGee saw it, the first thing they handed out to new arrivals from Wash
ington was a set of blinders. So far as McGee was concerned, the call letters for AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv should be SNE—for “see no evil.”

  3

  MCGEE’D SPENT HIS FIRST WEEK and a half in Israel reacquainting himself with the country. He called a few of his old contacts from an Israeli special forces unit with which he’d once cross-trained and listened to their assessments of the current situation. He sat in the security office and read a thick sheaf of reports. He listened as a political officer briefed him on the Embassy’s rules of engagement. And he spent five days traveling through the Gaza Strip with a PSS liaison security officer.

  The Palestinian was careful to keep McGee away from the Palestinian Authority’s weapons factories and the arms caches run by Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, as well as the tunnels under Rafah through which the PA smuggled weapons, explosives, and drugs. But McGee had had enough intelligence training at Delta to be able to observe discreetly. And he knew what to look for. And although he’d betrayed no hint of it to the PSS liaison, he spoke Arabic well enough to understand that the PA officer was telling everyone they met to keep their mouths shut in front of the American.

  And when he and his team assumed their duties, it didn’t take McGee long to realize American officials who traveled outside the Green Line4 were being observed and targeted. Security vulnerabilities were being probed every time the embassy ran a convoy into Gaza or the Territories. And what with all the heavy weapons and who-knows-what-else being brought through the tunnels from Egypt, McGee was convinced it was only a matter of time until there was a significant attack on American diplomatic interests in the Jewish state.